Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Using history to challenge Communist Party rule. Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future describes how some of China's best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history. The past is a battleground in many countries, but in China it is crucial to political power. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism's triumph. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and glorify its rule. Indeed, one of Xi Jinping's signature policies is the control of history, which he equates with the party's survival. But in recent years, a network of independent writers, artists, and filmmakers have begun challenging this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China's legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a regular pattern of disasters: from famines and purges of years past to ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present--powerful and inspiring accounts that have underpinned recent protests in China against Xi Jinping's strongman rule. Based on years of first-hand research in Xi Jinping's China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity's great struggles of memory against forgetting--a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.

The Sediq and Truku Indigenous peoples on the mountainous island of Formosa - today called Taiwan - say that their ancestors emerged in the beginning of time from Pusu Qhuni, a tree-covered boulder in the highlands. Living in the mountain forests, they observed the sacred law of Gaya, seeking equilibrium with other humans, the spirits, animals, and plants. They developed a politics in which each community preserved its autonomy and sharing was valued more highly than personal accumulation of goods or power. These lifeworlds were shattered by colonialism, capitalist development, and cultural imperialism in the twentieth century. Based on two decades of ethnographic field research, Truly Human portrays these peoples' lifeworlds, teachings, political struggles for recognition, and relations with non-human animals. Taking seriously their ontological claims that Gaya offers moral guidance to all humans, Scott E. Simon reflects on what this particular form of Indigenous resurgence reveals about human rights, sovereignty, and the good of all kind. Truly Human contributes to a decolonizing anthropology at a time when all humans need Indigenous land-based teachings more than ever.

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Han Kang's The White Book is a meditation on color, as well as an attempt to make sense of her older sister's death, who died in her mother's arms just a few hours after she was born. In captivating, starkly beautiful language, The White Book is a letter from Kang to her sister, offering a multilayered exploration of color and its absence, and of the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit.

This "vivid, moving, funny, and heartfelt" memoir tells the story of Curtis Chin's time growing up as a gay Chinese American kid in 1980's Detroit (Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers). Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung's Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone--from the city's first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples--could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese; where he navigated the divided city's spiraling misfortunes; and where--between helpings of almond boneless chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, and some of his own, less-savory culinary concoctions--he realized just how much he had to offer to the world, to his beloved family, and to himself. Served up by the cofounder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and structured around the very menu that graced the tables of Chung's, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant is both a memoir and an invitation: to step inside one boy's childhood oasis, scoot into a vinyl booth, and grow up with him--and perhaps even share something off the secret menu.

The term "Heartland" in American cultural context conventionally tends to provoke imageries of corn-fields, flat landscape, hog farms, and rural communities, along with ideas of conservatism, homogeneity, and isolation. But as the Midwestern and Southern states experienced more rapid population growth than that in California, Hawaii, and New York in the recent decades, the Heartland region has emerged as a growing interest of Asian American studies. Focused on the Heartland cities of Chicago, Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri, this book draws rich evidences from various government records, personal stories and interviews, and media reports, and sheds light on the commonalities and uniqueness of the region, as compared to the Asian American communities on the East and West Coast and Hawaii. Some of the poignant stories such as "the Three Moy Brothers," "Alla Lee," and "Save Sam Wah Laundry" told in the book are powerful reflections of Asian American history.  

In 1998, an Asian woman first joined the ranks of federal judges with lifetime appointments. It took ten years for the second Asian woman to be appointed. Since then, however, over a dozen more Asian women have received lifetime federal judicial appointments.   This book tells the stories of the first fifteen. In the process, it recounts remarkable tales of Asian women overcoming adversity and achieving the American dream, despite being the daughters of a Chinese garment worker, Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II, Vietnamese refugees, and penniless Indian immigrants. Yet The First Fifteen also explores how far Asian Americans and women still have to go before the federal judiciary reflects America as a whole.    In a candid series of interviews, these judges reflect upon the personal and professional experiences that led them to this distinguished position, as well as the nerve-wracking political process of being nominated and confirmed for an Article III judgeship. By sharing their diverse stories, The First Fifteen paints a nuanced portrait of how Asian American women are beginning to have a voice in determining American justice.

A mold-breaking memoir of Asian American identity, political activism, community, and purpose. Not Yo' Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamoto--artist, activist, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child navigating a fearful west coast during World War II, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century America and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who reclaimed their histories, identities, and power through activism and art.   Miyamoto vividly describes her early life in the racialized atmosphere of Hollywood musicals and then her turn toward activism as an Asian American troubadour with the release of A Grain of Sand--considered to be the first Asian American folk album. Her narrative intersects with the stories of Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, influential in both Asian and Black liberation movements. She tells how her experience of motherhood with an Afro-Asian son, as well as a marriage that intertwined Black and Japanese families and communities, placed her at the nexus of the 1992 Rodney King riots--and how she used art to create interracial solidarity and conciliation.   Through it all, Miyamoto has embraced her identity as an Asian American woman to create an antiracist body of work and a blueprint for empathy and praxis through community art. Her sometimes barbed, often provocative, and always steadfast story is now told.

The first comprehensive narrative of racism in America's World War II military and the resistance to it.America's World War II military was a force of unalloyed good. While saving the world from Nazism, it also managed to unify a famously fractious American people. At least that's the story many Americans have long told themselves. Divisions offers a decidedly different view. Prizewinning historian Thomas A. Guglielmo draws together more than a decade of extensive research to tell sweeping yet personal stories of race and the military; of high command and ordinary GIs; and of African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. Guglielmo argues that the military built not one color line, but a complex tangle of them. Taken together, they represented a sprawling structure of white supremacy. Freedom struggles arose in response, democratizing portions of the wartime military and setting the stage for postwar desegregation and the subsequent civil rights movements. But the costs of the military's color lines were devastating. They impeded America's war effort; undermined the nation's rhetoric of the Four Freedoms; further naturalized the concept of race; deepened many whites' investments in white supremacy; and further fractured the American people. Offering a dramatic narrative of America's World War II military and of the postwar world it helped to fashion, Guglielmo fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the war and of mid-twentieth-century America.

Fascinating portraits illuminate the diversity of Japanese American experiences From a title-winning boxer in Louisiana to a Broadway baritone in New York, Japanese Americans have long belied their popular representation as "quiet Americans." Showcasing the lives and achievements of relatively unknown but remarkable people in Nikkei history, scholar and journalist Greg Robinson reveals the diverse experiences of Japanese Americans and explores a wealth of themes, including mixed-race families, artistic pioneers, mass confinement, civil rights activism, and queer history. Drawn primarily from Robinson's popular writings in the San Francisco newspaper Nichi Bei Weekly and community website Discover Nikkei, The Unsung Great offers entertaining and compelling stories that challenge one-dimensional views of Japanese Americans. This collection breaks new ground by devoting attention to Nikkei beyond the West Coast--including the vibrant communities of New York and Chicago, as well as the little-known history of Japanese Americans in the US South. Expertly researched and accessibly written, The Unsung Great brings to light a constellation of varied and incredible life stories.

An innovative anthology showcasing Asian American and Pacific Islander women's histories Our Voices, Our Histories brings together thirty-five Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond. This volume is unique in exploring Asian American and Pacific Islander women's lives along local, transnational, and global dimensions. The contributions present new research on diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's history, from the politics of language, to the role of food, to experiences as adoptees, mixed race, and second generation, while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States. Our Voices, Our Histories showcases how new approaches in US history, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and Women's and Gender studies inform research on Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Attending to the collective voices of the women themselves, the volume seeks to transform current understandings of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's histories.