Asian America – serie

In this important and masterful synthesis of the Chinese and Japanese experience in America, historian Roger Daniels provides a new perspective on the significance of Asian immigration to the United States. Examining the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1980s, Daniels presents a basic history comprising the political and socioeconomic background of Chinese and Japanese immigration and acculturation. He draws distinctions and points out similarities not only between Chinese and Japanese but between Asian and European immigration experiences, clarifying the integral role of Asians in American history.Daniels’ research is impressive and his evidence is solid. In forthright prose, he suggests fresh assessments of the broad patterns of the Asian American experience, illuminating the recurring tensions within our modern multiracial society. His detailed supporting material is woven into a rich historical fabric which also gives personal voice to the tenacious individualism of the immigrant.The book is organized topically and chronologically, beginning with the emigration of each ethnic group and concluding with an epilogue that looks to the future from the perspective of the last two decades of Chinese and Japanese American history. Included in this survey are discussions of the reasons for emigration; the conditions of emigration; the fate of first generation immigrants; the reception of immigrants by the United States government and its people; the growth of immigrant communities; the effects of discriminatory legislation; the impact of World War II and the succeeding Cold War era on Chinese and Japanese Americans; and the history of Asian Americans during the last twenty years.This timely and thought-provoking volume will be of value not only to specialists in Asian American history and culture but to students and general historians of American life.

In this important and masterful synthesis of the Chinese and Japanese experience in America, historian Roger Daniels provides a new perspective on the significance of Asian immigration to the United States. Examining the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1980s, Daniels presents a basic history comprising the political and socioeconomic background of Chinese and Japanese immigration and acculturation. He draws distinctions and points out similarities not only between Chinese and Japanese but between Asian and European immigration experiences, clarifying the integral role of Asians in American history.Daniels’ research is impressive and his evidence is solid. In forthright prose, he suggests fresh assessments of the broad patterns of the Asian American experience, illuminating the recurring tensions within our modern multiracial society. His detailed supporting material is woven into a rich historical fabric which also gives personal voice to the tenacious individualism of the immigrant.The book is organized topically and chronologically, beginning with the emigration of each ethnic group and concluding with an epilogue that looks to the future from the perspective of the last two decades of Chinese and Japanese American history. Included in this survey are discussions of the reasons for emigration; the conditions of emigration; the fate of first generation immigrants; the reception of immigrants by the United States government and its people; the growth of immigrant communities; the effects of discriminatory legislation; the impact of World War II and the succeeding Cold War era on Chinese and Japanese Americans; and the history of Asian Americans during the last twenty years.This timely and thought-provoking volume will be of value not only to specialists in Asian American history and culture but to students and general historians of American life.

In 1882, Congress enacted immigration legislation excluding "idiots," "lunatics," and "Chinese laborers." Eventually, a series of laws restricted the entry of every Asian group, though over a period of decades these laws were repealed one by one. The most dramatic change in immigration law came in 1965. Though designed to encourage European immigration, the unintended result of changes in the selection system was that the Asian immigrant population jumped from one million in 1965 to seven million in 1990. This is the first comprehensive study of how U.S. immigration policies have shaped - demographically, economically, and socially - the six largest Asian American communities: Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Asian Indian. For each group, the book offers detailed information, much of it previously unknown or too scattered to be useful, on gender ratios, age distributions, foreign- versus American-born ratios, geographic settlement, employment profiles, income, and poverty. The author also focuses on the impact immigration policies have had on three important areas of Asian American life experience - educational performance, political participation, and self-identity. He simply questions the validity of the images of Asian Americans as academic "whiz kids," their communities as relatively lacking in strong political interests, and the presence of a unified Asian American identity. Throughout, the author counters the frequent lumping together of Asian Americans by demonstrating their tremendous diversity of background, history, motivation, and achievement. As their numbers have grown, the visibility of Asian Americans has prompted policymakers, scholars, journalists, community organizers, activists, and, of course, restrictionists to take Asian Americans more seriously. At the same time, they have sometimes become the target of racist hostility, which is occasionally physical but more often sociopolitical and economic, such as the recent concerns over the disproportionate number of Asian Americans admitted to prestigious colleges and universities. Serious gaps in fundamental information about Asian America persist, leading to serious distortions. This pioneering work of research and analysis is intended as a step toward a better understanding of relationships and experiences that few have bothered to study.

