Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People

FROM THE PUBLISHER
This book is about the transformation of Asian Americans from a few small, disconnected, and largely invisible ethnic groups into a self-identified racial group that is influencing every aspect of American society. It explores the junctures that shocked Asian Americans into motion and shaped a new consciousness, including the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, by two white autoworkers who believed he was Japanese; the apartheid-like working conditions of Filipinos in the Alaska salmon canneries; the boycott of Korean American greengrocers in Brooklyn; the L.A. riots; and the casting of non-Asians in the Broadway musical Miss Saigon. The book also examines the rampant stereotyping of Asian Americans, which has an impact on key issues concerning all Americans, from affirmative action and campaign finance to popular culture and national security.
Helen Zia, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, was born in 1952, when there were only 150,000 Chinese Americans in the entire country, and she writes as a personal witness to the dramatic changes involving Asian Americans.

FROM THE CRITICS

Ronald Takaki
An inspiring story of the struggles of Zia and diverse Asian Americans to transform themselves from 'aliens' into Americans.

Iris Chang
Zia . . . deftly interweaves the remarkable history of a people with her own unique journey as a pioneer activist and writer . . .

Urvashi Vaid
The history of activism rarely gets written by the people who helped to make it . . . an astute journalists eye . . .

Mari Matsuda
Part memoir, part theory, part call to action — this book swept me away.

Somini Sengupta
. . . important book because it seeks to answer . . . What does it take for people like the author to become fully American?

MEET THE AUTHOR ON DECEMBER 2ND

Meet Helen Zia when she visits Northeastern University on Friday, December 2nd, 2005 at 1:30 PM in Snell Library, Room 90.

ABOUT HELEN ZIA

Helen Zia is an award-winning journalist and scholar who has covered Asian American communities and social and political movements for decades. She is the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, a finalist for the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. President Bill Clinton quoted from Asian American Dreams at two separate speeches in the Rose Garden.

She is also co-author, with Wen Ho Lee, of My Country Versus Me, which reveals what happened to the Los Alamos scientist who was falsely accused of being a spy for China in the “worst case since the Rosenbergs.”

Zia is former Executive Editor of Ms. Magazine. Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, books and anthologies. She was named one of the most influential Asian Americans of the decade by A. Magazine.

Zia has received numerous journalism awards for her ground-breaking stories; her investigation of date rape at the University of Michigan led to campus demonstrations and an overhaul of its policies, while her research on women who join neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations provoked new thinking on the relationship between race and gender violence in hate crimes.

A second generation Chinese American, Zia has been outspoken on issues ranging from civil rights and peace to women's rights and countering hate violence and homophobia. In 1997, she testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the racial impact of the news media. She traveled to Beijing in 1995 to the UN Fourth World Congress on Women as part of a journalists of color delegation. She has appeared in numerous news programs and films; her work on the 1980s Asian American landmark civil rights case of anti-Asian violence is documented in the Academy Award nominated film, “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” and she was profiled in Bill Moyers' PBS documentary, “Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.”

Zia received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the Law School of the City University of New York for bringing important matters of law and civil rights into public view. She is a graduate of Princeton University’s first graduating class of women. She quit medical school after completing two years, then went to work as a construction laborer, an autoworker, and a community organizer, after which she discovered her life’s work as a writer.