Canwen Xu | author
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This page contains a book club guide to Boring Asian Female (read my book review here). Please see my Index for all the content that you have access to.
Author deep dive: Canwen Xu
Canwen Xu, like the characters in her debut book Boring Asian Female, attended the prestigious Columbia College. Her family moved to the US when she was two, where she grew up in North Dakota and South Dakota (also like her characters), and Idaho, with little racial diversity and she was used to being the only Asian woman in the room. She grappled with conforming to the stereotypes expected of her as an Asian, and conforming to the whiteness around her, with no room for anything in between.
As a college student, she delivered a TEDx talk, ‘I Am Not Your Asian Stereotype’, now viewed nearly four million times. In it, she shared the harm caused by ignorance and lazy stereotypes, and the importance of seeing individuals as having their own identity.
