ABSTRACT
[Until the early 1960s, many desirable new suburbs legally advertised that no homes would be sold to anyone but Christian whites. Purchasers even had to sign a clause guaranteeing that they would never resell the house to anyone non-Christian or non-white. When that changed, the great exodus of newly prosperous second generation Asians (the ‘Nisei,’ in Japanese) began. Brian Niiya has disguised this affectionate, comic memoir of the Nisei generation’s escape from the Little Tokyos to Brady Bunch suburban prosperity as a set of deadpan instructions to his third (Sansei) generation, on how to build a “Nisei-style house.”—The Editors.]
