Kwong, Peter

Peter Kwong, director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, is a Chinatown activist and the author of Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930-1950.

Newspapers today are filled with stories of corruption and strife in America's Chinatowns, reversing the popular view of Chinese Americans as a model minority of law-abiding, hard-working people whose diligent children end up in high-tech jobs. In The New Chinatown, Peter Kwong goes beyond the headlines in a compelling and detailed account of the political and cultural isolation of Chinese-American communities. This new edition offers a revised and updated text as well as a new chapter on Chinatown in the 1990s. Peter Kwong's informed and up-to-date socio-historical study of modern Chinese communities in the United States-and their continuing isolation and disenfranchisement-offers a "slendid antidote to the consistent misrepresentation of Chinese-American life in the press and in scholarly writings. This important book breaks through the myth of the 'model minority' to reveal the character of Chinatown's economic boom, the new sources of conflict and domination it has created, and the recent struggles of the community's workers and political activists." --David Montgomery, Yale University