Asian American Studies

I discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died, but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them? I am haunted and driven to explore my identity and the meaning of family--especially as farmers tied to the land. I uncover family secrets that bind us to a sense of history buried in the earth that we work and a sense of place that defines us.

Fascinating portraits illuminate the diversity of Japanese American experiences From a title-winning boxer in Louisiana to a Broadway baritone in New York, Japanese Americans have long belied their popular representation as "quiet Americans." Showcasing the lives and achievements of relatively unknown but remarkable people in Nikkei history, scholar and journalist Greg Robinson reveals the diverse experiences of Japanese Americans and explores a wealth of themes, including mixed-race families, artistic pioneers, mass confinement, civil rights activism, and queer history. Drawn primarily from Robinson's popular writings in the San Francisco newspaper Nichi Bei Weekly and community website Discover Nikkei, The Unsung Great offers entertaining and compelling stories that challenge one-dimensional views of Japanese Americans. This collection breaks new ground by devoting attention to Nikkei beyond the West Coast--including the vibrant communities of New York and Chicago, as well as the little-known history of Japanese Americans in the US South. Expertly researched and accessibly written, The Unsung Great brings to light a constellation of varied and incredible life stories.

Fred Korematsu's decision to resist F.D.R.'s Executive Order 9066, which provided authority for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, was initially the case of a young man following his heart: he wanted to remain in California with his white fiancée. However, he quickly came to realize that it was more than just a personal choice; it was a matter of basic human rights. After refusing to leave for incarceration when ordered, Korematsu was eventually arrested and convicted of a federal crime before being sent to the internment camp at Topaz, Utah. He appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, which, in one of the most infamous cases in American legal history, upheld the wartime orders. Forty years later, in the early 1980s, a team of young attorneys resurrected Korematsu's case. This time, Korematsu was victorious, and his conviction was overturned, helping to pave the way for Japanese American redress. Lorraine Bannai, who was a young attorney on that legal team, combines insider knowledge of the case with extensive archival research, personal letters, and unprecedented access to Korematsu his family, and close friends. She uncovers the inspiring story of a humble, soft-spoken man who fought tirelessly against human rights abuses long after he was exonerated. In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

A memoir in short stories, Starting from Loomis chronicles the life of accomplished writer, playwright, poet, and actor Hiroshi Kashiwagi. In this dynamic portrait of an aging writer trying to remember himself as a younger man, Kashiwagi recalls and reflects upon the moments, people, forces, mysteries, and choices--the things in his life that he cannot forget--that have made him who he is. Central to this collection are Kashiwagi's confinement at Tule Lake during World War II, his choice to answer "no" and "no" to questions 27 and 28 on the official government loyalty questionnaire, and the resulting lifelong stigma of being labeled a "No-No Boy" after his years of incarceration. His nonlinear, multifaceted writing not only reflects the fragmentations of memory induced by traumas of racism, forced removal, and imprisonment but also can be read as a bold personal response to the impossible conditions he and other Nisei faced throughout their lifetimes.

"Please don't cry," wrote Iwao Matsushita to his wife Hanaye, telling her he was to be interned for the duration of the war. He was imprisoned in Fort Missoula, Montana, and she was incarcerated at the Minidoka Relocation Center in southwestern Idaho. Their separation would continue for more than two years. Imprisoned Apart is the poignant story of a young teacher and his bride who came to Seattle from Japan in 1919 so that he might study English language and literature, and who stayed to make a home. On the night of December 7, 1941, the FBI knocked at the Matsushitas' door and took Iwao away, first to jail at the Seattle Immigration Stateion and then, by special train, windows sealed and guards at the doors, to Montana. He was considered an enemy alien, "potentially dangerous to public safety," because of his Japanese birth and professional associations. The story of Iwao Matsushita's determination to clear his name and be reunited with his wife, and of Hanaye Matsushita's growing confusion and despair, unfolds in their correspondence, presented here in full. Their cards and letters, most written in Japanese, some in English when censors insisted, provided us with the first look at life inside Fort Missoula, one of the Justice Department's wartime camp for enemy aliens. Because Iwao was fluent in both English and Japanese, his communications are always articulate, even lyrical, if restrained. Hanaye communicated briefly and awkwardly in English, more fully and openly in Japanese. Fiset presents a most affecting human story and helps us to read between the lines, to understand what was happening to this gentle, sensitive pair. Hanaye suffered the emotional torment of disruption and displacement from everything safe and familiar. Iwao, a scholarly man who, despite his imprisonment, did not falter in his committment to his adopted country, suffered the ignominity of suspicion of being disloyal. After the war, he worked as a subject specialist at the University of Washington's Far Eastern Library and served as principal of Seattle's Japanese Language School, faithful to the Japanese American community until his death in 1979.

"I may have been like other boys, but there was a major difference -- my family included 80 to 100 single young men residing in a Filipino farm-labor camp. It was as a ?campo? boy that I first learned of my ancestral roots and the sometimes tortuous path that Filipinos took in sailing halfway around the world to the promise that was America. It was as a campo boy that I first learned the values of family, community, hard work, and education. As a campo boy, I also began to see the two faces of America, a place where Filipinos were at once welcomed and excluded, were considered equal and were discriminated against. It was a place where the values of fairness and freedom often fell short when Filipinos put them to the test.?"-- Peter Jamero Peter Jamero?s story of hardship and success illuminates the experience of what he calls the ?bridge generation? -- the American-born children of the Filipinos recruited as farm workers in the 1920s and 30s. Their experiences span the gap between these early immigrants and those Filipinos who owe their U.S. residency to the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. His book is a sequel of sorts to Carlos Bulosan?s America Is in the Heart, with themes of heartbreaking struggle against racism and poverty and eventual triumph. Jamero describes his early life in a farm-labor camp in Livingston, California, and the path that took him, through naval service and graduate school, far beyond Livingston. A longtime community activist and civic leader, Jamero describes decades of toil and progress before the Filipino community entered the sociopolitical mainstream. He shares a wealth of anecdotes and reflections from his career as an executive of health and human service programs in Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and San Francisco.

