Contemporary asian america a multidisciplinary reader 3rd edition pdf

CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICA

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Contemporary Asian America A Multidisciplinary Reader

THIRD EDITION

Edited by Min Zhou and Anthony C. Ocampo

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org

© 2016 by New York University All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zhou, Min, 1956– editor. | Ocampo, Anthony Christian, 1981– editor. Title: Contemporary Asian America : a multidisciplinary reader / edited by Min Zhou and Anthony C. Ocampo. Description: Third edition. | New York : New York University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015043568| ISBN 9781479829231 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479826223 (pb : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Asian Americans. | Asian Americans—Study and teaching. Classification: LCC E184.O6 C66 2016 | DDC 973/.0495—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043568

e-ISBN: 978-1-4798-4999-4

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http://www.nyupress.org
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043568
From Min Zhou: For Philip Jia Guo and Lisa Phuong Mai, the children of Asian immigrants

From Anthony C. Ocampo: For my parents Myrtle and Chito Ocampo, immigrants from the Philippines

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CONTENTS

List of Tables and Figures Preface to the Third Edition Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Introduction: Revisiting Contemporary Asian America

Min Zhou, Anthony C. Ocampo, and J. V. Gatewood

PART I. CLAIMING VISIBILITY: THE ASIAN AMERICAN MOVEMENT

1. “On Strike!” San Francisco State College Strike, 1968–1969: The Role of Asian American Students

Karen Umemoto

2. The “Four Prisons” and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s

Glenn Omatsu Study Questions Suggested Readings Films

PART II. TRAVERSING BORDERS: CONTEMPORARY ASIAN IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES

3. Contemporary Asian America: Immigration, Demographic Transformation, and Ethnic Formation

Min Zhou, Anthony C. Ocampo, and J. V. Gatewood

4. The Waves of War: Refugees, Immigrants, and New Americans from Southeast Asia

Carl L. Bankston III and Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo

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Study Questions Suggested Readings Films

PART III. TIES THAT BIND: THE IMMIGRANT FAMILY AND THE ETHNIC COMMUNITY

5. New Household Forms, Old Family Values: The Formation and Reproduction of the Filipino Transnational Family in Los Angeles

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

6. The Reorganization of Hmong American Families in Response to Poverty Yang Sao Xiong

7. Enclaves, Ethnoburbs, and New Patterns of Settlement among Asian Immigrants

Wei Li, Emily Skop, and Wan Yu Study Questions Suggested Readings Films

PART IV. STRUGGLING TO GET AHEAD: ECONOMY AND WORK

8. Just Getting a Job Is Not Enough: How Indian Americans Navigate the Workplace

Pawan Dhingra

9. Gender, Migration, and Work: Filipina Health Care Professionals to the United States

Yen Le Espiritu

10. The Making and Transnationalization of an Ethnic Niche: Vietnamese Manicurists

Susan Eckstein and Thanh-Nghi Nguyen Study Questions Suggested Readings

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Films

PART V. SEXUALITY IN ASIAN AMERICA

11. “Tomboys” and “Baklas”: Experiences of Lesbian and Gay Filipino Americans

Kevin L. Nadal and Melissa J. H. Corpus

12. No Fats, Femmes, or Asians: The Utility of Critical Race Theory in Examining the Role of Gay Stock Stories in the Marginalization of Gay Asian Men

C. Winter Han Study Questions Suggested Readings Films

PART VI. RACE AND ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY

13. Are Asians Black? The Asian American Civil Rights Agenda and the Contemporary Significance of the Paradigm

Janine Young Kim

14. Are Second-Generation Filipinos “Becoming” Asian American or Latino? Historical Colonialism, Culture, and Panethnicity

Anthony C. Ocampo

15. Are Asian Americans Becoming White? Min Zhou

Study Questions Suggested Readings Films

PART VII. INTERMARRIAGES AND MULTIRACIAL ETHNICITY

16. Are We “Postracial”? Intermarriage, Multiracial Identification, and Changing Color Lines

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Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean

