Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics explores three trans and queer Asian American archives to ask, how can homing as a form of storytelling assist in situating trans and queer Asian Americans (QTAPI) in the United States’ broader narrative of belonging?Throughout the book, V. Jo Hsu conceptualizes and works with the following key terms: homing, a critical approach to storytelling that situates individual experiences in relevant histories and events (9); constellation, the plotting of individual narratives into a network that has the capacity to hold a multitude of relationships and responsibilities (11); diasporic listening, the act of critically attuning oneself to reciprocities ignored or obscured by normative frames (11); and lastly, commonplaces, storylines upon which common understanding can be found, similar to Aristotle's topoi (26).Hsu begins by situating the reader in a brief overview of Asian American history in the United States. Back to the exploitation of Chinese railroad laborers, Hsu traces the evolution of the spaces of “belonging” wherein Asian Americans have been conceptualized via public imagination—from yellow peril as diseased and hypersexualized beings to the model minority of assimilation, and back to anti-Asian hate during and beyond the age of COVID-19. By drawing upon homing as method, Hsu argues that individual stories from trans and queer Asian American individuals can be placed within a larger history and narrative of control. “Listening diasporically to this history exposes the entanglements of yellow peril/model minority with other controlling narratives of U.S. history,” Hsu writes (21). Each chapter explores an archive of oral histories, photography, community work, and storytelling by and for QTAPI, challenging the model minority myth in their respective ways. How do such stories work in tandem, Hsu asks, to interpret and invent Asian America's past and future?Chapter 1, titled love, showcases the Dragon Fruit Project, an intergenerational oral history project that connects younger QTAPI volunteers with older QTAPI activists to record stories about love, family, and community (27). The project was created by historian Amy Sueyoshi upon finding that only two out of 702 entries in the GLBT Historical Society's archive were voices of Asian and Pacific Islander women. Sueyoshi passed the project along to API Equality—Northern California (APIENC) to expand and maintain (39). Love, when constricted by capitalist logics to the idea of the heterosexual productive nuclear family, has scripted the racialization of Asian Americans who, at times, were projected to defy said logics in relation to whiteness (38). The Dragon Fruit Project illustrates alternate intimacies and belongings, challenging normative scripts of love by means of constellating various individual stories into an interconnected narrative (39).Chapter 2, titled resilience, examines the Visibility Project, an archive of photographs that place empowerment in the context of community, pushing against neoliberal, individualist understandings of resilience (74). The Visibility Project reconstructs the commonplace to critique racialized, gendered, and ableist constructions of resilience. Photographer, activist, and archivist Mia Nakano photographed over two hundred queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming Asian Americans, making this the largest collection focusing specifically on this population (86). Photos are displayed along with annotations of how individuals self-identified in terms of gender and ethnicity. As Hsu writes, “the subjects in the Visibility Project renounce the desire for belonging on normative terms, whether through U.S. citizenship or through inclusion in the majoritarian story of Asian America” (90). The Visibility Project also includes a digital history tour of Bay Area Queer Asian Pacific American History and a storytelling and performance workshop built upon archival material (84–85). Ultimately, the Visibility Project reframes Asian American resilience as a “communal empathy” that “channels individual stories into negotiations of communal needs,” empowering QTAPI as “co-conspirators at the fore of a transformational American story” (107).Chapter 3, titled ancestry, features the Queer Ancestors Project, a printmaking and writing workshop for LGBTQ+ youth. Given the complicated experiences of family that queer diasporic subjects often have, the Queer Ancestors Project ensconces students within queer family and encourages them to “listen for submerged relations and story them into far-reaching genealogies” and tend to their chosen familial bonds (111). Ancestry may be understood here as “an array of stories through which QTAPI place themselves in longer traditions of resistance, courage, and care,” connecting them to past and future trans and queer kin (111). Hsu identifies the Queer Ancestors Project's workshop anthologies as a form of kuaer pedagogy. This combines critical pedagogy and queer theory by drawing upon E. Patrick Johnson's quare studies, which center race and class in experiences of gender and sexuality, and Wenshu Lee's subsequent kuaer theory, which takes quare studies through a transnational, transcultural turn across borders.1 Identification goes beyond genetic ancestry tests and “scientific racism”—ancestors can be chosen via shared struggle and resistance, “reaching across timelines and geographies for sturdy, imaginative family formations” (121–122).Chapter 4 centers Hsu themself within the themes of love, resilience, and ancestry, as well as proposing the bodymind as a form of archive that records experiences and stories. Hsu constellates their own personal experiences within their parents’ stories and histories, their experiences of resilience within pain and disability in the academy. To connect bodyminds to homing, Hsu writes that if “our bodyminds archive the experiences we encounter, then homing not only assigns meaning to those archives, but channels that meaning into new ways of encountering ourselves and one another” (183). Homing can be a writing praxis, a way for diasporic subjects to reinterpret their places of origin, creating new connections of belonging and theorizing how we survive together (146). Especially for diasporic subjects, homing is a verb in actively shaping spaces into those of belonging and community for their own selves (183).As a diasporic subject myself who found herself resonating with many of Hsu's stories, I found Hsu's concepts and frameworks to be imaginative and generative. Hsu's work is particularly helpful for scholars looking for frameworks to situate a seemingly disparate scattering of individual narratives and stories within a larger constellation, making meaning out of many. It is also bound to be helpful for scholars looking for methods that center subjects’ active meaning-making in their worlds, their own definitions of belonging, of family—of homing. Hsu's in-depth research into each of these queer and trans Asian American archives is an invaluable piece of critical scholarship.