•  Don Lee followed Yellow, the collection which contains this story, with his 2004 novel, Country of Origin. This critically acclaimed book centers on a mystery. A graduate student of Japanese-African-American descent goes to Tokyo to do research, ends up working in a men’s club and disappears, leaving a Foreign Service junior officer and a jaded police detective to look for clues.

•  Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club takes place in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and like Yellow, it tells the interconnected stories of a community. It is often credited with starting a national trend toward interest in the Asian-American experience. The Joy Luck Club was reissued in an edition by Penguin in 2006.

•  Chang-Rae Lee is a much-lauded Korean-American writer. His novel Aloft (2004) was on the New...