ABSTRACT
When pondering these two excellent books focused, respectively, on an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ Asian American population, I encountered an intriguing volume by the sociologist Kai Erikson (1994) that persuaded me to construe them in terms of ‘human disaster research’. The volume by Tamura, a third-generation Japanese American (Sansei) born and raised in the small Oregon community in which her study is set, centres upon the ‘disaster’ of the Second World War eviction and detention experience of, primarily, her Nisei parents’ and Issei grandparents’ generations (as represented in taped interviews by the author with fourteen surviving Hood River Issei).1 Similarly, Chan’s edited anthology of ‘interviews’ (more accurately, life stories) transacted by her Hmong students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, concentrates on the linked ‘disaster’ of war, flight, and resettlement endured by their parents and grandparents in Southeast Asia and the United States over the last four decades. At the heart of both of these books is the problematic relationship between traumatized communities and the intergenerational transmission of the remembered past.
