Hazel Ah Ying Lee: Chinese-American WASP

Hazel Ah  Ying Lee was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1912. She was the daughter of Chinese immigrants—the second of eight children. Lee was nineteen when she experienced her first flight, at the end of a friend’s flying lesson.  She was hooked. She immediately began to save up the money for flying lessons from her…

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Strangers in the Land

I ended Asian-American Heritage Month with a Big Fat History Book: Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Michael Luo started thinking about writing such a history in the fall of 2016. He and his family were standing in front of a restaurant in Manhattan when a…

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The Celestials’ Last Game

I’ve been following Ben Railton on social media for a long time now, first on the site formerly known as Twitter (back in the good old days) and now on Bluesky, where he is @americanstudier.bluesky.social  Among other things, he curates a fabulous list, #SundayScholar, of people to follow and stuff to read. I always find…

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