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A Chinaman's Chance
Eric Liu
One Family's Journey and the Chinese American Dream
PublicAffairs
July 2014
On Sale: July 8, 2014
248 pages
ISBN: 1610391942
EAN: 9781610391948
Kindle: B00J1JPS9O
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
From Tony Hsieh to Amy Chua to Jeremy Lin, Chinese Americans
are now arriving at the highest levels of American business,
civic life, and culture. But what makes this story of
immigrant ascent unique is that Chinese Americans are
emerging at just the same moment when China has emerged -
and indeed may displace America - at the center of the
global scene. What does it mean to be Chinese American in
this moment? And how does exploring that question alter our
notions of just what an American is and will be?
In
many ways, Chinese Americans today are exemplars of the
American Dream: during a crowded century and a half, this
community has gone from indentured servitude, second-class
status and outright exclusion to economic and social
integration and achievement. But this narrative obscures too
much: the Chinese Americans still left behind, the erosion
of the American Dream in general, the emergence—perhaps—of a
Chinese Dream, and how other Americans will look at their
countrymen of Chinese descent if China and America ever
become adversaries. As Chinese Americans reconcile competing
beliefs about what constitutes success, virtue, power, and
purpose, they hold a mirror up to their country in a time of
deep flux.
In searching, often personal essays that
range from the meaning of Confucius to the role of Chinese
Americans in shaping how we read the Constitution to why he
hates the hyphen in "Chinese-American," Eric Liu pieces
together a sense of the Chinese American identity in these
auspicious years for both countries. He considers his own
public career in American media and government; his
daughter's efforts to hold and release aspects of her
Chinese inheritance; and the still-recent history that made
anyone Chinese in America seem foreign and disloyal until
proven otherwise. Provocative, often playful but always
thoughtful, Liu breaks down his vast subject into bite-sized
chunks, along the way providing insights into universal
matters: identity, nationalism, family, and more
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