Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America [Paperback]

AKirkus Reviews,New York Public Library, andThe New YorkerBest Book of the Year

Biting the Handvivid, powerful, and empatheticgrapples with the story of how America got made, is made, and will be made. The harshness of this story is often forgotten or misused. This book reminds us of some of its complicated truth.Jamaica Kincaid, author ofA Small Place

Julia Lee is angry. And she has questions.What does it mean to be Asian in America? What does it look like to be an ally or an accomplice? How can we shatter the structures of white supremacy that fuel racial stratification?

When Julia was fifteen, her hometown went up in smoke during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Julia was taught to be grateful for the privilege afforded to her. However, the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, following the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper, forced Julia to question her racial identity and complicity. She was neither Black nor white. So who was she?

This question would follow Julia for years to come, resurfacing as she traded in her tumultuous childhood for the white upper echelon of elite academia. It was only when she began a PhD in English that she found answersnot through studying Victorian literature, as Julia had planned, but rather in the brilliant prose of writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Their works gave Julia the vocabulary and, more important, the permission to critically examine her own tortured position as an Asian American, setting off a powerful journey of racial reckoning, atonement, and self-discovery.

With prose by turns scathing and heart-wrenching, Julia lays bare the complex disorientation and shame that stem from this countrys imposed racial hierarchy. And she argues that Asian Americans must work towardlÃT