A seventeen-year-old Chinese American in Minnesota and her family tread a balance between the Far East and Middle West.

A seventeen-year-old Chinese American in Minnesota and her family tread a balance between the Far East and Middle West.

"Sherri Gerbert Fuller provides us with a rare look at Chinese immigrant lives and aspirations in Minnesota, proudly reclaiming their voices as part of our great American heritage. I was delighted to read this book."--Iris Chang, author of "The Chinese in America " Minnesota's first Chinese settlers, fleeing racial violence in California, established scores of businesses after they arrived in the late 1870s. Newspapers eagerly published reports of their activities, including New Year's festivities, marriages, and restaurant and laundry openings. Beginning in 1882 federal laws banning Chinese immigration and denying citizenship put particular pressure on the community. Sherri Gebert Fuller relates the story of the Chinese from these early days to the 1960s when a new wave of immigrants, including students, businessmen, and professionals from China and Taiwan, began to bring new energy and issues to the community and a flourishing of ties between Minnesota and China.

Although the United States prides itself as a nation of diversity, the country that boasts of its immigrant past also wrestles with much of its immigrant present. While conflicting attitudes about immigration are debated, newcomers—both legal and otherwise—continue to arrive on American soil. And books about the immigrant experience—aimed at both adults and youth—are published with a fair amount of frequency. In Immigration Narrative in Young Adult Literature: Crossing Borders, Joanne Brown explores the experiences of adolescents as portrayed in young adult novels. Her study features protagonists from a wide variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds in order to provide a complete discussion of the immigration experience of young adults. In this volume, Brown analyzes young adult novels that portray various aspects of the immigrant experience—journeys to the shores of the United States, the difficulties of adjustment, and the tensions that develop within family units as a result of immigration. Brown also examines how ethnicity, religion, and country of origin affect the adolescent characters' adjustment to their new country, as well as the process of moving from social outsiders to accepted citizens. This thoroughly researched book includes theories of adolescent development and perspectives on immigration itself applied to the literary analyses. It also offers a framework for anticipating the success of young immigrants and relates this analysis to the novels Brown discusses. With an appendix of additional novels for further reading, this book will be a useful resource for librarians and teachers of adolescent literature, as well as for students, both those born in the United States and those who are immigrants themselves.

This first U.S. anthology of work by Asian-American women contains poetry, prose, and graphic art, and a section of reviews of previously published literature. These women, in contrast to their foremothers, repeatedly identify themselves through their art. Very often they do this by showing who they are not--not male, not white. The works reveal their pride in their cultural heritage. ISBN 0-934971-10-2:

In the early and mid-twentieth century, Chinese migrants evaded draconian anti-immigrant laws by entering the US under false papers that identified them as the sons of people who had returned to China to marry. Wayne Hung Wong tells the story of his life after emigrating to Wichita, Kansas, as a thirteen-year-old paper son. After working in his father’s restaurant as a teen, Wong served in an all-Chinese Air Force unit stationed in China during World War II. His account traces the impact of race and segregation on his service experience and follows his postwar life from finding a wife in Taishan through his involvement in the government’s amnesty program for Chinese immigrants and career in real estate. Throughout, Wong describes the realities of life as part of a small Chinese American community in a midwestern town. Vivid and rich with poignant insights, American Paper Son explores twentieth-century Asian American history through one person’s experiences.

A social history of the role of the Chinese laundry on the survival of early Chinese immigrants in the U.S.during the Chinese Exclusion law period, 1882-1943, and in Canada during the years of the Head Tax, 1885-1923, and exclusion law, 1923-1947. Why and how Chinese got into the laundry business and how they had to fight discriminatory laws and competition from white-owned laundries to survive. Description of their lives, work demands, and living conditions. Reflections by a sample of children who grew up living in the backs of their laundries provide vivid first-person glimpses of the difficult lives of Chinese laundrymen and their families.