Asian Americans in New England (review)

During his recent trip to Asia, President Obama declared the United States a "Pacific nation" and he himself "America's first Pacific president." These statements, indicative of an important strategic shift in U.S. worldview, were simultaneously a call for attention to the significant role Asia will play in the world arena in the twenty-first century and a reminder of Asia's cultural and social influences in American history. In particular, the perceptual shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific presents the moment that challenges us to reexamine more closely contributions of Asians and Asian Americans on the East Coast. In that regard, Asian Americans in New England is a timely publication highlighting the historic connections between Asia and New England as well as the important contributions Asian Americans have made to the cultural and social life in that region and in the nation.

The nine essays in this collection touch on various subject areas: Chinese students in the missionary school or Yale University in the first half of the nineteenth century; Japanese acrobats in the mid-nineteenth century; creation of the Department of Chinese and Japanese Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda's lecture tour in 1893 and its lasting influence; history of the New WORLD theater archival collections; and Southeast Asian immigrant communities. These essays eloquently confirm the area's deep connection with Asia and the presence of Asians long before that on the West Coast. During the colonial period, local merchants and officials from New England were already making their way to Asia, bringing back many Asian artifacts and products and introducing Asian culture and history to the region. Likewise, since the early nineteenth century, but especially after 1965, Asian immigrants have come to the New England area to obtain jobs, receive education, conduct business, or resettle families. Yet the long and rich history of Asian Americans in New England has often been overshadowed by the more popular stories on the West Coast, such as the Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad, and Japanese relocation. Chiu's collection is among the first to offer a focused and multifaceted examination of the variety of Asian ethnic groups in New England.

The authors of these essays, from diverse disciplines, shed refreshing insights into the subject from different perspectives. Karen Sanchez-Eppler's opening essay, "Copying and Conversion," for example, presents a meticulous and nuanced study of an 1824 friendship album by a Chinese youth at a missionary school in Cornwall, Connecticut. Situating the discussion in historical and cultural contexts, the author suggests new ways of understanding the "process of assimilation and conversion" in this nation (1). Constance Chen's study of New Englanders' fascination with Asian art at the turn of the twentieth century situates that craze against the background of the radical demographic and technological transformations of the time, arguing that collecting Japanese antiquity represents simultaneously a spiritual dimension of retrieving lost Eden and golden ages, the exoticization of the Orient, and a new cultural consciousness for Americans.

The essays in the second half of the collection are concerned with some contemporary issues and immigrant communities. Shirley Tang and James Bui study the Fields Corner neighborhood in Boston, home to a large Vietnamese immigrant community where immigrant organizations' successful collaborations with other local cultural and civic groups in creating murals and performances provide a vision for the directions of multicultural, multilingual, and multigenerational communities of people living and interacting comfortably in the same neighborhood. Monica Chiu's fine observations of Lao immigrant youths' use of media-inspired hip-hop for entertainment in a New Hampshire school underlines the role of popular culture, which, as she argues, becomes a medium for the underrepresented group to gain "yellow blackface as resistance to social and academic repudiation" (209).

In his introduction to the volume, Scott Wong provides a terse but insightful review of the historical connection between Asia and New England and scholarship in the...