STRANGERS FROM A DIFFERENT SHORE

Return to Book Page. Strangers from a Different Shore: In an extraordinary blend of eloquent narrative history, vivid personal recollection, and oral testimony, Ronald Takaki relates the diverse year history of Asian Americans.

Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans

Through richly detailed vignettes--by turns bitter, funny, and inspiring--he offers a stunning panorama of a neglected part of American history. Paperback , pages. Published September 23rd by Back Bay Books first published California Book Award for Nonfiction Gold To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Strangers from a Different Shore , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about Strangers from a Different Shore.

Lists with This Book. Jun 22, l. Issues that I had with this book: This book is pages long. Of these, only 24 were spent discussing the experiences of Indian Americans. Was it because Takaki exhaustively covers all Asian immigration to America? It's because the book focuses heavily on Japanese, Chinese and Korean immigrants, with lesser amounts of time being spent on Filipino immigrants and as said, 24 pages on Indian Americans.

I suppose there are also some short write ups on the experiences of refugees from Vietnam Issues that I had with this book: I suppose there are also some short write ups on the experiences of refugees from Vietnam 12 pages , Laos 8 pages and Cambodia 4 pages towards the end of the book but again, the brevity makes me question Takaki's priorities in writing this book.

If he wanted to write a book solely on East Asian immigration to America, he should have done so. South Asian Americans were consistently referred to as 'Asian-Indians' in this book and only on page the second of the two sections that discuss South Asian immigrants in any form, the first being from was it inadvertently revealed that Takaki chose this appellation because it was the official census category in , presumably to distinguish South Asian Americans from indigenous peoples.

I'm not sure of the politics involved in referring to indigenous peoples in America as 'Indians' but I think that just because a census 8 years prior to publication of your book chose to refer to a group of people with an inappropriate label as reaction to a outdated and racist label, doesn't mean it's the one that you, as a professor of ethnography should also use. The chapter dealing with 'Asian-Indians': Asian Indians in America. It's the content too. Why is the Ghadar movement covered in less than one page while the chapter on Korean Americans emphasizes their anti-colonial actions?

I suppose it could be because the Korean American anti-colonial movement concerns the interactions of Japanese Americans and Korean Americans but still! Also rme to the skies at the bit where Takaki writes about how Filipino men had an advantage over East Asian immigrants with women because they had been schooled by the Spanish in romance, just jfc. Maybe Filipino men were better able to breach the cultural divide with white women because of their exposure to Spanish culture but why would you word it like that.

What is this, 'Oh thank you kind colonial masters for teaching us the arts of love' tone. I'm glad that Takaki makes such good use of these valuable sources but at the same time, when a person gives you this narrative wherein he presents on the one hand, this evil white woman who ruins a strike using her feminine wiles and proclaims that she did it because, "I hate Filipinos as deeply as I hate unions!

You are all savages! Nearly three hundred dollars. All for you" and dies shortly after, you've got to wonder, to what extent is this more part of the narrator's personal mythology than his history? Sentimental stories with good-hearted prostitutes that die for our sins, where are we, in a Dostoevsky novel? Switch the ending - let the prostitute live, make the narrator bring her a sewing machine and marry her, and there we are: But Takaki looks at this and goes, see, white woman 1, "represented America's mean and exclusionist spirit" while white woman 2 "personified America's sympathy and softness.

He does that thing students do where when they're unsure of how their paper ties together and so repeat one 'key' phrase times in order to create a sense of connection between the points made. In Takaki's case, it's the phrase 'strangers from another shore' though he switches it up and sometimes just reminds us that the immigrants are treated like 'strangers' or that they're perceived as being forever 'from another shore.

And yet five pages don't go by without Takaki invoking the fact of Asian Americans being 'strangers from another shore.

