Guest post by Cara Lopez Lee

I grew up with my paternal grandparents, both first-generation Americans from different cultures. Grandma was half-Mexican and half-Chinese. Grandpa was my father’s adopted dad, a Korean American from Hawaii. To be clear, I’m not Korean, or Hawaiian, though my Korean cousins say I “have a Hawaiian heart.” My birthmother is white, but she wasn’t in the picture. I grew up steeped in Asian and Latina culture, as well as American style.

All my life, people have asked me, “What are you?” My historical novel, Candlelight Bridge (FlowerSong Press, 2024) is part of my answer. It’s inspired by the family stories my grandma used to tell me, stories of secret immigrants, mixed races, and family trauma passed down from generation to generation. I hope Candlelight Bridge leads readers to ponder the bigger American question: Who are we?

Research has taken me to China several times, including my great-grandfather’s village, where I made peace with the long-ago collision between Mexican and Chinese immigrants that created my grandma. I’ve been studying Cantonese for years. (My great grandpa spoke Toisanese, but it’s hard to find classes in that dialect.) I’m proud of my Chinese heritage.

Candlelight Bridge by Cara Lopez Lee

In 1910, twelve-year-old Candelaria Rivera and her family cross the Chihuahuan Desert to escape the start of the Mexian Revolution, while twenty-year-old Yan Chi Wong feels the Chinese Revolution and his past tragedy. Both flee to America, where they meet in El Paso, Texas. Together, they strive to build a life in a society that does not accept them, until a dangerous desire threatens to ruin their efforts to live. Candlelight Bridge is not a romance, but a story exploring two reluctant allies that are battling to achieve the American Dream.

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I read all over the map, always looking for the connections between cultures. My favorite stories are about characters with a foot in two or more worlds, uncertain where they fit in, so here are a few of my favorite novels by authors from Asia or of Asian descent:

The Three-Body Problem

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Chinese)

I keep in touch via WeChat with a friend in Guangzhou that I’ve known for 16 years. She was my translator for three research trips to China, when we discovered our mutual love of science fiction and dystopian stories. She turned me onto The Three Body Problem, a trilogy that broke my brain in the best way.

I love the way Cixin Liu engages readers in universe-spanning thought experiments: How can the scientific method solve seemingly unsolvable problems, and how does human nature create impossible-to-predict variables? How important are love, friendship, and community in solving global issues? How will we cope with a future in which technology has increasing power to both save us and destroy us?

I’ve started watching both the Chinese and international TV series, and they’re fascinating. But, if you haven’t read the books yet, I recommend starting there.

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The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Indian)

This novel made me cry several times. I was overwhelmed by Arundhati Roy’s poetic descriptions, which breathed overripe, monsoon-soaked life into every setting and under the skin of every emotionally wrecked character.

The God of Small Things turns on the axis of the intense connection between a pair of twins, outspoken Rahel and silent Estha, who journey from inseparable to worlds-apart and back. Their innocence breaks under the pressures of class segregation, social constraints, and the trauma adults pass down to children. I’m rarely this happy to have my heart broken, but this book does it so beautifully I’ve read it twice.

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Forbidden City by Vanessa Hua (Chinese-American)

Vanessa Hua proves writing can evoke both deep emotion and powerful ideas. Mei’s coming of age story is a profound awakening to the injustices women discover in any society at its worst. Mei is lured by the promise that women too can become heroes, only to become a pawn in a power struggle dominated by men.

Forbidden City transported me to the inner circle of Chairman Mao, to the streets of a revolution that lost its way, to the rivalries and friendships of teenage girls…but especially into the inner life of one teenage girl’s quest to save herself.

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The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan (Chinese-American)

“My sister Kwan believes she has Yin eyes” remains one of the most compelling opening lines I’ve ever read. The book delivers on that line’s promise. Amy Tan is one of my favorite authors, and this mystical tale in which modern American life and Chinese history collide is my favorite of her books.

Though I’m a sucker for romance, I’m most partial to stories that explore family ties, especially the conflicted bonds between family members who spring from different upbringings. Americanized Olivia seems normal, and she treats Kwan like a “weirdo” for clinging to her Chinese ways, but Olivia secretly fears she’s the one who doesn’t belong. Kwan’s belief in supernatural connections to past lives feels like a metaphor for the way trauma echoes through generations.

Olivia’s journey to China to trace her roots helped inspire me to do the same. During my travels there, I’ve often thought of Olivia and Kwan, and of how both love and guilt become ties that bind.

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The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (Bengali British-American)

I love all Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing, but The Namesake is my favorite so far. For me, this story was a sly seduction. The characters seemed ordinary on the surface, yet I felt pulled along by the sense they contained volcanic worlds within, worlds where they felt alone and unknowable.

Gogol is a character with his feet in two cultures, that of his Bengali parents and that of assimilated America, and he struggles with the problem of how to choose one or contain both. The way he navigates that struggle made me feel less lonely and reminded me of my affection for all the worlds I come from.

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The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro (British, of Japanese descent)

If you’ve ever felt pulled every which way by the needs of others, ever felt the need to start saying “no” but worried you’d say “no” to the wrong things, ever tried to juggle career and family and dropped all the balls, ever felt like an outsider but yearned to be an insider, or ever were an insider but felt like an outsider—this is the Kazuo Ishiguro book for you, though they’re all masterful. In The Unconsoled, the renowned pianist, Mr. Ryder, moves through his life as if he’s reliving someone else’s memories. For Ishiguro, the art of the novel is all about memory. Bonus points: I laughed aloud at his satire of arts communities that sometimes take themselves too seriously.

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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Vietnamese-American)

I related strongly to this story, maybe because when my grandma and grandpa divorced, I too ended up being raised by a single working mom. Especially resonant was the way Little Dog seemed to inherit the traumas of his mother’s youth in Vietnam. His story is a letter to his mother, who won’t be able to read it. It made me think of the communication gap between my grandmother and me, even though she could read English and I understood Spanish. But Vuong’s story reminds us that the sacrifices of a mother’s love are the most powerful language of all.

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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (Mixed-race American of Chinese Descent)

I love Lisa See’s novels, inspired by family history, and I’m all-in for stories of female friendship. The friendship in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is downright heroic, requiring two girls to overcome the cultural hurdles that prevent them from venturing outside their homes to visit each other.

Writing secret messages on a silk fan may be my favorite device a character has ever used to overcome an obstacle. The image is so beautiful, it sometimes floats into mind out of nowhere. I’ve taught writing classes in which I’ve given students (children and adults) blank white fans to write on, using the folds as metaphors for shrinking and expanding stories.

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