William Paulinha in Han Ong’sFixer Chaois a destitute Filipino gay immigrant in 1990s Manhattan, wandering the streets and feeling resentful of the city’s new wealth. Because he cannot find stable employment in a ruthlesslyn competitive job market, he resorts to prostituting himself to overweight white businessmen in a toilet at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Drowning his sorrows at a seedy Times Square bar one evening, William meets Shem C., a failed Jewish American writer incensed by his expulsion from New York’s literati. Shem recruits William in his revenge plot against the high society that has spurned him....

Shaun Tan is a Chinese Australian artist whose picture books depict experiences of migration, estrangement, and historical memory. In his best-known graphic narrative,The Arrival, Tan portrays the story of one man’s passage to another country, illustrating the sense of displacement, bewilderment, and awe that migrants experience when arriving in a strange new land they yearn to call home. The story unfolds through black-and-white drawings whose sepia tones call up memories of immigrants in the Western world from bygone eras. It begins with a two-page grid of faces that bear a haunting resemblance to photographs taken of immigrants arriving in...

Nineteenth-century anti-Asian sentiment powerfully modeled the racialization of Filipinos in twentieth-century America. As can be seen in the writings of Carlos Bulosan, capitalism’s economics produced an Asiatic racial form that shaped racialized perceptions of early Filipino migrants on the US Pacific Coast. Yet these perceptions were paradoxical: white Americans perceived Filipinos through stereotypes about black men as hypersexual predators of white women. But whites also associated Filipinos with the Chinese, who were thought to have an unusual capacity for exploitable labor—for performing servile work that, in the eyes of whites, rendered Filipinos subservient and childlike.

In 1930, at age...

What has become of the American Dream? For whom does it still matter?

The idea of America as a place of freedom in which anyone can achieve success, realize happiness, and attain a sense of home and belonging remains an important theme in Asian American literature. From the late twentieth century to the present, Asian American writings reflect aspirations to achieve the American Dream, with its good life of wealth, comfort, and well-being, while simultaneously staying grounded in histories of origin, migration, and diaspora. These works represent the attempts of Asian Americans to express a sense of self and claim...

In recent Asian American writings, there has been an upsurge of interest in mixed-heritage people and particularly multiracial persons. Ruth Ozeki’sAll over Creation, Kip Fulbeck’sPaper BulletsandPart Asian, 100 Percent Hapa, Paisley Rekdal’sThe Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, Jessica Hagedorn’sDogeatersandThe Gangster of Love, Nora Okja Keller’sComfort WomanandFox Girl, Heinz Insu Fenkl’sMemories of My Ghost Brother, Kien Nguyen’sThe Unwanted, Brian Ascalon Roley’sAmerican Son, and Don Lee’sCountry of Originare just some of many works that feature the experiences of mixed-heritage and multiracial Asian Americans.¹ These writings...

In June 2012, the Pew Research Center released its report “The Rise of Asian Americans” proclaiming Asian Americans to be the most successful race group in the United States. The report asserted that Asian Americans are the “best-educated, highest-income, fastest-growing race group in the country” (1). It lauded the six largest Asian American ethnic groups (Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Indian Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Korean Americans, and Japanese Americans) for having achieved “milestones of economic success and social assimilation” that have enabled them to be “more satisfied than the general public with their lives, finances, and the direction of the country”...

In this book, I have coined the termracial feelingsto depict and interrogate capitalism’s production of emotions in the logic of individualism and the formation of Asian America. The term indicates the pivotal role these emotions and, in particular, the pursuit of happiness have played in the racialized perception of Asian Americans. In their cultural works, Asian Americans critically represent and evaluate this perception by showing how Asian American subjects accommodate, rechannel, and resist racial feelings produced by liberal capitalism.

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s deeply moving novelThe Namesake, racial feelings of alienation, conflicting loyalties, and divided identity are central...