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There's this moment where Takaki writes that among the many abuses this Japanese immigrant suffered, he was "even" called 'a chink'. Why is there this 'even'? Is it really surprising that someone who would use a racial epithet wouldn't know or care about the differences between East Asians? There's no 'even' when Takaki talks about how 'Asian Indians' and Filipinos were called the n-word. Idk, it's just one of those details that catch your attention and seem to confirm the suspicions you had about the writer, even though they're not really demonstrative of anything.

But despite these things, it's a good history of East Asians in America. Mar 16, Morgan Dhu rated it really liked it. I wish I could find something similar that deals with the history of Asian communities in Canada, because one thing I do know is that while some of the patterns of immigration and exclusion are the same - from the early use of East Asians as a cheap, expendable labour force, to the incarceration of Japanese immigrants in interment camps, and much that happened in-between - the shared Commonwealth membership of Cana Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore is a history of Asian-Americans.

I wish I could find something similar that deals with the history of Asian communities in Canada, because one thing I do know is that while some of the patterns of immigration and exclusion are the same - from the early use of East Asians as a cheap, expendable labour force, to the incarceration of Japanese immigrants in interment camps, and much that happened in-between - the shared Commonwealth membership of Canada and some Asian nations made for different immigration patterns, and the overall proportion of people of Asian background in the general population is greater in Canada than in the US around 12 percent, compared to around six percent.

But there are many books I want to read about Canada that haven't been written, or if they have been, aren't accessible. Back to Ronald Takaki's study of Asian-Americans. Takaki begins by noting that Asian-Americans have been left out of the popular concept of what it means to be American.

For many people, "American" means white; it may be accompanied by "African-American", but rarely does it encompass the notion of "Asian-American. As Takaki stresses, Asian Americans are strangers from a different shore - the countries of the Pacific Rim and South Asia - but they also arrived at a different shore - some in Hawaii, some the West coast.

And unlike many European arrivals who assimilated, often within a generation, Asian Americans remain in some ways strangers in the land they have been born in. Takaki's project is a large and complicated one - looking at the immigration of so many diverse groups - Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, and others - across American history.

But even among the differences, some threads connect the experiences of most groups. The early history of Asian immigrants in Hawaii and the Western states is one of being seen as the answer to a growing demand for cheap labour. Not only could Asian workers be employed in agricultural and other areas where many whites would not work, they could be paid far less than white labourers.

White farm owners and other large-scale employers used Asian immigrants to discourage union organising among white workers, and hired Asian workers along with Mexican and Puerto Rican workers from different nations to discourage solidarity: The practice [was] intended to avoid labor trouble which might result from having a homogeneous group of laborers of the same race or nationality.

Laborers speaking different languages [were] not as likely to arrive at a mutual understanding which would lead to strikes. They would pit Japanese crews against Korean or Chinese crews, playing on traditional animosities to encourage competition in worker output. They would hire Mexican workers as strikebreakers when Filipino workers tried to negotiate better pay. Immigration laws often separated families or favoured single men as immigrants. In some cases, the ratios of men to women immigrating was as high as ten to one.

Men alone, without their wives or without any chance if finding wives from their own backgrounds, frequented brothels and sex workers. And some formed long-term relationships with white women, even though in many states, interracial marriages were against the law. Fear of Asian men as sexual predators surfaced at regular intervals; like blacks in America, Asian immigrants were often portrayed as dangerous to the safety of white women and the purity of the national bloodlines.

Changing immigration laws over time made it sometimes possible for entire families to come to America, at other times, only men were allowed, specifically as labourers. Sometimes they were able to gain citizenship and bring wives and children to join them, at other times the path to citizenship was difficult, and even citizens could not sponsor non-citizens.

In some cases, Asian immigrants who had at ine time been able to acquire citizenship, such as immigrants from Indus, had their citizenship taken away when exclusion laws were extended to include them. The laws changed based on the economic needs and racial prejudices of white America, and patterns of immigration among Asians of different nationalities changed with the laws.

The early stories of different waves of Asian immigrants are fairly similar - most came to America to find economic success, hoping to either return home as wealthy men, or to bring their families to join them in a land of prosperity. While some did achieve one of these goals, for many, the dream was never realised.

