Readings on Race

Asian American Youth covers topics such as Asian immigration, acculturation, assimilation, intermarriage, socialization, sexuality, and ethnic identification. The distinguished contributors show how Asian American youth have created an identity and space for themselves historically and in contemporary multicultural America.

The most comprehensive history available on the Asian and Pacific Islander Americans who have served in Congress.

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation."

The college experience can serve as a precursor to improving the social and economic situation of the Hmong students when aligned with the personal desire to gain upward mobility and motivation to circumvent social and academic inconsistencies. The methodology of the study was designed for one-on-one phenomenological informal interviews with Hmong American college upper-classmen using a two-part interview protocol to elicit demographic and experiential information. Moustakas' approach to the analysis of data provided guidelines to review individual transcripts and to group, remove, cluster, and thematize lived experiences.

This anthology of tanka poems, translated from Japanese into English, paints a deeply personal profile of life in the Wartime Relocation Camps during WWII. The short (31 syllable) traditional Japanese poetry form, tanka, offers an economical account of the inner lives of four internees, whose work was originally published in camp magazines and later in anthologies and Japanese newspapers in Hawai'i. The collection includes illustrations by camp artist George Hoshida and the featured poets—Keiho Soga, Taisanboku Mori, Sojin Takei, and Muin Ozaki. Winner of the 1985 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.

In the continuing debates on the topic of racial and ethnic identity in the United States, there are some that argue that ethnicity is an ascribed reality. To the contrary, others claim that individuals are becoming increasingly active in choosing and constructing their ethnic identities.Focusing on second-generation South Asian Americans, Bandana Purkayastha offers fresh insights into the subjective experience of race, ethnicity, and social class in an increasingly diverse America. The young people of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese origin that are the subjects of the study grew up in mostly white middle class suburbs, and their linguistic skills, education, and occupation profiles are indistinguishable from their white peers.

In this compelling look at second-generation Indian Americans, Khyati Y. Joshi draws on case studies and interviews with forty-one second-generation Indian Americans, analyzing their experiences involving religion, race, and ethnicity from elementary school to adulthood; As she maps the crossroads they encounter as they navigate between their homes and the wider American milieu, Joshi shows how their identities have developed differently from their parents' and their non-Indian peers' and how religion often exerted a dramatic effect. The experiences of Joshi's research participants reveal how race and religion interact, intersect, and affect each other in a society where Christianity and whiteness are the norm.

When author Gail Okawa was in high school in Honolulu, a neighbor mentioned that her maternal grandfather had been imprisoned in a World War II concentration camp on the US mainland. Questioning her parents, she learned only that "he came back a changed man." Years later, as an adult salvaging that grandfather's memorabilia, she found a mysterious photo of a group of Japanese men standing in front of an adobe building, compelling her eventually to embark on a project to learn what happened to him.

ALOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER* ANEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWEDITOR'S CHOICE*Bestselling author Richard Reeves provides an authoritative account of the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese aliens during World War II "Highly readable . . . [A] vivid and instructive reminder of what war and fear can do to civilized people." --Evan Thomas,The New York Times Book Review After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed an executive order that forced more than 120,000 Japanese Americans into primitive camps for the rest of war. Their only crime: looking like the enemy.

Written by Queen Liliuokalani, the last monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, this book was published in 1898, five years after the overthrow of the Kingdom. Liliuokalani gives her account of her upbringing, her ascension to the throne, and her overthrow.

Winner, 2020 American Book Award, given by the Before Columbus Foundation How games have been used to establish and combat Asian American racial stereotypes As Pokémon Go reshaped our neighborhood geographies and the human flows of our cities, mapping the virtual onto lived realities, so too has gaming and game theory played a role in our contemporary understanding of race and racial formation in the United States. From the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to the model minority myth and the globalization of Asian labor, Tara Fickle shows how games and game theory shaped fictions of race upon which the nation relies.

The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States.

Eleanor Ty's bold exploration of literature, plays, and film reveals how young Asian Americans and Asian Canadians have struggled with the ethos of self-sacrifice preached by their parents. This new generation's narratives focus on protagonists disenchanted with their daily lives. Many are depressed. Some are haunted by childhood memories of war, trauma, and refugee camps. Rejecting an obsession with professional status and money, they seek fulfillment by prioritizing relationships, personal growth, and cultural success. As Ty shows, these storytellers have done more than reject a narrowly defined road to happiness. They have rejected neoliberal capitalism itself.

