Asian Studies

Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), twins conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, who were "discovered" in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads of rural America to bring "entertainment" to the Jacksonian mobs.

From Lawrence Ross, author of The Divine Nine, Blackballed is an explosive and controversial book that rips the veil off America's hidden secret: America's colleges have fostered a racist environment that makes them hostile spaces for African American students. Blackballed exposes the white fraternity and sorority system, with traditions of racist parties and songs and assaults on black students; and the universities themselves, who name campus buildings after racist men and women.

Inhabiting four lives - a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption - this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive - as much through love as blood.

Less than three months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and inflamed the nation, President Roosevelt signed an executive order declaring parts of four western states to be a war zone operating under military rule. The US Army immediately began rounding up thousands of Japanese-Americans, sometimes giving them less than 24 hours to vacate their houses and farms. For the rest of the war, these victims of war hysteria were imprisoned in primitive camps.

On October 24, 1944, more than 200 American soldiers were surrounded by German infantry deep in the Vosges Mountains of Eastern France. When their food, ammunition, and medical supplies ran out, the area's army headquarters turned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit of Japanese American soldiers, to achieve what other units had failed to do: rescue the "lost battalion".

After their father's death, Harry, Frank, and Pierce Fukuhara - all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest - moved to Hiroshima, their mother's ancestral home. Eager to go back to his own land - America - Harry returned in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Despite being sent to an internment camp, Harry dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, his brothers, Frank and Pierce, became soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army.

Lily Nakai and her family lived in Southern California, where sometimes she and a friend dreamt of climbing the Hollywood sign that lit the night. At age 10, after believing that her family was simply going on a “camping trip”, she found herself living in a tar-papered barrack, nightly gazing out instead at a searchlight. She wondered if anything would ever be normal again. In this creative memoir, Lily Havey uses storytelling to recount her youth in two Japanese American internment camps during World War II.

One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade's worth of cult-reputation essays - it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.

As Asian Americans are rising in terms of number and influence, the need for understanding their identity becomes important on academic, social, political, economic, and intellectual levels. This book is a very important book to meet the rising need that has been largely neglected in academia and in the publishing industry thus far. This book is an essential addition to all serious university libraries, public libraries, and private personal libraries of educated individuals.

This audiobook contains touching accounts of struggles and achievements of Korean Americans and serves an important primary source material for understanding the Korean teenage experience in the United States. This audiobook contains biographical accounts of a diverse group Korean Americans. Kenny Yoon, a junior at Horace Mann School in New York, is a part of the gifted music program at The Julliard School. Kenny describes how he came to play violin and how he hopes to bring joy to people through music.

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.

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.

Asian American Christians need to hear and own our diverse stories beyond the cultural expectations of the model minority or perpetual foreigner. A team from East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian backgrounds explores what it means to learn our names and be seen by God. They encourage us to know our history, telling stories of the Asian diaspora in America who have been shaped and misshaped by migration, culture, and faith. As we live in the multiple tensions of being Asian American Christians, we can discover who we are and what God may have in store for us and our communities.

For the first time, The Lost Tribe of Coney Island unearths the incredible true story of the Igorrotes, a group of "headhunting, dog eating" tribespeople brought to America from the Philippines by the opportunistic showman Truman K. Hunt. At Luna Park, the g-string-clad Filipinos performed native dances and rituals before a wide-eyed public in a mocked-up tribal village. Millions of Americans flocked to see the tribespeople slaughter live dogs for their daily canine feasts and to hear thrilling tales of headhunting.

Kimi’s Obaachan, her grandmother, had always been a silent presence throughout her youth. Sipping tea by the fire, preparing sushi for the family, or indulgently listening to Ojichan’s (grandfather’s) stories for the thousandth time, Obaachan was a missing link to Kimi’s Japanese heritage, something she had had a mixed relationship with all her life. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, all Kimi ever wanted to do was fit in, spurning traditional Japanese cuisine and her grandfather’s attempts to teach her the language.

On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible.

Yunte Huang ingeniously traces Charlie Chan from his real beginnings as a bullwhip-wielding detective in territorial Hawaii to his reinvention as a literary sleuth and Hollywood film icon. Huang finally resurrects the "honorable detective" from the graveyard of detested postmodern symbols and reclaims him as the embodiment of America’s rich cultural diversity. The result is one of the most critically acclaimed books of the year and a "deeply personal...voyage into racial stereotyping and the humanizing force of storytelling" (Donna Seaman, Los Angeles Times).

In Eyes of the Storm, Roksana Badruddoja explores the perceptions of second-generation South Asian-American women about daily social practices in the U.S. and how they view themselves in comparison to broader American society. She accomplishes this by engaging in a year-long feminist ethnography (in 2004) with a cross-national sample of twenty-five women in the U.S., spending a day in the life of each woman eating, drinking, and talking about work, partners, families, food, clothing, and how they feel about being children of immigrants, among other things. The research on which Eyes of the Storm is based explores the meaning of national belonging (and lack of belonging) for a group of "second-generation" South Asian women in America. Here, Badruddoja focuses on both the conceptual and theoretical perspectives of the social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and political dimensions of transnational migration, which includes the effects of population circulations and demographic change (community formation, segregation, and integration).

As you begin to listen to this book, you will become familiar with all the gods and goddesses of Chinese culture. The historical context will become clear, as well as the institutions, the law, the rules about sexuality, marriage, and children, and so much more. Understanding these aspects of their society before fully becoming engaged in the folklore that was the popular belief at the time is essential to your comprehension of the cultural anecdotes in those tales.

Prisons and Patriots provides a detailed account of 41 Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans), known as the Tucsonians, who were imprisoned for resisting the draft during WWII. Cherstin Lyon parallels their courage as resisters with that of civil rights hero Gordon Hirabayashi, well known for his legal battle against curfew and internment, who also resisted the draft. These dual stories highlight the intrinsic relationship between the rights and the obligations of citizenship, particularly salient in times of war.