About the Author

Helen Zia, a graduate of Princeton University's first co-educational class, is an award-winning journalist who has covered Asian American communities and political movements for twenty years. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Reviews

"An ambitious blend of personal and cultural history, a primer on Asian America that covers everything from the history of Asian immigration to the turbulence of the past three decades as the community has gone from silent majority to demanding its place in American society." --Ferdinand M. de Leon, The Seattle Times "An important book because it seeks to answer a question that few other popular works pose: What does it take for people like the author to become fully American?" --Somini Sengupta, The New York Times Book Review "Written with journalistic clarity Asian American Dreams offers a way out of the cycle of racial prejudice, discrimination and violence. Its examples of individuals and communities that have spanned cultural antipathies to fight for a cause serve as beacons of hope." --Roger Yim, San Francisco Chronicle "Helen Zia has produced what many of us were waiting for--an honest, scholarly, yet intensely personal book about the transformation of Asian America. She deftly interweaves the remarkable history of a people with her own unique journey as a pioneer activist and writer. The result--Asian American Dreams--is a fresh and incisive narrative, epic in its sweep, thrilling in its verve and clarity." --Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking "A rich chronicle of personal and national history involving Asian Americans that examines issues ranging from immigration patterns to stereotypes in entertainment." --Dinah Eng, Gannett News "Dreams is a wonderful, sophisticated, lively sociohistorical biography of Asian Pacific Americans fighting back to broaden the human rights of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike. Herein Helen Zia emerges as the foremost activist-chronicler of the eighties and nineties." --John Kuo Wei Tchen, professor, New York University, author of New York Before Chinatown "Serves not only as an invaluable record of a movement but also as a moving and often funny personal memoir." --David Henry Hwang

While growing up in New Jersey in the 1950s and '60s, Zia was provided with plenty of American history by her teachers, while her father inundated her with stories of China's past. Yet she was left wondering about people like herself, Asian Americans, who seemed to be "MIH--Missing in History." In this ambitious and richly detailed account of the formation of the Asian-American community--which extends from the first major wave of immigration to Gold Mountain" (as the Chinese dubbed America during the gold rush) to the recent influx of Southeast Asians, who since 1975 have nearly doubled the Asian-American population--Zia fills those absences, while examining the complex origins of the events she relates. The result is a vivid personal and national history, in which Zia guides us through a range of recent flash points that have galvanized the Asian-American community. Among them are the brutal, racially motivated murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit in 1982; the devastating riots in Los Angeles in 1992, where almost half of the $1 billion in damages to the city were sustained by Korean-American shop owners; and the embattled South Asian New York City cab drivers who, in May of 1998, banded together with the New York Taxi Workers alliance and pulled off a citywide strike. The recent boom in the Asian-American population (from half a million in the 1950s to 7.3 million in 1990), coupled with Zia's fresh perspective, makes it unlikely that their stories will go missing again. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.