In this remarkable memoir, Tung Pok Chin casts light on the largely hidden experience of those Chinese who immigrated to this country with false documents during the exclusion era. Although scholars have pieced together their history, first-person accounts are rare and fragmented; many of the so-called "Paper Sons" lived out their lives in silent fear of discovery. Chin's story speaks for the many Chinese who worked in urban laundries and restaurants, but it also introduces an unusually articulate man's perspective on becoming Chinese American.

In an extraordinary blend of narrative history, personal recollection, and oral testimony, the author presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. He writes of the Chinese who laid tracks for the transcontinental railroad, of plantation laborers in the canefields of Hawaii, of "picture brides" marrying strangers in the hope of becoming part of the American dream. He tells stories of Japanese Americans behind the barbed wire of U.S. internment camps during World War II, Hmong refugees tragically unable to adjust to Wisconsin's alien climate and culture, and Asian American students stigmatized by the stereotype of the "model minority." This is a powerful and moving work that will resonate for all Americans, who together make up a nation of immigrants from other shores.

""How does it feel to be a problem?" asked W. E. B. Du Bois of black Americans in his classic The Souls of Black Folk. A hundred years later, Vijay Prashad asks South Asians "How does it feel to be a solution?" In this kaleidoscopic critique, Prashad looks into the complexities faced by the members of a "model minority," one, he claims, that is consistently deployed as "a weapon in the war against black America."" "On a vast canvas, The Karma of Brown Folk attacks the two pillars of the "model minority" image, that South Asians are both inherently successful and pliant, and analyzes the ways in which U.S. immigration policy and American Orientalism have perpetuated these stereotypes.

The brutal and systematic ethnic cleansing of Chinese Americans in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century is a shocking and virtually unexplored chapter of American history. Driven Out unearths this forgotten episode in our nation's past. Drawing on years of groundbreaking research, Jean Pfaelzer reveals how, beginning in 1848, lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians purged dozens of communities of thousands of Chinese residents and how the victims bravely fought back.

From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans asserted an identification with the racial origins of Polynesians, declaring them to be racially almost white and speculating that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan descent. In Possessing Polynesians Maile Arvin analyzes this racializing history within the context of settler colonialism across Polynesia, especially in Hawai'i. Arvin argues that a logic of possession through whiteness animates settler colonialism, by which both Polynesia (the place) and Polynesians (the people) become exotic, feminized belongings of whiteness. Seeing whiteness as indigenous to Polynesia provided white settlers with the justification needed to claim Polynesian lands and resources.

A behind-the-scenes examination of Asian Americans in the workplace. In the classroom, Asian Americans, often singled out as so-called "model minorities," are expected to be top of the class. Often they are, getting straight As and gaining admission to elite colleges and universities. But the corporate world is a different story. As Margaret M. Chin reveals in this important new book, many Asian Americans get stuck on the corporate ladder, never reaching the top. In Stuck, Chin shows that there is a "bamboo ceiling" in the workplace, describing a corporate world where racial and ethnic inequalities prevent upward mobility.

Writing against Racial Injury recalls the story of Asian American student rhetoric at the site of language and literacy education in post-1960s California. What emerged in the Asian American movement was a recurrent theme in U.S. history: conflicts over language and literacy difference masked wider racial tensions. Bringing together language and literacy studies, Asian American history and rhetoric, and critical race theory, Hoang uses historiography and ethnography to explore the politics of Asian American language and literacy education.

"This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can't. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home. After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom." --Jose Antonio Vargas,

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured US cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War. Examining texts by major American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt.

An anthology of Asian diasporic writers musing on the notion of "home"--and the possibilities of outsiderhood and belonging. Asian diasporic writers imagine "home" in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, this anthology moves beyond the model-minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong.

Contagious Divides charts the dynamic transformation of representations of Chinese immigrants from medical menace in the nineteenth century to model citizen in the mid-twentieth century. Examining the cultural politics of public health and Chinese immigration in San Francisco, this book looks at the history of racial formation in the U.S. by focusing on the development of public health bureaucracies.

