The use of coaching books systematically deceived the American immigration system during the years following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Follow Jim’s life as an eight-year-old immigrant from Taishan whose diligent memorization of false identities, dates and places erased all memories of his boyhood in China. After facing language difficulties and isolation during assimilation and education, he eventually achieves academic success. But then he must overcome the institutional racism of the 1950s, and reaches the plateau of middle class America during the Cold War. He finds himself oddly suited to the silence and secrecy shrouding his work with the military and NASA. But despite having lived the American Dream, he sees the world as a Chinese American in a racist society. Mr. Eng completed this memoir at the age of 95. He attributes his health, long life, and success to his beautiful wife Lan.

Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music documents the variety of musics-from traditional Asian through jazz, classical, and pop-that have been created by Asian Americans. This book is not about "Asian American music" but rather about Asian Americans making music. This key distinction allows the author to track a wide range of musical genres. Wong covers an astonishing variety of music, ethnically as well as stylistically: Laotian song, Cambodian music drama, karaoke, Vietnamese pop, Japanese American taiko, Asian American hip hop, and panethnic Asian American improvisational music (encompassing jazz and avant-garde classical styles). In Wong's hands these diverse styles coalesce brilliantly around a coherent and consistent set of questions about what it means for Asian Americans to make music in environments of inter-ethnic contact, about the role of performativity in shaping social identities, and about the ways in which commercially and technologically mediated cultural production and reception transform individual perceptions of time, space, and society. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music encompasses ethnomusicology, oral history, Asian American studies, and cultural performance studies. It promises to set a new standard for writing in these fields, and will raise new questions for scholars to tackle for many years to come.

During the height of racist anti-Chinese U.S. immigration laws, illegal aliens were able to come into the States under false papers identifying them as the sons of those who had returned to China to marry and have children. American Paper Son is the story of one such Chinese immigrant who came to Wichita, Kansas, in 1935 as a thirteen-year-old "paper son" to help in his father's restaurant there. This vivid first-person account addresses significant themes in Asian American history through the lens of Wong's personal stories. Wong served in one of the all-Chinese units of the 14th Air Force in China during World War II and he discusses the impact of race and segregation on his experience. After the war he found a wife in Taishan, brought her to the US, and became involved in the government's infamous Confession program (an amnesty program for immigrants). Wong eventually became a successful real estate entrepreneur in Wichita. Rich with poignant insights into the realities of life as part of a very small Chinese American population in a Midwestern town, this memoir provides an important new view of the Asian American experience away from the West Coast. Benson Tong adds a scholarly introduction and useful annotations.

Sweet Bamboo is the vivid and absorbing memoir of a Chinese American family who lived in Los Angeles since the first years of the twentieth century. Lovingly recounted by the second daughter, who went on to become the first Asian American reporter for a major American newspaper, this account illuminates the many changes that occurred in the family as members increasingly became integrated into American society. While much of the attention given to Chinese immigrants has focused on the struggles of working class people, this book sheds new light on a different kind of immigrant experience—that of privileged Chinese parents and their children living in relative affluence in a predominantly white neighborhood. The family saga begins in China's Kwangtung Province, in the village of Gum Jook (Sweet Bamboo), about 31 miles south of Canton. It follows Louise Leung Larson's parents through their arranged marriage in 1898, to their arrival in Los Angeles, the birth of three daughters and five sons (named after American presidents), and her father's development of a successful herbalist business. Larson's intimate portrait of her family, her lively depiction of Los Angeles at the turn of the century, and her engaging descriptions of meals eaten, holidays celebrated, school events, visits from relatives, and much more make this a richly textured excursion into the dreams and disappointments of everyday life. The death of the author's mother in 1957 marks the end of an era for the Tom Leung family. An epilogue brings the story to the late 1980s, tracing the intermarriage of the third and fourth generations, and the family's diminishing sense of its Chinese identity. A postscript by the author's daughter, Jane Leung Larson, provides details of the fourth and fifth generations Leungs and recounts Jane's trip to China where she visited her parents' birthplaces and met relatives from both her grandmother's and grandfather's families. Taken together, these keen observations illustrate several generations' adaptation to dual cultures and the formation of a unique Chinese American sensibility.

Combining archival research in Chinese language sources with oral history interviews, Renqiu Yu examines the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA), an organization that originated in 1933 to help Chinese laundry workers break their isolation in American society. Yu brings to life the men who labored in New York laundries, depicting their meager existence, their struggles against discrimination and exploitation, and their dreams of returning to China. The persistent efforts of the CHLA succeeded in changing the workers' status in American society and improving the image of the Chinese among the American public. Yu is especially concerned with the political activities of the CHLA, which was founded in reaction to proposed New York City legislation that would have put the Chinese laundries out of business. When the conservative Chinese social organization could not help the launderers, they broke with tradition and created their own organization. Not only did the CHLA defeat the legislative requirements that would have closed them down, but their "people's diplomacy" won American support for China during its war with Japan. The CHLA staged a campaign in the 1930s and 40s which took as its slogan, "To Save China, To Save Ourselves." Focusing on this campaign, Yu also examines the complex relationship between the democratically oriented CHLA and the Chinese American left in the 1930s.

A portrait of the Asian-American experience from the perspective of a mother and son traces the author's childhood in the 1960s housing projects of San Francisco's Chinatown and the disparate views held by both son and mother about such topics as survival, tradition, and culture. 30,000 first printing.