Many of my readers have asked me why I named my book, “The Tamago Stories.”

This collection was a coming together of several Asian American short stories. They span a number of Asian American characters, from Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese and Thai and a blend of their Asian and American experiences. It also crossed a number of genres from, crime-action, family, medical and legal drama, rom-com and even Sci-Fi. Finally, it was just simply Asian American men and women coming together as the heroes and heroines of the stories.

I needed something to represent such an awesome scrambling of intersections that would resonate with Asian Americans.

There have been previous book titles using the word Yellow, which make sense as the color represents Asian Americans. Just recently, the movie Crazy Rich Asians featured the song “Yellow,” sung by a second year pre-med student, Katherine Ho. Yolk was another term that was used in the past. I wanted an object, an Asian one, to represent all the profundity of my book and it was like a scrambled egg, and the beautiful Japanese tamago came to mind.

The tamago is a delicious egg omelette, served usually as nigiri sushi. It’s a scramble of the egg whites and the yolk, similar to the Asian American experience. The tamago is made through several delicate folds so each fold represented the varied Asian American ethnicities, the rich storylines and Asian American men and women coming together in story. It was very much like a beautiful tamago.

Only until we as Asian Americans can scramble our Asian American experiences, can we truly own our stories, our narrative and our authenticity to create a new form of awesome Asian American storytelling.

There are still many more Asian American short stories to write but here in America, we no longer have to separate the eggs whites and the yolk, everything can become scrambled to create whole new set of immersive experiences.

And that is why, this collection of Asian Americans short stories, is simply called The Tamago Stories.