Chinese food first became popular in America under the shadow of violence against Chinese aliens, a despised racial minority ineligible for United States citizenship. The founding of late-nineteenth-century "chop suey" restaurants that pitched an altered version of Cantonese cuisine to white patrons despite a virulently anti-Chinese climate is one of several pivotal events in Anne Mendelson's thoughtful history of American Chinese food. Chow Chop Suey uses cooking to trace different stages of the Chinese community's footing in the larger white society.

On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor comes a harrowing and enlightening look at the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II- from National Book Award finalist Albert Marrin. Just seventy-five years ago, the American government did something that most would consider unthinkable today- it rounded up over 100,000 of its own citizens based on nothing more than their ancestry and, suspicious of their loyalty, kept them in concentration camps for the better part of four years. How could this have happened? Uprooted takes a close look at the history of racism in America and carefully follows the treacherous path that led one of our nation's most beloved presidents to make this decision.

The Hmong People's Journey of Freedom Illustrated by Chue & Nhia Thao Cha

Angel Island, off the coast of California, was the port of entry for Asian immigrants to the United States between 1892 and 1940. Following the passage of legislation requiring the screening of immigrants, "the other Ellis Island" processed around one million people from Japan, China, and Korea. Drawing from memoirs, diaries, letters, and the "wall poems" discovered at the facility long after it closed, the nonfiction master Russell Freedman describes the people who came, and why; the screening process; detention and deportation; changes in immigration policy; and the eventual renaissance of Angel Island as a historic site open to visitors.

When Wu Chien Shiung was born in China 100 years ago, most girls did not attend school; no one considered them as smart as boys. But her parents felt differently. Giving her a name meaning “Courageous Hero,” they encouraged her love of learning and science. This engaging biography follows Wu Chien Shiung as she battles sexism and racism to become what Newsweek magazine called the “Queen of Physics” for her work on beta decay. Along the way, she earned the admiration of famous scientists like Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer and became the first woman hired as an instructor by Princeton University, the first woman elected President of the American Physical Society, the first scientist to have an asteroid named after her when she was still alive, and many other honors.

Fourteen teens who have grown up together in Japantown, San Francisco. Fourteen teens who form a community and a family, as interconnected as they are conflicted. Fourteen teens whose lives are turned upside down when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps. In a world that seems determined to hate them, these young Nisei must rally together as racism and injustice threaten to pull them apart.

It's 1944, and World War II is raging across Europe and the Pacific. The war seemed far away from Margot in Iowa and Haruko in Colorado--until they were uprooted to dusty Texas, all because of the places their parents once called home: Germany and Japan. Haruko and Margot meet at the high school in Crystal City, a "family internment camp" for those accused of colluding with the enemy. The teens discover that they are polar opposites in so many ways, except for one that seems to override all the others: the camp is changing them, day by day and piece by piece.

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the feeling took root—that desire to look, to move closer, to touch. Whenever it started growing, it definitely bloomed the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. Suddenly everything seemed possible. But America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.

Star-crossed lovers, meddling immortals, feigned identities, battles of wits, and dire warnings: these are the stuff of fairy tale, myth, and folklore that have drawn us in for centuries. This young adult novel is an excellent choice for accelerated tween readers in grades 7 to 8, especially during homeschooling. It's a fun way to keep your child entertained and engaged while not in the classroom. Sixteen bestselling and acclaimed authors reimagine the folklore and mythology of East and South Asia in short stories that are by turns enchanting, heartbreaking, romantic, and passionate.

Two friends. One fake dating scheme. What could possibly go wrong? Frank Li has two names. There's Frank Li, his American name. Then there's Sung-Min Li, his Korean name. No one uses his Korean name, not even his parents. Frank barely speaks any Korean. He was born and raised in Southern California. Even so, his parents still expect him to end up with a nice Korean girl--which is a problem, since Frank is finally dating the girl of his dreams: Brit Means. Brit, who is funny and nerdy just like him. Brit, who makes him laugh like no one else. Brit . . . who is white.

For as long as she can remember, it's been Robin and her mom against the world. Growing up as the only child of a single mother in Seoul, Korea, wasn't always easy, but it has bonded them fiercely together. So when a vacation to visit friends in Huntsville, Alabama, unexpectedly becomes a permanent relocation--following her mother's announcement that she's getting married--Robin is devastated. Overnight, her life changes. She is dropped into a new school where she doesn't understand the language and struggles to keep up. She is completely cut off from her friends in Seoul and has no access to her beloved comics.

