American Exodus: Second Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949 (University of California Press, 2019). Between twenty-five and fifty percent of all native-born Chinese American citizens in the early twentieth century left the United States for China under the assumption that they would never permanently return to the land of their birth. American Exodus explores this little-known aspect of modern Chinese and American history through the lives of the thousands of Chinese Americans who settled in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and the Pearl River Delta.

Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Drawing on extensive research in both Chinese- and English-language sources, Between Mao and McCarthy looks at the divergent ways that Chinese Americans in San Francisco and New York balanced domestic and international pressures during the tense Cold War era. On both coasts, Chinese Americans sought to gain political power and defend their civil rights, yet only the San Franciscans succeeded. Forging multiracial coalitions and encouraging voting and moderate activism, they avoided the deep divisions and factionalism that consumed their counterparts in New York.

Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Between the early 1900s and the late 1950s, the attitudes of white Californians toward their Asian American neighbors evolved from outright hostility to relative acceptance. Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends examines this transformation through the state’s urban housing markets, where the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans, which initially stranded them in segregated areas, eventually facilitated their integration.