8 Memoirs That Complicate the Story of Filipino America

The first known Filipino American memoir, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, was published in 1946. The next wouldn’t appear on the American literary landscape for nearly 60 years. Then, starting around 2018, something shifted: a surge of memoir and hybrid writing by Filipino American writers that hasn’t slowed down since.

What connects this body of work across eight decades is a persistent refusal of easy narrative, though that refusal doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes it breaks the page apart, other ...