In 1982, a congressional commission concluded that the incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II resulted from racism, war hysteria, and failed political leadership. Against long odds, the commission's recommendation that the U.S. government offer financial redress became law on August 10, 1988, when President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act. This book is a case study of the political, institutional, and external factors that led to the passage of this controversial legislation. Based on extensive interviews with Senators, members of Congress, key members of their staffs, and lobbyists, as well as statistical analyses of roll call votes, this book provides a uniquely rich account of the passage of a federal law. It also places the campaign for redress in the broader theoretical context of the workings of Congress and the policy-making process.—Publisher description.

In 1975, after five years of devastation and upheaval caused by civil war, the Cambodian people welcomed the victorious communist Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot. Once in power, the new regime tightly closed Cambodia to the outside world. Four years later, when the Vietnamese communists invaded Cambodia and defeated the Khmer Rouge, the world learned that during their control the Khmer Rouge had turned the country into "killing fields," in one of the most horrifying instances of genocide in history. Of an estimated population of 7 million people, about 1.5 million had been killed or had died of starvation, torture, or sickness. After the Vietnamese takeover, thousands of survivors of the Khmer Rouge, fearful of continuing war and a new communist regime, fled their homeland. Approximately 150,000 of them settled in the United States.This book documents the Cambodian refugee experience through nine powerful first-person narratives of men, women, and children who survived the holocaust and began new lives in America. The narrators come from varied socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds and include a former Buddhist monk, an unskilled factory worker, and a farm boy, all of whom are ethnic Cambodians; a middle-class Chinese Cambodian housewife and her daughter; and a Vietnamese Cambodian medical student. The refugees first speak of their lives before the Khmer Rouge. We get an intimate view of a distinct way of life that had evolved over 2,000 years as the refugees relate Cambodian views of life, death, rebirth, karma, love, marriage, and family—views deeply imbued with Buddhist concepts.Next, with sorrow and sometimes anger, they relive their traumatic survival of the Khmer Rouge, reflecting on the deaths of loved ones and the desecration of their culture. Finally, they retrace their hazardous escapes and journeys to the United States and talk candidly about their hopes, dreams, and fears as they continue the difficult adjustment to a new social and cultural environment. To enhance understanding of the narratives, there are introductory chapters on Cambodia's history, culture, society, and religion. The author concludes with a critique of the concepts used by American social workers and researchers to evaluate the adjustment of Cambodian refugees to life in the United States.

These letters tell the story of a young American woman of Japanese descent who, along with over 10,000 other Japanese Americans, was stranded in Japan during World War II.

This book has a dual purpose. The first is to present a biography of Yamato Ichihashi, a Stanford University professor who was one of the first academics of Asian ancestry in the United States. The second purpose is to present, through Ichihashi's wartime writings, the only comprehensive first-person account of internment life by one of the 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who, in 1942, were sent by the U.S. government to "relocation centers," the euphemism for prison camps.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.

These letters tell the story of a young American woman of Japanese descent who, along with over 10,000 other Japanese Americans, was stranded in Japan during World War II.