Aware of the racial tumult in the years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mei tries to remain blissfully focused on her job, her close friendship with the camp foreman's daughter, and telling stories about Paul Bunyan—reinvented as Po Pan Yin (Auntie Po), an elderly Chinese matriarch. Anchoring herself with stories of Auntie Po, Mei navigates the difficulty and politics of lumber camp work and her growing romantic feelings for her friend Bee. The Legend of Auntie Po is about who gets to own a myth, and about immigrant families and communities holding on to rituals and traditions while staking out their own place in the United States.

The owner of the Jade Market has a secret--one that will soon change her grandson's life. Thirteen-year-old Tai Pham lives in the apartment above his grandmother's store, where his bedroom is crammed with sketchpads and comic books. But not even his most imaginative drawings could compare to the colorful adventure he's about to embark on. When Tai inherits his grandmother's jade ring, he soon finds out it's more than it appears. Suddenly he's being inducted into a group of space cops known as the Green Lanterns, his neighborhood is being overrun by some racist bullies.

George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire.

All Jin Wang wants is to fit in. When his family moves to a new neighbourhood, he suddenly finds that he's the only Chinese-American student at his school. Jocks and bullies pick on him constantly, and he has hardly any friends. Then, to make matters worse, he falls in love with an all-American girl...Born to rule over all the monkeys in the world, the story of the Monkey King is one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables. Adored by his subjects, master of the arts of kung-fu, he is the most powerful monkey on earth. But the Monkey King doesn't want to be a monkey. He wants to be hailed as a god...Chin-Kee is the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, and he's ruining his cousin Danny's life.

How is a local level democratic organization cultivated so that members, who were previously disenfranchised, are empowered to oppose an oppressive central authority and participate in a revolutionary reconstruction of society? Having spent many years researching this question, Johannes P. Van Vugt applies a model of democratic organization for social change to his findings regarding the way literacy campaigns and Christian Base communities were organized in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Brazil.

A young Asian girl notices that her eyes look different from her peers'. They have big, round eyes and long lashes. She realizes that her eyes are like her mother’s, her grandmother's, and her little sister's. They have eyes that kiss in the corners and glow like warm tea, crinkle into crescent moons, and are filled with stories of the past and hope for the future. Drawing from the strength of these powerful women in her life, she recognizes her own beauty and discovers a path to self-love and empowerment. This powerful, poetic picture book will resonate with readers of all ages.

In The Paper Boat, Thao's signature collage art tells the wordless story of one family's escape from Vietnam—a journey intertwined with an ant colony's parallel narrative. At her home in Vietnam, a girl rescues ants from the sugar water set out to trap them. Later, when the girl's family flees war-torn Vietnam, ants lead them through the moonlit jungle to the boat that will take them to safety. Before boarding, the girl folds a paper boat from a bun wrapper and drops it into the water, and the ants climb on. Their perilous journey, besieged by punishing weather, predatory birds, and dehydration, before reaching a new beginning, mirrors the family's own.

Cora loves being in the kitchen, but she always gets stuck doing the kid jobs like licking the spoon. One day, however, when her older sisters and brother head out, Cora finally gets the chance to be Mama's assistant chef. And of all the delicious Filipino dishes that dance through Cora's head, she and Mama decide to make pancit, her favorite noodle dish.With Mama's help, Cora does the grown-up jobs like shredding the chicken and soaking the noodles (perhaps Mama won't notice if she takes a nibble of chicken or sloshes a little water on the floor). Cora even gets to stir the noodles in the pot--carefully-- while Mama supervises. When dinner is finally served, her siblings find out that Cora did all their grown-up tasks, and Cora waits anxiously to see what everyone thinks of her cooking.

When a young boy visits his grandfather, their lack of a common language leads to confusion, frustration, and silence. But as they sit down to draw together, something magical happens - with a shared love of art and storytelling, the two form a bond that goes beyond words.

This New Year's Eve for the first time Marisa gets to help her grandmother make the traditional dumpling soup for the family. As she wraps them Marisa worries whether anyone will want to eat her strangely shaped dumplings. Set in the Hawaiian islands where eating as a way to express love and affection, this story celebrates the joyful mix of food, customs and languages from many cultures. For ages 4 to 8.

