India in the West: South Asians in America (The Asian American Experience) [Library Binding]

Ronald Takaki (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 5-10-Another entry in the series carefully adapted from Takaki's adult title, Strangers from a Different Shore (Little, 1989), which details the Asian American immigrant experience. Skillfully combining fact with personal narratives, the author tells of the Asian Indians who came in the early 1900s first to Canada and then to the U.S. He describes the living and working conditions of this small minority, which mainly consisted of Sikh men, as well as the prejudice they encountered. With the liberalization of U.S. immigration laws in 1965, a great influx of people began to come from the Indian subcontinent; Takaki outlines the characteristics of this group, the situations they have encountered, and the adjustments they have made as they combine their old traditions with the new. The lively text is set in a pleasing open format and accompanied by archival black-and-white photographs.
Diane S. Marton, Arlington County Library, VA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Library Binding: 117 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (September 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791021866
• ISBN-13: 978-0791021866
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,663,039 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

My grandfather emigrated from Japan to work on the cane fields of Hawaii in 1886, and my mother was born on the Hawi Plantation. As a teenager growing up on Oahu, I was not academically inclined but was actually a surfer. During my senior year, I took a religion course taught by Dr. Shunji Nishi, a Japanese American with a Ph.D. I remember going home and asking my mother, who only had an eighth-grade education: "Mom, what's a Ph.D.?" She answered: "I don't know but he must be very smart." Dr. Nishi became a role model for me, and he arranged for me to attend the College of Wooster. There my fellow white students asked me questions like: "How long have you been in this county? Where did you learn to speak English?" They did not see me as a fellow American. I did not look white or European in ancestry. As a scholar, I have been seeking to write a more inclusive and hence more accurate history of Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans as well as certain European immigrant groups like the Irish and Jews. My scholarship seeks not to separate our diverse groups but to show how our experiences were different but they were not disparate. Multicultural history, as I write and present it, leads not to what Schlesinger calls the "disuniting of America" but rather to the re-uniting of America.