Since the 1970's, when Maxine Hong Kingston began publishing her prize-winning books, we have seen an explosive growth in Asian American literature, a literature that has won both popular and critical acclaim. Literary anthologies and critical studies attest to a growing academic interest in the field. This book seeks to identify the forces behind this literary emergence and to explore both the unique place of Asian Americans in American culture and what that place says about the way Americanness is defined.The author is preoccupied with how the sense of the nation is disseminated through the practice of reading and writing, and he argues that Asian American literature is a productive discursive negotiation of the contemporary contradiction in American citizenship. By analyzing the textual strategies with which literary Asian America is represented, the book shows how the "fictive ethnicity" of the nation continues to exert its regulatory power and suggests how we can work toward a radical American democratic consent.Through nuanced readings of exemplary texts, the author delineates how Asian American literary production has become a site for the creation of Asian American subjects and community. The texts range from Kingston's enigmatic Tripmaster Monkey to the seductive cunning of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club; from Bharati Mukherjee's romantic Jasmine to the geocultural ambivalence of David Mura's Turning Japanese; and from the transvestic subversion of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly to the transpirational tropes of David Wong Louie's Pangs of Love.Imagining the Nation integrates a fine appreciation of the formal features of Asian American literature with the conflict and convergence among different reading communities and the dilemma of ethnic intellectuals caught in the process of their institutionalization. By articulating Asian American structures of feeling across the nexus of East and West, black and white, nation and diaspora, the book both sets out a new terrain for Asian American literary culture and significantly strengthens the multiculturalist challenge to the American canon.

This book has a dual purpose. The first is to present a biography of Yamato Ichihashi, a Stanford University professor who was one of the first academics of Asian ancestry in the United States. The second purpose is to present, through Ichihashi's wartime writings, the only comprehensive first-person account of internment life by one of the 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who, in 1942, were sent by the U.S. government to "relocation centers," the euphemism for prison camps.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.

Adding an important new dimension to the history of U.S.-Japan relations, this book reveals that an unofficial movement to promote good feeling between the United States and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s only narrowly failed to achieve its goal: to modify the so-called anti-Japanese exclusion clause of the 1924 U.S. immigration law.It is well known that this clause caused great indignation among the Japanese, and scholars have long regarded it as a major contributing factor in the final collapse of U.S.-Japan relations in 1941. Not generally known, however, is that beginning immediately after the enactment of the law, private individuals sought to modify the exclusion clause in an effort to stabilize relations between the two countries. The issue was considered by American and Japanese delegates at almost all subsequent U.S.-Japan diplomatic negotiations, including the 1930 London naval talks and the last-minute attempts to prevent war in 1941.However, neither the U.S. State Department nor the Japanese Foreign Office was able to take concrete measures to resolve the issue. The State Department wanted to avoid appearing to meddle with Congressional prerogatives, and the Foreign Office did not want to be seen as intruding in American domestic affairs. This official reluctance to take action opened the way for major efforts in the private sector to modify the exclusion clause.The book reveals how a number of citizens in the United States—mainly clergy and business people—persevered in their efforts despite the obstacles presented by anti-Japanese feeling and the economic dislocations of the Depression. One of the notable disclosures in the book is that this determined private push for improved relations continued even after the 1931 Manchurian Incident.

Since the 1970's, when Maxine Hong Kingston began publishing her prize-winning books, we have seen an explosive growth in Asian American literature, a literature that has won both popular and critical acclaim. Literary anthologies and critical studies attest to a growing academic interest in the field. This book seeks to identify the forces behind this literary emergence and to explore both the unique place of Asian Americans in American culture and what that place says about the way Americanness is defined.The author is preoccupied with how the sense of the nation is disseminated through the practice of reading and writing, and he argues that Asian American literature is a productive discursive negotiation of the contemporary contradiction in American citizenship. By analyzing the textual strategies with which literary Asian America is represented, the book shows how the "fictive ethnicity" of the nation continues to exert its regulatory power and suggests how we can work toward a radical American democratic consent.Through nuanced readings of exemplary texts, the author delineates how Asian American literary production has become a site for the creation of Asian American subjects and community. The texts range from Kingston's enigmatic Tripmaster Monkey to the seductive cunning of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club; from Bharati Mukherjee's romantic Jasmine to the geocultural ambivalence of David Mura's Turning Japanese; and from the transvestic subversion of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly to the transpirational tropes of David Wong Louie's Pangs of Love.Imagining the Nation integrates a fine appreciation of the formal features of Asian American literature with the conflict and convergence among different reading communities and the dilemma of ethnic intellectuals caught in the process of their institutionalization. By articulating Asian American structures of feeling across the nexus of East and West, black and white, nation and diaspora, the book both sets out a new terrain for Asian American literary culture and significantly strengthens the multiculturalist challenge to the American canon.

