Today Asian Americans are celebrated as America's "model minority." In 1986, NBC Nightly News and the McNeil/Lehrer Report aired special news segments on Asian Americans and their success, and a year later, CBS's 60 Minutes presented a glowing report on their stunning achievements in the academy. "Why are Asian Americans doing so exceptionally well in school?" Mike Wallace asked, and quickly added, "They must be doing something right. Let's bottle it." Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report featured Asian-American advances in a cover story, and Time devoted an entire section on this meteoric minority in its special immigrants issue, "The Changing Face of America." Not to be outdone by its competitors, Newsweek titled the cover story of its college-campus magazine "Asian-Americans: The Drive to Excel" and a lead article of its weekly edition "Asian Americans: A 'Model Minority.'" Fortune went even further, applauding them as "America's Super Minority," and the New Republic extolled "The Triumph of Asian-Americans" as "America's greatest success story."

Providence writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee was not adopted. Lately, though, a lot of people assume she was.

"People are coming up to me now and saying, 'I'm adopted, too. Thank you for writing our story,' " Lee says.

Lee says she immediately blurts out that she wasn't adopted. "I don't want to be dishonest with anyone," she says.

The struggle and triumph of Chinese-Americans are an integral part of US history

In the final chapter of "The Chinese in America," Iris Chang writes, "I can only close this book with a fervent hope: that readers will recognize the story of my people - the Chinese in the United States - not as a foreign story, but as a quintessentially American one." Indeed, covering the huge expanse of almost two centuries, Chang's story offers a thought-provoking overview of how the Chinese have been an integral part of American history - that in fact, the country as we know it could not possibly exist without the participation and contributions of Americans of Chinese descent.

Lê Thi Diem Thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For.  Anchor, 2004, 176pp., $11.95.

Asian American literature, until about 15 years ago, was predominated by Chinese and Japanese American writers who chronicled their immigrant experience of trying to negotiate between their new-found subjectivity and their disassociated cultural origins.  

With Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (considered by many to be the urtext of Asian American literature), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Asian American writing soon became largely a women’s affair (this is not to imply that there are no Asian male writers, but they are not as commercially or critically successful). It focused on the mother-daughter relationship which directly portrays the generational and cultural conflict experienced by and between many first and subsequent generations of Asian Americans. 

Given the sizable Chinese American population (20 percent in San Francisco, according to the 2002 census), children's books have a lot of catching up to do. Several new books reflect the Chinese American experience, good and bad.

What is considered the first Chinese American food? The fortune cookie, according to Fortune Cookie Fortunes by Grace Lin (Knopf; 32 pages; $15.95; ages 5-8). But just how this playful sweet came to be is up for debate. (An informative afterword places the popular cookie and its contents in cultural and historical context.)

Korean American writers find their own voices in genre fiction

When he's not dodging bullets or fending off low-lifes in a dark alley, Private Eye Allen Choice -- a.k.a. the Block -- loves to read Kierkegaard, sip lattes and run 5 miles a day in the Berkeley hills.

Unless he's brooding about his girlfriend's parents:

"The Block doesn't work well under pressure, and can already imagine himself screwing up. He will say the wrong thing or underwhelm them in some way. And he will be overtly self-conscious of his lack of ethnic ties. He can't speak Korean, and knows very little about Korean culture. Serena says he is a gyupo, an Americanized Korean. Serena, however, speaks the language and actually studied in Seoul for two summers, and this mere fact puts Allen at a disadvantage with her parents. He is starting in negative territory. He is an ethnic dunce."

Choice, the philosopher/PI protagonist of Leonard Chang's mystery series, is at it again in the Oakland writer's latest mystery, "Fade to Clear." With his third Allen Choice novel, Chang has established himself as one of a cadre of Asian American writers who march to a different drummer in a publishing world that, for the most part, still hankers for "the next Amy Tan."

