Nonfiction books about Chinese peoples, our cultures, our languages, and our histories, no matter where we are in the world. Also includes books that provide useful theoretical frameworks for understanding our experiences, with a caveat that this list leans toward Chinese-American experiences.

every once in a while, I finally make my peace with firefly again, only for some white person to say they’d reboot the franchise and my soul just starts scREAMING WITH HOW I, A CHINESE-AMERICAN, WOULD REIMAGINE FIREFLY AS A SINO DIASPORA NARRATIVE, SPACE WESTERN? how about how chinese people once made up a quarter…

This paper is primarily concerned with the linguistic backgrounds of Chinese immigrants to the United States and the shifts that have occurred from primarily Cantonese-speaking immigrants to later groups of immigrants that spoke other dialects, including Mandarin. However, tracing these linguistic patterns can be difficult: studies into the linguistic demographics of Chinese immigrants to the United States are limited by the lack of data on the topic. Early records of Chinese immigrants in the United States did not record their linguistic affiliations, and later records that documented the linguistic demographics of the United States population did not divide the Chinese spoken by Chinese immigrants into their component dialects. Despite these difficulties, we can still make a number of extrapolations based on the place of origin and institutional affiliations of the Chinese immigrants to determine the general trajectory of the linguistic patterns of Chinese immigrants.

Chinese-Americans are often placed in an ethnic bind: one that defines authenticity of Chinese-American identity from an outsider point of view while not recognizing lived experience or actual practice of identity. My study has found a complex relationship between language and identity in the Chinese-American diaspora, one that acknowledges
language as connected to heritage, but does not define language as necessary for authentic identity. Furthermore, the individuals who participated defined Chineseness as based solely
on heritage, and, to some participants, blood, which allows for all people of Chinese descent to have authentic Chinese identity. These shifting definitions allow for some degree of freedom from the ethnic bind, although some lingering binding with agency of reclamation remains.