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Revealing the untold stories of a pioneer generation of young Chinese Americans, this book places the children and families of early Chinatown in the middle of efforts to combat American policies of exclusion and segregation. This book challenges long-held notions of early Chinatown as a bachelor community by showing that families—and particularly children—played important roles in its daily life. It explores the wide-ranging images of Chinatown's youth created by competing interests with their own agendas—from anti-immigrant depictions of Chinese children as filthy and culturally inferior to exotic and Orientalized images that catered to the tourist's ideal of Chinatown. All of these representations, the book notes, tended to further isolate Chinatown at a time when American-born Chinese children were attempting to define themselves as Chinese American. Facing barriers of immigration exclusion, cultural dislocation, child labor, segregated schooling, crime, and violence, Chinese American children attempted to build a world for themselves on the margins of two cultures. Their story is part of the larger American story of the struggle to overcome racism and realize the ideal of equality.

In Japan, “hibakusha” means “the people affected by the explosion”—specifically, the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945. In this study, the winner of the 1969 National Book Award in Science studies the psychological effects of the bomb on 90,000 survivors. He sees this analysis as providing a last chance to understand—and be motivated to avoid—nuclear war. This compassionate treatment is a significant contribution to the atomic age.

The surprise Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 shocked the international community. The two communist nations had seemed firm political and cultural allies, but the twenty-nine-day border war imposed heavy casualties, ruined urban and agricultural infrastructure, leveled three Vietnamese cities, and catalyzed a decade-long conflict. This book traces the roots of the conflict to the historic relationship between the peoples of China and Vietnam, the ongoing Sino-Soviet dispute, and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's desire to modernize his country. The book takes readers into the heart of Beijing's decision-making process and illustrates the war's importance for understanding the modern Chinese military, as well as China's role in the Asian-Pacific world today.

In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa, leaving the People's Republic of China with a crisis on its Tibetan frontier. This book tells the story of the PRC's response to that crisis and, in doing so, brings to life an extraordinary cast of characters: Chinese diplomats appalled by sky burials, Guomindang spies working with Tibetans in Nepal, traders carrying salt across the Himalayas, and Tibetan Muslims rioting in Lhasa. Moving from capital cities to far-flung mountain villages, from top diplomats to nomads crossing disputed boundaries in search of pasture, this book shows Cold War China as it has never been seen before and reveals the deep influence of the Tibetan crisis on the political fabric of present-day China.

This book examines American nation building in South Korea during the Cold War. Marshaling a vast array of new American and Korean sources, it explains why South Korea was one of the few postcolonial nations to achieve rapid economic development and democratization by the end of the twentieth century. The book contends that a distinctive combination of American initiatives and Korean agency enabled South Korea's stunning transformation. On the one hand, the United States supported the emergence of a developmental autocracy that spurred economic growth in a highly authoritarian manner. On the other, it sought to encourage democratization from the bottom up by fashioning new institutions and promoting a dialogue about modernization and development. Expanding the framework of traditional diplomatic history, the book examines not only state-to-state relations, but also the social and cultural interactions between Americans and South Koreans. It shows how Koreans adapted, resisted, and transformed American influence and promoted socioeconomic change that suited their own aspirations. Ultimately, the book argues, Koreans' capacity to tailor American institutions and ideas to their own purposes was the most important factor in the making of a democratic South Korea.