Editor's Preface

This special issue, devoted to engaging with what we might call our century's most significant global challenge so far, the COVID-19 pandemic, comes out of the thoughtful and responsive labors of our guest editors, Aggie J. Yellow Horse, Karen Kuo, and Karen J. Leong, all from the Asian Pacific American Studies program at Arizona State University's School of Social Transformation. When they brought to me their idea to have a collective conversation regarding matters of the pandemic from within the perspectives of our field and potentially beyond, all the members of our board of editors and I expressed no second thoughts, considering the urgency of the subject as well as the particular targeting of population groups that we are all too familiar with. What resulted from an immediate call for submissions was a profusion of responses that range from the personal to the institutional, a variety of interventions that aim to contextualize and clarify, and a whole slew of voices from diverse communities that we have now collected to express, reflect on, criticize, teach, and, hopefully, empower us in our moment of despair. Thank you to everyone who participated in this special project, especially our guest editors and our anonymous reviewers, who were so gracious in adeptly facilitating a fast-tracked publication process.

In our reviews section, we feature appraisals of a recently produced documentary series on the history of Asians in the United States, and four thought-provoking books that cover the following: the prospects of conducting a relational analysis of settler colonialism across Asian and Indigenous literary representations; a rethinking of the history of the construction of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Indigenous communities, Chinese migrant laborers, and the U.S. colonizing state; the educational experiences of selected high-achieving Asian American youth; and the multilayered forms of Anglophone literature emanating from transpacific locations.

This issue also marks the final installment of my term as editor-in-chief of JAAS, as well as the terms of Lan Dong, our reviews editor, and Thaomi Michelle Dinh, our assistant editor. Running the journal has been an immensely exhilarating and profound endeavor for me, and it would not have been so without Lan's amazingly organized and astute work, Michelle's insightful contributions and skillful coordination of our intricate editorial process, our editorial board's incisive guidance and sustenance, Mary Muhler and the rest of our production team's acuity and rigor, and Bill Breichner's forward-looking leadership, trust, and overall support of all facets of our work in his capacity as our publisher at JHUP. The officers, board members, and staff of the Association for Asian American Studies were the ones who believed in my potential to do the job well when Anita Mannur, my predecessor, first enthusiastically brought up my name to them; they have been so solid in their support for and appreciation of me throughout my term. From my vantage as editor, having overseen submissions make their way into eventual article publications, I have been so awestruck by the sheer richness, ingenuity, and depth of our interdiscipline's intellectual communities; I have been thus so privileged to work with each and every author we transacted with. I have been privy to the invisible but very thorough labors of our reviewers; they are truly the crucial backbones of our editorial process, securing our journal's professional integrity and our field's high standards through their keen and constructive behind-the-scenes work.

I have also consulted with numerous colleagues, friends, and family members, including past editors, former AAAS presidents and officers, and students, librarians, community workers, and scholars from many locations within and beyond Asian American studies; their advice, comforting words, and compassionate listening skills have been so remarkably invaluable to me. Lastly, working with our associate editors Diane Fujino and Lisa Sun-Hee Park for the past two years has been very productive and filled with energy; they are embarking on their next step as editors-in-chief beginning next year, and I have no doubt that their editorial leadership of JAAS, along with the work of our next reviews editor, Christopher Patterson...