17. Mapping Multiple Histories of Korean American Transnational Adoption Kim Park Nelson

Study Questions Suggested Readings Films

PART VIII. CONFRONTING ADVERSITY: RACISM, STEREOTYPING, AND EXCLUSION

18. A Letter to My Sister and a Twenty-Five-Year Anniversary Lisa Park

19. “Racial Profiling” in the War on Terror: Cultural Citizenship and South Asian Muslim Youth in the United States

Sunaina Maira

20. Racial Microaggressions and the Asian American Experience Derald Wing Sue, Jennifer Bucceri, Annie I. Lin, Kevin L. Nadal, and Gina C. Torino

Study Questions Suggested Readings Films

PART IX. BEHIND THE MODEL MINORITY

21. Jeremy Lin’s Model Minority Problem Maxwell Leung

22. Continuing Significance of the Model Minority Myth: The Second Generation

Lisa Sun-Hee Park

23. Racial Anxieties, Uncertainties, and Misinformation: A Complex Picture of Asian Americans and Selective College Admissions

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OiYan Poon and Ester Sihite Study Questions Suggested Readings Films

PART X. MULTIPLICITY AND INTERRACIAL POLITICS

24. Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences

Lisa Lowe

25. Critical Thoughts on Asian American Assimilation in the Whitening Literature

Nadia Y. Kim

26. Beyond the Perpetual Foreigner and Model Minority Stereotypes: A Critical Examination of How Asian Americans Are Framed

Jennifer Ng, Yoon Pak, and Xavier Hernandez

27. Race-Based Considerations and the Obama Vote: Evidence from the 2008 National Asian American Survey

S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, Janelle Wong, Taeku Lee, and Jane Junn Study Questions Suggested Readings Films About the Contributors Index

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List of Tables and Figures

TABLES

Table 3.1. Asian American Population, 1980–2000 (Thousands)

Table 3.2. Top Ten Metro Areas with Largest Asian American Population, 2010

Table 3.3. Largest Asian American Population Growth, by Region and State, 2000–2010

Table 4.1. Socioeconomic and Family Characteristics of the US Population and of Major Southeast Asian Groups in the United States, 2010–2012

Table 6.1. Poverty Rate of Select Racial/Ethnic Categories, 1989–1999

Table 6.2. Population of Hmong Alone by Select US States, 1990–2010

Table 6.3. Average Household and Family Size by US General and US Hmong Populations

Table 6.4. Proportion in Poverty by US and Hmong Family Type, 2005–2010

Table 7.1. Asian Americans in the United States and Top Ten States, 1990– 2010

Table 7.2. Metropolitan Areas with Largest Asian American Populations, 2010

Table 7.3. Metropolitan Areas with Asian American Population at Least One Percent of National Total

Table 10.1. Top Ten Countries of Origin of Foreign-Born Hairdresser and Grooming Service Workers in the United States in 2000

Table 10.2. Percentage of Nail Technicians in the United States of Diverse Ethnicities, 1999–2009

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Table 10.3. Vietnamese Manicurists by Year of Arrival (%), in 2007

Table 11.1. Domains and Themes

Table 14.1. Everyday Words in English, Spanish, and Tagalog

Table 14.2. Panethnic Identification of Respondents (N = 50)

Table 14.3. Panethnic Identification by Ethnicity, Second-Generation Asians (N = 1,617)

Table 14.4. Panethnic Identification by Ethnicity, Second-Generation Asians (N = 921)

Table 16.1. Rates of Exogamy among Marriages Containing at Least One Member of the Racial/Ethnic Group

Table 16.2. Multiracial Identification by Census Racial Categories

Table 16.3. Most and Least Multiracial States

Table 27.1. Asian American Vote Choice in the 2008 Primaries, among Registered Voters

Table 27.2. Asian American Vote Choice in the 2008 General Election, among Registered Voters, by Month of Interview

Table 27.3. Asian American Vote Choice in the 2008 General Election, among Registered Voters, by Primary Vote Choice

Table 27.4. Group Distance and the Black-Latino Divide among Asian American Registered Voters

Table 27.A.1. Asian American Vote Choice in the 2008 General Election, among Registered Voters, by Ethnicity

Table 27.A.2. Logit Regressions of Vote Choice in the 2008 Primary and General Election

