April 2021 Book Selection
“To many, what happened to Chin represented a double tragedy: the murder of a young man with a promising future and a criminal justice system that failed to adequately punish the killers... Suddenly, people who had endured a lifetime of degrading treatment were wondering if their capacity to suffer in silence might no longer be a virtue.”
― Erika Lee
“The Making of Asian America”
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.