Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps, as one of 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.

Chronicles the history of Japanese Americans with entries that reveal their culture, religion, accomplishments, and social interactions with other ethnic groups in America.

Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition--if such a thing exists? Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America.

Frank H. Wu offers a unique perspective on how changing ideas of racial identity will affect race relations in the twenty-first century. Wu examines affirmative action, globalization, immigration, and other controversial contemporary issues through the lens of the Asian-American experience. Mixing personal anecdotes, legal cases, and journalistic reporting, Wu confronts damaging Asian-American stereotypes such as "the model minority" and "the perpetual foreigner." By offering new ways of thinking about race in American society, Wu's work dares us to make good on our great democratic experiment.

Written expressly for students and general readers, this book is a fascinating introduction to Asian American folktales.This book gathers together a selection of more than 30 Asian American folktales and groups them in thematic sections on origins; heroes, heroines, villains, and fools; society and conflict; and the supernatural. These tales reflect the traditional beliefs of the East as well as the new experiences of Asians in America.

The long-lost tale of the Chinese workers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, helping to forge modern America only to disappear into the shadows of history. n this groundbreaking book, award-winning historian Gordon H. Chang recovers the stories of these "silent spikes" and returns them to their rightful place in our national saga. Drawing on recent archeological findings, as well as payroll records, ship manifests, photographs, and other sources from American and Chinese archives, Chang retraces the laborers' odyssey in breathtaking detail.

Traces the rewards and pitfalls of a Chinese mother's exercise in extreme parenting, describing the exacting standards applied to grades, music lessons, and avoidance of Western cultural practices.

Chronicles the evolution of food culture unique to the Polynesian, Micronesian, and Melanesian regions of the Pacific Islands.