When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.
When the Chinese first came to San Francisco, they were actually welcomed by the mayor and they had special ceremonies for them-again this is when their colony was very small, only a few Chinese.
There isn't much in the way of pure communist spirit, because the whole nation seems to be engaged in capitalistic enterprises. Much of the country still operates under government control.
There is also an epidemic of infertility in this country. There are more women who have put off child-bearing in favor of their professional lives. For them, the only way they are going to have a family is to adopt from China.
The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.
Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law.
Of course, in the United States, which at the time was a very young country, there were also class distinctions. They weren't as pronounced, but they quickly evolved as well.
It's much more difficult to work on a broad subject than on a specific one, because even if it's hard to find the information, if you look hard enough for something specific you will find it, and you will discover things that you wouldn't have thought of before.
It was clear that the special interest groups in California really wanted the Chinese to be shut out of the country, because that was where the racial tension was the greatest.
If the conditions were right there could be great acceptance. Often it is only when they pose an economic or political threat that it turns really ugly.
After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.
For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
