320+ Asian American Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest. What happens when two different sides of the earth are brought together in a community, a family, or even a single person? Our collection of Asian American short stories can give you some ideas.

🏆 Winning stories

“The Porcelain Village” by Jonathan Page

🏆 Winner of Contest #213

My clay hands are becoming solid porcelain. I have always had potter’s hands. The throwing water absorbs the moisturizing oils of the skin. Leaves the hands rough. The clay paste dries and cracks the skin. Leaving it red. But now my hands are hardening. In the bisque firing, my hands harden like porous greenware. The cremated carbon and sulfur escape, exhuming my soul from the earthen clay, little by little, drawing it back to its source. The soul stews out in a boiling whistle, agitating out from...

137 likes 90 comments 90

Read story

“Shameless” by Parul Shah

🏆 Winner of Contest #206

We stopped leaving the garage door open when we were cooking because I told my mom the police were saying criminals had been stealing equipment from garages. My dad was away on an engineering work contract in Dubai like half the Uncles I knew, so we kids were left to help our moms with everything from house maintenance to legal compliance. Back then there was no internet and overseas phone calls to Dubai were expensive, so there were a great many things left unreported to the dads. To compensate for this lack of communication, my mom and all...

128 likes 85 comments 85

Read story

“Birth Mother” by Amanda Lieser

🏆 Winner of Contest #124

I stand in a perfectly pristine kitchen. The counter tops are covered in flour. She stands at them, waiting for me. She’s rolling out the cookie dough in deep, even strokes, like the ocean kissing the beach. Her soft humming fills the kitchen with love. Her hands lift me up; I'm in a navy blue sundress with little yellow sunflowers on it. “Here, sweetie,” she hands me an apron and I lift my little arms obediently to her. She ties it around my waist. A little teddy bear clutching a rolling pin in one soft, brown paw is splashed across my tumm...

167 likes 108 comments 108

Read story

⭐️ Recommended stories

“Base Stock” by Scott Christenson

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #177

In the steamy air of Mizuna’s kitchen, beads of sweat trickle down the 30-something Japanese job candidate’s face.“Which restaurants have you worked in in New York?” I am holding the afternoon interview to replace the fifth prep cook who’s left this year for higher pay elsewhere.“None.” He shakes his head. “In Japan. Soba.” He gestures kneading dough with his hands. In the kitchen the hiss of the gas burners is constant. With his limited English and my very basic Japanese, this conversation isn’t really going anywhere. I point toward th...

52 likes 66 comments 66

Read story

“May My Wing Send You Free” by Grey Barr

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #176

I know he can always sense me nearby. If that was the last remaining work of Longwei or simply the fact that Ung had always been a little too smart for his own good, I did not know. I can say, though, that when he walks home from school alone and the ripples in the pond nearby shiver, he knows that I am flying fast, and I can say that when the branches shake above his head, he knows that I am flying free. And so what matters most is that Ung knows he is not lost because I am his echo. I am what comes after. I am the wind. I am his birdcall. ...

18 likes 9 comments 9

Read story

“Hana, Hanako, Hanabi” by Zack Powell

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #150

Once, when I was a child, my father took me on a day trip to Nagasaki and said, "This is what can happen when you're not careful." He gestured to the Peace Park around us, the chestnut trees and the memorial statue and the plaques commemorating the atomic bombing. We were alone, save for a few crows roosting in the treetops, but he spoke like he was divulging classified information. "Your great-grandfather, for example. He passed away in the explosion, as did many others like him. Unprepared."He stood with his back to the sun, forcing me to ...

73 likes 71 comments 71

Read story

Introducing Prompted, a new magazine written by you!

🏆 Featuring 12 prize-winning stories from our community. Download it now for FREE.

Download

✍️ All stories

“A Name Too Big For Me” by Archie Arboleda

Submitted to Contest #276

Nothing brings my family together quite as good as a funeral. They’re like ants to spilled sugar. This time, the sugar being my grandmother's will. The last bit of her belongings spanning from her time here in the Philippines, Holland, Hawaii, and finally where she spent most of her time, with us in America. However, she wanted to die in the house her husband built for her, so she spent the last bit of time she had left in this world reminiscing about a man who was no longer there. Something that runs in our family, apparently. Our father, m...

