Asian Studies

A journey back in time, The Golden Mountain is the gripping tale of four generations of Chinese women who live and die under the restrictions of their culture, except for one, the author. Her story tells of growing up in Hong Kong and of her transition to New York City where she struggled to meld the American dream with her ethnic background. Finally, at age 50, she dares to move into the present and understand the true nature of dreams and what it means to live.

Our Voices, Our Histories brings together 35 Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond.

In public life and in Shih's own, "Asian Americanness" has changed shape constantly, directed by the needs of the country's racial imaginary. A memoir in essays, Chinese Prodigal examines the emergence of "Asian American" identity in a post-Civil Rights America in the wake of Vincent Chin's death. Shih guides us through the roles offered to Asian Americans to play, illuminating what these issues have to teach us about American values and about the vexed place Asians and Asian Americans inhabit today. Shih masterfully captures the intimate costs of becoming an American.

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.

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.

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.

Enjoy this audio recording of the Thai New Contemporary Version read by two readers. The Thai New Contemporary Version offers both a faithful rendering of Scripture’s original word order while also delivering the most comprehensive and clear translation of the Bible’s stories and concepts in the Thai language.

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.

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 tale of St. Josaphat, a prince who gave up his wealth and kingdom to follow Jesus, was widely told and read in the Middle Ages, translated into a dozen languages, and even cited by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Only in the 19th century did scholars note the parallels between the lives of Buddha and Josaphat. In Search of the Christian Buddha traces the Buddha’s story from India to Persia to Jerusalem and then throughout Europe, as it was rewritten by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian authors, illustrating its unsuspected integration into European culture.

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.

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.

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.

The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. Here, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Forcing us to confront this history, America for Americans explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America.

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.

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.

Author Lauren Hilgers captures the joys and indignities of building a life in a new country - and the stubborn allure of the American dream - in this deeply reported story of one indelible family transplanted from rural China to New York City.

In 1966 Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily into China's Cultural Revolution. Disillusionment soon followed, then turned to disgust and fear when Shen discovered that his compatriots had tortured and murdered a doctor whose house he'd helped raid and whose beautiful daughter he secretly adored. A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, Shen's Gang of One is more than a memoir of one young man's harrowing experience during a time of terror.