Asian-American Books

An Empire built on hundreds of military bases and intimidation is still an empire. Control without responsibility of governing or providing for the welfare of citizens. Ignorance, arrogance, and spectacular hypocrisy are required. Most Americans are blinded by the rationales of policy; most peoples in exploited areas (and many allies) are not.

Read this series of essays by well known specialists (at last well known outside the US) with an open mind. Policies are seriously flawed while many are blinded by policy rationales these writers see as, with some justification, excuses. More extremism and terror are but part of the reaction of the weak, dishonored, and exploited. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands die to support a way of life characterized by greed, anger, and arrogance which increases vast differences in wealth and unsustainable injustices. (A favorite example versus the myth: US foreign aid is about the lowest proportionally of industrial countries, it is less than some domestic economic subsidies that destroy peoples and economies in other countries and requires many purchases from the US of military goods. The US also gives 10 times as much per capita to Israel as the nearest second, Egypt.)

Key essays are on: the global war on terror (an absurd notion at its roots); weapons of mass destruction; failed states; humanitarian intervention; regime change towards democracy; war on drugs. All provide the basis for autocratic governments profiteering from their piece of `farming' their economies. Many governments simply label opposition as terrorist or extremist (like labeling "communist" years ago) to expunge opposition and democratic elements. But state terrorism is totally ignored by those supporting the self declared "Washington consensus". Extreme injustice can not be sustained forever by brute power. .

Editor"s essays tie things together sucessfully and author Tariq Ali adds his reflections. Some overseas editions are entitled, "Masks of Empire".

Seven Stars collects the battle diaries of two starkly different generals from the World War II battles fought at Okinawa. Lieutenant General Buckner was a straight laced, clockwork-precision type who preferred to use artillery and tanks to reduce entrenched positions, while General Stilwell was a short-tempered outsider who disdained set-piece battles in favor of maneuver. In addition to presenting disparate views of history in each man's own words, editor Nicholas Sarantakes offers informed and informative explanations of crucial events referred to in the battle diaries, as well as glossaries of main characters and military terms. A welcome addition to military reference shelves and primary reference sources of the Pacific battles of World War II, and utterly involving for scholars of military science and lay readers alike, Seven Stars is very highly recommended reading for students of 20th Century Military History.

The ancient Chinese believed that human sexuality was analogous to 'cosmic' procreation. They saw absolutely no difference between rain wetting a field and semen fertilizing the womb of a woman, or between a damp soil ready for sowing seed and a moist vagina ready for penetration.
Their sexuality was never tainted by morality (guilt) and could never be a sin.

The ancient Chinese palette went from the most detailed biological pictures of copulation to the most spiritual experiences of love.

However, there were important differences between confucianism, taoism and tantrism.
The most conformist way of life was confucianism, which believed in biological immortality through offspring. Marriage was an important institution, but not an occasion for rejoicing. Music was prohibited for three days, because it was considered as a signal for the father that his son would soon take his place!
Taoists believed in physical immortality and tried to prolong life through different techniques: respiration (mastering the uterine respiration of the embryo), diets, gymnastics or heliotherapy imposing a harsh body regimen for its adepts.
A taoist 'alchemist' sect considered the woman's womb as a kind of chemist's cup capable of fabricating 'Life's Elixir' through copulation.
Certain sects organized mass copulations trying to put their followers in a mystical delirium and making them believe that they were invulnerable and invincible in combat. Powerful men used them in this sense for political goals.

Tantrism was a more difficult practice. Sexual intercourse had to take place when a woman was most fertile, but the man had to withhold ejaculation (coitus reservatus) in order to capture the yin of the woman and heighten his own vital powers.

Robert van Gulik (author of excellent 'Chinese' detective novels) treats this particularly difficult theme masterly.
He wrote a most stimulating book, not only for Chinese scholars.

Susan Koshy's first book (foreshadowing many to come) offers a sustained and lucid analysis of the structural and geopolitical constraints (as opposed to more liberal or volunaristic accounts) that act upon producing a certain kind of discourse on race and, later, ethnicity, within white-centered frameworks of the US legal system. She enacts an important intervention into the whole way American and Asian American Studies conceive of "whiteness" as a constituitive category of national belonging or the Asian American as an automatic subaltern, however privileged he or she is in class or worldly situation. The racism produced by various Asian groups against other Asian immigrants and blacks, in shifting historical contexts of capitalist modernity, is shown to be an ongoing function of legal constraints upon how (white) citizenship is established, and, later, how minority citizenship is signified and valorized as hybrid or exemplary as such. This later shift from racial to ethnic senses of belonging is an important one for the field-imaginary in a transnational era, and shows how the new discourse of ethnicity in a transnational context (within Asian-friendly Pacific Rim discourse) often obscures (yes this is so) the operations of race and class.

