The quest for gold mountain.

• Author: Bow, Leslie
• Position: 'The Making of Asian America: A History' - Book review

The Making of Asian America: A History

By Erika Lee

Simon & Schuster. 416 pages. $29.95.

In 1914, my grandfather was recommended for deportation.

He failed to convince immigration officials at Angel Island--the Ellis Island of the West Coast--that he was indeed the son of a legal immigrant attempting to bring his family over from China. Officials found discrepancies between the testimonies of the "alleged" father and son. In response to the question, "Is there resemblance between alleged father and applicant?" the inspector typed, "Not in my opinion."

His conclusion: "Attempted fraud is quite evident." Federal repositories house hundreds of such decisions regarding Chinese migrants in interrogations like this. Detailed questions about the village, house, and neighbors were designed for tripping up would-be immigrants as cheats willing to commit fraud to obtain passage into Gold Mountain, their name for the United States. Why this bureaucracy of suspicion in a nation of immigrants?

Erika Lee's important book, The Making of Asian America: A History, answers this question with a comprehensive and accessible account of migrants from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. From the first appearance of Filipino sailors landing in the New World in the 1500s, through the racial profiling of South Asians after 9/11, the book succeeds in conveying the shared experience of being Asian in the United States.

It's also a much welcome caution against believing the media hype about Asians in this country.

In 2012, the Pew Research Center released a report titled, "The Rise of Asian Americans." It begins: "Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States." Such grandiose statements feed a popular narrative about a racial minority that might not perform like one. For that reason, Americans love Asians. For that reason, we also hate them.

The Making of Asian America resurrects a history that has been conveniently lost, but one that explains this contradictory sentiment. Lee, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, is eminently well suited to survey the vast panorama of Asian experience in the United States (with a nod to parallel histories in Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean). Her book draws on scholarly work in Asian American studies, as well as archives, newspaper accounts...