Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage: Selected Books

An essential volume for the growing academic discipline of Asian American studies, this collection of core primary texts draws from a wide range of fields, from law to visual culture to politics, covering key historical and cultural developments that enable students to engage directly with the Asian American experience over the past century. The primary sources, organized around keywords, often concern multiple hemispheres and movements, making this compendium valuable for a number of historical, ethnic, and cultural study undergraduate programs.

Features 485 essays about Asian and Pacific Islander Americans from the late eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. Many of them are household names, famous for their work in such fields as entertainment, sports, civil rights, politics, and literature. Others have received less attention but made important contributions in such fields as education, journalism, business, and science.

What does it mean to belong? How are twenty-first-century diasporic subjects fashioning identities and communities that bind them together? Aspiring to Home examines these questions with a focus on immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Advancing a theory of locality to explain the means through which immigrants of varying regional, religious, and linguistic backgrounds experience what it means to belong, Bakirathi Mani shows how ethnicity is produced through the relationship between domestic racial formations and global movements of class and capital.

The Chinese in America have rarely been asked to describe themselves in their own words. This superb anthology, a diverse and illuminating collection of primary documents and stories by Chinese Americans, provides an intimate and textured history of the Chinese in America from their arrival during the California Gold Rush to the present. Among the documents are letters, speeches, testimonies, oral histories, personal memoirs, poems, essays, and folksongs; many have never been published before or have been translated into English for the first time. They bring to life the diverse voices of immigrants and American-born; laborers, merchants, and professionals; ministers and students; housewives and prostitutes; and community leaders and activists. Together, they provide insight into immigration, work, family and social life, and the longstanding fight for equality and inclusion.

Chinese in America endured abuse and discrimination in the late nineteenth century, but they had a leader and a fighter in Wong Chin Foo (1847-1898), whose story is a forgotten chapter in the struggle for equal rights in America. The first to use the term "Chinese American," Wong defended his compatriots against malicious scapegoating and urged them to become Americanized to win their rights. A trailblazer and a born showman who proclaimed himself China's first Confucian missionary to the United States, he founded America's first association of Chinese voters and testified before Congress to get laws that denied them citizenship repealed. Wong challenged Americans to live up to the principles they freely espoused but failed to apply to the Chinese in their midst. This evocative biography is the first book-length account of the life and times of one of America's most famous Chinese--and one of its earliest campaigners for racial equality.

'Go home!' is always a slur, but often also an impossibility; this collection explores the words' personal and political dimensions. Asian diasporic writers imagine 'home' in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, Go Home! moves beyond the model minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong.

From silent films to television programs, Hollywood has employed actors of various ethnicities to represent Oriental characters, from Caucasian stars like Loretta Young made up in yellow-face to Korean American pioneer Philip Ahn, whose more than 200 screen performances included roles as sadistic Japanese military officers in World War II movies and a wronged Chinese merchant in the TV show "Bonanza." The first book-length study of Korean identities in American cinema and television, "Hollywood Asian" investigates the career of Ahn (1905-1978), a pioneering Asian American screen icon and son of celebrated Korean nationalist An Ch'ang-ho. Chung's work offers a provocative and original contribution to cinema studies, cultural studies, and Asian American as well as Korean history.

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship in a search to both uncover and speak the truth.

On concert stages Asian faces are suddenly conspicuous. In the first book to account for the growing prominence of Asians in the world of Western classical music, Mari Yoshihara grapples with the significance of this trend. Yoshihara explores the history of East Asian nations' adoption of Western music to explain why the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese are the most visible Asian groups in the field today. Interviewing established and aspiring musicians, she develops a complex picture of the Asians and Asian Americans who have dedicated themselves to classical music in the United States.

A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan. In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

From the perspectives of ethnic studies, history, literary criticism, and legal studies, the original essays in this volume examine the ways in which the colonial history of the Philippines has shaped Filipino American identity, culture, and community formation. The contributors address the dearth of scholarship in the field as well as show how an understanding of this complex history provides a foundation for new theoretical frameworks for Filipino American studies.

Mary Paik Lee left her native country in 1905, traveling with her parents as a political refugee after Japan imposed control over Korea. Her father worked in the sugar plantations of Hawaii briefly before taking his family to California. They shared the poverty-stricken existence endured by thousands of Asian immigrants in the early twentieth century, working as farm laborers, cooks, janitors, and miners. Lee recounts racism on the playground and the ravages of mercury mining on her father's health, but also entrepreneurial successes and hardships surmounted with grace. This award-winning book provides a compelling firsthand account of early Korean American history and continues to be an essential work in Asian American studies.