What happens when Chinese American youths travel to mainland China in search of their ancestral roots, only to realize that in many ways they still feel out of place, or when mainland Chinese realize that the lives of the Chinese abroad may not be as good as they had imagined? By considering programs designed to facilitate interactions between overseas Chinese and their ancestral homelands, Andrea Louie highlights how these programs not only create opportunities for new connections but also reveal the disjunctures that now separate Chinese Americans from China and mainland Chinese from the Chinese abroad.Louie focuses on “In Search of Roots,” a program that takes young Chinese American adults of Cantonese descent to visit their ancestral villages in China’s Guangdong province. Through ethnographic interviews and observation, Louie examines the experiences of Chinese Americans both during village visits in China and following their participation in the program, which she herself took part in as an intern and researcher. She presents a vivid portrait of two populations who, though connected through family ties generations back, are meeting for the first time in the context of a rapidly changing contemporary China. Louie situates the participants’ and hosts’ shifting understandings of China and Chineseness within the context of transnational flows of people, media, goods, and money; China’s political and economic policies; and the racial and cultural politics of the United States.

Chineseness across Borders: Renegotiating Chinese Identities in China and the United States

Andrea Louie

Duke University Press Books

"This is how we are told wars end: either in victory or defeat, with honor or in shame, but as Topography of War shows us, nothing could be more false. Wars live on in intimate, complex, and painful ways, down through the generations and often in geographies far beyond their battlefields. Using word and image, the contributions in this important book pry open Asian American identities to show how they have been repeatedly forged through experiences of war. By replacing the comfortable American narrative of immigrant arrival with the very human struggle between memory and forgetting, Topography of War is also necessary reading, required not only for understanding our painful past but, as the United States continues its military adventurism around the world, for discovering what our collective future holds." -- Moustafa Bayoumi, associate professor of English, Brooklyn College.

Topography of War: Asian American Essays

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Asian American Writers' Workshop

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Andrea Louie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Andrea Louie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Andrea Louie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Chineseness across Borders: Renegotiating Chinese Identities in China and the United States

Topography of War: Asian American Essays