Table 27.A.3. Ordered Logit Regression of Intended Vote Choice in the 2008 General Election

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FIGURES

Figure 3.1. Percentage Distribution of Asian American Population, 1900–2010

Figure 3.2. Asian American Population: Percentage Foreign-Born, 1900–2010

Figure 4.1. Major Southeast Asian Populations in the United States, 1920– 2013

Figure 7.1. Detailed Asian Groups by Foreign-Born, Second Generation, and Third and Later Generations

Figure 7.2. Chinatown in San Francisco

Figure 10.1. Number of Nail Salons in the United States, 1991–2008

Figure 10.2. Nail and Beauty Salon Share of Total Revenue in the Beauty Sector, 1999–2007

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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

There was a time, not too long ago, when race in America was synonymous with the black-white dichotomy. But since the United States reformed its immigration policy and reopened its borders to newcomers, immigrants and their children have transformed the racial landscape of this country. In the past decade or so alone, the immigrant population has grown tremendously, from thirty million at the turn of the twenty-first century to over forty million today. The Pew Research Center’s comprehensive study of Asian Americans, titled “The Rise of Asian Americans,” surprised many by pointing out that Asian Americans, not Latinos, constituted the fastest growing racial group, and much of the growth is due to international migration. More than a third (36 percent) of the new immigrants who came to this country in 2010 were of Asian American or Pacific Islander descent, compared to 31 percent of Latino origin.

Over the past half century, Asian Americans grew from fewer than one million (or 0.6 percent of the total US population) in 1960 to more than nineteen million (or 6 percent of the US population) in 2013.1 Although Asian Americans compose a tiny proportion of the US population, they form an increasingly visible racial minority group. Many Americans assume that Asian Americans congregate along the coastal states of the Pacific West, but in fact their numbers have increased most rapidly in new destinations of the US South, a region considered to be the “geographic center of black-white relations.”2 Asian Americans have now complicated Americans’ notions of race. By virtue of their presence all over the country, it is now impossible for nineteen million people of Asian origins to remain unseen.

As the contributors of the following chapters demonstrate, Asian Americans have carved out niches and made themselves visible within many arenas of American life—schools and colleges, community-based organizations, suburbs and ethnoburbs, neighborhoods and “gayborhoods,” political movements, and even professional sports leagues. Asian American immigrants and their children work in every echelon of the mainstream and ethnic labor markets—professional occupations, service sectors, hospitality industries, and health care and medicine—and have achieved measureable positive socioeconomic outcomes. Unlike the

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European and Asian immigrants of yesteryear, they excel in the education arena and fare well in American society on economic terms. They also have more resources and technology to intimately and economically tether themselves to the home countries they left behind. The emerging popularity of social media has helped democratize American pop culture, and Asian Americans have used the Internet to raise social consciousness (e.g., 18millionrising.org, Hyphen magazine), blog about Asian American racial injustices (e.g., Angry Asian Man), and build a fan base for their music and comedy (e.g., The Fung Brothers of Monterey Park, CA). Historically touted as “forever foreigners,” Asian Americans throughout the United States are weaving themselves into the tapestry of American society and continue to be lauded as “the model minority.”

Yet despite significant advances in social mobility, Asian Americans have yet to achieve a social status in the United States that is on par with that of their European counterparts of yesteryear. In spite of the widespread popularity of the “model minority” trope, there are Asian Americans who are poor and struggle to make ends meet, who barely make it into community colleges because of both academic and financial challenges, who live in the shadows because of their legal status, and who continue to be subject to overt and covert forms of racial discrimination on a daily basis. No matter what their levels of cultural and economic assimilation, they are still considered the racial other because of their phenotype, even those who are adopted by and raised in white families and communities for their entire lives. They continue to face a bamboo ceiling that blocks their mobility to leadership positions. Their representation in upper-level management in corporations, college and university administrations, Hollywood televisions and films, and even the US Congress remains negligible. Despite the fact that American society is more open than ever before, and an Asian American basketball player in the NBA has evolved into a national news sensation, Asian America is still on the margin of mainstream America. As French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr famously declared, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Even the Pew Research Center report about the “rise” of Asian Americans was rife with controversy. To the credit of the organization, they consulted with several of the leading Asian American social scientists in the country; however, it was their reporting of the data that brought tremendous angst to Asian American leaders around the country. At its heart, the report seemed celebratory in nature—in total congruence with the model minority stereotype. In opting to highlight the successes, the

