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“Biting the Hand—vivid, powerful, and empathetic—grapples with the story of how ‘America’ got made, is made, and will be made. The harshness of this story is often forgotten or misused. This book reminds us of some of its complicated truth.
— Jamaica Kincaid, author of A Small Place
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Biting the Hand messed me up, and I love it. The book was able to circle and ultimately pounce on something I’ve been afraid to write through for years. Julia Lee has really written a lush treatise on the politics of expectation. It’s phenomenal.
— Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
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Hopeful, honest, and bitterly funny, Julia Lee offers a captivating story of teaching and learning, listening and speaking out, how we distinguish who we’re supposed to be from who we might become.
— Hua Hsu, author of Stay True
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A brilliant, fearless, vulnerable examination of our shared journey navigating racial caste structures in America. This is the book of my heart that wasn’t my story to tell, so I’m elated that Lee cracked open her heart for us to travel with her.
— Kimberly Jones, author of How We Can Win
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A memoir that brims with wit, intelligence, vulnerability, and delicious rage, Biting the Hand is the fiery manifesto of an ‘angry little Asian girl’ that delivers on so many levels. A perfect distillation of scholarship, lived experience, and revolutionary call for the liberation of all peoples.
— Phuc Tran, author of Sigh, Gone
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“[Biting the Hand] consistently glimmers with humor, vulnerability, idealistic clarity, and, as promised, incandescent rage. Lee’s honest, compassionate analysis of her past mistakes leaves readers plenty of space to address their own. A lively, wise, and immensely insightful memoir about Asian America's relationship with Whiteness.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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[Julia Lee] dispels the myth of the docile Asian and calls out the absurdities of racial hierarchies in this incisive memoir…Lee’s self-reflective voice and sharp assessment of societal failures yield a revealing and righteously infuriating work.
— Publishers Weekly
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“[A] clear-sighted memoir humming with justified anger…[Lee] untangles the complexities of existing outside the Black/white racial binary that has long defined American society, powerfully calling on anyone who has felt invisible to aid in the dismantling of the existing power structure.
— Booklist