This is the first collection of letters by a member of the legendary 442nd Combat Team, which served in Italy and France during World War II. Written to his wife by a medic serving with the segregated Japanese American unit, the letters describe a soldier's daily life. Minoru Masuda was born and raised in Seattle. In 1939 he earned a master's degree in pharmacology and married Hana Koriyama. Two years later the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, and Min and Hana were imprisoned along with thousands of other Japanese Americans. When the Army recruited in the relocation camp, Masuda chose to serve in the 442nd. In April 1944 the unit was shipped overseas. They fought in Italy and in France, where they liberated Bruyeres and rescued a "lost battalion" that had been cut off by the Germans. After the German surrender on May 3, 1945, Masuda was among the last of the original volunteers to leave Europe; he arrived home on New Year's Eve 1945. Masuda's vivid and lively letters portray his surroundings, his daily activities, and the people he encountered. He describes Italian farmhouses, olive groves, and avenues of cypress trees; he writes of learning to play the ukulele with his "big, clumsy" fingers, and the nightly singing and bull sessions which continued throughout the war; he relates the plight of the Italians who scavenged the 442nd's garbage for food, and the mischief of French children who pelted the medics with snowballs. Excerpts from the 442nd daily medical log provide context for the letters, and Hana interposes brief recollections of her experiences. The letters are accompanied by snapshots, a drawing made in the field, and three maps drawn by Masuda.

Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials, captures theexperiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate multiple social identities. The essays by scholars both in the United States and Japan draw upon the Japanese American millennial experience to examine how they find self-expression in Youth Basketball Leagues or Christian youth camps as well as how they grapple with being mixed-race, bicultural, or queer. Featuring compelling interviews and observations, Japanese American Millennials dislodges the dominant generational framework toaddress absences in the current literature and suggests how we might alternatively study Japanese Americans as a whole.

Winner, 2020 American Book Award, given by the Before Columbus Foundation How games have been used to establish and combat Asian American racial stereotypes As Pokémon Go reshaped our neighborhood geographies and the human flows of our cities, mapping the virtual onto lived realities, so too has gaming and game theory played a role in our contemporary understanding of race and racial formation in the United States. From the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to the model minority myth and the globalization of Asian labor, Tara Fickle shows how games and game theory shaped fictions of race upon which the nation relies.

This book sheds light on experiences relatively underrepresented in academic and non-academic sport history. It examines how Asian and Pacific Islander peoples used American football to maintain a sense of community while encountering racial exclusion, labor exploitation, and colonialism. Through their participation and spectatorship in American football, Asian and Pacific Islander people crossed treacherous cultural frontiers to construct what sociologist Elijah Anderson has called a cosmopolitan canopy under which Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and people of diverse racial and ethnic identities interacted with at least a semblance of respect and equity. And perhaps a surprising number of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have excelled in college and even professional football before the 1960s. Finally, acknowledging the impressive influx of elite Pacific Islander gridders who surfaced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it is vital to note as well the racialized nativism shadowing the lives of these athletes.

Chinese food first became popular in America under the shadow of violence against Chinese aliens, a despised racial minority ineligible for United States citizenship. The founding of late-nineteenth-century "chop suey" restaurants that pitched an altered version of Cantonese cuisine to white patrons despite a virulently anti-Chinese climate is one of several pivotal events in Anne Mendelson's thoughtful history of American Chinese food. Chow Chop Suey uses cooking to trace different stages of the Chinese community's footing in the larger white society. Mendelson begins with the arrival of men from the poorest district of Canton Province during the Gold Rush. She describes the formation of American Chinatowns and examines the curious racial dynamic underlying the purposeful invention of hybridized Chinese American food, historically prepared by Cantonese-descended cooks for whites incapable of grasping Chinese culinary principles. Mendelson then follows the eventual abolition of anti-Chinese immigration laws and the many demographic changes that transformed the face of Chinese cooking in America during and after the Cold War. Mendelson concludes with the post-1965 arrival of Chinese immigrants from Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and many regions of mainland China. As she shows, they have immeasurably enriched Chinese cooking in America but tend to form comparatively self-sufficient enclaves in which they, unlike their predecessors, are not dependent on cooking for a white clientele.

The third edition of the foundational volume in Asian American studies Who are Asian Americans? Moving beyond popular stereotypes of the "model minority" or "forever foreigner," most Americans know surprisingly little of the nation's fastest growing minority population. Since the 1960s, when different Asian immigrant groups came together under the "Asian American" umbrella, they have tirelessly carved out their presence in the labor market, education, politics, and pop culture. Many times, they have done so in the face of racism, discrimination, sexism, homophobia, and socioeconomic disadvantage. Today, contemporary Asian America has emerged as an incredibly diverse population, with each segment of the community facing its unique challenges.

A toolkit for understanding how Asian Americans influence, consume and are reflected by mainstream media. Asian Americans have long been the subject and object of popular culture in the U.S. The rapid circulation of cultural flashpoints--such as the American obsession with K-pop sensations, Bollywood dance moves, and sriracha hot sauce--have opened up new ways of understanding how the categories of "Asian" and "Asian American" are counterbalanced within global popular culture. Located at the crossroads of these global and national expressions, Global Asian American Popular Cultures highlights new approaches to modern culture, with essays that explore everything from music, film, and television to comics, fashion, food, and sports. As new digital technologies and cross-media convergence have expanded exchanges of transnational culture, Asian American popular culture emerges as a crucial site for understanding how communities share information and how the meanings of mainstream culture shift with technologies and newly mobile sensibilities. Asian American popular culture is also at the crux of global and national trends in media studies, collapsing boundaries and acting as a lens to view the ebbs and flows of transnational influences on global and American cultures. Offering new and critical analyses of popular cultures that account for emerging textual fields, global producers, technologies of distribution, and trans-medial circulation, this ground-breaking collectionexplores the mainstream and the margins of popular culture.

