Telling Chinese-American Stories

Less than 70 years after the official end of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all immigration from China, Chinese American culture is all around us. Yet many of the leading examples -- from the the Charlie Chan detective novels of the 1920s to Amy Tan's bestseller The Joy Luck Club and Bruce Lee movies -- are insufficient to capture the full Chinese-American experience. Historian Mae Ngai moderates a Zócalo panel about efforts to tell those stories over the years. Panelists include University of California at Santa Barbara English professor Yunte Huang; Suellen Cheng, curator of El Pueblo Historical Monument in downtown Los Angeles; and Franklin Odo, former director of the Asian Pacific American program at the Smithsonian.