Thirty-five personal, and often controversial, essays written by college-aged Asian Americans comprise Asian American X, an anthology on the “intersection of race, identity and experiences growing up,” says John Hsu, who, along with Arar Han, co-edited the work.

Whether it’s a story about racial violence, anorexia or about being a gay Christian Korean American, the uniqueness of each writer and his or her perspective comes forth.

It all started in March 2001, when Han and Hsu, friends from high school in Cupertino, Calif., were sophomores in Massachusetts — Hsu at Harvard University and Han at Boston College. The Harvard school paper, the Crimson, had just published “The Invasion” by Justin Fong, an opinion piece that accused Asian American students of perpetuating stereotypes and racial divisions.

“The reactions were pretty violent against Justin Fong,” says Han. “Critics said he alone set Asian Americans back 10 years at Harvard.”

The article also garnered national attention, spurring debate among Asian Americans across the country.

“There was a strong, restless undercurrent within Asian Americans of our age group,” says Han, who immigrated from Korea at the age of 5. “There was an unresolved understanding of identity and a need for discussion.”

So Hsu and Han came up with the idea to send e-mails to Asian organizations and student groups across the nation, with the following proposal: “Anybody who’s interested in writing, whether it’s specifically or generally about all the different aspects of your identity — such as being a Christian, a musician, an adoptee — we’d like to know about it.”

The response was not what they expected.

“We were overwhelmed,” says Han, by the more than 100 submissions and several hundred inquiries. “Here we are, two undergraduate students, no credibility, no book contract, and all these people wrote in.”

During the summer of 2001, they narrowed the submissions to a few dozen essays, but before they could submit proposals to publishers, they needed to learn about book publishing. Hsu hit the library and read the Dummy’s Guide to Book Publishing. Along with a query letter and recommendations from their professors, they began the long process of submitting to commercial and academic presses. Three years later, in August 2004, Asian American X published under the University of Michigan Press.

“Before I started working on the book, I had a very rigid notion of what it meant to be Asian American. But that was quickly challenged when the essays started coming in,” says Han, whose high school in California’s Silicon Valley had a population where Asian Americans became the majority. “Whereas I could just dismiss the feeling of other-ness, some writers came from places where they were the only Asian in school. They didn’t have the same luxury I had.

“My claim to understand all things Asian American quickly disappeared. I wasn’t going to be an expert, just a better docent in the museum, and by no means a master,” says Han,