“Narrative Cold War: Public Identities in the Confession Era,” Excerpt from Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities: The Cold War of Chinese American Narrative (Temple University Press, 2021)

In this excerpt from Heidi Kim's book llegal Immigrants: Model Minorities: The Cold War of Chinese American Narrative, Kim presents new research on the life and family history of Chinese American novelist Jade Snow Wong, often regarded as a paradigm of immigrant upward mobility and whose memoirs written years apart suggest contradictory narratives of the family's immigration to the United States. Kim's deeper purpose in examining Wong's family history is to provide context for the collective history of Chinatowns and the Chinese American communities who were targeted as presumed fraudulent immigrants during a period of intensive anticommunist sentiment.