An attempt to put an Asian woman on Canada's $100 bill in 2012 unleashed enormous controversy. The racism and xenophobia that answered this symbolic move toward inclusiveness revealed the nation's trumpeted commitment to multiculturalism as a lie. It also showed how multiple minor publics as well as the dominant public responded to the ongoing issue of race in Canada. In this new study, Christine Kim delves into the ways cultural conversations minimize race's relevance even as violent expressions and structural forms of racism continue to occur. Kim turns to literary texts, artistic works, and media debates to highlight the struggles of minor publics with social intimacy. Her insightful engagement with everyday conversations as well as artistic expressions that invoke the figure of the Asian allows Kim to reveal the affective dimensions of racialized publics. It also extends ongoing critical conversations within Asian Canadian and Asian American studies about Orientalism, diasporic memory, racialized citizenship, and migration and human rights.

The words "Asian American film" might evoke a painfully earnest, low-budget documentary or family drama, destined to be seen only in small film festivals or on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). In her groundbreaking study of the past fifty years of Asian American film and video, Jun Okada demonstrates that although this stereotype is not entirely unfounded, a remarkably diverse range of Asian American filmmaking has emerged. Yet Okada also reveals how the legacy of institutional funding and the "PBS style" unites these filmmakers, whether they are working within that system or setting themselves in opposition to its conventions.     Making Asian American Film and Video explores how the genre has served as a flashpoint for debates about what constitutes Asian American identity. Tracing a history of how Asian American film was initially conceived as a form of public-interest media, part of a broader effort to give voice to underrepresented American minorities, Okada shows why this seemingly well-intentioned project inspired deeply ambivalent responses. In addition, she considers a number of Asian American filmmakers who have opted out of producing state-funded films, from Wayne Wang to Gregg Araki to Justin Lin.    Okada gives us a unique behind-the-scenes look at the various institutions that have bankrolled and distributed Asian American films, revealing the dynamic interplay between commercial and state-run media. More than just a history of Asian Americans in film, Making Asian American Film and Video is an insightful meditation on both the achievements and the limitations of institutionalized multiculturalism. 

The "yellow peril" is one of the most long-standing and pervasive racist ideas in Western culture-indeed, this book traces its history to the Enlightenment era. Yet while Fu Manchu evokes a fading historical memory, yellow peril ideology persists, animating, for example, campaign commercials from the 2012 presidential election. Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, pop culture artifacts and political polemic. Written by two leading scholars and replete with paintings, photographs and images drawn from dime novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, polemical and pseudo-scholarly literature, and other pop culture ephemera, this book is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.

"The Color of Success" tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities"--peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership. Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders. By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, "The Color of Success" reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.

In the last fifty years, transnational adoption--specifically, the adoption of Asian children--has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children. Based on extensive archival research, Global Families moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of U.S. multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, Choy acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge.--Publisher website.

As the Leaves Turn Gold examines the challenges and opportunities around aging for Asian American women and men in the United States. The book looks at a range of Asian Americans--affluent and poor, third-generation natives and recent immigrants, political exiles and recent migrants, people who immigrated early in life and those who immigrated late in life--and features interview excerpts that bring these issues to life. The book shows how the life courses of individuals, including discrimination they may have faced in earlier years, can shape their golden years. As they grow older, Asian Americans continue to struggle to fit into American society--this is true even of those who are highly educated, relatively affluent, and have lived and worked with non-Asian Americans for most of their lives. As the Leaves Turn Gold discusses not only the challenges older Asian Americans face, such as lack of adequate support services, but also local and transnational solutions. As the Leaves Turn Gold is an important examination of aging, immigration, and social inequality.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, Chinese American owned supermarkets located outside of Chinatown, catering to a non-Chinese clientele, and featuring mainstream American foods and other products and services rose to prominence and phenomenal success in Northern California, only to decline as union regulations and competition from national chains made their operation unprofitable. Alfred Yee's study of this trajectory is an insider's view of a fascinating era in Asian American immigration and entrepreneurship. Drawing on oral interviews with individuals who worked in the business during its peak and decline, he presents an accessible history that illustrates how this once-thriving business fostered the social and economic integration of Chinese Americans into life in the United States. Yee demonstrates how Chinese American supermarkets were able to sell American groceries at reduced prices by using the cheap labor of family members and Chinese immigrants whose entry to the United States had been sponsored by their employers. This type of symbiotic relationship was eventually undermined by labor unions' demands that employees be covered by labor laws and fully compensated for all hours worked. Also contributing to the ultimate demise of Chinese American supermarkets were increasing costs of capitalization and operation, the dominance of national chain stores, and difficulties arising from traditional Chinese methods of business management.

