Reading Women Discuss Cathy Park Hong and Maxine Hong Kingston

To close out the month on API Heritage Month Nonfiction, Kendra and Sachi discuss The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston and Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong.

From the episode:

Kendra: ​So May is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. So all this month, we’re talking about nonfiction titles by women from this background. It’s been pretty great, I must say.

Sachi: ​​Oh, yeah. I had a lot of fun doing this last year, and, as always, talking with you, Kendra—this year has been just as great. So very excited to dive in to these two books. I feel like we already dove in the last episode, but I’m excited to elaborate further. Hopefully everyone’s interest has been piqued after our last episode, and this will seal the deal for our listeners to pick up these two books.

Kendra: ​Well, you talk about this in the first episode, but why in particular did you want to look at this theme for nonfiction, I should say, for this particular month?

Sachi: ​​Yeah. So I personally, I feel like I need to do a better job of reading more nonfiction because I just get sucked into the fiction scope and narrative. And so this was a really good way for selfishly, me personally, to squeeze in the goal to prepare for the podcast by reading nonfiction. But also I feel like too . . . one of the reasons why we kind of threw this out is, at least from my perspective, I knew that my inner feelings was coming out. There is a lot of buzz about it. And I knew . . . I had a pretty good feeling based off of comments that I had heard from early readers that it was really awesome. Then I was like, Ooo. Let’s try to weave a way to focus on this book. And then as we’d started talking about like potential other nonfiction picks, we came up with a lot of possibilities. And I think it just kind of like sealed it as like, oh, yeah, this has some meat to it. And I think it worked out pretty nicely, especially with these two discussion picks, like we said in the last episode. Like we didn’t do it on purpose that these kind of go hand in hand. But it turned into a really happy accident that like both are very interlinked.

Kendra: ​Yes, very much so. And they pair so well together, I think.

Sachi: ​​Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, obviously every May I want to talk about an Asian and Asian American Pacific Islander titles, but this is a really good way to do that. But also just focus. . . . Like our discussions compared to last year, which were a lot of our books were kind of fiction focused, like the conversation is totally different, but it’s still focused on this group of people. And it just shows like how wide the scope really is when you’re talking about Asian American and Pacific Islanders for Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. So it’s very, very interesting. I could talk about Asian books all day.

Kendra: ​That’s true.

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This episode is brought to you by the new book A Farewell to Arms, Legs, and Jockstraps by Diane Shah.