Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
On the Human Condition I HAVE READ RICHARD HOFSTADTER and understand the root of anti-intellectualism in this country’s history, but its abysmally low point still surprises and saddens me. Almost thirty years ago, after witnessing the lights at Tiananmen Square go out and a massacre carried out in the dark, I looked towards the New … Read more
PANDEMIC BRINGS US TO PANDEMONIUM, not the center of Hell—Pandemonium in Milton’s Paradise Lost—but tumult, chaos, the upending of our quotidian lives due to the infernal virus, on which we have conferred the somewhat majestic title, Novel Corona Virus-19. Normalcy is a far-away country, and even with all its attendant and even discordant notes, seems … Read more
In the first decades of the 20th century, almost half of the Chinese Americans born in the United States moved to China—a relocation they assumed would be permanent. At a time when people from around the world flocked to the United States, this little-noticed emigration belied America’s image as a magnet for immigrants and a land of upward mobility for all. Fleeing racism, Chinese Americans who sought greater opportunities saw China, a tottering empire and then a struggling republic, as their promised land. American Exodus is the first book to explore this extraordinary migration of Chinese Americans.
This talk is based on an essay for the upcoming issue of Asian American Matters: A New York Anthology, published by AAARI, discussing the necessary convergence of Islamic Studies and Asian studies. Prof. Ming Xia will elaborate on his own personal and intellectual journey as a China scholar, discovering how Islam has become so essential … Read more
Among many art, music and literature lovers, particularly devotees of Modernism, the expatriate community in France during the Jazz Age represents a remarkable convergence of genius in one place and period—one of the most glorious in history. Drawn by the presence of such avant-garde figures as Joyce and Picasso, artists and writers fled the censorious … Read more
From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, a Polish Jew named Emile Bocian, extensively photographed and documented New York City’s Chinese community for The China Post, a Chinese-language daily paper. Billing itself as “The Voice of the American Chinese,” The China Post was in publication from 1972 through 1986. At its height, the paper saw a … Read more