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This chapter explores the beginning of a new stage of Asian American history that is characterized by improved socioeconomic opportunities and a move away from the Asian American strongholds of Hawaii and California. The high levels of Asian American demographic growth and migration to the New South are facilitated by a less discriminatory labor market than was characteristic of the pre-Civil Rights era. Many Asian Americans are flocking to the New South to take advantage of its improved socioeconomic opportunities. Whereas the better-paying and more desirable jobs were reserved for whites in the Old South, Asian Americans in the New South no longer appear to be automatically excluded from the top of the “racial hierarchy.”

This chapter examines the role of adoptees in the history of Asian international adoption in the United States. Focusing on the socio-historical as well as aesthetic contributions by Asian American adult adoptees, it challenges the notion that international adoption is a “quiet migration.” The chapter analyzes two documentary films by Deann Borshay Liem, First Person Plural and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, in relation to two experimental films: Marlon Fuentes's Bontoc Eulogy and Rea Tajiri's History and Memory. It links the works of Borshay Liem, Fuentes, and Tajiri to what literary scholar Lisa Lowe calls “national memory” as it relates to the conception of Asian Americans as immigrants, as “foreigners-within,” in America. It argues that artistic works by and about Asian American adoptees are important to Asian American history.

Despite the turn toward diasporic, transnational, global, and comparative perspectives, this chapter argues that historians of Asian America have largely neglected and need to reflect upon inter-imperial relations--the relations of cooperation, competition, and conflict between empires, including subaltern attempts at creating spaces for maneuver and agency between them. With a focus on the development of the United States as an empire, this article identifies the key inter-imperial relations over time that have shaped the Asian American experience. An awareness of inter-imperial relations helps scholars to account for the political dynamics, the multiple sources of power, and the challenges to existing hegemonies that have structured Asian American lives. An approach sensitive to inter-imperial relations opens up the possibility of recognizing, and comparing, the simultaneous subaltern struggles that cut across nations and immigrant groups.

This concluding chapter contemplates the present state of Afro-Asian relations and begins by thinking about the connections that exist between the past and the present in which African Americans and Asian Americans find themselves. It focuses on the early twentieth century as a way to elaborate the prevalent, late twentieth-century belief that Afro-Asian relations have always been and will always be primarily hostile because of essentialized cultural differences. The most helpful way to understand the long span of Afro-Asian American history is to think of the past as a corrective that develops an unquestioned account of that history and as a gloss that explicates and contextualizes that relationship. The book concludes that writers were already writing and anticipating the early twenty-first century's obsessions; Asian American and African American cultural productions already indicate alternative narratives of American literary history that look beyond traditional field markers.

This chapter details how Japan in the 1890s was largely a mystery to Americans. Chinese, on the other hand, evoked strong sentiments of antipathy in San Francisco. As more Japanese arrived, clear distinctions arose between Chinese and Japanese as two separate races, most visibly in the city morgue’s processing of unknown Asian bodies. This differentiation between the two ethnicities further underscored San Francisco’s obsession over its Asian population, which in total made up less than 3 percent of the city’s population at the time. As city officials took pride in their home being an “International City,” communities of color and indigenous people would never have considered it to be a racial utopia. Indeed, San Francisco’s embrace of its immigrant population and diversity would only be available to ethnic whites.

The “vexed problem of immigration,” as Jane Addams termed it in 1909, was a central issue for the emerging social work profession in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Work with immigrants, some of the poorest subsections of the growing urban population, shaped the nature and the direction of social work in the crucial early years of the profession. Social work’s attention, however, did not extend to Asian immigrants nor to the fact that all Asian immigrants had long been adjudged as a population racially unsuitable for full participation in U.S. society. The profession’s lack of contact with and interest in this population—excluded in immigration and blocked from naturalization—is an important context in understanding its response to the removal and incarceration of the Nikkei during World War II.