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

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

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.

Fighting for the Dream is a collection of oral histories of 40 Chinese American men and women-ages 24 to 94-who served in wars from World War II to conflicts in Afghanistan. These individuals defied boundaries, went against their cultural grain, and changed history. Through their personal stories, we see a greater tapestry that is the story of America in the last hundred years. This collection includes interviews with the first Asian American general (John Fugh), the first Asian American Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Management Policy (Frederick Pang), the first Asian American full unrestricted Marine (Kurt Lee), the first Asian American National Commander of the American Legion (Fang Wong), the first Asian American judge in New York State (Randall Eng), as well as some of the 20,000 Chinese Americans - a quarter of the Chinese American population at the time - who served during World War II. This collection also features the stories of: World War II veterans Genson Lum, Peter Woo, Kay Wong Chin, Dr. Wing Mar, Al Chinn, Earl Jung, Tom Wah Sun Lew, Mack Pong, Sam Jue, Richard Y.W. Chin, Richard Goon, Lester Fong, Elsie Seetoo, Wayne H. Wong Korean War veterans Kurt Lee, Rita K. Chow Vietnam War veterans John Gerald Miki, David J. Louie, Gabe Mui, Richard Wong, Thomas Wing Persian Gulf War veterans Tony Lee, Mimi Wang Iraq & Afghanistan veterans Chi Szeto, Pakee Fang, Michael Chan, See-wan Szeto, Welton Chang, Wilem Wong, Cindy Wu, Howard Chin, Cliff Chen, Juliet Shum, Mo Pan, Astrid Szeto, William Chan