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Ellie Yang Camp is an artist, educator, and author from the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been a high school history teacher, full-time parent, calligrapher, anti-racist educator, and now an author. Her first book, Louder Than the Lies: Asian American Identity, Solidarity, and Self-Love (Heyday Books), is a primer on racism that offers an intersectional, anti-racist, coalition-building view of Asian American identity.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
With candor and insight, educator Ellie Yang Camp unpacks the confusing dynamics and complicated systems that shape the racial experiences of Asian Americans.
On your nightstand now:
Right now, I'm working my way through Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park, which is complicated but also unlike anything I've read before so it's exciting that I have no idea where the story is going. To balance that out I'm reading the YA book The Misdirection of Fault Lines by Anna Gracia, about the drama between three competitive Asian American girls at a summer tennis tournament. I'm also finishing up the audiobook to Curtis Chin's memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, which has been delightful.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I'm a slow reader and did not read for fun as a child, so I can't say I had a favorite book. Also, as the child of Taiwanese immigrants, there were no books around me in the 1980s that reflected my world back to me enough to maintain my interest, and I didn't start reading avidly until I was in my 30s. However, as a mom I read Dumpling Days by Grace Lin with my kid. It's about a Taiwanese American girl's first visit to Taiwan and was the first time I ever read anything that felt true to my childhood. The experience made me cry even though it's not a sad book! I wish I could have read that book as a child.
Your top five authors:
Min Jin Lee, Kiley Reid, Angie Kim, Brit Bennett, Elizabeth Acevedo.
Book you've faked reading:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain in high school. I definitely CliffsNotes-ed that one.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross. It's a fascinating book about the history of how we know what we know about women's bodies, which after reading the book, is apparently not very much! I've suggested this book to many, many friends.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee. I was intrigued by an Asian girl dressed up like a Southern belle on the cover. It's a YA historical fiction that imagines what living in Atlanta at the turn of the 20th century under Jim Crow would have been like for a Chinese American girl, and it did not disappoint! A lot of people don't know that Asian Americans were already living in the South by then.
Book you hid from your parents:
This wasn't much of an issue for me because I didn't read much as a kid, but I do remember my mom being dismayed when I came home from college with a copy of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which I actually didn't finish reading either.
Book that changed your life:
I Bring the Voices of My People by Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes. The way it centered the experiences of women of color, including Asian American women, in understanding the system of white supremacy helped me see that a book like mine could exist.
Favorite line from a book:
"I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes." --Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
Five books you'll never part with:
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong quietly pierced my core, causing all these Asian American feelings to ooze out from my insides. Part of my desire to write my book was to anchor these feelings in an understanding of history and the system of white supremacy, rather than leaving them untethered.
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton is always on my desk, and I flip through it whenever I need to feel more grounded. Her poetry is unmatched.
Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee is a book I first read in my 20s and has grown along with me. I don't reread a lot of books, but Min Jin Lee writes with such care and insight that I've loved returning to this one at least once a decade to notice new things I didn't get when I was younger.
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa is the book I keep in my glove compartment to read when I'm stuck waiting somewhere. The skillful elegance and craft of her writing makes me swoon.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck was assigned to me in high school, and it was the first time I stayed up way past bedtime reading a book. It's still one of my favorite books.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Green Island by Shawna Yang Ryan is a fictionalized account about the transnational politics that surrounded the Taiwanese American community that I grew up around. It was thrilling to read a story about families adjacent to mine that captured the drama and suspense of our histories.
Book you wish you wrote:
How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith is a powerful work about how we talk about the history of slavery in the U.S. and how that informs our identities as Americans. The ways Smith reflects on the purpose and craft of uncovering history, wrestling with it, and making meaning of it spoke deeply to my history nerd educator heart.