Offering a textured history of the Chinese in America since their arrival during the California Gold Rush, this work includes letters, speeches, testimonies, oral histories, personal memoirs, poems, essays, and folksongs. It provides an insight into immigration, work, family and social life, and the longstanding fight for equality and inclusion.

While a growing number of popular and scholarly works focus on Asian Americans, most are devoted to the experiences of larger groups such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Indian Americans. This book presents discussion of underrepresented groups, including Burmese, Indonesian, Mong, Hmong, Nepalese, Romani, Tibetan, and Thai Americans.

The dragon, a symbol of Asian art and mythology, appears in many guises and is always adaptable -- a survivor par excellence. Asian Americans display this same supple strength as they move between their Asian culture and their American one. In American Dragons, Laurence Yep brings together twenty-five talented writers, each with a different story about the Asian American experience: - A Chinese American girl struggles to find her place in a suburban high school without denying her true intelligence. - A young woman is torn when her romantic feelings clash with the expectations of her Vietnamese parents. - A twenty-first-century teenager and his aging grandfather learn that it is possible to live in the future without losing touch with the past.

"A landmark contribution. . . . These rich materials—including proverbs, immigration interrogations, poems, articles, photographs, social workers' reports, recipes, and oral histories—add a new dimension to Asian American studies, U.S. women's history, Chinese American history, and immigration studies."—Valerie Matsumoto, University of California, Los Angeles

A modern poetry anthology that includes the work of a second generation of Asian American poets who are taking the best of the prior generation, but also breaking conventional patterns.

Original writings address the struggles of young Asian Americans to define their identities while growing up in the United States

"In three days the number of so-called 'volunteers' reached over three hundred men. Very quickly they organized us into military units. Just like that I became a North Korean soldier and was on the way to some unknown place." -- from the book South Korean Lee Young Ho was seventeen years old when he was forced to serve in the North Korean People's Army during the first year of the Korean War. After a few months, he deserted the NKPA and returned to Seoul where he joined the South Korean Marine Corps. Ho's experience is only one of the many compelling accounts found in Voices from the Korean War. Unique in gathering war stories from veterans from all sides of the Korean War -- American, South Korean, North Korean, and Chinese -- this volume creates a vivid and multidimensional portrait of the three-year-long conflict told by those who experienced the ground war firsthand. Richard Peters and Xiaobing Li include a significant introduction that provides a concise history of the Korean conflict, as well as a geographical and a political backdrop for the soldiers' personal stories.