Koshy's examples-of Mississippi Chinese and shifting claims and constructions of South Asians-help to expose the porousness of whiteness as a container for that construct as wielded against black US citizens. The well-argued difference and originality in her account both outlines the complicity of various Asian American groups in affiliating themselves with forms and claims of white citizenship. At the same time her account shows how such claims had to emanate from within a hegemonic legal system (and related, more fluid cultural genres of representation) that did not allow for the subversive power of difference and counter-hegemonic force many credit Asian American legal subjecitivity and literature with. Thus, Koshy offers a grim, well researched, and Foucault-wise project that shows the full range of power to produce forms of complicity and to contain and delimit forms of resistance. Through thick descriptive detail and close reading of key libidinal texts, the project traces the shift from narrating visions of tragic and sentimentalized exclusion (Long and Griffith) to more hybrid and creolized forms of US national belonging via "racial hybridity tropes" and cross-racial romance (Bulosan and Mukerjee). The latter examples by Asian American authors threaten to fall into versions of democratic idealism and what Koshy calls "conservative multiculturalism,"

Koshy's study thus reveals that the minority texts cannot be read as utopic instances of subaltern resistance and difference but as romantic-national works themselves implicated and contained in the legalistic and hegemonic force-fields of American liberal culture. Her chapter on the "Madame Butterfly" syndrome and long historical transformation is the best I know and a delight to read. This book is important he said she said...

For those looking for authenticity, this book will connect you to what you need.

An excellent contribution to the local history of Northern California and a remarkable insight into the nature of Chinese integration into American society and business, written by an author with personal knowledge of the retail food industry and the scholarly qualifications to do the in-depth research necessary for the book. The author traces the rise and decline of Chinese-owned grocery stores in Northern California - not ethnic grocery stores aimed at the Asian market, but general-purpose stores and supermarkets advertised for everyone. In the 1920's and 30's Chinese entrepreneurs began with local markets in Sacramento, Yuba City, and the Bay Area, then in the 50's and 60's developed these stores into heavily advertised chains such as the Giant Foods of the title, Farmers Markets, Famous Foods, and Bel Air Markets (which still exist under non-Chinese ownership). Using low-cost labor, primarily family members and recent immigrants, these markets were able to undercut their competitors' prices. But the owners' reluctance to modernize and to build for the long term caused these markets, with some exceptions, to lose their competitive status and to eventually be sold to non-Chinese rivals. The author also includes valuable information on the California grocery workers union and on the current state of the retail food industry.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in Northern California history.

Benjamin picks his baby sister up out of her crib, puts her in his knapsack and takes her to school for show and tell. She then wakes up and begins to cry. It is hilarious to watch the flustered adults in charge all try to get her to be quiet. I read this to my kindergarten class, and we all laughed so hard we cried. (If you like Stephanie's Ponytail, you'll like this one, too!) Munsch's dialog is clever, and there is just the right amount of repetition in the story for kids to chime in as it is read aloud. This is a fun book for a child with a new baby at home, too.

His logic is impeccable, his language is breathtaking. Time after time I stopped to reread a sentence for the style alone. Thoroughly recommended.

This book is at least on part based on public lectures given by Oz at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Oz is a tremendously powerful and beautiful speaker and reader of Hebrew. These lectures sounded not so much like academic criticism but as a kind of long prose-poem. I do not know Agnon's work well- enough to argue with the reading Oz makes of it. Agnon was a religious Jew who was deep inside the Tradition as is evidenced in some of the anthology work he did especially ' Days of Awe' . Oz has gone somewhere else, and does not have Agnon's midrashic and talmudic background. Yet the thesis that Oz proposes in regard to the contradiction between the ideals of the religious and Zionist return to the land, and the reality which was met and made in the Yishuv is a very real one. It is also true that Agnon's work is a chronicle of the collapse of Eastern Jewry written before the great destruction comes. Oz knows the Agnon text well, and his power as writer makes it seems as if his reading of Agnon is the most convincing one. I think however it should be balanced against the reading of other commentators including Baruch Kurzweil, Arnold Band, Hillel Weiss and a host of others.
However reading this work of Oz will give not only knowledge of two of the Hebrew language's greatest writers in modern times ( Agnon and Oz) it will illuminate the whole ideological dimension of the Jewish return to Eretz Yisrael.

The Sino-American Friendship As Tradition and Challenge: Dr. Ailie Gale In China 1908-1950 by Dr. M. Cristina Zaccarini (History Professor, Adelphi University) focuses on the writings of Dr. Ailie Gale, an American female missionary and hospital administrator, and her erudite, up-close comparison and contrast between nations from the perspective of one who has lived in both worlds. Her beliefs in duty and service to God, spiritual equality between genders, and the efforts of her medical service are all brought to vivid life on the page, as are her forceful opposition to a patriarchal hierarchy and the subordination of women that she saw all too heavily inlaid within the traditional Chinese cultures around her. The Sino-American Friendship As Tradition And Challenge is highly recommended for international studies and 20th century Chinese history curriculum supplemental reading lists and academic reference collections.