"Looking for Asian America shows real people engaged in the full range of human activity. This is no small accomplishment for the photographer or his subjects. For Asian Americans it is extraordinary to be merely ordinary. To others, even if not to themselves, Asian Americans appear to be contradictions of identity--a Chinese-Yankee is a knockoff." --Frank H. Wu

"Compared to many existing texts on this subject, which tend to take a rather historical approach, this book focuses on more contemporary Asian experiences. Thus, Min has provided a new tool for those of use who have looked for adequate material to teach current Asian American trends in advanced undergraduate courses in the sociology of race as well as in ethnic studies. Encompassing a variety of perspectives from prominent scholars makes this book a valuable device to examine the less visible aspects of Asian Americans′ lives. Students and educators alike would certainly benefit from diligent study of this text." --TEACHING SOCIOLOGY

Los Angeles's Japanese American National Museum, established in 1992, remains the only museum in the United States expressly dedicated to sharing the story of Americans of Japanese ancestry. The National Museum is a unique institution that operates in collaboration with other institutions, museums, researchers, audiences, and funders. In this collection of seventeen essays, anthropologists, art historians, museum curators, writers, designers, and historians provide case studies exploring collaboration with community-oriented partners in order to document, interpret, and present their histories and experiences and provide a new understanding of what museums can and should be in the United States. Current scholarship in museum studies is generally limited to interpretations by scholars and curators. Common Ground brings descriptive data to the intellectual canon and illustrates how museum institutions must be transformed and recreated to suit the needs of the twenty-first century.

A comprehensive survey, Asian American History places Asian immigration to America in international and domestic contexts, and explores the significant elements that define Asian America: imperialism and global capitalist expansion, labor and capital, race and ethnicity, immigration and exclusion, family and work, community and gender roles, assimilation and multiculturalism, panethnicity and identity, transnationalism and globalization, and new challenges and opportunities. It is an up-to-date and easily accessible resource for high school and college students, as well as anyone who is interested in Asian American history.

When American occupiers broke up the Japanese empire in the wake of World War II, approximately 1.7 million people departed Japan for various parts of Northeast Asia. The mass exodus was spearheaded by Koreans, many of whom chartered small fishing vessels to ship them back quickly to their liberated homeland, while wartime devastation hampered the return of Okinawans to their archipelago. By the time the officially endorsed repatriation program was inaugurated, however, increasing numbers of people began escaping US military rule in southern Korea and the Ryukyu Islands by smuggling themselves into occupied Japan. How and why did these migrants move across borderlines newly drawn by American occupiers in the region? Their personal stories reveal what liberation and defeat meant to displaced peoples, and how the compounding challenges of their resettlement led to the expansion of smuggling networks. The consequent surge of unauthorized border-crossings spurred occupation authorities into forging exclusionary migration regulations. Through a comparative study of Korean and Okinawan experiences during the postwar occupation era, Matthew Augustine explores how their migrations shaped, and were in turn shaped by, American policies throughout the region. This is the first comprehensive study of the dynamic and often contentious relationship between migrations and border controls in US-occupied Japan, Korea, and the Ryukyus, examining the American interlude in Northeast Asia as a closely integrated, regional history. The extent of cooperation and coordination among American occupiers, as well as their competing jurisdictions and interests, determined the mixed outcome of using repatriation and deportation as expedient tools for dismantling the Japanese empire. The heightening Cold War and deepening collaboration between the occupiers and local authorities coproduced stringent migration laws, generating new problems of how to distinguish South Koreans from North Koreans and "Ryukyuans" from Japanese. In occupied Japan, fears of communist infiltration and subversion merged with deep-seated discrimination, transforming erstwhile colonial subjects into "aliens" and "illegal aliens." This transregional history explains the process by which Northeast Asia and its respective populations were remade between the fall of the Japanese empire and the rise of American hegemony.

The term "Heartland" in American cultural context conventionally tends to provoke imageries of corn-fields, flat landscape, hog farms, and rural communities, along with ideas of conservatism, homogeneity, and isolation. But as the Midwestern and Southern states experienced more rapid population growth than that in California, Hawaii, and New York in the recent decades, the Heartland region has emerged as a growing interest of Asian American studies.

A recovery of the vital role Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans played in US intelligence services in Asia during World War II.Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with Axis Powers.All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's CIA.

The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971. Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated "the concentration camp law" and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America.

Providing the most comprehensive examination to date of Asians in the Centennial State, William Wei addresses a wide range of experiences, from anti-Chinese riots in late nineteenth-century Denver to the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans at the Amache concentration camp to the more recent influx of Southeast Asian refugees and South Asian tech professionals. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, Wei reconstructs what life was like for the early Chinese and Japanese pioneers, and he pays special attention to the different challenges faced by those in urban versus rural areas. The result is a groundbreaking approach that helps us better understand how Asians survived--and thrived--in an often hostile environment.

Confinement and Ethnicity documents in unprecedented detail the various facilities in which persons of Japanese descent living in the western United States were confined during World War II: the fifteen ?assembly centers? run by the U.S. Army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, the ten ?relocation centers? created by the War Relocation Authority, and the internment camps, penitentiaries, and other sites under the jurisdiction of the Justice and War Departments. Originally published as a report of the Western Archeological and Conservation Center of the National Park Service, it is now reissued in a corrected edition, with a new Foreword by Tetsuden Kashima, associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington.

Photographs by Hikaru C. IwasakiForeword by the Honorable Norman Y. Mineta In Japanese American Resettlement through the Lens, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi gathers a unique collection of photographs by War Relocation Authority photographer Hikaru Iwasaki, the only full-time WRA photographer from the period still living. With substantive focus on resettlement - and in particular Iwasaki's photos of Japanese Americans following their release from WRA camps from 1943 to 1945 - Hirabayashi explores the WRA's use of photography in its mission not only to encourage "loyal" Japanese Americans to return to society at large as quickly as possible but also to convince Euro-Americans this was safe and advantageous. Hirabayashi also assesses the relative success of the WRA project, as well as the multiple uses of the photographs over time, first by the WRA and then by students, scholars, and community members in the present day. Although the photos have been used to illustrate a number of publications, this book is the first sustained treatment addressing questions directly related to official WRA photographs.

