Asian Studies

In this book, Wen-chin Ouyang shows how our experience of adab stories has the power to transform both our personal relationships and society. She draws on classic Arabic stories from the famous Thousand and One Nights and compares them with tales from the canonical Chinese novels Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, and Water Margin.

An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US...

A deeply personal and shocking look at how China is coming to terms with its conflicted past as it emerges into a modern, cutting-edge superpower. Through the stories of three generations of women in her family, Karoline Kan, a former New York Times reporter based in Beijing, reveals how they...

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY New York Times Critics Wall Street Journal Kirkus Reviews Christian Science Monitor San Francisco Chronicle Finalist for the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Biography Award Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize The deeply reported story of...

From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli author, a suspenseful and poignant story of a family coping with the sudden mental decline of their beloved husband and father—an engineer who they discover is involved in an ominous secret military project Until recently, Zvi Luria was...

Daryl Joji Maeda's account of Bruce Lee's legacy traces how movements and migrations across the Pacific Ocean structured the cultures Lee inherited, the milieu he occupied, the martial art he developed, the films he made, and the world he left behind. A unique blend of cultural history and biography, Like Water unearths the cultural strands intertwined in Lee's rise to a new kind of global stardom. Moving from the gold rush in California and the British occupation of Hong Kong to the Cold War, Maeda builds depth and complexity to this larger-than-life figure.

Have you ever wondered about the origin of the terrifying Wendigo? How about the Philippine shape-shifting vampire? What about the Māori forest spirits? Join award winning podcaster and researcher Kamuela Kaneshiro as he takes you on a thrilling trip through Asia, the Americas, and other fascinating cultures touching the Pacific Ocean. And as you marvel at this captivating assortment of deities, monsters, and historical backdrops, you’re sure to have your imagination sparked by the wonders of the world.

In Western Journeys, Teow Lim Goh charts her journeys immigrating from Singapore and spending the last 15 years living in and exploring the American West. Goh chronicles her lived experiences while building on the longer history of immigrants from Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries, bringing new insights to places, the historical record, and memory.

A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never told On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda...

In 1885, following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. The Chinese Must Go shows how American immigration policies incited this violence, and how this gave rise to the concept of the "alien" in America. Our story begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens. By tracing the idea of the alien back to this violent era, Lew-Williams offers a new origin story of today's racialized border.

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.

The author at 16 years old was evacuated with her family to an internment camp for Japanese Americans, along with 110,000 other people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. She faced an indefinite sentence behind barbed wire in crowded, primitive camps. She struggled for survival and dignity, and endured psychological scarring that has lasted a lifetime. This memoir is told from the heart and mind of a woman now nearly eighty years old who experienced the challenges and wounds of her internment at a crucial point in her development as a young adult.

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.

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.

Award-winning poet Brandon Shimoda has crafted a lyrical portrait of his paternal grandfather, Midori Shimoda, whose life - child migrant, talented photographer, suspected enemy alien and spy, desert wanderer, American citizen - mirrors the arc of Japanese America in the 20th century. In a series of pilgrimages, Shimoda records the search to find his grandfather and unfolds, in the process, a moving elegy on memory and forgetting.

From the editor of the award-winning Children of Manzanar, Heather C. Lindquist, and Edgar Award winner Naomi Hirahara comes a nuanced account of the “Resettlement”: the relatively unexamined period when ordinary people of Japanese ancestry, having been unjustly imprisoned during World War II, were finally released from custody. Given $25 and a one-way bus ticket to make a new life, some ventured east to Denver and Chicago to start over, while others returned to Southern California only to face discrimination and an alarming scarcity of housing and jobs.

One of America's best-known rock and entertainment journalists describes his journey from his childhood, cooped up in the "rice room" of his family's restaurant in Oakland's Chinatown, where he did chores, to the major role he played as a writer and editor at Rolling Stone. It is a story of teen worship of Elvis, but also of Chinese customs and the tragic murder of his brother, and of the '60s scene in San Francisco, where he found freedom - and his career.

In summer 2006, 20-year-old Gerald Yeung and his childhood friends from Hong Kong travel to South America and Africa on their parents' dime. Confronted by challenges foreign to their privileged upbringing, the "Wannabe Backpackers" persevere in their Christian Dior clothes. They make plans to do it again when they turn 30. The decade that follows doesn’t go exactly to plan.

The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is not only a tale of injustice; it is a moving story of faith. In this pathbreaking account, Duncan Ryuken Williams reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation's history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American.

A memoir of a South Vietnamese colonel's daughter, chronicling the tumultuous years growing up in the war-torn country of Vietnam and the abrupt and brutal regime change that forced her disruptive and disorienting coming of age between two vastly different cultures.