Evolving Threads: East and South East Asian Heritage Month
This year, ESEA Heritage Month invites us to reflect on the theme “Evolving Threads”, honouring the ways in which our stories, actions and solidarities are continuously woven together across time, place, and community.
In response, we have dedicated this month’s reading list to some of our favourite books about identities and migration. Choosing ten was next to impossible! We hope this is a good starting point for you to explore further.
Bone Talk
Candy Gourlay
Written by award-winning author and journalist Candy Gourlay, Bone Talk is already considered a Middle Grade classic. Set on the brink of the American occupation of the Philippines, it’s a story about coming of age, identity and belonging.
Flowers of Fire
Hawon Jung
A brilliant account of the South Korean feminist movement and their ongoing battles for gender equality reported on by Hawon Jung, journalist and former foreign correspondent. One that will make you want to research more.
Chinese and Any Other Asian
Anna Sulan Masing
What does it mean to be East and South East Asian in Britain today? Anna Sulan Masing talks about the often overlooked identities of cultures that have contributed to the British cultural landscape for centuries with an approach that is at once data driven and deeply humane.
Sour Sweet
Timothy Mo
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted to a film by Mike Newell, Sour Sweet is the classic about the lives of Chinese families in Soho’s 1960s Chinatown. The novel is a sharp portrayal of a community who is at once trying to preserve its identity and integrate, only marginally succeeding at both.
Wandering Souls
Cecile Pin
This astonishing debut tells the story of a family of Vietnamese refugees landing in Thatcher’s Britain. A story of love, loss and unwavering hope, it illuminates on the tolls of assimilation and the power of connection.
Small Bodies of Water
Nina Mingya Powles
A poetic exploration of belonging viewed through nature, Powles’s memoir takes us from a swimming pool in Borneo via the coast of New Zealand to a pond in London as it reflects on different cultures, what separates us and what connects us.
Taiwan Travelogue
Yang Shuang-Zi
Taiwan Travelogue won of the International Booker Prize 2026 that took the book charts by storm. Masterfully translated from Mandarin Chinese, this fictionalised memoir set in 1930s Taiwan is the captivating story of the romance between a Japanese food tour guide and her interpreter.
Year of the Rabbit
Tian Veasna
An incredible account of Tian Veasna’s parents’ journey as they planned to escape Cambodia when Pol Pot seized power, this graphic novel is as terrifying as it is engaging, making perfect use of images and words to educate and to tell a story.
Questions 27 & 28
Karen Tei Yamashita
Yamashita’s instant modern classic transforms real archival data into a chorus of voices of three generations of Japanese immigrants to America. A gender-bending novel and a powerful history of Japanese Americans, it will make you wonder about the nature of history.
But The Girl
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
Girl is in Scotland writing a PhD on Sylvia Plath. She got there via Australia, where her family migrated to from Malaysia on the very day she was born. This irreverent and witty memoir is all about identity and what it means to leave behind the people that made you who you are.