This article examines ways of effective reading of non-Asian literary texts in Asian contexts, e.g. in a predominantly Thai classroom, among others. It puts forth essential elements of student-centeredness that need to be implemented and analyzes useful teaching strategies. To this end, Their Eyes Were Watching God by African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston has been selected as a model on which objectives, guidelines, questions, activities and stages of literary analysis are based. The article culminates in a discourse on the issue of identity, which is a comprehension threshold to be crossed in order to gain insights that reach beyond the scope of a novel. Through this process Asian (Thai) students are guided toward expressing their own concepts of identity and constructing unbiased applications of their notions to literary characters.