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http://www.18millionrising.org
report marginalized the segments of the community that were most in need. For every Asian American success story, there are many more Asian American families and communities who continue to suffer through the indignant effects of racism, sexism, homophobia, violence, and poverty. Given the scarcity of think tanks that address Asian American issues, the Pew Research Center report was a missed opportunity. In the eyes of many Asian American activists, scholars, and policymakers, they were “blindsided” by a one-dimensional depiction of what they know—and have proven with their life’s work—to be a culturally and socioeconomically heterogeneous population.3

Like the Asian American population in the United States, Contemporary Asian America continues to evolve. We have enlisted an interdisciplinary group of sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, and ethnic studies scholars to contribute to this third edition new chapters that underscore the growing complexity of Asian American communities and social issues. Some of the chapters tackle new frontiers in Asian American studies. How is Latino immigration reshaping how Asian Americans think about race? How have gay Asian Americans carved out their agency in a time when LGBT individuals have reached unprecedented levels of acceptance? How has the age of Obama reshaped the political behaviors of Asian Americans? Other chapters address issues that Asian Americans continue to endure. How does race affect the everyday experiences of Asian American students and workers? What strategies do Asian Americans use to maintain their cultural and social ties to their home country? How do the historical, economic, and political relations of the United States across the Pacific affect Asian Americans’ experiences in this country today? These are complicated questions, to which our book does not propose to provide a solution. Nonetheless, this third edition does hope to inspire a new generation of students—Asian American or not—to critically consider these issues, rather than reduce a population of nineteen million rising to mere Orientalist stereotypes.

As the coeditors, we are incredibly thankful to New York University Press (NYUP), who not only provided the initial spark to develop this reader into the new edition, but, as a publisher, has also made itself an important ally to the growing field of Asian American studies. We are grateful for their continued willingness to provide an important space for contemporary Asian American issues to be debated in a critical fashion. NYUP editor Jennifer Hammer has offered her unending support and enthusiasm for this project, as she did in the previous editions. We thank Eric Zinner for playing a key role in providing this important scholarly

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space for Asian American studies. We also thank Constance Grady and Dorothea Stillman Halliday, who have patiently guided us through the necessary steps in the publishing process, and Joseph Dahm, who is our meticulous copy editor.

We are grateful for our contributors, both old and new, who have not only helped make Contemporary Asian America a repository of the multifaceted experiences of Asian Americans, but also given us an important set of tools for understanding the current state and the future of this ever-evolving community. Their brilliant chapters shed new light on the history and current state of Asian America and inspire scholars and students of Asian American studies. When it comes to this extraordinary group of passionate scholars, “the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past,” to invoke the words of the American writer William Faulkner.

This volume would not have been possible without the support of our past and present home institutions. We would like to express our gratitude for the institutional and funding support we have received from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore; the Department of Sociology, Asian American Studies Department, Asian American Studies Center, and the fund from Walter and Shirley Wang Endowed Chair in US-China Relations and Communications at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Department of Psychology and Sociology at Cal Poly Pomona. We thank our home institutions for continuing to believe in the field of Asian American studies.

Finally, we would like to thank our wonderful colleagues, research assistants, students, friends, and family. Min would like to thank her colleagues and students in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA who have helped nurture her Asian American sensitivity and inspire her research in the field. Anthony would like to thank his colleagues at Cal Poly Pomona, the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, the Association of Asian American Studies, and the community of immigration, race, and gender scholars within the American Sociological Association, for their support. We thank our incredibly hardworking research assistants—Jin Lou, Jingyi Wen, and Hao Zhou from NTU and Audrey E. Aday, Sarine Aratoon, Irisa Charles, Joseph Cipriano, Jessica Galvan, and Milio Medina from Cal Poly Pomona. We appreciate the help from Antonio Ocampo for proofreading the manuscript. Min dedicates this book to her son Philip Jia Guo and daughter-in-law Lisa Phuong Mai. Anthony thanks his brothers and sisters from the UCLA sociology PhD program; his dearest friends both in and

