ASIANS, FROM THE BEGINNING OF our settlement here, have had to write ourselves onto the script of a nation that has, for the most part, excluded our collective histories and occluded our individual voices. Because no one ever “gave America to us,” freely, we have had to collectively find it, rock by rock, wave by wave, one migrant at a time stumbling across the barbed wire of Arizona sands or steadfastly towing our bodies to reach the darkened shore of Rockaway Beach, Queens, or the foggy shores of San Francisco Bay. Yet after we found it, we had to build a city—no, rather a barrio or an enclave upon the rock.
Editor’s Note
Linking Asian Pacific Latitudes
IN HIS EDITORIAL DISCUSSING the “knowledge economy,” Pico Iyer states that we “overestimate how much we understand the world” in relation to historical and contemporary events. Likewise, in our understanding of Asian and Asian American Studies, we produce knowledge, but we may not always understand the complex shifts and currents of scholarship in relation to other stories and voices of the community, and what they imply. For example, in this issue, Jess Delegencia links his experience as a student at UC Berkeley with the U.S. anti-apartheid movement, the People Power Movement in the Philippines, and the Los Angeles Uprisings with the forming of his own identity in the U.S. and South Africa. New Pacific connections also reveal themselves in this issue: indigenous writer Syaman Rapongan, together with scholar Hsinya Huang, offer an oceanic perspective to challenge current global/continental ways of positioning the world.
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Creating Forums: ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES TODAY
SEVENTY-SIX YEARS SEPARATE Younghill Kang’s depiction of Korean immigrants in 1920s New York and Jennifer Hayashida’s observations on the practice of Asian American scholarship today. Yet the words of these two writers bridge the underlying struggles — and dreams — of the immigrant journey and of the historical experience of Asians in New York and the Eastern seaboard from the eighteenth century onwards.
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