Voices of the Heart: Asian American Women on Immigration, Work, and Family (review)

From 1970 to 2000, the Asian American population grew from 1.4 million to 12 million; Asian Americans were the fastest-growing group in the United States, faster than Latinos/Hispanics. In addition, many prominent Asian Americans are becoming household names: Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana; Jerry Yang, cofounder of Yahoo; and Yao Ming, a Houston Rockets basketball player.

Asian Americans can no longer be characterized as sojourners, as people who cling to native cultures and live in ethnic enclaves, or as members of the "model minority." Scholars have proposed new and more sophisticated ways of examining and understanding the Asian American population and experience. It is in this environment that Huping Ling introduces Voices of the Heart: Asian American Women on Immigration, Work, and Family.

Having already contributed several important works to the literature of Asian American studies, Ling plunges into the ordinary lives of Asian American women and records these women's experiences with almost no interference. Voices of the Heart is a collection of voices from the hearts of the interviewees as well as from the geographic heart of the United States, which usually gets less attention than the East and West coasts.

Together with Benson Tong's effort, which produced Wayne Hung Wong's American Paper Son, an autobiography of a Chinese American man from the Midwest, Voices of the Heart shows the practical reality of involving students in conducting interviews as well as the value of ordinary people's experiences. Tong and Ling help to make it possible to record grassroots voices and to allow those who are not scholars or not yet scholars to become involved in the meaningful documentation of American experiences and feelings.

Voices of the Heart has an impressive coverage. It documents experiences and feelings of women whose ethnic origins stem from ten different Asian countries. These women range from American-born citizens of Asian ethnicities to Asian students studying at American universities; from adoptees from Asian countries raised by European American parents to mothers who immigrated to the United States to join their adult children; from immigrants who moved here as Asian brides to wives who accompanied their husbands in the latter's pursuit of education; and from displaced persons or refugees of wars to women whose ethnicity was Asian but who grew up in Latin America and were immigrants in the United States at the time of the interview.

The experiences told by the interviewees defy any orthodox characterization. Ling Ng was born in China and went to the Philippines with her parents. She came to the United States as a college student and returned to the Philippines after graduation and married there. When her children came to the United States for college, she came with them. While her children returned to the Philippines after college, she stayed and was working as a guidance counselor in a high school when she was interviewed in 1995. The old "push and pull" factors did not apply to Ling Ng. For her family, life was good in the Philippines. One of the reasons she decided to stay in the United States was that she felt "more self-assured, useful, and independent" (20). Independence is echoed by another interviewee. Surya Gupta, from India, is a university professor in Missouri. At the time of the interview, she was in her forties and was unmarried. She said that in India, people would gossip about her. She therefore likes "the independence of living in America" (278).

Some of the interviewees' experiences demonstrate disparities between the developed and developing countries in the globalized economic system. Amihan Perez gave up her teaching job in the Philippines for an assembly job in the United States. She made more money as an assembler in the United States. This same reason brought Bituin Perez to the United States. She said that "there was more leisure time in...