BECOMING ASIAN AMERICAN; Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities

KIBRIA, Nazli, BECOMING ASIAN AMERICAN; Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities. Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002, 217pp., $40.95 hardcover.

Kibria's book is a timely and important contribution to the research on the issues of ethnicity, identity and adaptation of the new immigrants in America, especially with the increasing proportion of nonwhite racial minorities. She draws upon her extensive interviews that she conducted with the second- generation Chinese and Korean Americans in Boston and Los Angeles. She has divided her book into seven chapters and has explored their experiences in different life contexts and situations. Kibria is of Bangladeshi decent and her studying the Chinese and Korean in America presents an interesting example of the 'insider-outsider' continuum in the ethnographic research.

While analyzing the 'puzzle' of the new immigration integration, Kibria, delineates that Asian Americans are both racial and ethnic Americans, i.e., their experiences merge...