The Making of Asian America: A History

Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America: A History is a complex work. The book synthesizes several approaches to writing history and a variety of archival information to weave a cohesive narrative. The author relies on social history, the history of immigration law and legal history, the history of foreign policy and international relations, and individual biographies. The purpose of combining these approaches is to enhance the reader’s understanding of an Asian American immigrant experience in a top-down and bottom-up way. Lee’s sources include scholarship, legal documents, statistical information, oral history collections, mass media and popular culture, and even her own family history.

The purpose of social history is to uncover the lives of ordinary people. Social history is a response to traditional history writing, which tends to focus on the lives of political leaders and important historical events while often ignoring ordinary people. In this book, the use of social history helps uncover the experience of Asian immigrants, often of lower socioeconomic status, in the Americas. To understand their lives, Lee relies on the intersectionality of race, sex/gender, and class, discussed in the Asian Immigration in the Framework of Race, Gender, and Class theme. Doing so helps the reader identify the similarities and differences between the experiences of immigrant men and women and between different ethnocultural groups, such as the Japanese and the Hmong, the Christian Koreans, and the Sikh Indians.

Here, terminology matters. Lee opts for a compassionate approach by using “undocumented immigrant” rather than “illegal alien (migrant).” She refers to all immigrants, regardless of their legal status, and regardless of whether they remained in the Americas, as “immigrants” rather than “migrants.” The author also relies on statistical information to provide an objective balance to more subjective perspectives sourced from immigrant oral histories. To illustrate these experiences in a more specific way, she uses individual biographies, such as her maternal great-great-great-grandfather Moy Dong Kee. Such examples also highlight the author’s personal investment in this topic.

Furthermore, individual biographies illustrate legal history in this book. For example, there is South Asian immigrant Vaishno Das Bagai, who lost his naturalized US citizenship because of the ruling in the Supreme Court Case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). The latter involved a South Asian World War I veteran, Bhagat Singh Thind, who failed to obtain naturalization on racial grounds. This level of personalization allows the reader to truly understand the Asian American struggles and the injustices they faced in the Asian Exclusion period.

The author also pays special attention to immigration laws, from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. She discusses the way each law impacted different Asian immigrant groups specifically, and how the legal framework impacted them in general—for instance, by creating international undocumented migration. Lee also reviews the way political and business pressure, international relations, factional in-fighting in the government, and prejudicial societal attitudes contributed to the passing of certain immigration laws.

The role of traditional history writing, and the history of foreign policy and international relations, is to provide the background context. To determine how and why Chinese coolies ended up in the Caribbean, the author discusses the inner functioning of the British Empire. To understand the challenges of Hmong refugees in the United States after 1975, the author considers the aggressive US foreign policy of containment during the Cold War, especially in Southeast Asia, as well as conflict-zone trauma. The author strategically places background information for a broader context while keeping her focus on the social history of Asian American groups.

Overall, Lee’s chosen methodology embraces and challenges the historical lumping of diverse Asian peoples into a single immigrant category in the Americas. By examining separate ethnocultural groups and individuals, the author highlights the differences in their experiences based on historical, socioeconomic, and cultural factors. However, by focusing on Asian Americans as a whole, she also identifies the shared character of their struggle and resilience.