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 so doing, they demand that the rest of us reconsider our outmoded ideas about the so-called model minority.

Asian migration and mobilities are transforming education cultures in the Anglosphere, prompting mounting debates about ‘tiger mothers’ and ‘dragon children’, and competition and segregation in Anglosphere schools. This book challenges the cultural essentialism which prevails in much academic and popular discussion of ‘Asian success’ and in relation to Asian education mobilities. As anxiety and aspiration within these spaces are increasingly ethnicised, the children of Asian migrants are both admired and resented for their educational success. This book explores popular perceptions of Asian migrant families through in-depth empirically informed accounts on the broader economic, social, historical and geo-political contexts within which education cultures are produced. This includes contributions from academics on global markets and national policies around migration and education, classed trajectories and articulations, local formations of ‘ethnic capital’, and transnational assemblages that produce education and mobility as means for social advancement. At a time when our schooling systems and communities are undergoing rapid transformations as a result of increasing global mobility, this book is a unique and important contribution to an issue of pressing significance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

From the short stories and journalism of Sui Sin Far to Maxine Hong Kingston's pathbreaking The Woman Warrior to recent popular and critical successes such as Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians, Asian North American literature and media encompass a long history and a diverse variety of genres and aesthetic approaches. The essays in this volume provide context for understanding the history of Asian immigrants to the United States and Canada and the experiences of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Contributors address historical contexts, from the early enactment of Asian exclusion laws to the xenophobia following 9/11, and provide tools for textual analysis. The essays explore conventionally literary texts, genres such as mystery and speculative fiction, historical documents and legal texts, and visual media including films, photography, and graphic novels, emphasizing the ways that creators have crossed boundaries of genre and produced innovative new forms.

Asian American Racialization and the Politics of U.S. Education explores issues surrounding Asian American education in the United States, and how they relate to educational theory, policy, and practice. The book challenges stereotypes and assumptions that pervade U.S. education, restores absent histories of Asian American people in this context, and provides concrete examples of educational actions and policies that enable anti-racist educational work to go on. It argues that understanding Asian American racialization in the U.S. is essential to fighting white supremacy in schools and communities. Utilizing frameworks from Asian American Studies and Cultural Studies, this book will be important reading for those interested in doing anti-racist, liberatory, and abolitionist educational work. In particular, it will be relevant for those working or researching in the fields of Asian American Education, Multicultural Education, Social Justice Education, and Critical Education.

Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the “model minority.” Their sizeable presence at elite universities and high household incomes have helped construct the narrative of Asian American “exceptionalism.” While many scholars and activists characterize this as a myth, pundits claim that Asian Americans’ educational attainment is the result of unique cultural values. In The Asian American Achievement Paradox, sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou offer a compelling account of the academic achievement of the children of Asian immigrants. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the adult children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees and survey data, Lee and Zhou bridge sociology and social psychology to explain how immigration laws, institutions, and culture interact to foster high achievement among certain Asian American groups. For the Chinese and Vietnamese in Los Angeles, Lee and Zhou find that the educational attainment of the second generation is strikingly similar, despite the vastly different socioeconomic profiles of their immigrant parents. Because immigration policies after 1965 favor individuals with higher levels of education and professional skills, many Asian immigrants are highly educated when they arrive in the United States. They bring a specific “success frame,” which is strictly defined as earning a degree from an elite university and working in a high-status field. This success frame is reinforced in many local Asian communities, which make resources such as college preparation courses and tutoring available to group members, including their low-income members. While the success frame accounts for part of Asian Americans’ high rates of achievement, Lee and Zhou also find that institutions, such as public schools, are crucial in supporting the cycle of Asian American achievement. Teachers and guidance counselors, for example, who presume that Asian American students are smart, disciplined, and studious, provide them with extra help and steer them toward competitive academic programs. These institutional advantages, in turn, lead to better academic performance and outcomes among Asian American students. Yet the expectations of high achievement come with a cost: the notion of Asian American success creates an “achievement paradox” in which Asian Americans who do not fit the success frame feel like failures or racial outliers. While pundits ascribe Asian American success to the assumed superior traits intrinsic to Asian culture, Lee and Zhou show how historical, cultural, and institutional elements work together to confer advantages to specific populations. An insightful counter to notions of culture based on stereotypes, The Asian American Achievement Paradox offers a deft and nuanced understanding how and why certain immigrant groups succeed.

Roland Sintos Coloma and Gordon Pon’s Asian Canadian Studies Reader brings together essential writings by leading and emerging scholars in the field to explore the vibrancy of the diverse Asian diaspora in Canada. The Reader is the perfect textbook for undergraduate courses in Race and Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Migration and Diaspora Studies. The volume is organized into four main themes: ethnic, intersectional, comparative, and transnational encounters. It critically engages topics regarding orientalism, settler colonialism, globalization, and nationalism. Each groundbreaking essay challenges our conventional understandings of diversity and multiculturalism by tackling the intricacies of racism and racialization. By capturing the rich diversity within Asian Canadian communities, Coloma and Pon dispel the perceptions of Asians as always immigrants, newcomers, or model minorities. The Asian Canadian Studies Reader is the first interdisciplinary collection of essays intended for undergraduate use about Canada’s largest racialized minority group.