They faced discrimination, back-breaking work for low wages. They were seen as an expendable labour force, but not as prospective citizens. For Filipinos in America, the war in the Pacific was a direct threat to the families they had left behind. Many enlisted and fought with white soldiers against Imperial Japan, and many hoped that fighting for American interests would result in them being seen, finally, as Americans.

For Koreans, the war rekindled hope for Korean independence in the aftermath of a possible destruction of Imperial Japanese military power. Indian and Chinese immigrants benefitted from wartime alliances. Chinese communities in America contributed extensively to the war effort and enlistment was high among Chinese men. By the end of the war, the Exclusion Act had been repealed, opening doors for immigrants from both countries. Japanese Americans living in the western states were confined in internment camps as potential enemy combatants, their property confiscated.

In Hawaii, where Japanese had been integrated into the mainstream community, and where large proportions of key tradespeople necessary to the war effort were Japanese, wide-scale internment did not take place. Despite the internments, 33, Japanese Americans served in the US military during the war. In the postwar era, many veterans in all these groups used their status to become citizens and to finally bring their families to the United States.

Despite the lowering of immigration bans against Chinese, Indian and Filipino immigrants, quotas were set at very low levels which remained until the s, when race-based immigration policies were technically ended and all Asian nations assigned quotas in line with those for European countries. This resulted in yet more shifts in the patterns of immigration, and changes in the class and educational levels of those immigrants, although it did not necessarily make it easier for Asian immigrants to find jobs and social acceptance once they arrived.

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While many immigrants from Asian countries now arrive in the US with advanced degrees, business capital, or both, others are refugees from wars, poverty and environmental disasters and arrive with almost nothing. In telling the story of Asians coming to, and living and working in, America, Takaki alternates between a remote and academic historical narrative of facts and events and legislation, and a more ownvoice narrative that relies heavily on letters, journals, interviews, songs and poems to convey the experiences from the perspectives of the immigrants themselves, which he explores and expands on.

In these sections, he closes the distance even further by including, where appropriate, details from the experiences of his own family. In this well researched and well organised study, Takaki covers much ground, from the experiences of early Chinese laborers to refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the post Vietnam war era. Written in and revised in , the more recent stories of Asian peoples in America are missing, but as a historical survey, it is an excellent resource for anyone seeking to understand issues of diversity in the US.

Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans by Ronald Takaki

Takaki concludes his work with this summation: Since the arrival of the first Chinese during the gold rush, the interaction between Asian Americans and the larger society has been dynamic and dialectical. Exploited as agricultural and industrial workers, they fought for justice through labor unions and strikes. Forced into segregated Chinatowns and internment camps, Asian Americans joined the U. Excluded by racist immigration laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the National Origins Act, they helped end this discrimination with the Immigration Act.

Denied their cultures in a Eurocentric society, Asian Americans sought to preserve their heritages by creating communities like Chinatowns as well as Nihonmachis Japantowns , organizing festivals, and founding language schools as well as churches and temples. Rendered invisible in mainstream history textbooks and courses, they established their own historical societies and museums and also organized exhibits for the Smithsonian Institution.

And through a student activism that emerged in the sixties and resurged in the nineties, they innovated new curriculums in Asian-American studies at universities across America — from Berkeley and UCLA to Minnesota and Michigan to Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton. Jan 09, Cyndi rated it really liked it Shelves: Read for my Asian American History class the book is detailed but not boring relating the story of how different nationalities of Asians came to America and when.

Some came willingly and some were forced from their countries due to harsh regimes and American influence. Real numbers are given and real stories with names to personalize the struggle to try to fulfill dreams. Most came not as inhabiters but as sojourners, never meaning to stay but caught in the reality of trying to earn a living in Read for my Asian American History class the book is detailed but not boring relating the story of how different nationalities of Asians came to America and when.

