Customer Reviews

Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Twayne's Immigrant Heritage of America Series)

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Sucheng Chan offers a statistic-rich, informative history of Asian-Americans, from their first immigration to current issues of As-Ams as "model minorities". I definitely prefer Chan's style to Takaki's quote-heavy, anecdotal approach; she is both thorough and concise.

Not a casual read. Chan describes well over a hundred years of Asians emigrating to and growing up in the United States. Many of the pages describe years of backbreaking toil, especially in the California goldfields, and in the building of the transcontinental railroads. Exacerbated by periodic bouts of discrimination by the European settlers and immigrants.

In a relatively short book, the account cannot be comprehensive. Complexity is added, due to the different nationalities of Asians that came over. Chinese. Japanese. Filipinos. Koreans. There never was one unitary Asian bloc in the US. Thus descriptions of various benevolent social and cultural organisations that arose are often split by ethnicity or nationality.

The text also shows that the civil rights movement of the 1950-1970s, while primarily for Negroes, also benefited Asians. Something not necessarily widely known or appreciated today.

This book give a little overview of a multitude of topics, nothing indepth, but rather a 'light read'.