Mental health awareness within the Asian American and Pacific Islander community has long been overlooked and stigmatized, often due to things like fear of seeking help and the expectation of living up to the model minority myth. In media, these experiences are often tokenized, trivializing the stressors of achieving academic and professional success to repay the previous generations’ sacrifices, which seems to be the epitome of being in this minority group. The topic of mental wellness in this community has since shifted, calling attention not only to digital representation but also to dismantling commonly held beliefs and stereotypes. In order to hear more layered narratives about mental health from the AAPI community, literature is a great medium; fiction can tell very real stories, despite the characters themselves being made up. The following novels offer some of the best examples of this kind of literature. In order to hear more layered narratives about mental health from AAPI themselves, literature is a great medium; even fiction can tell very real stories. Although AAPI and Mental Health Awareness month has come to a close, these tales are meant to be read year-round, not just during the month of May.
“The Heart Principle” by Helen Hoang
Autism research has been known to be historically male-centered and Western-skewed. While this may stem from a lack of resources, the shortage of global perspectives lends itself to a flattening of experiences. Helen Hoang, a romance novelist diagnosed with autism, seeks to represent neurodivergence with compassion and nuance in her books. Many of her works feature autistic protagonists navigating love, intimacy and identity in empathetic ways.
In her 2021 dual-perspective novel “The Heart Principle,” violinist Anna Sun and entrepreneur Quan Diep meet on a dating app, both looking for something casual, but their relationship grows more serious as the protagonists engage in increasingly vulnerable conversations with each other. Anna struggles through recovery from an emotionally toxic relationship, inability to recreate the digital success of her viral violin video and difficulty overcoming her people-pleasing tendencies. Quan, who recently recovered from testicular cancer, grapples with his masculinity and self-esteem.
Fighting back against overly critical family members and a fear of seeking help, Quan helps Anna with setting boundaries and seeking therapy, leading to a diagnosis that gives her greater clarity and prompts her to reflect on the way she’s been treated in the past. Through both emotionally and physically intimate moments, Anna comforts Quan and helps him reclaim his confidence.
Terms like perfectionism, people-pleasing and low self-esteem are often thrown around as if everyone suffers from them, somehow lessening their validity as mental health struggles. But as “The Heart Principle” portrays, any emotional scar is worth addressing and healing, even if there are community members who dismiss them as insignificant.
“Yolk” by Mary H.K. Choi
How often are siblings compared to each other in terms of looks, grades and careers? How much worse are these pressures exacerbated by the expectations associated with your parents’ American Dream? Mary H.K. Choi’s young adult novel “Yolk” explores how parental pressure can be both a divisive and uniting force in sisterhood.
This story follows two sisters — Jayne and June Baek. While June is the accomplished and wealthy older sister, Jayne is the disorganized younger sister living in squalor as a floundering fashion student. These stark differences lead the sisters to grow apart over time, until June is diagnosed with cancer and ensnares Jayne as her main source of help.
In their unlikely reunion, both sisters slowly let down their judgmental walls to clear their misunderstandings about each other. June is not the perfect, pristine role model everyone expects her to be; instead, she hates her stuck-up job and regrets the uptight nature of her youth. Meanwhile, Jayne’s irresponsibility with her parents’ money, instability with boys and messy living situation stem from a place of insecurity and shame; the lack of control over her life manifests in disordered eating patterns and other self-sabotaging behaviors.
Both Jayne and June realize they need each other, seek each other’s approval more than they care to admit and enough bond over their shared family trauma. “Yolk” brings a redefining lens to the sisterhood dynamic in an immigrant family — one that even makes me rethink my relationship with my own sister.
“Lion Dancers” by Cai Tse
What does it mean to grieve? What should grief look like? It seems to arise from things like sickness, disaster or war — especially in marginalized communities. No matter the circumstance, grief seems to give people a tragedy to pity, rather than an event to live alongside.
Cai Tse’s graphic novel “Lion Dancers” follows 12-year-old Wei, who quits lion dancing after the death of his father, who was adept at it. This loss cost Wei his community and his best-friend-turned-arch-nemesis, Hung. At school, he struggles to find a group to fit into and remains a benchwarmer for the school’s basketball team.
However, when a chance encounter leads him back to lion dancing, he discovers more than a mere reunion with an old hobby. He finds a place and family he belongs to in a way that he didn’t have at school. He learns the importance of trust and teamwork. He finally gets the chance to fly in his lion-dance costume, just as his father had.
The author and illustrator of the novel, Cai Tse, is an artist and lion dancer herself. Throughout the pages, I could tell she wanted to use the comic as both a coming-of-age story and to showcase her appreciation for the intricacy of lion dance costumes and traditions. It wasn’t just the lions in the book that were drawn with detail, but the characters as well. Though the speech bubbles and dialogue propelled the narrative forward, the facial expressions and bold colors brought the novel to life and made it feel almost like a TV show as I flipped through the chapters.
In “Lion Dancers,” the death of Wei’s dad didn’t make him a tragic charity case nor was it a defining characteristic of who he was. His father’s love for lion dancing was only one aspect of why Wei joined his lion dance team. With his teammates, he found a family of his own — not one tied by blood but by their shared passion for preserving an age-old art form.
“Real Americans” by Rachel Khong
Is happiness something we can control? Are the traumas we carry indicative of our offspring’s luck? Are we able to help our kids feel joy more easily, even if we didn’t live the happiest lives ourselves?
“Real Americans,” which spans time from the Communist reign in China to a hypothetically advanced year 2030, aims to explore these questions through the lens of three generations of Asian Americans.
Adopting a somewhat unconventional format, “Real Americans” starts by following Lily and Matthew’s unfolding romance at the turn of the millennium, before transitioning to her son, Nick, and ending with Lily’s mother, May. By not adhering to a strict chronological timeline, the book allows readers to follow the reveal of an overarching family secret regarding a vast pharmaceutical empire, which is only fully revealed in the final section of the novel.
“Real Americans” experiments with genre-bending elements; its historical and contemporary fiction aspects are complemented by science fiction, which calls into question the ethics behind applying scientific breakthroughs. How truly “good” is the genetic modification of humanity? Instead of being a warning against technological reliance, the book covers this contentious debate with the attention and emotional weight required to assess good intent from less than attractive outcomes.
Rachel Khong’s novel is an introspective read that also serves as a study on intergenerational trauma and an interrogation on whether we can mold our children’s destiny with our hands or if fate must choose for them.
Daily Arts Writer Michelle Wu can be reached at michewu@umich.edu.