Most came not as inhabiters but as sojourners, never meaning to stay but caught in the reality of trying to earn a living in a country that not always welcomed and often took advantage of them due to lack of language skills and knowledge of laws that were meant to protect. Often in the beginning there were no laws or there were laws aimed at opressing the immigrants.

Depressing was those who came here with the same intents as their fellow countrymen and yet used them to get ahead with no thought of the opression they were inflicting. Parallels were made to the blacks who had just won their freedom and the Asian coolies who were then imported to do the work of the previous slaves.

The timeline is important as is how the nationalities were used against each other by those in power to keep themselves in power. Second and third generations talked about with the saddest part being the loss of culture as they assimilated into American culture. The word liminality used a lot to describe the threshold or betweeness felt by many.

Good book told with the intent to educate not blame but will raise the conscious level of the reader. Apr 09, Z. Rose rated it it was amazing. This is my inaugural Goodreads review. I felt that this book warranted one because it's subject matter is immensely important to me. During my undergrad, I minored in ethnic studies with a focus on Asian Americans. Myself, being first-generation Filipino American, I've had a curiousity about the influence of Asian Americans in society. It focused on an overview of mainly the This is my inaugural Goodreads review.

It focused on an overview of mainly the first Asian migrants from: The later chapters of the book touch upon more recent migrants experiences from Asia, but not too in-depth.

There are many themes that resonated for me, including commentary regarding Asian Americans being the "model minority" as well as being treated as the constant outsider. The writer, Ronald Takaki does a great job of writing this in an approachable, not densely academic style. He weaves narrative of the universal experience of being an immigrant in with historical data.

I honestly think this should be required reading for any ethnic studies course. It should also be supplementary reading in American History classes either in A.

Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans Summary & Study Guide Description

It isn't hard to follow and it makes you appreciate and realize the influence Asian Americans contributed to The United States. Coincidently, this month of May just happens to be Asian American and Pacific Islanders month -Highly recommend this be read! Sep 24, Charles Yan rated it it was amazing Shelves: Fantastic - I feel that every Asian American should read this book at least once. Takaki weaves together historical accounts, interviews, and his own experiences to make a thoroughly engaging story of the "strangers from a different shore.

While it didn't answer particularly to my own heritage as a descendent of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees and a 2nd wave immigrant from the mainland, it hel Fantastic - I feel that every Asian American should read this book at least once. While it didn't answer particularly to my own heritage as a descendent of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees and a 2nd wave immigrant from the mainland, it helped me understand a bigger picture of local Bay Area sites like SF Chinatown and San Jose's Little Saigon, as well as respect the unique perspectives of many of my peers.

Takaki focuses most on the experiences of Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and Japanese immigrants and their children, but that's only because they have the longest and most prominent history in America among Asians. Still, it would have been nice to see a little more than a few pages for other ethnic groups, particularly Vietnamese and other SE Asians.

The book concentrates on Chinese, Filipino, Japanese and Indian immigrants, although other Asian immigrants are also discussed. Most came to America and Hawaii with hopes and dreams of a better life. Many did not find it. Asian immigration began because of the need for labor. In Hawaii there was an need for plantation workers, and the growers began to import Chinese workers.

Many of the Chinese signed labor contracts in China that provided for passage and the terms of their employment. They left their families behind and worked long and hard hours in the fields. They lived in crowded conditions.

Eventually, workers were recruited from other occupations and this led to conflict between the groups. The planters intentionally played one group against the other so they couldn't write and act as one labor group in their demands for higher wagers and better conditions. Asians immigration to the mainland began in response to labor demands due to industrialization and the building of railroads.

Eventually many Asians can to America looking for jobs. They only jobs they found were low paying jobs that other workers didn't want. Most could not bring their families and could not marry white women. This led to the development of a picture bride business. Asian immigrants faced a great deal of discrimination. Only low wage jobs were available. They were denied service in most white establishments.

Some were able to open their own small business, which allowed them to eke out a living. The Asians were discriminated against by the immigration laws.