Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage: Books

Examines the struggles and achievements of Japanese immigrants to America over the past two centuries.

Arriving in the United States from Japan in 1894, when he was sixteen, Ichihashi attended public school in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford University, and received a doctorate from Harvard University. He began teaching at Stanford in 1913, specializing in Japanese history and government, international relations, and the Japanese American experience. He remained at Stanford until he and his wife, Kei, were forced to leave their campus home for a series of internment camps, where they remained until the closing days of the war.

In this critically acclaimed memoir, Lim lays bare the turns in her early life in wartorn Malaysia, from wealth and security to poverty and family violence. Her struggles to fashion a meaningful life that will include professional achievement and a self-determined sexuality take her on a journey across cultural and geographical borders. In time, she moves from a numbered isolation to a self-forged identity as an Asian American, aware of her relationship to the land she left behind, her new homeland, and the homeland she carries within herself.

Since 1970, a growing number of Asian Indians have called Michigan home. Representative of the "new immigration," Asian Indians come from a democratic country, are well-educated, and come from middle- and upper-class families. As Arthur W. Helweg shows, Asian Indians contribute to the richness and diversity of Michigan's culture through active participation in local institutions, while maintaining a strong ethnic identity rooted in India.

One of the most remarkable stories of immigration in the last half century is that of Indians to the United States. People of Indian origin make up a little over one percent of the American population now, up from barely half a percent at the turn of the millennium. The Other One Percent is a careful, data-driven, and comprehensive account of the three core processes-selection, assimilation, and entrepreneurship-that have led to this rapid rise.

World War II was a watershed event for many of America's minorities, but its impact on Chinese Americans has been largely ignored. Utilizing extensive archival research as well as oral histories and letters from over one hundred informants, K. Scott Wong explores how Chinese Americans carved a newly respected and secure place for themselves in American society during the war years.

In this foundational study, Shehong Chen investigates how Chinese immigrants to the United States transformed themselves into Chinese Americans during the crucial period between 1911 and 1927. In addition to identifying the ideological elements of the Chinese American identity, Chen documents the building of permanent Chinese American communities, or Chinatowns. from being Chinese in the People's Republic of China, Chen documents how Chinese immigrants survived exclusion and discrimination, envisioned and maintained Chineseness, and adapted to American society.

This concise interpretation of the Vietnamese experience in America begins with the fall of Saigon in 1975, when enormous waves of refugees fled Vietnam. It graphically details their flight to asylum countries in Asia and then to the United States. Based in part on firsthand interviews, the book recounts vivid stories of the horror of getting out of Vietnam and the difficulties of starting over in a new country.

Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States examines in comprehensive detail the most rapidly growing and quickly changing minority group in the United States. Once a small population, this group is now recognized by official census counts and by society as a diverse people, comprised of Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Samoans, and many other heritages. However, the conception that Asians are a single and successful model minority still exists, though they are in fact a complex and multidimensional people still struggling in the pursuit of the American dream.

Extensive, but selective, history of Hawaiian music including its roots, structure, instruments, influences in the world and biographies of leading musicians

A collection of stories about Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana as they face love, loss, despair, and the challenges and conflicts of a new life.

In 1949 four Chinese women-drawn together by the shadow of their past-begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Nearly forty years later, one of the members has died, and her daughter has come to take her place, only to learn of her mother's lifelong wish--and the tragic way in which it has come true. The revelation of this secret unleashes an urgent need among the women to reach back and remember...

"Tan is one of the prime storytellers writing fiction today." -NEWSWEEK Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past-including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.

San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries--memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.

An upbeat photo-essay shows a Vietnamese American third grader at home with her refugee family . . . Ted Thair . . . and his informal pictures capture the richness of the child's experience in two cultures.

Elizabeth's romantic interest in an Asian American student angers a prejudiced bully named Brad.