Asian Studies

The first book of our three-part series highlights and breaks down our most popular and cited posts of all time, number 38, "White Guys", and number 40, "White Girls". Due to national and viral news coverage, this post enables listeners to truly experience the wide gamut of Asian American experiences and emotions regarding white people. It has been referenced and cited in academic publications and popular media, even TV shows!

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.

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.

Asian American Christians need to hear and own our diverse stories beyond the cultural expectations of the model minority or perpetual foreigner. A team from East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian backgrounds explores what it means to learn our names and be seen by God. They encourage us to know our history, telling stories of the Asian diaspora in America who have been shaped and misshaped by migration, culture, and faith. As we live in the multiple tensions of being Asian American Christians, we can discover who we are and what God may have in store for us and our communities.

From Lawrence Ross, author of The Divine Nine, Blackballed is an explosive and controversial book that rips the veil off America's hidden secret: America's colleges have fostered a racist environment that makes them hostile spaces for African American students. Blackballed exposes the white fraternity and sorority system, with traditions of racist parties and songs and assaults on black students; and the universities themselves, who name campus buildings after racist men and women.

"Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", "Aladdin", "Sinbad the Sailor": These are just some of the strange and amazing stories that clever Scheherazade tells to captivate her husband, King Shahryar…and to save her own life. Each one is more fantastic than the last, filled with demons and dervishes, caliphs and genies, men transformed into dogs and monsters with eyes that glow. Like the king, children will find themselves enchanted by every tale.

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.

The Analects or Selected Sayings is an ancient Chinese text comprising sayings and wisdom teachings attributed to Confucius and his contemporaries, as well as fragmentary dialogues between the philosopher and his students. The Analects has been one of the most influential books in China for the last two millennia, and continues to contribute to Chinese and East Asian culture and thought.

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.

This book of autobiographies by Korean middle-school students is something that is needed for Korean studies and Korean-American studies, in my opinion. Because this book contains our voices, this book is very powerful. In a sense, we are documenting our own history. Because our lives are like the lives of other middle-school students who are Koreans, I believe that this book contains an important history for everyone who listens to this book.

As Asian Americans are rising in terms of number and influence, the need for understanding their identity becomes important on academic, social, political, economic, and intellectual levels. This book is a very important book to meet the rising need that has been largely neglected in academia and in the publishing industry thus far. This book is an essential addition to all serious university libraries, public libraries, and private personal libraries of educated individuals.

Will China be the leading global power of this century? Otto Tien-Pok Xing argues that China is set to be the dominant superpower in 10 years.

On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be “colored”; the school was for whites. This event would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools, an astonishing thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Inhabiting four lives - a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption - this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive - as much through love as blood.

How is it that Korean-Americans came to play such an important role in the American society, particularly in the area of religion? This is a very good book to understand what makes the Korean-Americans "tick". Particularly insightful are the ways in which Christian Kim, the author, captures general patterns for the Korean-Americans and their successes. This is by far the best introductory book on Korean-Americans in the market and will be very useful for use in classroom settings.

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.