Amplifying Asian Voices with Audible.ca during Asian Heritage Month

The month of May is dedicated to celebrating Asian Heritage. With that in mind, Audible.ca has an impressive roster of worthy content by some of the most influential, innovative, and inspiring Asian voices. Whether it's in wellness, arts, music or literature, Asian culture has helped to shape the world for centuries.

From Sophia Chang’s impactful memoir, The Baddest B*tch in the Room, to Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Scotiabank Giller Prize winning title, How to Pronounce Knife, Audible.ca has content for everyone to enjoy.

Here's a worthy list to check out...

For those who love memoirs: 

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Two Trees Make a Forest,Mistakes to Run With by Jessica J. Lee 

A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew.
Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities.
 

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. 

Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related by Jenny Heijun Wills

Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for transnational adoptees where she lived, alliances were troubled by violence and fraught with the trauma of separation and of cultural illiteracy. Unsurprisingly, heartbreakingly, Wills found that her nascent relationships with her family were similarly fraught. This story describes in visceral, lyrical prose the painful ripple effects that follow a child's removal from a family, and the rewards that can flow from both struggle and forgiveness.

The Baddest B*tch in the Room (explicit version) by Sophia Chang (*Audible Original)

Sophia Chang is a badass of the music industry. As the daughter of Korean immigrants in predominantly white suburban Vancouver, she grew up shunning the “model minority” myth. Armed with a fierce sense of independence, she moved to New York City and infiltrated the world of hip-hop, yet remained mostly in the shadows of the artists she supported. With her debut memoir, Sophia Chang is finally ready to grab the mic for herself. This inspiring story spans her adventures in the music business, her path to becoming an entrepreneur, as well as her candid accounts of marriage, motherhood, marginalization, and martial arts.  In this Audible Original by Hello Sunshine, Sophia Chang drops knowledge about her motivating journey that took her from record label boardrooms to the Wudang mountains as she built a life shattering biases about Asian women. To this day, she declares she was “raised by Wu-Tang”, and she brings da ruckus as the baddest b*tch in the room. At last, her memoir shows the world exactly what that means.  

The Woo-Woo, by Lindsay Wong

In this jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family whose members blamed their woes on ghosts and demons when in fact they should have been on antipsychotic meds. Lindsay Wong grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic grandmother and a mother who was deeply afraid of the “woo-woo” - Chinese ghosts who come to visit in times of personal turmoil. From a young age, she witnessed the woo-woo’s sinister effects; at the age of six, she found herself living in the food court of her suburban mall, which her mother saw as a safe haven because they could hide there from dead people, and on a camping trip, her mother tried to light Lindsay’s foot on fire to rid her of the woo-woo.  

We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib

Samra Habib has spent most of her life searching for the safety to be herself. As an Ahmadi Muslim growing up in Pakistan, she faced regular threats from Islamic extremists who believed the small, dynamic sect to be blasphemous. From her parents, she internalized the lesson that revealing her identity could put her in grave danger. When her family came to Canada as refugees, Samra encountered a whole new host of challenges: Bullies, racism, the threat of poverty, and an arranged marriage. Backed into a corner, her need for a safe space - in which to grow and nurture her creative, feminist spirit - became dire. The men in her life wanted to police her, the women in her life had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body was a problem to be solved. 

And more...

For non-fiction and motivation: 

Wild Sounds of Canada by Sarika Cullis-Suzuki

 You Are Awesome by Neil Pasricha

Unlock It:The Master Key to Wealth, Success and Significance by Dan Luk

How to Be a Bawse, by Lilly Singh

The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong

For those who like fiction and literature: 

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto

The Library of Legends by Janie Chang

Bestiary by K-Ming Chang

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Crosshairs by Catharine Hernandez

How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Goodbye, Again by Jonny Sun

My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee