Obesity has reached epidemic levels in the United States (U.S.). Despite an increasing number of studies on obesity, a very few have addressed this debilitating condition among Asian American adults. The overall objective of this study is to utilize the latest cycles of the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) to better understand obesity and identify its correlates among Asian Americans. The study population comprised Asian American adults aged 18 years or older from the CHIS with data pooled from the 2013 and 2014 survey years. Obesity (≥27.5 kg/m2) was defined using the World Health Organization (WHO) Asian body mass index (BMI) cut points. This study examined differences in obesity prevalence across ethnically diverse groups, the association between geography and obesity, and investigated the influence of immigrant generation on obesity. Descriptive analyses were used to examine the prevalence of obesity. Weighted multiple logistic regression analyses were used for the analyses. The prevalence of obesity was 23.3% among Asian Americans. Compared to Whites, being Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese were associated with lower prevalence of obesity (Odd Ratio (OR) = 0.28, 95% CI = 0.18-0.45; OR=0.14, 95% CI=0.04-0.46; OR=0.28, 95% CI=0.14-0.58, respectively). Compared to Chinese, being Japanese and Filipino were associated with higher obesity prevalence (OR=2.75, 95% CI=1.52-4.95; OR=2.90, 95% CI=1.87-4.49). Living in rural areas was associated with lower prevalence of obesity in 2014 (OR=0.53, 95% CI=0.29-0.97). Being male was associated with higher prevalence of obesity overall, in 2013, and in 2014, respectively. In California, 1st generation of Asians had lower odds of being obese compared to Whites (OR=0.34, 95% CI=0.26-0.45). Among Asian adults, 2nd generation (OR=1.69, 95% CI=1.10-2.60) and 3rd generation (OR=2.33, 95% CI=1.29-4.22) were associated with higher odds of being obese compared to 1st generation. Disparities in ethnicity/race, geography, and immigrant generations were observed in Asian Americans in California in 2013-2014. Our findings can help resolve controversies surrounding the obesity etiology, especially as applied to health disparities in Asian Americans, and help guide future obesity and health disparity elimination intervention efforts.

Asians have been part of the American South's physical, cultural, and economic landscape since Reconstruction when plantation owners introduced Chinese immigrants to replace newly freed African Americans as their primary labor source. Nearly a century later, sweeping immigration reform led to the influx of thousands of Asian immigrants who transformed the region's social, economic, and physical landscapes. Southern Orientation: Reimagining Asian American Identity and Place in the Global South utilizes twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film, and oral histories to investigate how the socio-spatial practices of Asians produce new iterations of place-bound identities that unsettle traditional notions of southern community. Drawing from spatial theory, cultural trauma, and ecocriticism, this dissertation argues that the appearance of the Asian engenders new anxieties and reawakens past anxieties about racial and ethnic integration in the post-Jim Crow South. However, the growing visibility of Asians in the region also hints at the possibility of new multiracial and multiethnic coalitions and new place-bound communal identities centered on the shared struggle against material, social, and spatial inequalities.;With the exception of a few studies, there is a noticeable lack of scholarship on Asian Americans in southern literature and film. But the increased focus on the South in a global context and the growing number of narratives depicting Asians living in the region are compelling reasons to further explore the ways in which Asians influence and are influenced by southern cultural practices. These recent texts highlight the global movements of peoples, cultures, and economies that mark the region as both a transformed and transformative place. Works including Monique Truong's short story "Kelly" (1991) and Cynthia Kadohata's children's novel Kira-Kira (2004) illustrate how the internationalization of southern locales can reintroduce segregationist practices as a means of safeguarding long-held communal boundaries based on racial, ethnic, and class differences. Other narratives such as Mira Nair's film Mississippi Masala (1991) and Cynthia Shearer's novel The Celestial Jukebox (2004) reveal how Asians are part of a larger narrative of exploitation, exclusion, and survival that interweaves the history of multiple "Souths.".;For Asians migrating to the American South, defining home often involves the complex interplay between stasis and movement, acceptance and opposition, remembering and forgetting. This study foregrounds the critical intersections between Southern studies and Asian American cultural politics in order to better understand how global processes influence the ways in which an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic population define, inhabit, and transform communities in the American South.

This research assesses cultural meanings attributed to Asian American sport celebrities, focusing specifically on former professional tennis player Michael Chang and professional golfer Michelle Wie. This work will examine how they are represented in mainstream American media and how their images have been used in various advertising campaigns. A key assumption of this research is that cultural stakeholders are involved in their particular media representations. Given that Asian American athletes have occupied peripheral positions in American sport, media and their invisibility in advertising campaigns, the recent commodification of Asian American athletic bodies is worth examining in greater detail. Drawing on Susan Birrell and Mary McDonald's (1999, 2000) “reading sport” methodology, I critically read their representations in mainstream media and television commercials to explore the complexity and particularity of the articulation of power lines surrounding these Asian American sport celebrities. The “reading sport” methodology emphasizes the particularity of power relations and interdependence of lines of power. Accordingly, I situate his or her representations in the different contexts that each athlete had to encounter. Chang's representation is situated within the conservative climate of post-Reagan America, and Wie's representation is situated within the context neoliberal racism and postfeminism. This study provides a broad understanding of the media representations of Asian American athletes and their different ideological functions in different contexts. Given that there have been a serious lack of studies regarding Asian American athletes, this study seeks to extend the existing body of knowledge about Asian American athletes and their multiple representations.

My research is a qualitative study about the Asian American experience. Studies have shown that Asian Americans obtain high levels of educational attainment and household income, but these figures are misleading. Asian Americans are getting a lower financial return on their education compared to their white counterparts. They suffer higher rates of suicide and depression than all other racial groups. Little quantitative and no qualitative research exists addressing these issues. My research explores Asian American life experiences with a focus on what role systemic racism plays in their lives and how this connects to the health disparities. This analysis utilizes thirty-six in-depth interviews to discuss the types and frequency of racist events. Respondents revealed a plethora of discriminatory incidents and shared various coping strategies that they use to deal with the stress of discrimination and to combat future racism. The analysis concludes that the great efforts that Asian Americans go to in order to protect themselves from white racism are costly. Respondents have to combat feelings of isolation, inadequacy, and inferiority. The analysis also utilizes interview data to discuss the ways in which respondents attempt to conform to the white racial frame in hopes to find relief from discrimination. By conforming, some adopt negative racial stereotypes about themselves and other people of color. Even after going to great lengths to conform, interviewees still struggled with feeling excluded by whites. Eventually, some respondents became hopeless that they would ever be accepted. This work also explores alternative methods some Asian Americans are using to combat systemic racism. Some respondents revealed an alternate mindset to those who have chosen to conform to the white racial frame. This group of respondents challenged white racist ideologies, and some even discussed methods in which they actively resist in hopes to improve the racial situation for all Asian Americans. This work is an attempt to fill the large gaps in research about the unique Asian American experience. There has been no other similar analysis in the past. My data reveal the complexities of the Asian American experience and the need for further research.

Even if their presence is only temporary, diasporic individuals are bound to disrupt the existing order of pre-structured communities they enter. Plenty of scholars have written on how identity is constructed; I investigate the power relations that form when components such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and language intersect in diasporic and transnational movements. How does sexuality operate on ethnicity so as to cause an existential crisis? How does religion function both to reinforce and to hide one's ethnic identity? Diasporic subjects participate in the resignification of their identity not only because they encounter (semi)-alien, socio-economic and cultural environments but also because components of their identity mentioned above realign along different trajectories, and this realignment undoubtedly affects the way they interact in the new environment. To explore this territory, I analyze Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, Peter Bacho's Cebu, Linh Dinh's "Prisoner with a Dictionary" and "'!'," and Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land.

During World War II, over 100,000 Japanese American were confined in relocation and internment camps across the country as a result of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. While many of their families were behind barbed wire, thousands of other Japanese Americans served in the US Army's Military Intelligence Service and the all-Japanese American 100th Infantry and 442nd Regimental Combat Team. These circumstances were largely public knowledge during the war years, but a pervasive silence on the subject became apparent in the decades following the war. Due to widespread racism and recognition of the hypocrisy evident in a democratic country confining its own citizens, many Americans were content to allow the Japanese American experiences to be forgotten. The destruction and scattering of communities through evacuation and resettlement and a sense of shame within the Japanese American community helped perpetuate the silence amongst Japanese Americans as well. Through the Civil Rights Movement, the social protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and ultimately through the redress movement in the 1980s, the Japanese American voice gradually entered the public consciousness. Following the discussion of the historical context for the WWII experiences of the Japanese Americans, this research analyzes the period of forgetting and the various factors that combined to allow for eventual change. An analysis of public commemoration through war memorials, museums, historic sites, community events, and the less traditional memorials of novels, artwork, and films reveals how members of the Japanese American community and sympathetic Caucasian Americans overcame racist opposition and demonstrated determination in their efforts to pay tribute to the sacrifices of the soldiers, preserve relevant sites, and provide for the education of current and future generations on the subject of the Japanese American experience. The research also demonstrates the diversity within the Japanese American community, by disproving the common stereotype of homogeneity within the "model minority," and revealing the strength of individualism within the community as a significant contributing factor to memorialization efforts.

My research is a qualitative study about the Asian American experience. Studies have shown that Asian Americans obtain high levels of educational attainment and household income, but these figures are misleading. Asian Americans are getting a lower financial return on their education compared to their white counterparts. They suffer higher rates of suicide and depression than all other racial groups. Little quantitative and no qualitative research exists addressing these issues. My research explores Asian American life experiences with a focus on what role systemic racism plays in their lives and how this connects to the health disparities. This analysis utilizes thirty-six in-depth interviews to discuss the types and frequency of racist events. Respondents revealed a plethora of discriminatory incidents and shared various coping strategies that they use to deal with the stress of discrimination and to combat future racism. The analysis concludes that the great efforts that Asian Americans go to in order to protect themselves from white racism are costly. Respondents have to combat feelings of isolation, inadequacy, and inferiority. The analysis also utilizes interview data to discuss the ways in which respondents attempt to conform to the white racial frame in hopes to find relief from discrimination. By conforming, some adopt negative racial stereotypes about themselves and other people of color. Even after going to great lengths to conform, interviewees still struggled with feeling excluded by whites. Eventually, some respondents became hopeless that they would ever be accepted. This work also explores alternative methods some Asian Americans are using to combat systemic racism. Some respondents revealed an alternate mindset to those who have chosen to conform to the white racial frame. This group of respondents challenged white racist ideologies, and some even discussed methods in which they actively resist in hopes to improve the racial situation for all Asian Americans. This work is an attempt to fill the large gaps in research about the unique Asian American experience. There has been no other similar analysis in the past. My data reveal the complexities of the Asian American experience and the need for further research.

Abstract This thesis sets out to explore Shirley Geok-lin Lim's poetry collection Monsoon History in terms of three aspects: language, migrancy, and ethnicity. It also attempts to examine Shirley Lim's diasporic identity by embracing the border thinking. The notion of border-crossing, either physically or psychologically, passes through each chapter to represent the poet's identity and to re-create a space for herself to articulate. It is a study of Lim's exile experiences and how she establishes the poetics of diaspora for Asian American literature. In the introduction, the concept of diaspora and the theoretical framework will be explicated. The first chapter probes into the relationship between Shirley Lim and her choice of language in writing. I adopt Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's analysis of language and definition of ¡§minor literature¡¨ to discuss the deterritorialization of Lim's writing. The second chapter traces Lim's migrant status, in which I resort to Edward Said's ¡§Reflections on Exile¡¨ and his different categorizations of exile. The third chapter, appealing to several theorists or critics, such as Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Ling-chi Wang, deals with Lim's problem of ethnic identity displayed in her poetry. The last chapter concludes with an overall argumentation that the destination and dissolution of Lim's identity is an Asian American because of reterritorialization of language, migrancy, and ethnicity.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2003. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-96). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-187). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.