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out of academia (especially Daniel Soodjinda and Elmer Manlongat); and his partner Joseph Cipriano. He dedicates this book to his mother and father, Maria Myrtle and Antonio “Chito” Ocampo, whose own migration story inspired him to pursue this profession. Min Zhou, Singapore Anthony C. Ocampo, Los Angeles May 23, 2015

NOTES 1 Pew Research Center, “U.S. Hispanic and Asian Populations Growing, but for

Different Reasons,” http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/26/u-s- hispanic-and-asian-populations-growing-but-for-different-reasons/ (accessed May 23, 2015).

2 Monica McDermott, Working Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 1.

3 Karthick Ramakrishnan, “When Words Fail: Careful Framing Needed in Research on Asian Americans,” Hyphen Magazine, June 27, 2012, http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2012/06/when-words-fail- careful-framing-needed-research-asian-americans (accessed January 31, 2015).

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http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/26/u-s-hispanic-and-asian-populations-growing-but-for-different-reasons/
http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2012/06/when-words-fail-careful-framing-needed-research-asian-americans
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

It was no small coincidence that the US population hit the three-hundred- million mark just as we were putting the finishing touches on the second edition of Contemporary Asian America in October 2006. For most Americans, this unique historical moment was fairly anticlimactic. There were no visible signs of celebration—no parades with colorful floats and marching bands, no fireworks, not even a public gathering. President Bush —a politician who has an unusual way of speaking to the moment— delivered what can only be described as a tepid response to the demographic change. In a press release issued by the White House, the president lauded that people were “America’s greatest asset,” and praised the American people for their confidence, ingenuity, hopes and for their love of freedom. He concluded that “we welcome this milestone as further proof that the American Dream remains as bright and hopeful as ever.”1 This brief blip in the news cycle disappeared almost as suddenly as it came. To be certain, any celebrations that might have occurred were dampened by an ongoing debate in the United States about immigration and it impact on the environment, natural resources, public services, and quality of life.

By contrast, the arrival of the two-hundred-millionth American in November 1967 was a more splendid affair, marked by celebrations and extensive news coverage. Addressing the nation while standing before a giant census clock, President Lyndon Johnson delivered his own message of hope and caution for the future. As Haya El Nasser recounts, President Johnson’s words were broken on several occasions by the sounds of applause from the crowd of onlookers who had converged on the Department of Commerce to hear the president speak.2 Among the many events that celebrated the two-hundred-million mark was a contest of sorts, sponsored by Life magazine. The editors at Life sent teams of photographers to twenty-two cities across the United States, finding the baby who arrived closest to the hour appointed by the US Census Bureau when the two-hundred-millionth American would arrive. The winning baby was a fourth-generation Chinese American, Robert Ken Woo, Jr., born at Atlanta’s Crawford Long Hospital at 11:03 AM, November 20, 1967, to Robert and Sally Woo. Woo’s story was—to paraphrase the writer Gish Gen—“typically Asian American.” Bobby’s great-grandfather

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had come to Georgia after the Civil War to work on the Augusta Canal. His mother’s family had fled the Communist Revolution in China and settled in Augusta in 1959 after several years of waiting for permission to emigrate. Both of parents were college graduates; his father worked as a certified public accountant in Georgia. Bobby Woo was one of a small number of Asian Americans growing up in the suburb of Tucker. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate and as a law student. Today, he is a practicing attorney (and the first Asian American partner at King & Spalding, one of the most prestigious law firms in America), an advocate for immigrant rights, and the father of three children.

Woo’s story is both fascinating and symbolically appropriate. Even though it was by happenstance, Woo’s selection as the two-hundred- millionth American anticipated drastic changes that had altered the country’s demographic, social, and political landscape since his ancestors first arrived in America nearly a hundred years before his birth. Woo’s parents and Woo himself were beneficiaries of the growing educational and economic opportunities that were made available to them and other racial/ethnic minorities only within a relatively short span of time—the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and subsequent changes in public policies and public attitudes toward racial/ethnic minorities as a result of the civil rights movement. The passage of the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act (Hart-Celler Act), two years before Woo’s birth, made possible the coming of hundreds and thousands of immigrants from all over the world, especially from countries in Asia and Latin America that had legally been excluded. Consequently, the face of America has changed dramatically. Asian Americans, barely visible on the American scene in the 1960s, have experienced unparallel growth, largely through immigration, from 1.5 million in 1970 to 14.3 million as of today.