In 1943, University of Washington student Gordon Hirabayashi defied the curfew and mass removal of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and was subsequently convicted and imprisoned as a result. InA Principled Stand, Gordon's brother James and nephew Lane have brought together his prison diaries and voluminous wartime correspondence to tell the story ofHirabayashi v. United States, the Supreme Court case that in 1943 upheld and on appeal in 1987 vacated his conviction. For the first time, the events of the case are told in Gordon's own words. The result is a compelling and intimate story that reveals what motivated him, how he endured, and how his ideals changed and deepened as he fought discrimination and defended his beliefs.

During World War II over 5,500 young Japanese Americans left the concentration camps to which they had been confined with their families in order to attend college. Storied Lives describes—often in their own words—how nisei students found schools to attend outside the West Coast exclusion zone and the efforts of white Americans to help them. The book is concerned with the deeds of white and Japanese Americans in a mutual struggle against racism, and argues that Asian American studies—indeed, race relations as a whole—will benefit from an understanding not only of racism but also of its opposition, antiracism. To uncover this little known story, Gary Okihiro surveyed the colleges and universities the nisei attended, collected oral histories from nisei students and student relocation staff members, and examined the records of the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council and other materials.

Asian American Studies Now truly represents the enormous changes occurring in Asian American communities and the world, changes that require a reconsideration of how the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies is defined and taught. This comprehensive anthology, arranged in four parts and featuring a stellar group of contributors, summarizes and defines the current shape of this rapidly changing field, addressing topics such as transnationalism, U.S. imperialism, multiracial identity, racism, immigration, citizenship, social justice, and pedagogy.

Altered Lives, Enduring Community examines the long-term effects on Japanese Americans of their World War II experiences: forced removal from their Pacific Coast homes, incarceration in desolate government camps, and ultimate resettlement. As part of Seattle's Densho: Japanese American Legacy Project, the authors collected interviews and survey data from Japanese Americans now living in King County, Washington, who were imprisoned during World War II. Their clear-eyed, often poignant account presents the contemporary, post-redress perspectives of former incarcerees on their experiences and the consequences for their life course. Using descriptive material that personalizes and contextualizes the data, the authors show how prewar socioeconomic networks and the specific characteristics of the incarceration experience affected Japanese American readjustment in the postwar era.

2004 Washington State Book Award Finalist Judgment without Trial reveals that long before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government began making plans for the eventual internment and later incarceration of the Japanese American population. Tetsuden Kashima uses newly obtained records to trace this process back to the 1920s, when a nascent imprisonment organization was developed to prepare for a possible war with Japan, and follows it in detail through the war years.

In Fighting Invisibility, Monica Mong Trieu argues that we must consider the role of physical and symbolic space to fully understand the nuances of Asian American racialization.

A vital account of everyday Nisei life and identity formation in an early twentieth-century community Tacoma's vibrant Nihonmachi of the 1920s and '30s was home to a significant number of first generation Japanese immigrants and their second generation American children, and these families formed tight-knit bonds despite their diverse religious, prefectural, and economic backgrounds. As the city's Nisei grew up attending the secular Japanese Language School, they absorbed the Meiji-era cultural practices and ethics of the previous generation. At the same time, they positioned themselves in new and dynamic ways, including resisting their parents and pursuing lives that diverged from traditional expectations. Becoming Nisei, based on more than forty interviews, shares stories of growing up in Japanese American Tacoma before the incarceration. Recording these early twentieth-century lives counteracts the structural forgetting and erasure of prewar histories in both Tacoma and many other urban settings after World War II. Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman underscore both the agency of Nisei in these processes as well as their negotiations of prevailing social and power relations.

Few studies have highlighted the stories of middle-class children of immigrants who move to their ancestral homelands--countries with which they share cultural ties but haven't necessarily had direct contact. Chasing the American Dream in China addresses this gap by examining the lives of highly educated American-born Chinese (ABC) professionals who "return" to the People's Republic of China to build their careers. Analyzing the motivations and experiences of these individuals deepens our knowledge about transnationalism among the second-generation as they grapple with complex issues of identity and societal belonging in the ethnic homeland. This book demonstrates how these professional migrants maneuver between countries and cultures to further their careers and maximize opportunities in the rapidly changing global economy. When used strategically, the versatile nature of their ethnic identities positions them as indispensable bridges between the global superpowers of China and the United States in their competition for global dominance.  

There is a rich body of literature on the experience of Japanese immigrants in the United States, and there are also numerous accounts of the cultural dislocation felt by American expats in Japan. But what happens when Japanese Americans, born and raised in the United States, are the ones living abroad in Japan?    Redefining Japaneseness chronicles how Japanese American migrants to Japan navigate and complicate the categories of Japanese and "foreigner." Drawing from extensive interviews and fieldwork in the Tokyo area, Jane H. Yamashiro tracks the multiple ways these migrants strategically negotiate and interpret their daily interactions.

Among the many groups of Chinese who migrated from their ancestral homeland in the nineteenth century, none found a more favorable situation that those who came to Hawaii. Coming from South China, largely as laborers for sugar plantations and Chinese rice plantations but also as independent merchants and craftsmen, they arrived at a time when the tiny Polynesian kingdom was being drawn into an international economic, political, and cultural world.Sojourners and Settlers traces the waves of Chinese immigration, the plantation experience, and movement into urban occupations. Important for the migrants were their close ties with indigenous Hawaiians, hundreds establishing families with Hawaiian wives. Other migrants brought Chinese wives to the islands. Though many early Chinese families lived in the section of Honolulu called "Chinatown," this was never an exclusively Chinese place of residence, and under Hawaii's relatively open pattern of ethnic relations Chinese families rapidly became dispersed throughout Honolulu.Chinatown was, however, a nucleus for Chinese business, cultural, and organizational activities. More than two hundred organizations were formed by the migrants to provide mutual aid, to respond to discrimination under the monarchy and later under American laws, and to establish their status among other Chinese and Hawaii's multiethnic community.

