Review of “Chasing the American Dream in China: Chinese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland”

“Chasing the American Dream in China” by Leslie Kim Wang is a newly published book about Asian Americans in a setting outside of America. Asian Americans ironically have been seen as both a “model” minority and invisible minority in US society, but relatively few studies focused on Asian Americans, compared with African Americans. Moreover, the existing studies of Asian Americans have focused on Asians in the United States, and they often discuss the achievement and assimilation process of Asian immigrants and their offspring in the United States. Taking a different approach, Leslie Wang has turned her lens to the other side of the world to study Asian Americans who work and live in Asia. Through semi-structured interviews with over 40 Chinese Americans who were either born in or migrated to the United States at a very young age with their parents, Leslie looked closely at how these Chinese Americans have...