6 likes 1 comment 1

Read story

“Gwisin Girlie” by Emily Paik

Submitted to Contest #275

Don’t ask me how I turned into a gwisin, I don’t know how. I mean, I’m barely even Korean. One minute I’m on the commute back to my Harlem duplex after a long shift serving cappuccinos to Patagonias on the Upper West, and the next I’m flat on my ass in a white hanbok in the middle of a forest surrounded by a bunch of other creepy ladies in white hanboks. I tried to ask around, ok, I really did. The second I woke up in the afterlife, I stood right up and started trying to get answers, but it turns out the guy in charge – God, I guess – o...

8 likes 3 comments 3

Read story

“Thank you wave.” by Hannah Orr

Submitted to Contest #274

Finals hadn’t been over more than 48 hours before Sonny was barefoot on her beach again. She would have been back sooner if her cross-country bus hadn't gotten a flat no more than 20 miles out of the Manila city center. You don’t hop on a bus in the Philippines and expect to get anywhere on time. Despite her thick black hair sticking to her neck and having to sit with her backpack in the only space for her feet to go, she was relaxed knowing she was en route to her home island for the summer. The tourists fly but the locals take the bus, the...

2 likes 0 comments 0

Read story

“Storytellers” by Christine McArdle

Submitted to Contest #274

*Trigger Warning - Description of death* It was cold for September. Charlotte pulled her hoodie over her baseball cap and adjusted the earbuds attached to her phone. It was lunch time, and the sidewalks were full. Barely audible through the sounds of Midtown Manhattan, Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries played as she made her way through the crowds to the subway station. Mercifully, it was empty except for the attendant at the booth. She scanned her metro card once, twice, three times – the new metro cards were awful, at least Charlotte’s was...

5 likes 0 comments 0

Read story

“A Haunting in Vietnam ” by Han Ly

Submitted to Contest #274

Author's note: The event of this story is true and happened to my parents when we visited Vietnam in 2006. Names have been changed for privacy.****I heard the knife before ever seeing it. The sound it made cut through the quiet night, sharp and clean. Sleep was settled in my bones, invisible strings tugging my eyelids, and I struggled to fight it—but something in my guts screamed at me to wake. I ripped the strings and opened my eyelids— rubbing at the blurriness.Strange noises teetered at the edge of my awareness, but lucidity hadn’t found ...

9 likes 5 comments 5

Read story

“VIBRANCE IN THE DEADENED VOID” by Lily Finch

Submitted to Contest #274

The air thickened with haunting sounds—a relentless chorus of moaning and mewling unsettled the senses. High-pitched moans pierced the air, reverberating with an unnerved intensity, sending shivers through the screamer's body. Their fear radiated, overshadowing the listeners' apprehension around them. Yet, this was a unique terrain she discovered herself traversing. Despite Sarah's efforts to block out the jarring sounds in her ears and cloud her mind, the noise continued to surge, relentless and menacing. Sarah felt the familiar sensation ...

17 likes 4 comments 4

Read story

“Every Type of Cabbage” by Martha Kowalski

Submitted to Contest #270

“They hate me, don’t they?” The burn of the kimchi jigae still coats my tongue in fire despite the ginseng tea I try to douse it with. I feel a similar burn in my cheeks as Minjun’s parents patter around in the kitchen but the tea doesn’t help much in extinguishing that. My Korean skills are minimal but even I pick up the occasional, “isanghan” – strange. As in, the isanghan blue-eyed, blonde-haired girl their son somehow, inexplicably fell in love with. As in, the isanghan way he lets her call him MJ instead of his full name. As i...

36 likes 28 comments 28

Read story

“One Man's trash is another Man's... Demon?” by Laura Fred-Smith

Submitted to Contest #269

Come on Imogene! This thrift store is supposed to have the best stuff!” I was not as excited as my sister, Kathy, as she tried to drag me to yet another store to look at what she called “ good thrift store stuff”. Lately, I hated thrift shopping. It seemed like every time I picked up an object, I just felt depressed. Over the last few years, I got better about not picking up the objects with violent histories at least, but in a thrift shop more often than not, the objects were just sad. The dishes sold after their grandmother died, furn...

