Essays on Asian American

Growing up as an Indian, I always had a weird relationship with the term “Asian-American.” I was technically of Asian descent, but it always felt like that word wasn’t meant for me, and that Asian-American was referring to some other group of people. When people...

Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart meditates on the place of Filipino writers within American literature. In America Is in the Heart, there are two “types” of writers that are presented: “American writers” and “Filipino writers.” Carlos Bulosan characterizes “American writers” as ones who...

“I have a thing for Asians.” Everyone has heard this phrase at least once in their lives, either told to them or told to someone else. Although this is commonly heard or said, it is not commonly questioned. What does a “thing for Asians” actually...

Time and time again, we see Asian-American students quietly but surely rise above their peers with their quiet, studious, and high tests scores. What is it about these students that separates them from their peers? Keith Osajima, a professor of race ethnic studies at the...

From the Boston Tea Party to current movements like Black Lives Matter, activism and protest has cultivated American society. The American people expressed their dissent and forced change, causing the country to evolve. Asian Americans have been at the forefront of some of these pressing...

The play I chose to read for my independent study on diversity in theater between 1975 and 2000 was the short play, Trying to Find Chinatown (1996) by David Henry Hwang. Surprisingly, I have never read anything by David Henry Hwang in its entirety. I’ve...

Minority groups have suffered and endured much discrimination, oppression, racism, and social injustices in America. Asian and Asian American women are inclusive of this group. In addition to the above, they have experienced sexism, mistreatment, and objectification due to the added fact of being of...

The treatment of Asian Americans in the United States has been brought to attention through literature and popular culture, as well as through the self-representation technique by which Asian Americans discuss their own treatment. Frank Wu, author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and...

With the increasing emphasis on cultural exchange in recent literature, writers have attempted to point out how difficult it was for the people to maintain their ethnic identity besides their national identity. Assimilation into the mainstream American culture seems to be a primordial way of...

America is in the Heart begins with Bulosan’s childhood and traces a difficult immigrant experience defined by poverty, rootlessness and illness and culminates in a remaking of his self through writing. As Rajini Srikanth notes, the novel is “curiously marked by a faith and idealism...

Even in a globalized community that consists of a blending of many different cultures and races, stereotypes still thrive in the modern day. Two persistent and contrasting stereotypes of Asian American men exist: the first is that they are sexually deficient and weak, physically and...