A person of rare talent and broad appeal, Dhan Gopal Mukerji (1890-1936) holds the distinction of being the first South Asian immigrant to have a successful career in the United States as a man of letters. As the author of two dozen published volumes of poetry, drama, fiction, social commentary, philosophy, translations, and children's stories, Mukerji was a pivotal figure in the transmission and interpretation of Indian traditions to Americans in the first several decades of the twentieth century. This reissue of his classic autobiography Caste and Outcast, with a new Introduction and Afterword, seeks to revitalize interest in Mukerji and his work and to contribute to the exploration of the South Asian experience in America.Originally published in 1923, this book is an exercise in both cultural translation and cultural critique. In the first half of the book, Mukerji draws upon his early experiences as a Bengali Brahmin in India, hoping to convey to readers "an intimate impression of eastern life"; the second half describes Mukerji's coming to America and his experiences as a student, worker, and activist in California. Mukerji's text, written in an engaging personal style, is the kind of ethnographic writing that seeks to render intelligible and familiar the unfamiliar and the exotic. Gordon H. Chang's substantial Introduction locates the story of Caste and Outcast within the larger context of Mukerji's life, tracing the author's personal history and his connections to such major figures as Jawaharlal Nehru, M. N. Roy, Van Wyck Brooks, Roger Baldwin, and Will Durant. The Afterword, by Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta, examines the ways in which Mukerji stretches the limits of the autobiographical genre and provides a counternarrative to the dominant nationalist account of American society.

This ambitious work confronts the complex question of who and what is a Nikkei, that is, a person of Japanese descent, by studying their communities in seven countries in the Americas: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Paraguay, Peru, and the United States. It also considers the special case of the many Latin American Nikkei who have returned to Japan in recent decades to seek employment. The contributors draw upon a range of disciplines to present a multifaceted portrait of people of Japanese descent in the Americas, the destination of 90 percent of Japanese emigrants. Thus, for example, the reader is able to view the Peruvian Japanese experience through the eyes of an anthropologist, a demographer/historian, and a journalist—all of whom are Peruvians of Japanese descent. Among the main questions explored in New Worlds, New Lives are: What is the historical background and current status of Nikkei society in a given country? Are there any common attributes the Nikkei share across the Americas, especially in terms of social institutions, the family, the position of women, religion, education, politics, and economics? What are the significant differences between the Nikkei populations in the various countries and why have these differences developed? What are the future prospects of Nikkei communities in the Americas?

This ambitious work confronts the complex question of who and what is a Nikkei, that is, a person of Japanese descent, by studying their communities in seven countries in the Americas: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Paraguay, Peru, and the United States. It also considers the special case of the many Latin American Nikkei who have returned to Japan in recent decades to seek employment. The contributors draw upon a range of disciplines to present a multifaceted portrait of people of Japanese descent in the Americas, the destination of 90 percent of Japanese emigrants. Thus, for example, the reader is able to view the Peruvian Japanese experience through the eyes of an anthropologist, a demographer/historian, and a journalist—all of whom are Peruvians of Japanese descent. Among the main questions explored in New Worlds, New Lives are: What is the historical background and current status of Nikkei society in a given country? Are there any common attributes the Nikkei share across the Americas, especially in terms of social institutions, the family, the position of women, religion, education, politics, and economics? What are the significant differences between the Nikkei populations in the various countries and why have these differences developed? What are the future prospects of Nikkei communities in the Americas?

