Staff Book Recommendations: Young-chan Han
November is National Literacy Month! To celebrate, we asked our staff to recommend their favorite equity books. Here’s what they said…
By Young-chan Han
Senior Family Engagement Specialist, MAEC
I have worked closely with immigrants for my entire adult life, so my interest in books is also about immigrants. There are two books in particular that I would like to share. One is titled Innovative Voices in Education: Engaging Diverse Communities by Eileen Kugler and the other is Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhhà Lai.
Innovative Voices in Education, published in 2012, is a compilation of chapters written by 17 different authors, including teachers, education leaders, community activists, and two immigrant students. I contributed a chapter, titled “From Survivors to Leaders: Stages of Immigrant Parent Involvement in Schools.” In this chapter, I share my experiences working with immigrant families and describe four stages of immigrant parent involvement in schools: from cultural survivor to cultural learner to cultural connector and cultural leader.
I want to highlight the chapter written by the immigrant students, titled “A Foot in Two Worlds: Immigrant Students in U.S. Schools.” These young authors share about the culture divide between immigrant parents and their children at home and school. Parents want to keep their country’s traditions; children want to fit into American culture. Often the two collide. One of the students writes, “I did feel like I was caught in between two worlds and trapped in two identities.” I can relate to that too.
The second book I want to share with you is Inside Out and Back Again, published in 2011. My daughter introduced me to the book in 2017, after she read it with a 
community group in Loudon County, Virginia. The author, Thanhhà Lai, is a refugee from Vietnam who escaped the fall of Saigon in 1975 and eventually settled in the US with her family. This book is composed of a series of poems inspired by authors’ childhood experiences in Vietnam and her first few months in the US in Alabama. As an Asian American immigrant myself, I relate to many of her experiences. The author brought two outfits with her when she came to the U.S.; I had one suitcase with me. She writes about a bucket of chicken, skin crisp and golden, that her mom could not eat, just like I could not eat pizza for years. The smell of cheese made me sick! (I eat pizza now.) I love and treasure this book because it reminds me that every immigrant, every refugee, child and family that comes into our schools brings unique and powerful experiences.