Driving through Ohio in an old Pontiac, a young girl's parents stop suddenly when they spot watercress growing wild in a ditch by the side of the road. Grabbing an old paper bag and some rusty scissors, the whole family wades into the muck to collect as much of the muddy, snail covered watercress as they can. At first, she's embarrassed. Why can't her family get food from the grocery store? But when her mother shares a story of her family's time in China, the girl learns to appreciate the fresh food they foraged. Together, they make a new memory of watercress.

A warmhearted and tender true story about a young girl finding beauty where she never thought to look. Drawn from author Kao Kalia Yang's childhood experiences as a Hmong refugee, this moving picture book portrays a family with a great deal of love and little money. Weaving together Kalia's story with that of her beloved grandmother, the book moves from the jungles of Laos to the family's early years in the United States. When Kalia becomes unhappy about having to do without and decides she wants braces to improve her smile, it is her grandmother—a woman who has just one tooth in her mouth—who helps her see that true beauty is found with those we love most.

When Shek and little Wong journey to America in 1865, they have work! Along with hundreds of other Chinese, the brothers are going to help build a great railroad across the West. But as days grow into months, Shek and Wong endure more than they could have imagined--bleeding hands, blasting dynamite, and treacherous avalanches. For very little pay. Are they being treated this way because of their almond-shaped eyes--because they are coolies? Inspired by actual events in the history of the American railroad, Cooliesa reveals the harsh truth about life for thousands of Chinese laborers, while it celebrates the love and loyalty between two brothers who were determined not only to survive, but to succeed.

From acclaimed director Steve James, this Academy Award® Nominee, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail tells the saga of the Chinese immigrant Sung family, owners of Abacus Federal Savings of Chinatown, New York. Accused of mortgage fraud, the indictment and trial forces the Sung family to defend themselves - and their bank's legacy in the Chinatown community - over the course of a five-year legal battle.

This dazzling film is a gigantic stirfry of savory images - Paul and his mother cooking in his San Francisco kitchen, street vendors simmering their soups, bustling markets piled with peppers, cilantro, and chilis. In America, cooking is often a solitary experience, but in Vietnam it is a family affair, with everyone cutting, chopping, and stirring while chattering. An undercurrent of longing for the motherland runs through this nostalgic film. The death of his father in Vietnam is the occasion for his visit to Saigon. Now at last memory and reality are reconciled, and he is ready to return to his adoptive country. 

On Angel Island, the history is written on the walls. From 1910 until 1943, Chinese immigrants to America passed through Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, the Ellis Island of the West. Unlike other groups, the Chinese were legally discriminated against under an 1882 law called the Chinese Exclusion Act. This program looks at how two women-one an artist, the other a documentary filmmaker-are raising funds and awareness to have the old immigration station restored. Slated for destruction, the station was spared in 1970 when a park ranger discovered, beneath layers of paint, poems written by anxious detainees about their fears of deportation.

At the turn of the millennium, Asian Americans have become the fastest growing population in the U.S. It is a time of tremendous change, as the country tackles urgent debates over immigration, race and economic disparity.

The Color of Honor portrays the complex variety of responses of Japanese American men during WWII. While reviled and interned in their home country for their ethnic heritage, they were also confronted with the rise of fascism abroad. Some wanted to prove they were loyal Americans and fought bravely in the highly decorated all Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Unit, which liberated European towns, even while their own families were virtually imprisoned in internment camps. Others served as secret Military Intelligence linguists using their deep understanding of the Japanese language to interrogate prisoners of war and intercept messages in the Asian Pacific theater of the war.

A mix of archival footage and historical recreations tells the story of the Japanese Hawaiians' efforts to maintain equal rights and fair treatment during World War II. Fearing that Japan's involvement in the war would stoke racial hatred, Americans of Japanese descent living in Hawaii effectively anticipated and countered the type of harsh treatment that forced Japanese-Americans on the U.S. mainland into internment camps.

During a time of war and social tumult, a young generation fights for equality in the fields, on campuses and in the culture, and claim a new identity: Asian Americans. The aftermath of the Vietnam War brings new immigrants and refugees.

During the Cold War years, Asian Americans are simultaneously heralded as a Model Minority, and suspected as the perpetual foreigner. It is also a time of ambition, as Asian Americans aspire for the first time to national political office.

