History

As evidenced by the numerous entries for the History Book Award, Asian American History remains a vibrant and growing field. The two winning entries and the honorable mention all help us revise our understandings of Asian American history and provide blueprints for future scholarship. I would like to thank my fellow committee members, Mae Ngai and Catherine Ceniza Choy, for their exemplary service. We were unanimous in our decisions and enormously excited about all of the entries. We honor three books with awards this year.

The first is an Honorable Mention to K. Scott Wong for Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War, published by Harvard University Press. In this rich and engaging study, Scott Wong brings to life the experiences of the second generation of Chinese Americans, men and women who have been largely absent from past histories. Drawing from over 100 interviews and communications with Chinese Americans in San Francisco, New York, and Honolulu, Wong is part sociologist, anthropologist, and historian in this book. He explores how Chinatown and Chinese Americans were transformed by World War Two and demonstrates how Chinese Americans enthusiastically embraced the "internal experience of citizenship," including service in the U.S. armed forces. The committee believes that Wong's explanation of just how and why Chinese Americans embraced this "Americans First" identity is by far one of the best explanations of the historical roots of the model minority racial formation to date. And Wong's attention to the unique regional contexts and differences between Hawaii and the mainland is an important reminder to all of us swept up in the transnational turn in Asian American Studies. Americans First is enormously important not only in filling a crucial gap in the historiography, but also in its model of interdisciplinary research methodology and community engagement. Wong writes that working on this book only deepened his conviction that "history is fundamentally about individuals—people with desires, dreams, disappointments, and memories." Wong successfully places the people and their voices at the center of this amazing study, and we are pleased to honor Americans First with an Honorable Mention.

The first book award goes to Mary Ting Yi Lui for The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City, published Princeton University Press. Lui creatively uses a sensational murder mystery to explore interracial intimacy and the historical construction of race-, class-, and gender-based borders in New York City. The 1909 murder victim is Elsie Sigel, a middle-class white missionary woman. The suspect is her Americanized Chinese male lover, Leon Ling.

Using a stunning array of sources, including newspapers, city and police records, federal immigration files, cultural productions, census records, and more, Lui uses the Siegel murder as a window to view the vibrant interracial life of New York City; the relational ways that the racialized, gendered, and sexualized experiences of Chinese men informed the experiences of young white women; and the ways that Chinatown was historically constructed as a cultural (Orientalist) as well as a bounded geographical place and space. But she also demonstrates how easily those borders were transgressed. Lui hunts down immigration records, baptism documents, and family histories to paint complex and rich portraits of interracial couples and families and the state surveillance under which they suffered. Like any good murder mystery, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery ends with a recounting of the national and international manhunt for Leon Ling. I will not give away the ending—you'll have to buy the book to find out—but suffice it to say, the committee unanimously believes that your money will be well-spent! Chinatown Trunk Murder Mystery is simply history at its best.

The second book award goes to Eiichiro Azuma for Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, published by Oxford University Press. This bold and ambitious book on the "interstitial" identities of Japanese immigrants in the U.S. before World War Two, compels us to re-think a number of traditional Asian American historical narratives and presents us with an excellent model of how to do history, period. First, Azuma uses an abundant and...