Reddit reviews The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

At this point, I think you could read pretty much anything outside of your comfort zone and learn a lot! "Classics" are great, worth your time, and have a lot to offer, but also are likely so different from what you're used to that it might be hard to properly use them as a learning tool--especially ones old enough to be in the public domain.

• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is a great contemporary literary fiction novel about a communist Vietnamese spy in America.
  
• The Plague by Albert Camus is more in the "classic" age range ('47), and is a compellingly written story about people & society suddenly isolated and confronted with their demise.
  
• Any collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges would be good--they're generally super fascinating, short "concept" stories. He has one about an infinite library (The Library of Babel), a man who dreams another person into being (The Circular Ruins), and a cult of scholars who invent an incredibly elaborate fictional, tangential reality (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius). He's a hugely influential early "post-modernist" writer.
  
• and maybe Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five? This probably falls into the camp of "required high school reading," but it's both classic lit and sci-fi and it's written in a unique style that's basically impossible to describe--a sort of colloquial madman philosopher--that you might find inspiring.
  
  I realize none of these are public domain, but they shouldn't be too hard to find online or at a library. They're also just books that I've found informative to my own writing, and definitely don't constitute any sort of curriculum (it's also short because I know you're already gonna be buried in recs).

Viet Thanh Nguyen's fictional stories are great -- The Sympathizer and his short story collection The Refugees.

If you're looking for something a little more pulpy there's:

Vermilion: The Adventures of Lou Merriwether, Psychopomp

Henry Chang has a series of mystery thrillers with a Chinese-American cop protagonist.

Also of note:

https://bookriot.com/2017/07/20/a-round-up-of-awesome-asian-american-protagonists-in-ya-lit/

https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/asian-american-protagonist (some cross pollination with the link above, but still)

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-inscrutable-voices-of-asian-anglophone-fiction

Add to that The Sympathizer, which, while a work of fiction, masterfully brings it home on a human level.

Any chance you're talking about The Sympathizer? The guy just won a Pulitzer for it. He's a fucking refugee and his brother, also a fucking refugee, is now some important guy in the Obama administration. Native-born Americans: what the fuck have you done with your mickey mouse life of comfy 1980s Saturday Morning Cartoons?