The invaluable services provided by Filipina health-care workers to the elderly (much in evidence here in Taiwan) are lauded in another essay. Registered Filipina nurses are a common sight in the US and Canada, the author points out, but the work done by non-registered workers in connection with those incapacitated by age has received less attention.
One of the virtues of this collection is that it doesn't necessarily subscribe to the formulaic pieties of those routinely opposed to the injustices brought about by inequalities of race, class and gender. The undeniable fact that Asian Americans have experienced discrimination and other hardships, in other words, is not always and inevitably taken as a pretext to view them as victims pure and simple. The complexity of reality is accepted, and, though some of the pieces are strongly worded, not all the writers involved in the book have an ax to grind.
The most absorbing item concerns a Vietnamese woman, Xuan. Her story is told in order to throw more light on the experience of local women during the Vietnam War. For her, who was going to win didn't matter -- she could hardly distinguish between the communists and the government forces anyway. She fought not for an ideology or a boundary but to try to keep her family and children alive. All she and the millions like her wanted was for the fighting to end.
As a teenage refugee, she was forced into prostitution after she became the only support for her family left alive, she told her interviewer. She simply lost track of many relatives, especially fighting men. There are still 300,000 Vietnamese missing-in-action, in contrast to 1,750 Americans, she points out. She eventually married a US airman, the father of her second child, but even then went on to live life as a battered wife in the US.
This book forms a useful companion volume to The Columbia Guide to Asian-American History (reviewed in Taipei Times 3 March 2002). The former is a wide-ranging survey, pointing researchers in the direction of particular sets of texts. This eye-opening book, by contrast, puts specific problems, and often single case-histories, under the microscope.
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