Topography of War: Asian American Essays

"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.