At a time when the United States is now the third most populous country on earth after China and India, one wonders what the future of Asian America will look like. With the exception of Woo’s story, Asian Americans and their contributions to American life were hardly mentioned by the American public either at the two-hundred-million celebration in November 1967 or at the quiet passing of the three-hundred-million milestone during the third week of October 2006. This absence is a glaring one. Since the arrival of the first immigrants from Asia in the mid- nineteenth century, Asian Americans have played and will continue to play a critical role in this country’s future. Their American stories need to be

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unfolded further and understood deeper. The second edition of Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader grows out of this urgent need. We have thus worked assiduously to compile a new reader that delves into contemporary Asian America in its fullness and complexity; to assemble a selection of readings and documentary films that offer an excellent grounding for understanding many of the emerging trends, issues, and debates in the community and in Asian American studies; and to organize topics that lend insight into the future of this ethnically diverse Asian American community.

Listening to students, instructors, researchers, and others who have used the first edition of our reader for their studies, teaching, and research, we aimed to make the second edition of Contemporary Asian America more user-friendly by reducing its size and revamping it with the best and most up-to-date works that reflect contributions—and changes—that have occurred within the field of Asian American studies since 2000. Our goal proved challenging: How do you reduce the number of articles and yet retain the breath and depth? How do you retain the “classic” works most utilized by survey courses in Asian American studies and at the same time introduce new topics, concepts, and perspectives that are sensitive to the changing terrains of contemporary Asian America and essential for the continual development of Asian American studies today? We have addressed these questions rather substantively through a reconfiguration of certain sections from the original volume and the incorporation of original and recently published works that concern twenty-first-century Asian America, including the impact of September 11 on Asian American identity, citizenship, and civil liberties; globalization as a dynamic force shaping the contemporary Asian American community; theoretical debates that continue to inform Asian American studies; and an emphasis on diversity of Asian American experiences along lines of class, ethnicity, nativity, gender, and sexuality. Of particular importance to the new edition is the movement away from nation-centered models of identity formation (a core component of Asian American studies as it existed in the 1960s through the 1990s) to a model governed by fluidity, cosmopolitanism, and flexible identities rooted in global citizenship.

Of course, our interpretation of Asian American studies is just an interpretation, and perhaps a limited one at that. While no reader can be all things to all people, this new edition strives to achieve a balanced coverage with the range and depth that reflects our commitment to multiple interpretations of the Asian American experience(s) and the shared vision of the many possibilities and promises that is one of the defining features

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of Asian American studies. Along the way, we ask more questions than we answer, offering what we hope will be the framework for a larger discussion within and beyond the classroom. We believe that this second edition has met our intended goals. It also meets the growing expectations of our users. Instructors who have used the original edition of Contemporary Asian America should be able to comfortably adopt this new edition whether they choose to teach their courses the same way or differently. Those who have not used Contemporary Asian America before may now consider adopting it as it will surely stimulate much intellectual and personally reflexive discussion in classrooms.

We, as coeditors, are appreciative for the encouragement and support of so many individuals who made the original edition of Contemporary Asian America a great success and this second edition a real possibility. First and foremost, we thank our editor, Jennifer Hammer, at New York University Press (NYUP). Hammer has been a champion of this edition. Her enthusiasm, encouragement, and editorial insight have made this project as intellectually challenging as fun. We thank Eric Zinner, the editor-in-chief at NYUP, for his steadfast support and for his vision of the possibilities of Asian American studies. We also thank our copy editor, Emily Wright, for her careful reading and meticulous editing of the entire manuscript. We are especially grateful to NYUP’s anonymous reviewers who offered additional suggestions after carefully reading our second edition prospectus.

