Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties

By Karen L. Ishizuka. Foreword by Jeff Chang.

A narrative history of the movement that turned Orientals into Asian Americans.

Until the political ferment of the Long Sixties, there were no Asian Americans. There were only isolated communities of mostly Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos lumped together as Orientals. Serve the People tells the story of the social and cultural movement that knit these disparate communities into a political identity, the history of howand whythe double consciousness of Asian America came to be. Drawing on more than 120 interviews and illustrated with striking images from guerrilla movement publications, the book evokes the feeling of growing up alien in a society rendered in black and white, and recalls the intricate memories and meanings of the Asian American movement.

Paper: 288 pp.