- Race Education
“Daddy Why Am I Brown?”: A healthy conversation about skin color and family
This is a children’s book meant to start a conversation about how kids can learn to talk about skin color in a way that’s kind, thoughtful, and healthy. It’s also meant to help children understand the difference between race, ethnicity, and culture.
- Race Education
Resilience – “Reading and RES: Parent Tip Tool: Choosing and Using Books to Discuss Race and Ethnicity”
This brief article explains how reading books with your child is a key way to start and continue conversations about race and ethnicity. It also discusses why books are a good medium, the importance of conversations about race, and tips for how to choose appropriate books for your child.
- Race Education
Beynd the Golden Rule
This illustrated book serves as a parent’s guide to preventing and responding to prejudice. This book explores how to discuss racism and tolerance depending on the age of the child.
- LGBTQ+
AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities
This is an interdisciplinary essay collection which examines the shaping of local queer cultures in the Asian Pacific region in order to move beyond definitonis and understandings of sexuality and gender that rely on Western assumptions.
- Mental Health
NYU Langone Health: NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health
The NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health (CSAAH) is based in NYU Langone’s Section for Health Equity. Its services can most apply to and benefit anyone interested in the research and evaluation of Asian American health and health disparities. The webpage explains the sections on the background of the organization, its approach + guiding principles, research tracks, career development, and community engagement + dissemination resources.
- Mental Health
Project Lotus
The Lotus Project’s services can most apply to and benefit those who are interested in Asian American mental health advocacy. The mission is to destigmatize mental health in Asian-American communities by “tackling the model minority stereotype through culturally-relevant education for the community and the empowerment of voices.” The website features stories from the community, articles, webinars, workshops, and their podcast.
- Literature
Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War
This is a true story about life in a Saigon orphanage, a dramatic rescue flight from Vietnam to Canada, adoption by a Canadian family, and growing up in Canada. It tells the story of the last Canadian airlift operation that left Saigon and arrived in Toronto on April 13, 1975. Son Thi Anh Tuyet was one of 57 babies and children on that flight. Based on personal interviews and enhanced with archive photos, Tuyet’s story of the Saigon orphanage and her flight to Canada is an emotional and suspenseful journey that is brought to life in this book.
- Literature
I Love You Like Crazy Cakes
This tells the story of a woman who travels to China to adopt a baby girl. It is based on the author’s own experiences and is a celebration of the love and joy a baby brings into the home.
- Literature
The White Swan Express: A Story About Adoption
This is a picture book that talks about the process of adoption from China. It shows the steps from the adoption-agency paperwork to interviews to approval and finally being able to travel to China.
- Literature
The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairy Tale
This book is based on the ancient Chinese belief that an invisible, unbreakable red thread connects all those who are destined to be together. In this story, a king and queen rule a beautiful and peaceful land. They should be full of joy and contentment, but they both feel a strange pain that worsens every day. Then a peddler’s magic spectacles reveal a red thread pulling at each of their hearts. The king and queen know they must follow the thread–wherever it may lead.
- Literature
The Red Blanket
Eliza Thomas went to China in 1994 to adopt her daughter PanPan, who was then 5 months old. This is their story. It is a touching and beautiful adoption story that reveals the challenges as well as the joys of forming a new family. It is a story about a little girl who needed a mommy and a forgotten blanket that needed a little girl and a woman who needed them both. This is a journey about the forming of a family.
- Literature
Ten Days and Nine Nights: An Adoption Story
Follow a little girl as she and her family prepare for the new baby that will soon be joining them. And simultaneously, watch the girl’s mother fly off to Korea, meet the new baby, and bring her home. Here is an utterly simple, sweet, and child-centric look at the adoption process through the eyes of a soon-to-be older sibling. From cutting a red paper heart and taping it above the new baby’s crib to telling her best friend about the adoption, the young narrator counts down every day and night with growing anticipation, marking them with a big X on her calendar. This is also perfect for older children who are about to become big sisters and brothers.
- Literature
All You Can Ever Know
Cheung is a Korean transracial adoptee from Oregon and was born severely premature. She grew up knowing her adoption story as a “comforting, prepackaged myth”. As she grew up, she began to face prejudice, find her Asian American identity and became more curious about her origins. In this memoir, Cheung tells of the “search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child”. It is a “profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong”.
- Literature
Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption
Sjöblom was adopted from Korea at two years old into a Swedish home. Throughout her childhood, she struggled to fit in and was constantly told to suppress her feelings of wanting to know more about her origins. Thus, she learned to bury the feelings of abandonment, like many other adoptees. In this illustrated memoir, “Sjöblom’s unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child [and] she discovers a document containing the names of her biological parents”. She realizes “her own history may not match up with the story she’s been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background”. She ends up digging more into her background by traveling to Korea and the orphanage and finds out that the truth is “more complicated than the story she was told and struggled to believe”.
- Literature
The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past
This book presents a cultural history of the events that led to the controversial one-child policy in China and the generation-long abandonment of Chinese daughters to American families.
- Literature
Lucky Girl: A Memoir
In this true story, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, “comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades. | In 1974, a baby girl from Taiwan arrived in America, the newly adopted child of a loving couple in Michigan”. Hopgood had an “all-American upbringing, never really identifying with her Asian roots or harboring a desire to uncover her ancestry”. | When Hopgood was in her twenties, her birth family showed up. They end up being “a boisterous, loving, bossy, complicated middle-class family who hound her daily life by phone, fax, and letter, in a language she doesn’t understand until she returns to Taiwan to meet them. As her sisters and parents pull her into their lives, claiming her as one of their own, the devastating secrets that still haunt this family begin to emerge. Spanning cultures and continents, Lucky Girl brings home a tale of joy and regret, hilarity, deep sadness, and great discovery as the author untangles the unlikely strands that formed her destiny”.
- Literature
A Single Square Picture: A Korean Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots
Kim Ji-yun, who grew up in Seoul, Korea soon became Catherine Jeanne Robinson, who had an American family and lived in Salt Lake City, Utah. Twenty years later, she returned to Seoul in search of her birth mother and found herself “an American outsider in her native land”. Katy was left “conflicted, shattered, exhilarated, and moved in ways she never imagined”. This book is “a personal odyssey that ascends to the universal”, and is “a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever questioned their place in the world — and had the courage to find the answers”.