This book analyzes how the politics of memory and history affected representations of the World War II internment of Japanese Americans during the last six decades. It compares attempts by government officials, internees, academics, and activists to control interpretations of internment causes and consequences in congressional hearings, court proceedings, scholarship, popular literature, ethnic community events, monuments, museums, films, and Web sites. Initial accounts celebrated internee loyalty, military patriotism, postwar assimilation, and "model minority" success. Later histories emphasized racist "concentration camps," protests inside the camps, and continued suffering within the community.

Founded during the Gold Rush years, the Chinese community of San Francisco became the largest and most vibrant Chinatown in America. For those Chinese traveling between the Old World and the New, San Francisco was a port of entry and departure. Many Chinese settled there, forming one of the oldest continuing ethnic communities in urban America.This is a detailed social and cultural history of the Chinese in San Francisco, relating the development of various social and cultural institutions, ranging from brothels to the powerful "Six Companies." The book recaptures in vivid detail not only the community's collective mentalities but also the lives of ordinary people—laborers, theater-goers, gamblers, and prostitutes. In so doing, the author achieves what has been missing from virtually all the historiographic writing on the Chinese in America—he brings to life individual personalities with their varying human qualities.The book shows the persistence of Chinese social patterns in San Francisco Chinatown, and demonstrates how the community helped shape white America's view of Asians in general and the development of race consciousness and strife. The author challenges several long-accepted views, such as the myth that the Chinese exodus to California in the mid-nineteenth century occurred mainly because of impoverishment in South China and the notion that the overwhelming majority of Chinese women in San Francisco were prostitutes. He also makes insightful comparisons of Chinese Americans with other ethnic groups.The book makes imaginative use of a wide range of materials, private and public, fictional and statistical, in both Chinese and English, produced by both pro- and anti-Chinese sources. Among these are Chinese-language newspapers (including their advertisements), handbills, personal diaries, and other cultural productions. The author offers multidisciplinary analyses of such documents, showing the possibilities of extracting rich historical information from texts created for very different purposes.

This book is a highly original study of transnationalism among immigrants from Taishan, a populous coastal county in south China from which, until 1965, the majority of Chinese in the United States originated. Drawing creatively on Chinese-language sources such as gazetteers, newspapers, and magazines, supplemented by fieldwork and interviews as well as recent scholarship in Chinese social history, the author presents a much richer depiction than we have had heretofore of the continuing ties between Taishanese remaining in China and their kinsmen seeking their fortune in "Gold Mountain."Long after the gold in California ran out and prejudice confined them to dismal Chinatowns, generations of Chinese—mostly men from rural areas of southern China—continued to migrate to the United States in hopes of bettering the family's lot by remitting much of the meager sums they earned as laundrymen, cooks, domestic workers, and Chinatown merchants.Economic hardships and U.S. Exclusion laws extended the immigrants' separation from their families for decades, "sojourns" that in many cases ended only in death. Men lived as bachelors and their wives as widows, parents passed away, and children grew up without ever seeing their fathers' faces. Families and village communities had to adapt to survive the stress of long-term, long-distance separation from their primary wage-earners.At the same time, men raised in the rural communities of a faltering imperial China had to negotiate encounters with an industrializing, Western-dominated, often hostile world. This history explores the resiliency and flexibility of rural Chinese, qualities that enabled them to preserve their families by living apart from them and to survive the intertwining of their rural world with global systems of race, labor, and capital. The author demonstrates that through migration to dank and narrow enclaves, they came to live, and even to flourish, in a transnational community that persisted despite decades of separation and an ocean's width of distance.

Sexual Naturalization offers compelling new insights into the racialized constitution of American nationality. In the first major interdisciplinary study of Asian-white miscegenation from the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, Koshy traces the shifting gender and racial hierarchies produced by antimiscegenation laws, and their role in shaping cultural norms. Not only did these laws foster the reproduction of the United States as a white nation, they were paralleled by extraterritorial privileges that facilitated the sexual access of white American men to Asian women overseas. Miscegenation laws thus turned sex acts into race acts and engendered new meanings for both.Koshy argues that the cultural work performed by narratives of white-Asian miscegenation dramatically transformed the landscape of desire in the United States, inventing new objects and relations of desire that established a powerful hold over U.S. culture, a capture of imaginative space that was out of all proportion to the actual numbers of Asian residents.

