Showing titles in Asian American Studies

If you're Irish American or African American or Eastern European Jewish American, there's a rich literature to give you a sense of your family's arrival-in-America story. Until now, that hasn't been the case for Chinese Americans. From noted historian Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones uncovers the three-generational saga of the Tape family. It's a sweeping story centered on patriarch Jeu Dips' (Joseph Tapes') self-invention as an immigration broker in post-gold rush San Francisco, and the extraordinary rise it enables.

In Different Racisms, Matthew Salesses explores the unique racism Asian Americans face, including the model minority myth, the impact of Jeremy Lin's fame on Asian American representation in national media, and America's perception of "Gangnam Style" singer and K-Pop sensation Psy.

A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as a child, must wrestle with her own complicity in white supremacy and bigotry as an adult.

As Beauty Director of the Telegraph Group, a member of the British Beauty Council’s Advisory Board and a British South-Asian herself, Sonia Haria is perfectly placed to debunk the myths and explain the truths of South-Asian beauty. Covering everything from a deep-dive into kohl, skin pigmentation and practical pantry recipes including face masks; to the relevance of Ayurveda, the mind-body connection and even the influence of Bollywood, this book is packed full of practical information and advice that will ensure our beauty becomes an effortless part of everyday life.

In The Ocean in the School, Rick Bonus tells the stories of Pacific Islander students as they and their allies struggled to transform a university they believed did not value their presence.

A harrowing journey into a milestone event of Canadian history: the use of Chinese coolies to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia in hazardous conditions. After the CPR is built in 1885, Yang Hok, a former coolie, treks along the railway to return his half-Chinese/half-Native son to the boy's mother, where he confronts the conflicts arising from road-building among the Chinese and Native peoples.

Sam Louie grew up torn between cultures as part of a first-generation Chinese immigrant family from Hong Kong living in a predominantly African American neighborhood in the United States. He experienced the duality of existence with the tension of two vastly different worldviews, his identity intertwined with the country he lives in and his ancestral ties. What traditions and cultural beliefs get preserved, what gets discarded, and what gets lost in translation? Beneath it all was the presence of three generations of addiction, trauma, and shame.

Pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong made more than 60 films, headlined theater and vaudeville productions, and even starred in her own television show. Her work helped shape racial modernity, as she embodied the dominant image of Chinese, and more generally, “Oriental” women between 1925 and 1940. In Anna May Wong, Shirley Jennifer Lim re-evaluates Wong’s life and work as a consummate artist, and positions the actress as a historical and cultural entrepreneur who rewrote categories of representation.

Author Lauren Hilgers captures the joys and indignities of building a life in a new country - and the stubborn allure of the American dream - in this deeply reported story of one indelible family transplanted from rural China to New York City.

Forced Out: A Nikkei Woman’s Search for a Home in America offers insight into “voluntary evacuation,” a little-known Japanese American experience during World War II, and the lasting effects of cultural trauma. Of the roughly 120,000 people forced from their homes by Executive Order 9066, around 5,000 were able to escape incarceration beforehand by fleeing inland.

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC-Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans. The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing?

Asian girls are hot. Asian fetishes are in. But correctly having an Asian fetish isn't easy. Angelina Zhang is an exotic, silken-haired, almond-eyed Chinese beauty who details the forbidden oriental mysteries of acquiring and maintaining an Asian fetish.

If you are an Asian American who has experienced racial violence, verbal harassment, stereotyping, or microaggressions, you might feel like the world is unsafe. You may suffer from anxiety, depression, or painful memories as a result of this trauma. And if you seek help, you may find that Western-trained mental health professionals simply can't understand your pain and life experiences. This book provides culturally informed treatment methods to help you heal from and fortify yourself against race-based trauma-including intergenerational and historical trauma-and stress.

It is 1942, and World War II is raging. In the months since Pearl Harbor, the US has plunged into the war overseas—and on the home front, it has locked up tens of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans in concentration camps, tearing them from their homes on the West Coast with the ostensible goal of neutralizing a supposed internal threat. At each of these camps the government places a white lawyer with contradictory instructions: provide legal counsel to the prisoners, and keep the place running.

Featuring biographies of Dr. Walter Hawkins, Garrett Morgan, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams MD, Aesop, Dr. Justina Laurena Warren MD, Mary Van Brittan Brown, Mansa Musa, Crispus Attucks, Alexandre Dumas, Alexander Miles, Oliver Jackson, Tzipora, Frederick Jones, and Dr. James McCune Smith MD - Black history is so much more than Martin Luther King!

Our Voices, Our Histories brings together 35 Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond.

When the U.S. government forced 70,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps in 1942, it created administrative tribunals to pass judgment on who was loyal and who was disloyal. In American Inquisition, Eric Muller relates the untold story of exactly how military and civilian bureaucrats judged these tens of thousands of American citizens during wartime. Some citizens were deemed loyal and were freed, but one in four was declared disloyal to America and condemned to repressive segregation in the camps or barred from war-related jobs.

This tale of illicit passion, set among the lush cane fields of the Hawaiian islands in 1919, was inspired by a true incident. Beautiful 16-year-old Yachiyo reluctantly leaves her impoverished parents to live with sophisticated relatives. As she acquires civilized graces, she also struggles with a passion for her hostess' husband.

This book contains autobiographies by 12 individuals of Korean descent. However, their background experiences are vastly different. The editor of the book, Ariel Raimundo Choi, was born in Argentina and is still a citizen of Argentina; therefore, he considers himself a Hispanic-Korean-American. Ye One Chung grew up most of her life in Israel, so she considers Israel as her home. She writes a part of her autobiography in modern Hebrew, a language Ye One Chung is fluent at.

In this classic book on the meaning of multiculturalism in larger American society, Gary Okihiro explores the significance of Asian American experiences from the perspectives of historical consciousness, race, gender, class, and culture.