The Loneliest Americans By Jay Caspian Kang
- Narrated by: Intae Kim
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Release date: 10-12-21
The Loneliest Americans AudioBook Summary
A riveting blend of family history and original reportage that explores — and reimagines — Asian American identity in a Black and white world
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR
“A smart, vulnerable, and incisive exploration of what it means for this brilliant and honest writer — a child of Korean immigrants — to assimilate and aspire while being critical of his membership in his community of origin, in his political tribe, and in America.” (Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko)
In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country’s demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They came with almost no understanding of their new home, much less the history of “Asian America” that was supposed to define them.
The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite — all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.”
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