The Soyo Workshop is a pottery studio outside of Seoul that takes its name from the words for wedging clay and firing clay in a kiln. Yeon Somin has set her second novel, The Healing Season of Pottery, in the Soyo Workshop and the quaint neighborhood where it’s situated. Similar in structure and tone to Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop and other comfort novels, the familiar coffee and cats are placed with a pottery studio that is new and different.

Bernie Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1943, but her story begins in South America. Her mother, Virginia Chia, was born and raised in Huacho, Peru, to a father named Carlos Chia, who had come from China to run a shipping business in South America, and a mother named Cristina Salinas who was half-Chinese and half-Basque and relished her role as a socialite more than that of a mother. Virginia’s parents split up while she was still a young girl, after Cristina discovered that Carlos had another wife and family back in China. Cristina kicked him out and had their marriage annulled.

In 1930, a Filipino immigrant named Fermin Tobera was shot and killed by white men in Watsonville, California, an all-too-common and mostly unpunished hate crime in the US at a time when they weren’t even labeled as such. Randy Ribay uses this period and this murder as the starting point in his new young adult novel Everything We Never Had, which spans four generations of teenage boys in the fictional Maghabol family, covering major historical events in Filipino American history, including violence against Asian agricultural workers in California, labor organizing, exiles from the Marcos years, and anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID pandemic.