Sexual Naturalization offers compelling new insights into the racialized constitution of American nationality. In the first major interdisciplinary study of Asian-white miscegenation from the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, Koshy traces the shifting gender and racial hierarchies produced by antimiscegenation laws, and their role in shaping cultural norms. Not only did these laws foster the reproduction of the United States as a white nation, they were paralleled by extraterritorial privileges that facilitated the sexual access of white American men to Asian women overseas. Miscegenation laws thus turned sex acts into race acts and engendered new meanings for both.Koshy argues that the cultural work performed by narratives of white-Asian miscegenation dramatically transformed the landscape of desire in the United States, inventing new objects and relations of desire that established a powerful hold over U.S. culture, a capture of imaginative space that was out of all proportion to the actual numbers of Asian residents.

This book examines cultural representations of African American and Asian American masculinity, focusing primarily on the major works of two influential figures, Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin. It highlights the language of gender and sexuality that writers use to depict the psychological injuries inflicted by racism on men of color—a language that relies on metaphors of emasculation. The book focuses on how homosexuality comes to function as a powerful symbol for a feminizing racism, and explains why this disturbing symbolism proves to be so rhetorically and emotionally effective. This study also explores the influential concept of literature that these writers promote—a view of writing as a cultural and political activity capable of producing the most virile and racially authentic forms of manhood. In comparing African American and Asian American writings, this book offers the first scholarly account of how black and yellow conceptions of masculinity are constructed in relation to each other.

This book examines cultural representations of African American and Asian American masculinity, focusing primarily on the major works of two influential figures, Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin. It highlights the language of gender and sexuality that writers use to depict the psychological injuries inflicted by racism on men of color—a language that relies on metaphors of emasculation. The book focuses on how homosexuality comes to function as a powerful symbol for a feminizing racism, and explains why this disturbing symbolism proves to be so rhetorically and emotionally effective. This study also explores the influential concept of literature that these writers promote—a view of writing as a cultural and political activity capable of producing the most virile and racially authentic forms of manhood. In comparing African American and Asian American writings, this book offers the first scholarly account of how black and yellow conceptions of masculinity are constructed in relation to each other.

Colonialism and empire have rarely been seen from the perspectives and experiences of the colonized. Five Faces of Exile addresses this gap by exploring a wide range of perspectives on colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial developments. More specifically, it explores American empire in the Philippines and its ethnic and racial dimensions in the United States through a close reading of the texts and social practices of five pioneering, trans-Pacific Filipino American writers of the colonial era: the diplomat Carlos P. Romulo, the poet Jose Garcia Villa, fiction writers N. V. M. Gonzalez and Bienvenido N. Santos, and the celebrated Asian American worker-writer Carlos Bulosan.In this first transnational intellectual history of an Asian American group, Espiritu shows that an exploration of those at the margins of the nation, who feel at home neither in the Philippines nor in the United States, raises profound questions about citizenship and national belonging. This beautifully written book explores the common desire for national solidarity and cultural translation and the shared ambivalence at the heart of Filipino American expatriate intellectual life, as well as the social practices of patronage and performance that shaped ethnic and national identities.

Colonialism and empire have rarely been seen from the perspectives and experiences of the colonized. Five Faces of Exile addresses this gap by exploring a wide range of perspectives on colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial developments. More specifically, it explores American empire in the Philippines and its ethnic and racial dimensions in the United States through a close reading of the texts and social practices of five pioneering, trans-Pacific Filipino American writers of the colonial era: the diplomat Carlos P. Romulo, the poet Jose Garcia Villa, fiction writers N. V. M. Gonzalez and Bienvenido N. Santos, and the celebrated Asian American worker-writer Carlos Bulosan.In this first transnational intellectual history of an Asian American group, Espiritu shows that an exploration of those at the margins of the nation, who feel at home neither in the Philippines nor in the United States, raises profound questions about citizenship and national belonging. This beautifully written book explores the common desire for national solidarity and cultural translation and the shared ambivalence at the heart of Filipino American expatriate intellectual life, as well as the social practices of patronage and performance that shaped ethnic and national identities.