12 likes 4 comments 4

Read story

“Sorano” by Shubham Ghodgaonkar

Submitted to Contest #269

Hana is a girl who lives in a New York penthouse with her mom and dad. Her mom’s name is Jenny and her dad’s name is Kiyoshi. He was a Japanese immigrant who came to the US to study engineering, and along the way ended up marrying Jenny and staying in the USA without returning home for a long time. Hana’s parents thought that now she had completed her 8th grade, they should take her to see his dad’s hometown which was in Shinjuku, Japan.  Hana was not that excited as she wanted to hang out with her friends from school and have some fun,...

6 likes 1 comment 1

Read story

“AFTER ....THE ACCIDENT?” by Frances Goulart

Submitted to Contest #267

AFTER ……..THE ACCIDENT???? I am staring up at a ceiling that isn’t  mine, on a hard mattress in in a bed that definitely isn’t  mine, in some kind of  nightshirt  that I would never have to worn to bed or anywhere else.! Where are my clothes? Where am I?  I have to get out of here. What’s this, bandages around my wrists?  And what is this tag on my wrist? It says Harrison Carmichael?  Who is Harrison Carmichael?  My name is Jack. Jack Keller.  It’s always been Jack Heller. Is this some kind of jok...

4 likes 1 comment 1

Read story

“Sunrise Mesa High School in Copenhagen” by Wenbo Bai

Submitted to Contest #265

No one slept much the night before the early morning flight to Copenhagen. Maeve messaged Sol into the early hours of the morning and only stopped when her phone ran out of texts. They were supposed to arrive at the McCarran airport an hour before dawn for the ambitious itinerary ahead of them: Las Vegas to Seattle to Reykjavik to Copenhagen. In the backseat that morning, it felt to Maeve that her parents were driving her through a murky ocean; the inky dark sky rendered the ride murky and viscous. Still, she felt relieved--she had just put ...

9 likes 2 comments 2

Read story

“My Crazy Year” by Amanda Stogsdill

Submitted to Contest #265

My Crazy Year by Amanda Stogsdill The wintery Colorado wind blew fiercely, numbing tingly fingers as my friends and I gulped in the frosty air. Bundled up in winter coats, scarves, multiple pairs of gloves, we boarded our usual bus to the Center for the Blind.The center was recommended by my vocational counselor, a place for learning new skills while living independently. So, there I was boarding a plane for Colorado. I'd arrived very unsure of what would happen. I was met by staff who assisted me through the airport, driving me to my...

9 likes 6 comments 6

Read story

“A Side of Banh Cuon” by Khiem Kyuong

Submitted to Contest #265

Chapter 1 “Uncle Pig snorted at the webcam,” Did you say a doctor?”“Um … a medical scribe, the person who takes notes for the doctor.”“So, you’re a note-taker?”“Yes, but I also ….”My uncle squealed, “You spent five years at college taking notes to take more notes!”“Well, I ….”“What happened to medical school?” His words sunk into my subconsciousness. Like most humans, I once had a dream. But eventually, you learn that nothing is free, and medical school comes with a price tag of $324,500.99. Bo and Ma, my immigrant parents, ra...

2 likes 0 comments 0

Read story

“Leaving, Staying, Going” by Madison Marvin

Submitted to Contest #265

Leaving, Staying, Going The first thing I noticed when we arrived in China was that it was hot. Not just summer hot, or even sauna hot, but sweltering, boiling, melt your face off hot. I’d never felt a heat so intense in my life, it was like my whole body was put in an oven set to 400 degrees. The second thing that I noticed about China was that all the people were… Chinese. Now I know this might sound obvious, but to me, the only time I saw people who looked like me was at the Panda Bear Adoption Group meetings my mom had us attend. An...

8 likes 0 comments 0

Read story

“The Fake Wedding Date” by Dragon The Poet

Submitted to Contest #264

I don’t like drama. I avoid drama. I don’t even like shows with a lot of drama.So why did I ever agree to being this guy’s date to a wedding? The son of a mother who is my mom’s social enemy? And this wedding of some prominent people in this community? I hardly know those people. They’re only a year or two older than me. I made my exit from this giant social community because of how toxic it was. So did my date. Why did we come back?I fix my cobalt blue and forest green saree, Gods know why I decided to wear one. At my ripe age of 25, I stil...

4 likes 0 comments 0

Read story