Did you grow up wishing you looked like Barbie? Many Asian Americans grow up confounded by our idea of beauty. We see girls with blonde hair, blue eyes, and pointed noses grace the covers of magazines and pick up roles for popular TV shows. For Alison Berlinski, author of A Beautiful Mess, the struggle was seeing beauty from an Asian American and Polish perspective. To her, being biracial was like straddling two worlds, never identifying with just one race.

Jean Kwok’s debut novel, Girl in Translation, reminds readers of the hardships immigrants can face both financially and culturally when trying to adapt to a new country. Kwok’s semi-autobiographical story details the story of Kimberly Chang, a young girl from Hong Kong who moves with her mother to Brooklyn with an infantile grasp of English and little-to-no money. As the story progresses, Kim learns she needs to lead a double life or face the consequences from her peers. At night, she helps her mother earn her keep as a Chinatown factory worker, barely …

Summer is the perfect time to crack open a new book and immerse yourself in different worlds and exciting adventures. If you can’t get away, take your mind there. This season, escape your job blues with a cross-country circus tour, a mysterious romp in the Brazilian Amazon, or a journey into the mind of an unusual five year-old boy. Here are my three top picks for summer reading:

One afternoon while passing time in between my college classes, I came across a colorful stack of magazine pamphlets. Curious, I picked up a copy and was both surprised and delighted to find that it was a student publication focused on issues affecting the Asian Pacific American community.
The USC magazine, called Bamboo Offshoot, is one of a handful of other Asian American student publications that have emerged on college campuses in the U.S., such as UC Berkeley’s hardboiled, Dartmouth College’s Main Street and NYU’s blog Generasian among others. A recent article from Diverse Education highlights …

In response to the much discussed book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” by Amy Chua, The Daily Show’s correspondent Olivia Munn, who is of Chinese descent on her mother’s side and German and Irish descent on her father’s, revealed her personal “Tiger Mom” story in a hilarious segment during last Tuesday’s show. In this clip, she brings us into her home, where she reminisces about the refrigerator where her mother enforced discipline.
“Do you remember what happened here?” says Munn.
“Yes, I banged your head in here…because you talked on the phone at …