From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island immigration station in San Francisco served as the processing and detention center for over one million people from around the world. The majority of newcomers came from China and Japan, but there were also immigrants from India, the Philippines, Korea, Russia, Mexico, and over seventy other countries. The full history of these immigrants and their experiences on Angel Island is told for the first time in this landmark book, published to commemorate the immigration station's 100th anniversary. Based on extensive new research and oral histories, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America examines the great diversity of immigration through Angel Island: Chinese "paper sons," Japanese picture brides, Korean refugee students, South Asian political activists, Russian and Jewish refugees, Mexican families, Filipino workers, and many others. Together, their stories offer a more complete and complicated history of immigration to America than we have ever known. Like its counterpart on Ellis Island, the immigration station on Angel Island was one of the country's main ports of entry for immigrants in the early twentieth century. But while Ellis Island was mainly a processing center for European immigrants, Angel Island was designed to detain and exclude immigrants from Asia. The immigrant experience on Angel Island-more than any other site-reveals how U.S. immigration policies and their hierarchical treatment of immigrants according to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and gender played out in daily practices and decisions at the nation's borders with real consequences on immigrant lives and on the country itself. Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America is officially sponsored by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. Proceeds will benefit the Foundation.

Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence is a compelling story of courage, community, endurance, and reparation. It shares the experiences of Japanese Americans (Nisei) who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, fighting on the front lines in Italy and France, serving as linguists in the South Pacific, and working as cooks and medics. The soldiers were from Hood River, Oregon, where their families were landowners and fruit growers. Town leaders, including veterans' groups, attempted to prevent their return after the war and stripped their names from the local war memorial. All of the soldiers were American citizens, but their parents were Japanese immigrants and had been imprisoned in camps as a consequence of Executive Order 9066. The racist homecoming that the Hood River Japanese American soldiers received was decried across the nation. Linda Tamura, who grew up in Hood River and whose father was a veteran of the war, conducted extensive oral histories with the veterans, their families, and members of the community. She had access to hundreds of recently uncovered letters and documents from private files of a local veterans' group that led the campaign against the Japanese American soldiers. This book also includes the little known story of local Nisei veterans who spent 40 years appealing their convictions for insubordination.

This book assists health care providers, researchers, educators, students, and policy makers who work with and for Asian American populations meet the increased demand for culturally competent health care and education. Chapters of this book focus on issues, needs, and assets of underserved, under-researched Asian American populations. Authors critically analyze interplay of culture, immigration, and social and political contexts in relation to the vulnerability of Asian American populations.

Crossing distinct literatures, histories, and politics, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America reveals the intertwined story of contemporary Asian Americans and Latinxs through a shared literary aesthetic. Their transfictional literature creates expansive imagined worlds in which distinct stories coexist, offering artistic shape to their linked political and economic struggles. Long Le-Khac explores the work of writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, and Aimee Phan. He shows how their fictions capture the uneven economic opportunities of the post-civil rights era, the Cold War as it exploded across Asia and Latin America, and the Asian and Latin American labor flows powering global capitalism today.

This new volume, Children's Literature from Asia in Today's Classrooms: Towards Culturally Authentic Interpretations, aims to provide readers with interpretation guides and practical ideas when they endeavor to make use of Asian international children's literature in the classroom. It attempts to help readers interpret stories from Asia more authentically, and focuses both on international children's literature and also on international literature read by young adults. In an increasingly interconnected world, understanding Asian international children's literature and effectively using it are worthy goals for PK-16 classrooms and teacher education programs. The book is divided into two parts. Part I discusses how to authentically read children's literature from four countries: India, Thailand, China, and Japan. These chapters provide guides for meaningful interpretations of cultural aspects of children's stories from these countries. Part II consists of annotated bibliographies of international children's literature from selected Asian societies: China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. The editors believe that readers will find each author's cultural insights fascinating and useful as they attempt to read with cultural authenticity.

Comparative philosophy is an important site for the study of non-Western philosophical traditions, but it has long been associated with "East-West" dialogue. Comparative Studies in Asian and Latin American Philosophies shifts this trajectory to focus on cross-cultural conversations across Asia and Latin America. A team of international contributors discuss subjects ranging from Orientalism in early Latin American studies of Asian thought to liberatory politics in today's globalized world. They bring together resources including Latin American feminism, Aztec teachings on ethics, Buddhist critiques of essentialism, and Confucian morality. Chapters address topics such as educational reform, the social practices surrounding breastfeeding, martial arts as political resistance, and the construction of race and identity. Together the essays reflect the philosophical diversity of Asia and Latin America while foregrounding their shared concerns on issues of Eurocentrism and coloniality. By bringing these critical perspectives to bear on the theories and methods of cross-cultural philosophy, Comparative Studies in Asian and Latin American Philosophies offers new insights into the nature and practice of philosophical comparison.

Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings."

Tricksters and Cosmopolitans is the first sustained exploration into the history of cross-cultural collaborations between Asian American writers and their non-Asian American editors and publishers. The volume focuses on the literary production of the cosmopolitan subject, featuring the writers Sui Sin Far, Jessica Hagedorn, Karen Tei Yamashita, Monique Truong, and Min Jin Lee. The newly imagined cosmopolitan subject that emerges from their works dramatically reconfigured Asian American female subjectivity in metropolitan space with a kind of fluidity and ease never before seen. But as Rei Magosaki shows, these narratives also invariably expose the problematic side of this figure, which also serves to perpetuate exploitative structures of Western imperialism and its legacies in late capitalism. Arguing that the actual establishment of such a critical standpoint on imperialism and globalization required the expansive and internationalist vision of editors who supported, cultivated, and promoted these works, Tricksters and Cosmopolitans reveals the negotiations between these authors and their publishers and between the shared investment in both politics and aesthetics that influenced the narrative structure of key works in the Asian American literary canon.

