This collection offers multifaceted explorations of how Chinese Americans have shaped their ethnic culture and identities to claim recognition and acceptance as participants in America's multiracial, multicultural democratic state. In a field that has recently demonstrated its centrality to American processes of racialized nation-state and ideological formations, these articles represent a cutting edge in American, immigration, and ethnic studies.Sucheng Chan introduces this valuable new anthology with a commanding discussion of the field of Chinese American studies, in which she examines its history and points the way ahead. Here, she and Madeline Y. Hsu have brought together leading-edge scholarship from a new generation of thinkers, as useful for scholars as it is for undergraduate readers. The contributors address a broad range of issues, from the activism of left-wing and Communist Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in the 1920s and early 1930s and humanitarian relief during the Sino-Japanese War to the construction of new Chinese regional identities in New York.