Book No. 39 of 2021
Astoundingly thorough and necessary book—I can’t believe how much I didn’t know, and I want so desperately for more people to read this book and for this history and understanding to be a part of regular teaching. Even before I was halfway through I had to go order my own physical copy, because this is something I want to mark up and bookmark and highlight and hang onto for the future.
Lee’s book upends so many myths that even I subscribed to my whole life without question, and demonstrates how Asian people have been a central part of the Americas (North, Central, and South) since the very beginnings of colonialism. One of the many, many myths she shatters is the idea that Asians and Asian Americans have quietly borne the slings and arrows of injustice—from the very beginning, writers and activists have been identifying inequities and fighting them, often losing their battles. This was, at times, a very difficult book for me to read, as so much old injustice is still very much alive, and some chapters of history are even more fucked up the more you examine them. Also, I would like to burn the model minority myth (excellently dismantled by Lee) in a raging fire.
I did not know that this book got a postscript this year, and was therefore shocked to read Lee’s analysis on the 2021 shootings and attacks against Asian Americans. That entire part was 🔥🔥🔥 and again, more people need to read it.
Similar Reads
There were so, so many connections to so many books I have read that it was truly lovely finding all these common threads; a non exhaustive list of books I was reminded of:
Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic
David Masumoto’s Epitaph for a Peach
Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie
C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold
Kirby Larson’s The Fences Between Us
Lisa Ko’s The Leavers
Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
The analysis of migration, community, and codified discrimination reminded me of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns.
The passages about migration and undocumented immigration reminded me of Karla Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans.