Contemporary Asian American

Kelly Hopkins is ready to break away, from her small apartment, loneliness, and most important, her past. Struggling to cope with her parents’ double murder five years prior, she’s finally ready to leave her reality-TV-show-addicted grandmother and the tense reality of being half-white in Koreatown. Receiving a scholarship from Columbia University, it is time to achieve her dreams of becoming a successful lawyer. Nothing can break her steadfast focus - that is, until she meets Ian.

"Where are you from . . . ? No—where are you from from?" It's a question every Asian American gets asked as part of an incessant chorus saying you'll never belong here, you're a perpetual foreigner, you'll always be seen as an alien, an object, or a threat. Monica Youn's From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of "authenticity," no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners' ideas about Asians? Your sense of yourself is part stereotype, part aspiration, part guilt.