This is a collection of the last essays by Yuji Ichioka, the foremost authority on Japanese-American history, who passed away two years ago. The essays focus on Japanese Americans during the interwar years and explore issues such as the nisei (American-born generation) relationship toward Japan, Japanese-American attitudes toward Japan's prewar expansionism in Asia, and the meaning of "loyalty" in a racist society—all controversial but central issues in Japanese-American history. Ichioka draws from original sources in Japanese and English to offer an unrivaled picture of Japanese Americans in these years. Also included in this volume are an introductory essay by editor Eiichiro Azuma that places Ichioka's work in Japanese-American historiography, and a postscript by editor Chang reflecting on Ichioka's life-work.

In Double Agency, Tina Chen proposes impersonation as a paradigm for teasing out the performative dimensions of Asian American literature and culture. Asian American acts of impersonation, she argues, foreground the limits of subjectivity even as they insist on the undeniable importance of subjecthood. By decoupling imposture from impersonation, Chen shows how Asian American performances have often been misinterpreted, read as acts of betrayal rather than multiple allegiance. A central paradox informing the book—impersonation as a performance of divided allegiance that simultaneously pays homage to and challenges authenticity and authority—thus becomes a site for reconsidering the implications of Asian Americans as double agents. In exploring the possibilities that impersonation affords for refusing the binary logics of loyalty/disloyalty, real/fake, and Asian/American, Double Agency attends to the possibilities of reading such acts as "im-personations"—dynamic performances, and a performance dynamics—through which Asian Americans constitute themselves as speaking and acting subjects.

In Double Agency, Tina Chen proposes impersonation as a paradigm for teasing out the performative dimensions of Asian American literature and culture. Asian American acts of impersonation, she argues, foreground the limits of subjectivity even as they insist on the undeniable importance of subjecthood. By decoupling imposture from impersonation, Chen shows how Asian American performances have often been misinterpreted, read as acts of betrayal rather than multiple allegiance. A central paradox informing the book—impersonation as a performance of divided allegiance that simultaneously pays homage to and challenges authenticity and authority—thus becomes a site for reconsidering the implications of Asian Americans as double agents. In exploring the possibilities that impersonation affords for refusing the binary logics of loyalty/disloyalty, real/fake, and Asian/American, Double Agency attends to the possibilities of reading such acts as "im-personations"—dynamic performances, and a performance dynamics—through which Asian Americans constitute themselves as speaking and acting subjects.

The economic boom of the 1990s that led to the rapid rise of computer hardware and software companies (on both sides of the Pacific Rim) also led to the rise of a trans-Pacific commuter culture, a culture in which thousands of Taiwanese-born high-tech engineers realized that they could greatly increase their career opportunities by establishing a life-style that allowed them and their families to regularly commute between two homes, one in Silicon Valley and the other in Taiwan. The Global Silicon Valley Home takes a close look at how participants in the jet-set, wired-to-the-Net, trans-Pacific commuter culture have invented new ways of thinking about how their homes reflect their personal identities.

Consuming Citizenship investigates how Korean American and Chinese American children of entrepreneurial immigrants demonstrate their social citizenship as Americans through conspicuous consumption. The American immigrant entrepreneur has played a central role in projecting the American ideology of meritocracy and equality. The children of these immigrants are seen as evidence of an open society. While it appears that these children have readily adapted to American culture, questions remain as to why second-generation Asian Americans feel compelled to convince others of their legitimacy and the way they go about asserting their citizenship status. Extending our understanding of such children beyond the traditional emphasis on assimilation, the author argues that their consumptive behavior is a significant expression of their paradoxical position as citizens who straddle the boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion.