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"May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month – a celebration of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. A rather broad term, Asian/Pacific encompasses all of the Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia (New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands), Micronesia (Marianas, Guam, Wake Island, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia) and Polynesia (New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Rotuma, Midway Islands, Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Easter Island).
Like most commemorative months, Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month originated with Congress. In 1977 Reps. Frank Horton of New York introduced House Joint Resolution 540 to proclaim the first ten days in May as Pacific/Asian American Heritage Week. In the same year, Senator Daniel Inouye introduced a similar resolution, Senate Joint Resolution 72. Neither of these resolutions passed, so in June 1978, Rep. Horton introduced House Joint Resolution 1007. This resolution proposed that the President should “proclaim a week, which is to include the seventh and tenth of the month, during the first ten days in May of 1979 as ‘Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week.’” This joint resolution was passed by the House and then the Senate and was signed by President Jimmy Carter on October 5, 1978 to become Public Law 95-419 (PDF, 158kb). This law amended the original language of the bill and directed the President to issue a proclamation for the “7 day period beginning on May 4, 1979 as ‘Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week.’” During the next decade, presidents passed annual proclamations for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week until 1990 when Congress passed Public Law 101-283 (PDF, 166kb) which expanded the observance to a month for 1990. Then in 1992, Congress passed Public Law 102-450 (PDF, 285kb) which annually designated May as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month.
The month of May was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States on May 7, 1843, and to mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869. The majority of the workers who laid the tracks were Chinese immigrants."
This libguide is a collaborative endeavor of the Hay Library and Western's DEI Committee.
(This LibGuide is by no means an exhaustive list of resources, but we do endeavor to keep this list of materials updated.)
Select the individual's name to view their works available in the Hay Library or online. Select the individual's picture to view their biography information.
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston is an American writer. Her writings primarily focus on ethnic identity formation in the United States of America. She is best known for her autobiographical novel ''Farewell to Manzanar'' that narrates her personal experiences in World War II internment camps.
Best known for her role as Kelly Kapoor on the hit situation comedy The Office, Mindy Kaling is an actress, writer, director, and producer. She works in all mediums and was the cowriter and costar of the underground theater sensation Matt & Ben. Along with her costars, Kapoor won several awards for her work on The Office before moving on to create and star in her own television series, The Mindy Project. Kaling lent her talents to a number of film projects including the 2012 animated film Wreck-It Ralph and the 2013 comedy This is the End. Kaling also lent her voice to Disney/Pixar's animated Inside Out (2015). In addition to taking on more acting challenges, Kaling also continued to pursue a career as a writer and producer in the years that followed, creating the NBC series Champions in 2017, the Netflix series Never Have I Ever in 2020, and The Sex Lives of College Girls for HBO Max in 2021. She also lent her voice to a Disney Plus series during the same year.
Lisa See is a writer who has taken to heart the old advice to writers to write about the things that they know and are passionate about. Despite her red hair and freckles, See is Chinese American and a fifth generation inhabitant of Los Angeles. She comes from a long line of feisty, intelligent, and hard working women. All of these attributes are evident in her writing.
The author of such award-winning novels as Dragonwings, Child of the Owl, and Dragon Steel, novelist and playwright Laurence Yep is noted for penning fiction that brings the history and culture of Chinese Americans into realistic view, exchanging the exaggerated, stereotyped images of Dr. Fu Manchu and Charley Chan for portraits of the real-life men and women who have enriched the United States with their labor and willingness to share their cultural heritage.
Erin Entrada Kelly is a Filipino-American children's author whose third middle-school novel, Hello, Universe (2017), won the prestigious John Newbery Medal for best children's book in 2018. Her books are characterized by their use of vulnerable characters who seek to find friendship and community over the course of the stories. Kelly's books are further known for their unique presentation of the American immigrant experience and frequent incorporation of Filipino-American characters that are otherwise rarely seen in children's literature. Although her books are not directly representative of her own personal experiences as a Filipino-American child in the United States, Kelly often draws upon aspects of her own childhood, helping to give them a carefully crafted and emotional reflection of immigrant life.
Gene Luen Yang is the first graphic novelist to have his work nominated for a National Book Award. That title, American Born Chinese, is a work which, according to New York Times Book Review contributor Ned Vizzini, "makes growing up Chinese in California seem positively terrifying." Widely praised by critics, American Born Chinese ultimately won an Eisner Award and the prestigious Michael L. Printz Award, among other honors. Yang's graphic novel "blends Chinese and American cultures in inventive, unexpected ways," Vizzini further noted, producing "that rare article: a youthful tale with something new to say about American youth." Image source link
Min Jin Lee is a Korean-born writer who was educated at Yale and Georgetown and practiced law in New York before becoming a full-time writer. As a child, she immigrated with her family to the Elmhurst section of Queens, New York, which is also the setting of her debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires. Image source link
Select the individual's name to view works about them that are available in the Hay Library or online. Select the individual's picture to view their biography information.
George Takei is a Japanese American actor. He is best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise, on the 1960s series Star Trek. Takei is also an outspoken advocate for equality. In 2012 he began to dabble in social media and soon had millions of followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. He also writes a popular blog.
While representing Hawaii for nearly 20 years in Congress, Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink (born 1927) made great strides toward peace, women's rights, civil rights, equality and justice.
On January 3, 1965, Patsy Takemoto Mink was the first Japanese-American woman and the first woman of color to be elected to the United States Congress. Breaking new ground for women and ethnic groups, though, was nothing new for her. The road to Congress was paved with many firsts, such as being elected the first female class president in her high school and being the first Japanese-American woman to practice law in Hawaii. Mink's dedication to helping others has resulted in legislative reforms in health care, education, women's rights, civil rights, conservation, employment and environmental affairs.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) worked on the origins, structure, and dynamics of stars and earned a prominent place in the annals of science. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist's most celebrated work concerns the radiation of energy from stars, particularly the dying fragments known as white dwarf stars.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-born American astrophysicist and applied mathematician whose work on the origins, structure, and dynamics of stars secured him a prominent place in the annals of science. His most celebrated work concerns the radiation of energy from stars, particularly white dwarf stars, which are the dying fragments of stars.
Once referred to as the "black gash of shame," according to Time's Jonathan Coleman, the memorial commemorating the nearly 60,000 American veterans who died in the Vietnam War has become the most popular landmark in Washington, D.C., attracting millions of visitors to its black granite walls to touch the carved names of the dead men and women who served during the 1960s and 1970s in America's most controversial military action. Maya Lin, the creator of this monument, was at first harshly criticized for her design, which many charged was unsentimental, degrading, even ugly; Lin herself was attacked on racial grounds, many vets believing that her heritage as a Chinese American made her an unacceptable memorialist. Since its 1982 unveiling, however, the massive monument has come to symbolize America's willingness to "not only finally...confront the outcome of the Viet Nam War but also to begin the long process of healing," wrote Coleman, who added that the memorial "made it possible for the country to come together and honor those who had served--those who had died and those who had come home to anything but a hero's welcome."
A second generation Chinese American who is an activist and journalist, Helen Zia (born 1952) advocated against racism and hate crimes that affected the Asian American community. She also involved herself with gay and lesbian and feminist issues, serving as a speaker, court witness, and White House panelist.
Call number: 973 OK3A 2015
A survey of U.S. history from its beginnings to the present, American History Unbound reveals our past through the lens of Asian American and Pacific Islander history. In so doing, it is a work of both history and anti-history, a narrative that fundamentally transforms and deepens our understanding of the United States. This text is accessible and filled with engaging stories and themes that draw attention to key theoretical and historical interpretations. Gary Y. Okihiro positions Asians and Pacific Islanders within a larger history of people of color in the United States and places the United States in the context of world history and oceanic worlds.
Call number: C LIT 823.8 Y16A 2006 (Graphic Novel)
A tour-de-force by New York Times bestselling graphic novelist Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he's the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny's life with his yearly visits. Their lives and stories come together with an unexpected twist in this action-packed modern fable. American Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax.American Born Chinese is the winner of the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award, a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring, a 2007 Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year, and a New York Times bestseller. Gene Luen Yang was the fifth the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and is a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of what's popularly known as the MacArthur "Genius" Grant.
Call number: 996.9 H13C 2014
The most recent state to join the union, Hawaii is the only one to have once been a royal kingdom. After its "discovery" by Captain Cook in the late 18th Century, Hawaii was fought over by European powers determined to take advantage of its position as the crossroads of the Pacific. The arrival of the first missionaries marked the beginning of the struggle between a native culture with its ancient gods, sexual libertinism and rites of human sacrifice, and the rigid values of the Calvinists. While Hawaii's royal rulers adopted Christianity, they also fought to preserve their ancient ways. But the success of the ruthless American sugar barons sealed their fate and in 1893, the American Marines overthrew Lili'uokalani, the last queen of Hawaii.
James L. Haley's Captive Paradise is the story of King Kamehameha I, The Conqueror, who unified the islands through terror and bloodshed, but whose dynasty succumbed to inbreeding; of Gilded Age tycoons like Claus Spreckels who brilliantly outmaneuvered his competitors; of firebrand Lorrin Thurston, who was determined that Hawaii be ruled by whites; of President McKinley, who presided over the eventual annexation of the islands. Not for decades has there been such a vibrant and compelling portrait of an extraordinary place and its people.
Call number: 973.0495 L510M 2015
"The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s; indentured "coolies" who worked alongside African slaves in the Caribbean; and Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian immigrants who were recruited to work in the United States only to face massive racial discrimination, Asian exclusion laws, and for Japanese Americans, incarceration during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today"
Call number: 920 T139T 2019 (Graphic Novel)
George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.
Call number: 813.6 N499S 2015
The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.
The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
Call number: 813.6 Y90I 2020
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes "one of the funniest books of the year.... A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire" (The Washington Post).A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
Call number: 331.6251 C441C 2019
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.
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.
With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.
This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.
At the heart of Bui's story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home.
An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history
Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare.
Despite significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics, arts, and popular culture in the twenty-first century, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates American culture. Choy traces how anti-Asian violence and its intersection with misogyny and other forms of hatred, the erasure of Asian American experiences and contributions, and Asian American resistance to what has been omitted are prominent themes in Asian American history. This ambitious book is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century.
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band—and meeting the man who would become her husband—her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from—she wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth.
With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.
Recent discussions and dissemination of information regarding the rapid growth of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) across our nation are creating some awareness among administrators and educators in higher education institutions regarding the extensive diversity of AAPIs, the struggles of some AAPI populations in pursuing and succeeding in higher education, and the lack of support for their educational success. National discourse on AAPIs among educators, policymakers and AAPI communities underscores the need for more research—including more relevant research—that can inform policy and practice that will enhance educational opportunities for AAPIs who are underserved in higher education. The book focuses on diverse topics, many of which do not appear in the current literature. The chapters are authored by an array of distinguished and emerging scholars and professionals at various universities and colleges across the nation. The authors, whose insights are invaluable in understanding the diverse issues and characteristics that affect the educational success of underserved AAPI students, and they represent the ethnicities and cultures of Cambodian, Chinese, Guamanian/Chamorro, Filipino, Hispanic, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Native Hawaiian, Okinawan, Samoan, Vietnamese, and multiracial Americans. The authors not only integrate theoretical concepts, statistical analyses, and historical events, but they also merge theory and practice to advocate for social justice for AAPIs and other underrepresented and underserved ethnic minority groups in higher education.
Winner of the Chinese American Librarian Association Best Book Award Winner of the 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Award Montaigne Medal Finalist, Eric Hoffer Awards 2018 Frank Luther Mott - Kappa Tau Alpha Journalism & Mass Communication Research Award Finalist China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 ignited a race to capture new global media audiences. Hollywood moguls began courting Chinese investors to create entertainment on an international scale--from behemoth theme parks to blockbuster films. Hollywood Made in China examines these new collaborations, where the distinctions between Hollywood's "dream factory" and Xi Jinping's "Chinese Dream" of global influence become increasingly blurred. With insightful policy analysis, ethnographic research, and interviews with CEOs, directors, and film workers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Los Angeles, Aynne Kokas offers an unflinching look at China's new role in the global media industries. A window into the partnerships with Chinese corporations that now shape Hollywood, this book will captivate anyone who consumes commercial media in the twenty-first century.
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