Pacific Islanders serve in the U.S. military in disproportionally high numbers and have suffered the highest casualty rates in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The men and women of Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific, are American citizens and serve in our country\U+2019\s military at a rate three times higher than the rest of the country. Learn why the island\U+2019\s returning veterans say they can\U+2019\t get the healthcare they need.

This program examines a major piece of the new American mosaic-a group that is seeking to retain its traditional cultural values while adjusting to life in the U.S. Korean Americans have come into frequent and violent conflict with inner-city African Americans, and have sought, through their own ethnic civic organizations, to overcome the rejection of the community around them.

A filmmaker explores the life of her great-aunt, Jane Chung, an actress who made a career for herself at a time when Asian-Americans faced widespread racism in Hollywood. Working mostly in small parts and as an extra, Jane's fifty-year career reflects many of the struggles and triumphs of the Asian-Americans working in the entertainment industry. Jane had parts in over fifty films and TV shows including Chinatown, When Harry Met Sally, M*A*S*H and I Love Lucy, but much of her work is uncredited. The filmmaker's journey to uncover Jane's many film and TV roles brings together voices from multiple generations of her family, as she seeks out those who remember Jane best.

Through candid interviews with first- and second-generation Vietnamese-Americans, this program documents the process of assimilation into American culture of refugees from the former Republic of Vietnam. Vu-Duc Vuong, of the University of California, Berkeley, as well as college students, professionals, and clergy explore what it means to be of Vietnamese descent in America today. Topics include stresses on the family unit caused by cultural and generational differences, gang membership and drug abuse among the young, anti-Vietnamese racial bias, and feelings about relations between the U.S. and Vietnam.

Examines the moral and political contradictions experienced by a group of Americans of Japanese ancestry who, during World War II, proved their loyalty by heroic military service while their families were imprisoned by their own government. Includes archival material from World War II interwoven with present day interviews with survivors of the 442nd Japanese-American Regimental Combat Team.

Beyond the stereotypes of 'grass-skirt girls’, NĀ KAMALEI: THE MEN OF HULA is an award-winning feature-length documentary about the revival of men dancing hula focusing on legendary master hula teacher & Hawaiian entertainer, Robert Cazimero, and the only all-male hula school in Hawaiʻi.

This award-winning documentary explores portrayals of Asian men in American cinema, chronicling the experience of actors who have struggled against Hollywood's ethnic stereotyping and discriminatory practices. The Slanted Screen covers the practice of using Caucasian actors in yellowface makeup, drawing upon a wealth of materials, including 50 rare film clips spanning a century. The program, which was broadcasted nationally on PBS, features voice-over narration by Daniel Dae Kim as well as interviews with actors Mako, James Shigeta, Jason Scott Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Will Yun Lee, and Tzi Ma; producer Terence Chang; director Justin Lin; and casting director Heidi Levitt.

Lisa explores the massive and economically diverse movement of immigration from China to the United States \U+2013\ and traces her own family roots, to find out what it means to be Chinese in America.

One of the rare few who have managed to excel in both art and architecture, Maya Lin creates places of refuge and contemplation in highly public spaces. Constructed on an intimate human scale, they invite visitors to touch, feel, respond, and reflect. In this program, the acclaimed sculptor and architect talks with Bill Moyers about a life and a career that has been shaped by her Asian-American heritage and a profound respect and love for the natural environment.

This film tells the fascinating story of a pioneering American entertainer Jack Soo, an Oakland native who became the first Asian American to be cast in the lead role in a regular television series Valentine's Day (1963), and later starred in the popular comedy show Barney Miller (1975-1978). Featuring rare footage and interviews with Soo's co-stars and friends, including actors George Takei, Nancy Kwan and Max Gail, comedians Steve Landesberg and Gary Austin, and producer Hal Kanter, the film traces Jack's early beginnings as a nightclub singer and comedian, to his breakthrough role as Sammy Fong in Rogers and Hammerstein's Broadway play and film version of The Flower Drum Song.

On May 6th, 1882, on the eve of the greatest wave of immigration in American history, President Chester A. Arthur signed into law a unique piece of federal legislation. Called the Chinese Exclusion Act, it singled out as never before a specific race and nationality for exclusion, making it illegal for Chinese workers to come to America, and for Chinese nationals already here ever to become citizens of the United States. It is a deeply American story about immigration and national identity, civil rights and human justice; about how we define who can be an American, and what being an American means.