Asian America Books

This book is the first autobiography of Dhan Gopal Mukerji, (1890-1936) a Hindu of Brahmin parentage who became a writer and was the first Indian to win a Newbery Medal in 1928. This book covers his childhood to his early twenties, from his lessons training as a priest in India to his establishment in San Francisco as an anarchist, from his homeless, and his jobs working the fields. He spends time debating and thinking about the philosophy and religion of Hinduism while trying to find his way in America. Excerpts: “The Indian holy man attains the simplicity of a child; the more childlike he is, the more holy. The holy man has a sense of humor; he is so holy that he has forgotten his holiness. This is the ideal of all Hindu life. To attain the spirit of childhood is the aim of Indian education…They asked my holy man if he had seen God. He said, ‘Even if you touched God's hand, he would remain unknown. He is the origin that annihilates all origins; He is godless, that is why I call Him God. The moment you make Him a person. He does not exist.’” “There is a curious thing. When Jesus was asked whether the Jews should pay taxes to Caesar, he said, ‘Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.’ By this he meant to say to the Jews that it was easy to placate their Roman lords by sacrificing a few ounces of matter, gold or silver, which had no importance. But it was their relation to God which was of real value. Now I think,” Frank continued, “that the Indian should look at it in that way. He must not try to overcome Western materialism with a rival materialism of his own. The Indian who is an oriental must give an answer like Christ's — 'I am so busy with my spiritual business that I have no time to pay attention to you who are demanding something material.’ And it is not a humiliation to belong to a conquered race. The people that are most humiliated in this Indian-British transaction are the British. They are damning their souls by exploiting a race in the name of British liberty. They are selling liberty as a prostitute sells her body. The Indian, on the contrary, is selling very little, so if I were to choose between the conquered or the conqueror I would prefer to be the conquered. At least your soul is saved. Give your spirituality to the British as Christ gave his to the Romans. And it is because you are conquered that you are spiritually sound. If you were not conquered you would not be spiritual.” “As regards the Pacific Coast, it cannot resist the culture of Asia...Oriental decorations along with Oriental aloofness are becoming discernible elements. In the homes of the Pacific Coast I have found that the people are aloof. They build a Chinese wall of pride around themselves. On the Pacific Coast one also finds something Spanish, not altogether European, but rather Africo-Saracenic in character…will it be too much to say that in five hundred years America will have a culture unique, magnificent and overpowering? America's tradition is her future. A Hindu, who bears the weight of forty centuries of tradition, is drawn by no country as by America…The future of this country is more staggering than the past of India. A supreme desolation is America's, and this desolation is as alluring as that of the Himalayas. I found in America's air the sharp taste of freedom, not freedom from politicians, not freedom from economic conditions, but freedom from the dead. No dead generations rock the cradle of the new-born here. I felt in America, as in Asia, an anti-human outlook. In Europe, on the other hand, life is homocentric and man is the measure of all things. The nausea of humanity that seizes one in Europe is not present here. In America, man is what he is in Asia; he is, as he ought to be, an episode, in the life cycle of a continent. He learns that the universe is not homocentric, but cosmocentric. Man's life in America seems like the flight of gnats in a windswept field.”

Contentious Spirits explores the role of religion in Korean American history during the first half of the twentieth century in Hawai'i and California. Historian David K. Yoo argues that religion is the most important aspect of this group's experience because its structures and sensibilities address the full range of human experience. Framing the book are three relational themes: religion & race, migration & exile, and colonialism & independence. In an engaging narrative, Yoo documents the ways in which religion shaped the racialization of Korean in the United States, shows how religion fueled the transnational migration of Korean Americans and its connections to their exile, and details a story in which religion intertwined with the visions and activities of independence even as it was also entangled in colonialism. The first book-length study of religion in Korean American history, it will appeal to academics and general readers interested in Asian American history, American religious history, and ethnic studies.

Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse , Alexander Chee's Edinburgh , Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters , and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift . Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings." Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in May 1869 is usually told as a story of national triumph and a key moment for American Manifest Destiny. The Railroad made it possible to cross the country in a matter of days instead of months, paved the way for new settlers to come out west, and helped speed America's entry onto the world stage as a modern nation that spanned a full continent. It also created vast wealth for its four owners, including the fortune with which Leland Stanford would found Stanford University some two decades later. But while the Transcontinental has often been celebrated in national memory, little attention has been paid to the Chinese workers who made up 90 percent of the workforce on the Western portion of the line. The Railroad could not have been built without Chinese labor, but the lives of Chinese railroad workers themselves have been little understood and largely invisible. This landmark volume explores the experiences of Chinese railroad workers and their place in cultural memory. The Chinese and the Iron Road illuminates more fully than ever before the interconnected economies of China and the US, how immigration across the Pacific changed both nations, the dynamics of the racism the workers encountered, the conditions under which they labored, and their role in shaping both the history of the railroad and the development of the American West.

From the 1910s to the eve of the Pacific War in 1941, more than 50,000 young second-generation Japanese Americans ( Nisei ) embarked on transpacific journeys to the Japanese Empire, putting an ocean between themselves and pervasive anti-Asian racism in the American West. Born U.S. citizens but treated as unwelcome aliens, this contingent of Japanese Americans—one in four U.S.-born Nisei—came in search of better lives but instead encountered a world shaped by increasingly volatile U.S.-Japan relations. Based on transnational and bilingual research in the United States and Japan, Michael R. Jin recuperates the stories of this unique group of American emigrants at the crossroads of U.S. and Japanese empires before, during, and after World War II. From the Jim Crow American West to the Japanese colonial frontiers in Asia, from a coastal village on southern Kyushu to the cityscape of Tokyo, and from internment camps in America to Hiroshima on the eve of the atomic bombing, these individuals redefined ideas about home, identity, citizenship, and belonging as they encountered multiple social realities on both sides of the Pacific. Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless examines the deeply intertwined histories of Asian exclusion in the United States, Japanese colonialism in Asia, and volatile geopolitical changes in the Pacific world that converged in the lives of Nisei workers, students, sojourners, and survivors of the war in teh U.S.-Japan borderlands.