Asian Studies

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.

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.

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.

Unconditional Election: Poems is a collection of masterful poetry written by the poet par excellence, H. C. Kim. He has written many books of poetry, including Transition: Poems. H. C. Kim is particularly known for developing poetry-in-motion style of poetry. H. C. Kim writes his poetry as a person of wisdom who has travelled many lands and experienced many things in life. H. C. Kim has lived over three years in Israel and is fluent in Modern Hebrew.

If you're Irish American or African American or Eastern European Jewish American, there's a rich literature to give you a sense of your family's arrival-in-America story. Until now, that hasn't been the case for Chinese Americans. From noted historian Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones uncovers the three-generational saga of the Tape family. It's a sweeping story centered on patriarch Jeu Dips' (Joseph Tapes') self-invention as an immigration broker in post-gold rush San Francisco, and the extraordinary rise it enables.

Beyond soccer leagues, music camps, and drama lessons, today's youth are in an education arms race that begins in elementary school. In Hyper Education, Pawan Dhingra uncovers the growing world of high-achievement education and the after-school learning centers, spelling bees, and math competitions that it has spawned.

A wonderful collection of spine-tingling ghost stories and thought-provoking essays on insects. This new version has an introduction "Hearn and Japan", which details the continuing influence of Hearn on contemporary Japan.

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.

Ashok Rajamani, award-winning author of the hit memoir The Day My Brain Exploded, returns with Imagine Carnivalesque, his explosive first book of bold and insightful literary criticism. Uncover the unconscious in South Asian literature through two psychoanalytical essays that deconstruct gender codes and sexuality within Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy, and the Hindu epic poem Mahabharata.

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.

Identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence, until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. Award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing each of the birth and adoptive family members and tells the girls’ incredible story from their perspectives, challenging conceptions about adoption and what it means to give a child a good life.

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.

Model Breakers: Breaking Through Stereotypes and Embracing Your Authenticity explores the intersection of self-awareness, identity, and minority stories. Charlene Wang invites us to change the limiting beliefs we impose on ourselves and break through the stereotypes that can keep us from achieving our dreams. Through the experiences of numerous Model Breakers, this audiobook will help you to take risks and turn disadvantages into powerful tools. This audiobook is for anyone who strives to fearlessly discover, accept, and share their story with the world.

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.

Pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong made more than 60 films, headlined theater and vaudeville productions, and even starred in her own television show. Her work helped shape racial modernity, as she embodied the dominant image of Chinese, and more generally, “Oriental” women between 1925 and 1940. In Anna May Wong, Shirley Jennifer Lim re-evaluates Wong’s life and work as a consummate artist, and positions the actress as a historical and cultural entrepreneur who rewrote categories of representation.

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.

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.

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).

Find your voice, own your story, and elevate your professional life. In The Visibility Mindset: How Asian American Leaders Create Opportunities and Push Past Barriers, a team of dedicated creative professionals and educators delivers an incisive treatment addressing the importance of cultural upbringing in our lives and careers. In the book, you'll explore the varied realities and experiences of Asian Americans in the diasporic Asian community and how they have impacted the personal and professional lives of real people.