The ghost as a literary figure has been interpreted multiple times: spiritually, psychoanalytically, sociologically, or allegorically. Following these approaches, Janna Odabas understands ghosts in Asian American literature as self-reflexive figures. With identity politics at the core of the ghost concept, Odabas emphasizes how ghosts critically renegotiate the notion of 'Asian America' as heterogeneous and transnational and resist interpretation through a morally or politically preconceived approach to Asian American literature. Responding to the tensions of the scholarly field, Odabas argues that the literary works under scrutiny openly play with and rethink conceptions of ghosts as mere exotic, ethnic ornamentation.

An anthology of Asian diasporic writers musing on the notion of "home." "Bold and devastating . . . the very definition of reclamation." --The International Examiner Asian diasporic writers imagine "home" in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, this anthology moves beyond the model-minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong. "The notion of home has always been elusive. But as evidenced in these stories, poems, and testaments, perhaps home is not so much a place, but a feeling one embodies. I read this book and see my people--see us--and feel, in our collective outsiderhood, at home." --Ocean Vuong

Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings."

The global circulation of comics, manga, and other such visual mediums between North America and Asia produces transnational meanings no longer rooted in a separation between "Asian" and "American." Drawing New Color Lines explores the culture, production, and history of contemporary graphic narratives that depict Asian Americans and Asians. It examines how Japanese manga and Asian popular culture have influenced Asian American comics; how these comics and Asian American graphic narratives depict the "look" of race; and how these various representations are interpreted in nations not of their production. By focusing on what graphic narratives mean for audiences in North America and those in Asia, the collection discusses how Western theories about the ways in which graphic narratives might successfully overturn derogatory caricatures are themselves based on contested assumptions; and illustrates that the so-called odorless images featured in Japanese manga might nevertheless elicit interpretations about race in transnational contexts.

This book offers captivating insights into the interaction between the Indian and the American cultural worlds. A fascinating work of research, it illustrates an extraordinary capacity to employ the details of literary texts as significant clues in understanding the configuration of transcultural identities. The book constructs an exciting dialogue between complex theoretical notions and the vibrant fictional worlds populated by Indian, American and European characters. Its original and multi-layered approach illustrates how complex theories of culture can help the reader understand contemporary processes of migration, cultural change and gender identity that interfere with daily life.

Asian American literature abounds with complex depictions of American cities as spaces that reinforce racial segregation and prevent interactions across boundaries of race, culture, class, and gender. However, in Cities of Others, Xiaojing Zhou uncovers a much different narrative, providing the most comprehensive examination to date of how Asian American writers - both celebrated and overlooked - depict urban settings. Zhou goes beyond examining popular portrayals of Chinatowns by paying equal attention to life in other parts of the city. Her innovative and wide-ranging approach sheds new light on the works of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese American writers who bear witness to a variety of urban experiences and reimagine the American city as other than a segregated nation-space.

Modern Minority presents a fresh examination of canonical and emergent Asian American literature's relationship to the genre of realism, particularly through its preoccupation with the everyday. Lee argues that it is through the elements of the everyday, which she defines as the 'quantifiable' attention to familiar objects and 'quasi-statistical' repetitions of ordinary acts, that Asian American writers negotiate their vexed relationship to modernity. Lee draws on Lukacs, Jameson, de Certeau, and other cultural critics to show how portraits of the everyday articulate Asian American writers' participation in the project of literary realism. The study participates in a new trend in Asian American criticism that sees form as crucial to the construction of minorness. The book covers most of the 20th century and spans a range of Asian ethnic groups and literary styles.

This interdisciplinary study examines the theme of consumption in Asian American literature, connection representations of cooking and eating with ethnic identity formation. Using four discrete modes of identification--historic pride, consumerism, mourning, and fusion--Jennifer Ho examines how Asian American adolescents challenge and revise their cultural legacies and experiment with alternative ethnic affiliations through their relationships to food.

Chinese American authors often find it necessary to represent Asian history in their literary works. Tracing the development of the literary production of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Lisa See, and Russell Leong, among others, this book captures the effects of international politics and globalization on Chinese American diasporic consciousness.

The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identity argues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity. Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge.

This critical study of Asian American literature discusses work by internationally successful writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Bharati Mukherjee, Amy Tan and others in their historical, cultural and critical contexts. The focus of this book is on contemporary writing, from the 1970s onwards, although it also traces over a hundred years of Asian American literary production in prose, poetry, drama and criticism. The main body of the book comprises five periodized chapters that highlight important events in a nation-state that has historically rendered Asian Americans invisible.

The French epicure and gastronome Brillat-Savarin declared, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are." Wenying Xu infuses this notion with cultural-political energy by extending it to an ethnic group known for its cuisines: Asian Americans. She begins with the general argument that eating is a means of becoming--not simply in the sense of nourishment but more importantly of what we choose to eat, what we can afford to eat, what we secretly crave but are ashamed to eat in front of others, and how we eat. Food, as the most significant medium of traffic between the inside and outside of our bodies, organizes, signifies, and legitimates our sense of self and distinguishes us from others, who practice different foodways.