By Arthur Golden
Excerpted from Memoirs of a Geisha
Random House, 1997

By the spring of 1946, we'd all come to recognize that we would live through the ordeal of defeat. There were even those who believed Japan would one day be renewed. All the stories about invading American soldiers raping and killing us had turned out to be wrong; and in fact, we gradually came to realize that the Americans on the whole were remarkably kind.

Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 253 pp.  $24.95 (hardbound).

There is difference and there is power and who holds the power shall decide the meaning of difference.

- June Jordan in Technical Difficulties

Addressing the Indian American Forum of Political Education in September 1997, Jesse Helms, the notorious senator from North Carolina, acclaimed: "Indian Americans represent the best and the brightest the United States has to offer." Over the last decade, such lavish praise has become commonplace as Indians shot to prominence in the U.S. If in India newspapers prominently featured Bill Clinton's visits, The New York Times carried a long story about Neera Tanden, a second generation Indian who managed Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign. Jhumpa Lahiri figured on the covers of literary magazines. And so on. All this cannot be explained merely by the 106 per cent growth in the Indian population since 1990. Much more important is the status afforded to Indians as a "model minority".

By Mark McLelland
Excerpted from "'A Mirror for Men?' Idealised Depictions of White Men and Gay Men in Japanese Women's Media"
Transformations
February 2003

In 1991 I was working as an editor in the Tokyo headquarters of the American publishing house Charles Tuttle Inc. which had brought out an English-Japanese phrasebook entitled Making Out in Japanese. The book provided simple, direct, pick-up lines for English-speakers to use to flirt with and hopefully take home Japanese partners. It quickly became Tuttle's best-selling title and a second volume with more of the same was hurriedly prepared. Soon after the book's release, Tuttle's marketing manager began to bring in articles about the book from the Japanese tabloid press and pass them round the office. Despite the fact that phrases in the book were divided according to gender[1](so that appropriate phrases could be used by men or women) the sensational and slightly hysterical tone of these articles showed that the book had touched a nerve with Japanese men who angrily denounced the fact that a phrasebook helping 'foreign' [gaijin][2] men pick up 'our' women had become such a best seller.

By Cynthia Wu
Melus
Spring 2002

Traise Yamamoto's Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body makes a significant contribution to the study of Asian American literature, being the first book-length text devoted entirely to Japanese American women authors. It is a likely companion for the foundation-laying work of those such as King-Kok Cheung and Amy Ling who have addressed the intersectionality of race and gender in the study of Asian American literature. Drawing on the work of Trinh T. Minhha, Franz Fanon, Rey Chow, Kaja Silverman, and Judith Butler, Yamamoto explores the gender- and ethnic-specific strategies of masking as a form of subversive resistance to Anglo-American racism and patriarchy. She argues that Japanese American women authors "employ the trope of masking--which at its most literal level, is directly connected to the Japanese face as the mark of difference--for their own ends."

By Peggy Pascoe
©2001 Journal of Social History
Summer 2001

Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier is a book that historians will likely find more suggestive than definitive, but it is nonetheless one of the most insightful books currently available on twentieth-century Asian American history. The author, David Palumbo-Liu, exemplifies the best of the emerging field of cultural studies, combining history, literary criticism, and political critique to offer pointed analyses of American pasts and presents. Building on the work of a dozen cultural theorists, from Arif Dirlik and Lisa Lowe to Saskia Sassen and David Harvey, as well as recent social histories of Asian America and careful readings of films, short stories, and autobiographies, Asian/American offers a new framework for understanding twentieth-century Asian American history, culture, and literature.

By Peter Kearly
©2001 Wayne State University Press
Fall 2001

The Melancholy of Race should be read both for its acumen and for its politics. The book's discussion of "racial melancholia" clarifies the psychological terms organizing the dynamics of race and what politics can be voiced based on those dynamics. In other words, Anne Anlin Cheng's book provides vocabulary for understanding the invisible aspects of race, particularly racial subjection, which tends to be ignored by the conventional politics of claiming grievances against racial injustice. Cheng wants us to pause on the important psychoanalytic distinction between grievance and grief and in so doing allow for the rethinking or retheorizing of the terms through which race is represented as well as experienced.