Asian American Fiction After 1965

Honorable Mention, 2026 AAAS Book Award in Literary Studies, Association for Asian American Studies Shortlisted, 2025 ASAP Book Prize, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Shortlisted, 2023-2024 MELUS Book Award, Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act loosened discriminatory restrictions, people from Northeast Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and eventually China immigrated to the United States in large numbers. Highly skilled Asian immigrants flocked to professional-managerial occupations, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math. Asian American literature is now overwhelmingly defined by this generation’s children, who often struggled with parental and social expectations that they would pursue lucrative careers on their way to becoming writers. Christopher T. Fan offers a new way to understand Asian American fiction through the lens of the class and race formations that shaped its authors both in the United States and in Northeast Asia.