Editors' introduction

The USA is a nation of immigrants and the children of immigrants, most of whom did not speak English when they arrived and whose adopted English will always show traces of their ancestry. Among notable groups of recent immigrants are speakers of Asian languages, with numbers large enough to sustain ancestral languages alongside English in some American communities. Asian immigrants are not new to the USA, and in this chapter Thom Huebner and Linda Uyechi describe the struggle many have faced in learning English, including “the role of language in negotiating multiple identities across cultures and generations” and “the emotion-laden burden of coping with racism and language discrimination” in the new land of promise.

The chapter relates the history of Asian contact and immigration, from its beginnings perhaps well before Columbus to its present-day compass across the Pacific and throughout Asia. Though the term “Asian American” has become familiar, this chapter underscores the fact that “Asian American” encompasses members of a community that is “split along several dimensions: first and second waves of immigration, immigrants and refugees, Asians in Hawai'i and Asians on the mainland, different countries of origin, different generations, and different languages.” The term covers an enormously diverse “community” whose home languages are members of many language families – Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Indo- European, and Tai, in addition to Japanese and Korean, languages that are generally not recognized as having related family members. For the hugely diverse Asian American community, the authors note, “the glue that binds” is English.