Eileen Tamura examines the forms that U.S. hysteria over 'Americanization' took after World War I in Hawaii, where the children of Japanese imigrants--the Nisei--were targets of widespread discrimination. She offers a wealth of original source material, using personal accounts and statistical data to create an essential resource for students of American ethnic history and U.S. race and class relations.

Reprints stories from Mrs. Spring Fragrance by the first published Asian North American fiction writer

At the age of ten and unaccompanied by any adult, Easurk Charr came to Hawaii in 1904, a convert to Christianity who hoped to earn enough money to acquire an education and return to his native Korea as a medical missionary. The Golden Mountain is Charr's story of his early years in Korea, his migration to Hawaii and the mainland, and the joys and pain of his life as one of some seven thousand Koreans who migrated to the United States between 1903 and 1905. Charr tells eloquently of his difficulties in becoming a naturalized citizen, even after serving in the army, of his sergeant's...

California's San Gabriel Valley has been called an incubator for ethnic politics. Located a mere fifteen minutes from Los Angeles, the valley is a brave new world of multiethnic complexity.Here Latinos and Asian Americans are the dominant groups, rather than the minorities they are elsewhere in the United States. Politics are Latino-dominated, while a large infusion of Chinese immigrants and capital has made the San Gabriel Valley the center of the nation's largest Chinese ethnic economy. The white population has dropped from an overwhelming majority in 1970 to a minority in 1990.Leland T....

Investigates how administrative agencies and federal courts actually enforced immigration laws.

Traces the emergence of a dynamic Nisei subculture and shows how the foundations laid during the 1920s and 1930s helped many Nisei adjust to the upheaval of the concentration camps.

As a part of late nineteenth-century Japan's modernizing quest for empire, midwifery was transformed into a new woman's profession, and the Issei midwives who moves to the united States ("sanba) served as cultural brokers as well as birth attendants. Arriving on the mainland, the midwives found an emerging welfare state in which the government assumed some responsibility for welfare, including health and midwifery. The history of Japanese American midwifery reveals the dynamic relationship between this welfare state and the history of women and health. The stories of these women, coupled with...

Discusses the author's experiences on three campuses within the University of California system where Asian American studies was first developed - in response to vehement student demand - under the rubric of ethnic studies. This title documents a field of endeavour in which scholarship and identity define and strengthen each other.

Wong served in one of the all-Chinese units of the 14th Air Force in China during World War II and he discusses the impact of race and segregation on his experience. After the war he found a wife in Taishan, brought her to the US, and became involved in the government's infamous Confession program. This title gives his portrait.

Chinese American Literature since the 1850s traces the origins and development of the extensive and largely neglected body of literature written in English and in Chinese, assessing its themes and style and placing it in a broad social and historical context. This essential volume, a much-needed introduction and guide to the field, shows how change and continuity in the Chinese American experience are reflected in the writings of immigrants from China and their descendants in the United States.

Using a fresh approach that combines literary and historical scholarship, Xiao-huang Yin covers...