We are much indebted to many of our colleagues, friends, and students, who offered invaluable feedback, insightful comments, and thoughtful ideas, and copious suggestions for our second edition based on their own research and classroom experiences using the original edition of Contemporary Asian America. Among these are Christina Chin, Meera Deo, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Russell Leong, Valerie Matsumoto, Don Nakanishi, Kyeyoung Park, and Nancy Yuen at the University of California, Los Angeles; Robert Lee, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo, and Karen Inouye at Brown University; Carl L. Bankston III, Yen Le Espiritu, Demetrius Eudell, Matt Guterl, Christopher Lee, Lynn Mie Itagaki, Elaine Kim, Susan S. Kim, Jennifer Lee, Sunaina Maira, Edward Melillo, Gary Okihiro, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Edward Park, John Park, Paul Spickcard and his students, Leti Volpp, Ellen Wu, and Judy Wu at other institutions. We are extremely fortunate to work with our authors whose contributions were absolutely first-rate and whose cooperation was incredibly generous and timely. We thank Jason Gonzales, Ly P. Lam, Jesse Lewis, Ravi Shivanna, Tritia Soto, and Yang

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Sao Xiong who provided tremendous technical support and research assistance.

We would like to acknowledge the institutional support from the Department of Sociology, Department of Asian American Studies, and Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, and the Department of American Civilization and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in the Americas at Brown University. The Asian American Studies Center, the Social Sciences Division of the College of Letters and Sciences, and the Academic Senate at UCLA provided partial funding for the project. The Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences awarded a fellowship to Min Zhou during the academic year 2005–2006, which freed up much time for her to concentrate on developing this project.

Last—but certainly not least—we thank our wonderful families who continue to inspire us and our endeavors. Min Zhou dedicates this book to her husband Sam Nan Guo and son Philip Jia Guo. Jim Gatewood dedicates this book to his wife, Jules, to his mum, June Gatewood, and to his pugs, Boo and Moses. Min Zhou and J. V. Gatewood Los Angeles, October 2006

NOTES 1 Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the President on U.S. Reaching

300 Million Population Milestone” (News release, October 17, 2006), http://georgewbush- whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061017-8.html (accessed September 12, 2015).

2 Haya El Nasser, “Little Fanfare Expected to Mark Population Milestone,” USA Today, October 13, 2006, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-12-population- milestone_x.htm (accessed September 12, 2015).

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http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061017-8.html
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-12-population-milestone_x.htm
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

The purpose of this anthology is to provide undergraduate and graduate students and all those interested in the Asian American community with some of the most central readings informing Asian America and Asian American studies today. Of critical importance in selecting the readings is our goal of making the entire project a reflexive undertaking. The readings, while important in and of themselves to the evolution of Asian American studies and the development of the community, have been selected upon the basis of what they can tell our readers about themselves or their own lives and, essentially, about the ways in which our readers’ experiences may resonate the larger framework of what we call “Asian American experience.”

We feel that it is important at the outset to state the limitations of an anthology such as this one. No one reader can capture the diversity of voices, experiences, and people that constitute different Asian American communities today. In privileging one topic of discussion, we must necessarily exclude another. It would be disingenuous for us to state otherwise. One of the most noticeable absences readily apparent to students and teachers is that of literary works produced by Asian American authors—the novels, short stories, poetry, plays. These literary works have played a fundamental role in defining both the curriculum in Asian American studies and in providing a valuable window through which to evaluate identity formation within the community itself. Our decision not to include literary works as such is not by happenstance. Initially, we agreed to include these works, but found it extremely difficult to devise ways to excerpt pieces without losing sight of their original meaning and context. It is disingenuous to the writers of these literary works to break apart chapters in their books or even short stories in a selection that cannot be fully understood when isolated from its other parts. We feel that most of the excellent literary works that exist in Asian American studies should be read and experienced in their entirety. Another reason underlying our motivations is that this anthology is meant to accompany a college-level introductory course in Asian American studies. It has been our experience from teaching Asian American studies courses that many classes have almost always included a number of monographs and novels by Asian American authors that frame the discussion of certain historical, cultural,

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and social themes in the community. We thus decided to provide a focus that frames these discussions in a social science context.