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Reviewed by:
  • Balancing Two Worlds: Asian American College Students Tell Their Life Stories
  • Robert T. Teranishi, Assistant Professor
Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny (Eds.). Balancing Two Worlds: Asian American College Students Tell Their Life Stories. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. 270 pp. Paper: $15.56. ISBN: 978-0801473845.

Despite their growing presence in U.S. higher education over the past three decades, the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) population has remained in the shadows of discourse on race, ethnicity, and identity development. Building on nearly a decade of autobiographical stories that capture the lived experiences of students of color in the American college (including First Person, First People: Native American College Graduates Tell Their Life Stories; Mi Voz, Mi Vida: Latino College Students Tell Their Life Stories; and Souls Looking Back: Life Stories of Growing Up Black), Andrew Garrod and coauthor Robert Kilkenny, share the memoirs of Asian American college students as they contend with issues of race, ethnicity, class, identity, and other factors faced by immigrants and children of immigrants in American society. The book is unique and is an important contribution, given the few works that have looked qualitatively at the lives of Asian American college students. [End Page 521]

By far, the strength of this book lies in the 14 first-person narratives of a diverse group of Asian American college students (of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Burmese, and South Asian descent) attending a highly selective university in the Northeast. These students, provided with a broad set of guiding questions from Garrod, describe their personal struggles with their evolving identities and youth culture, and their unique experiences growing up Asian American. These personal narratives individually and collectively provide a rare glimpse into the lives of Asian American youth during their formative stages of social and psychological development.

The book captures some key factors with which Asian American youth must contend as children and young adults. One of these is the perception of being a model minority. Fuyuki Hirashima, a second-generation Japanese American comments on the perception that "all Asians are nerds who lock themselves up in their rooms all day and study until the words become blurry. Then they take a shot of green tea and study some more" (p. 104).

In addition to dealing with such generalizations and stereotypes about Asian Americans is the absence of Asian American faces in the media. Dean Krishna states that the American media has "provided me with only two images of skin colors that could be an American—White or Black" (p. 153).

Many of these personal accounts are poignant stories about how Asian Americans grapple with their evolving identities and self-actualization. Patrick S. writes, "The real process of getting to know your identity involves as much an element of creation as it does of discovery" (p. 40). The challenge of actualizing oneself was particularly difficult for biracial and multiracial students. Anthony Luckett's essay on being "multi-hued" describes his life as a child of a Korean mother and a Black father. He states, "To my Korean friends I always felt like the token Black guy. To those two Black men who passed me on 43rd Avenue, one indelible night, I was a 'Chink'" (p. 213).

The complex challenges of biculturalism require that many Asian American college students balance different cultural contexts. Kenneth Lee describes himself as "a Burmese American who spoke neither Burmese nor practiced Buddhism" and asks if he is "a Burmese American in shell only?" (p. 68). Amy Lee talks about being a second-generation Chinese American and her experience during high school, described as "yellow on the outside and White on the inside" (p. 49). Indeed, the challenges of becoming oneself are complex and often personally distinctive to the myriad individuals who comprise the Asian American student population.

The provocative stories are complemented by two excellent bookends: an introduction by Russell Leong and an afterword by Vernon Takeshita. These chapters provide an excellent context in which these stories can be better understood, including discussions about a range of issues related to race and the racialization of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, ethnicity and ethnic identity, gender and sexuality, and immigration and...

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