This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase our recent Asian American studies titles to celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America, by William Gee Wong
Sons of Chinatown poignantly weaves father and son stories together with admiration and righteous anger. Through the mirrored lens of his father, Wong reflects on the hardships Asian Americans endured—and continue to face—with American exceptionalism. Wong’s inspiring memoir provides a personal history that also raises the question of whether America welcomes or repels immigrants.
Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980–2020, by Tritia Toyota
At the end of the twentieth century, many twenty-something Japanese women migrated to places like Southern California with few skills and an overall lack of human capital. These women, members of the shin Issei community, sought economic opportunities unavailable to them in their homeland. In Intimate Strangers, shin Issei women tell stories of precarity, inequality, and continuing marginality, first in Japan, where they were restricted by gendered social structures, and later in the United States, where their experiences were compounded by issues such as citizenship.
In the Asian American History and Culture series
Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, by Y-Dang Troeung
Cambodian history is Cold War history, asserts Y-Dang Troeung in Refugee Lifeworlds. Constructing a genealogy of the afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, Troeung mines historical archives and family anecdotes to illuminate the refugee experience, and the enduring impact of war, genocide, and displacement in the lives of Cambodian people.
In the Asian American History and Culture series
Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production, by Linh Thủy Nguyễn
Nearly fifty years after the end of the war in Vietnam, American children of Vietnamese refugees continue to process the meanings of the war and its consequences through creative work. Displacing Kinship examines how Vietnamese American cultural productions register lived experiences of racism in their depictions of family life and marginalization.
In the Asian American History and Culture series
In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family by Sara Docan-Morgan
What does it mean to be “family”? How do people use communication to constitute family relationships? How are family relationships created, maintained, and negotiated over time? In Reunion details adoptive and cultural identities, highlighting how adoptees often end up shouldering communicative responsibility in their family relationships. Interviews reveal how adoptees navigate birth family relationships across language and culture while also attempting to maintain relationships with their adoptive family members.
The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee, edited by Ruth Maxey
Pioneering Indian American writer Bharati Mukherjee is best known for her novel, Jasmine, and her breakthrough collection, The Middleman and Other Stories, which won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award. Arranged chronologically, this essential collection brings many of Mukherjee’s stories back into print, from the semi-autobiographical story, “Hindus,” in her 1985 debut collection, Darkness, to her late stories, published from 1997–2012, as well as her classic, “The Management of Grief.”
In the Asian American History and Culture series
Cover illustration: Manhattan Mall by The Singh Twins, 1997 Copyright © The Singh Twins: http://www.singhtwins.co.uk
Cultures Colliding: American Missionaries, Chinese Resistance, and the Rise of Modern Institutions in China, by John R. Haddad
The American missionaries who journeyed to China in 1860 planning solely to spread the Gospel ultimately reinvented their entire enterprise. By 1900, they were modernizing China with schools, colleges, hospitals, museums, and even YMCA chapters. In Cultures Colliding, John R. Haddad nimbly recounts this transformative institution-building—how and why it happened—and its consequences.
The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s, by Masumi Izumi
Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated “the concentration camp law” and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America.
In the Asian American History and Culture series
Beauty and Brutality: Manila and Its Global Discontents, edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV, Robert Diaz, and Rolando B. Tolentino
The first volume to offer a cultural and urban studies approach to Manila, Beauty and Brutality considers the tensions of the Filipino diaspora as they migrate and “re-turn,” as well as the citizens’ responses to the Marcos (and post-Marcos) dictatorship, President Duterte’s authoritarianism, and “Drug War.” Essays also map out geographies of repression and resistance in the struggles of classes, genders and sexualities, ethnicities and races, and generations.
A Refugee’s American Dream: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the U.S. Secret Service, by Leth Oun with Joe Samuel Starnes
“I saw many killed. I almost starved. But I escaped to refugee camps in Thailand and eventually made it to the U.S.” Thus begins Leth Oun’s poignant and vivid memoir. A survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields—having spent a torturous three years, eight months, and ten days imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge—Oun thrived in America, learning English, becoming a citizen, and working as an officer in the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division.
The authors’ proceeds will go to help Cambodians in need.
Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community, and Memory, edited by Linda Ho Peché, Alex-Thai Dinh Vo, and Tuong Vu
The large number of Vietnamese refugees that resettled in the United States since the fall of Saigon have become America’s fastest growing immigrant group. Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies traces the ideologies, networks, and cultural sensibilities that have long influenced and continue to transform social, political, and economic developments in Vietnam and the U.S.
Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures, by Erin Suzuki
In her pathbreaking book , Ocean Passages, Erin Suzuki explores how movement through—and travel across—the ocean mediates the construction of Asian American and Indigenous Pacific subjectivities in the wake of the colonial conflicts that shaped the modern transpacific. Ocean Passages considers how Indigenous Pacific scholars have emphasized the importance of the ocean to Indigenous activism, art, and theories of globalization and how Asian American studies might engage in a deconstructive interrogation of race in conversation with this Indigenous-centered transnationalism.
In the Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality series
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