This volume presents global perspectives on Asian American literature by accomplished scholars from Germany, Japan, Singapore, Spain, and the US. It covers a diverse range of interdisciplinary topics in contemporary Asian American Studies across a wide spectrum of ethnic groups: Burmese, Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Vietnamese. Section I probes themes such as the vital role that war plays in the production of Asian American literary works, and the agency of the self in the life writings of Asian American autobiographers. Section II examines the confines of binary oppositions of gender, as well as issues of pan-ethnicity and gender relations. Section III explores the role that performance, film, and language play in the definition of self-identity and in ethnic empowerment. Five intrinsically connected themes run through all sections: gender roles; stereotyping; identity politics; intersections of literature, history, family, and the self; and the impact of wars on Asian American culture and literature.

What explains the perception of Asians both as economic exemplars and as threats? America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to more familiar primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"--two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"-- to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier. From Progressive efforts to regulate corporate monopoly to New Deal contentions with the crisis of the Great Depression, a particular racial mode of social redress explains why turn-of-the-century radicals and reformers united around Asian exclusion and why Japanese American internment during World War II was a liberal initiative.

Through a blend of personal narrative, cultural and literary analysis, and discussions about teaching, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship shows how people of color use reading and writing to develop and articulate notions of citizenship. Morris Young begins with a narration of his own literacy experiences to illustrate the complicated relationship among literacy, race, and citizenship and to reveal the tensions that exist between competing beliefs and uses of literacy among those who are part of dominant American culture and those who are positioned as minorities.

One of the central tasks of Asian American literature, argues Patricia P. Chu, has been to construct Asian American identities in the face of existing, and often contradictory, ideas about what it means to be an American. Chu examines the model of the Anglo-American bildungsroman and shows how Asian American writers have adapted it to express their troubled and unstable position in the United States. By aligning themselves with U.S. democratic ideals while also questioning the historical realities of exclusion, internment, and discrimination, Asian American authors, contends Chu, do two kinds of ideological work: they claim Americanness for Asian Americans, and they create accounts of Asian ethnicity that deploy their specific cultures and histories to challenge established notions of Americanness.

The dramatic events recounted in this story include: Iva's arrest by the Americans, who eventually found that her actions were blameless Her emotional return to the United States and the racially-motivated public outcry that led to her re-arrest and prosecution for treason The dishonest actions of prosecutors who coerced witnesses into providing false evidence against her The six years she spent in prison, and her eventual pardon by President Ford in 1977 Written by Andre Frattino and illustrated by Kate Kasenow, Tokyo Rose: Zero Hour has an introduction explaining the "Tokyo Rose" phenomenon and the devastating effects of World War II on Asian-American communities that continue to reverberate. In a world rife with misinformation and racial prejudice, the story of Tokyo Rose has never been more relevant.

Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada's No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America's past with disturbing links to the American present.

The 112th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores the Vietnamese-American experience   Duy Doan's striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the collection's unassuming title, in poems that explore--now with abundant humor, now with a deeply felt reserve--the ambiguities and tensions that mark our effort to know our histories, our loved ones, and ourselves. These are poems that draw from Doan's experience as a Vietnamese-American while at the same time making a case for--and masterfully playing with--the fluidity of identity, history, and language. Nothing is alien to these poems: the Saigon of a mother's dirge, the footballer Zinedine Zidane, an owl that "talks to his other self in the well"--all have a place in Doan's far-reaching and intimately human art.

MariNaomi's newest graphic novel tours the mid-90's US and Japanese illegal hostess bar scene and her own personal cultural awakening.

The daughter of an English merchant father and Chinese mother, Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) was a wildly popular fiction writer in her time. Born in Montreal, Eaton lived in Jamaica and several places in the United States before settling in Alberta. Her books, many of them published under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, encompass the experiences of marginalized women in Canada, Jamaica, the United States, and a romantic, imagined Japan. Marion: The Story of an Artist's Model is Eaton's only book that explicitly deals with being "foreign" in Canada. The novel follows the life of "half-foreign" Marion Ascough - a character based on Eaton's own sister - while never identifying her "foreignness."

Beauty plus pity--that is the closest we can get to a definition of art." -Vladimir Nabokov In this tragicomic modern immigrant's tale, Malcolm Kwan is a slacker twentysomething Asian-Canadian living in Vancouver who is about to embark on a modelling career when his life is suddenly derailed by two near-simultaneous events: the death of his filmmaker father, and the betrayal of his fiancee who has left him. Soon he meets Hadley, the half-sister he never knew existed--the result of his father's extramarital affair--and as their tentative relationship grows, Malcolm is forced to confront his past relationships with women, including his own mother, an art teacher working through her grief as well as her resentment at her son befriending her husband's daughter. Written with a winsome yet plaintive eye, Beauty Plus Pity is about a young man who's forced to reckon with the past as he works through his lifelong ambivalence toward his hyphenated cultural identity, and between two parents holding intolerable secrets.

Sister Swing chronicles the growing up years of three sisters. It follows their transplant from a relatively sheltered life in Malaysia to the raw realities of the United States. It illuminates the complex relationships between the sisters, and gently but firmly explores the morals, values and mindsets of growing up Asian in a Western world.

Now a major motion picture directed by Randall Park Adrian Tomine's beloved New York Times Notable book was adapted into a major motion picture. With the screenplay written by the cartoonist, Shortcomings debuted at Sundance and appeared at the Tribeca Festival, both to great acclaim. Ben Tanaka has problems. In addition to being rampantly critical, sarcastic, and insensitive, his long-term relationship is awash in turmoil. His girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, suspects that Ben has a wandering eye, and more to the point, it's wandering in the direction of white women. This accusation (and its various implications) becomes the subject of heated, spiralling debate, setting in motion a story that pits California against New York, devotion against desire, and trust against truth.

Facing barriers of immigration exclusion, cultural dislocation, child labor, segregated schooling, crime, and violence, Chinese American children attempted to build a world for themselves on the margins of two cultures. Their story is part of the larger American story of the struggle to overcome racism and realize the ideal of equality.