Hello AACP Newsletter Readers.

I hope you all had a wonderful and informative AAPI Heritage Month.

I was taking a quick look at some of our old articles/editorials for AAPI Heritage Month (June 2004, May 2005, and May 2006) and remembered how we were on a crusade to get AAPI Heritage Month changed to a different month of the year. Nineteen years have passed and AAPI Heritage Month appears to be well entrenched in May and going strong.

On a related note, have a read of our article “What We’ve Lost: The Ending of an Executive Order Meant to Help Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders.”

When I looked up AAPI Heritage Month in Wikipedia, the article noted that president Trump initially eliminated federal recognition of the month. What the Trump administration really did was end a special executive order (that had been renewed and revamped many times over the last 26 years). These executive orders were routinely enacted near or around AAPI Heritage Month (thus the confusion).

For our other article, it’s actually a message about the passing of Rosie Shimonishi, one of the founders and long time board members of AACP.

When I became a board member of AACP, there were five founding members of the organization that were still actively participating. It was always interesting to hear all of their stories – about the founding and early days of the organization, and about their lives in general. We’d see each other at least once a month for our board meetings and whenever they came to help at events. When Rosie stopped participating as a regular board member, she still continued to help us at events, especially the ones near her home in San Jose. The last time I saw Rosie was at such an event – the San Jose Day of Remembrance (commemorating the signing of EO 9066). Rosie was the last of the five founders that I personally had the privilege of working with and knowing. We will miss you Rosie.

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I’m running out of time to get you this newsletter. So I’ll make my description of the featured books rather brief. Please have a look at all the featured books. I usually spend a lot of time finding these books and we’d appreciated it if you checked them all out.

For this month’s selection we have ten books for LGBT Pride Month. Included among these books is George Takei’s new graphic memoir “It Rhymes With Takei,” which covers his coming out, his closeted life before, and his activist life after. Another well anticipated book is Ocean Vuong’s new novel “The Emperor of Gladness.” Vuong is the author of the bestselling novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.”

A number of our other featured books for this month are for “Immigrant Heritage Month.” Among these titles is a children’s book called “Some of Us: A Story of Citizenship and the United States.” Another title is a middle grade book about the Chinese Exclusion act called “Exclusion and the Chinese American Story”; a book about immigrants to the Pacific Northwest called “Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City”; a book that’s appropriate for both LGBT Month and Immigrant Heritage Month called “Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons” (); a book about South Asian immigrants called “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America”; and an Iris Chang book that seems appropriate for the times we’re living in called “Thread of the Silkworm” a biography of Tsien Hsue-Shen, one of the pioneers of the American space program that was shamefully deported to China.

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Thank you Susan and the other editors.

Have a great summer everyone!