Word: changes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...RETIREMENT ANNOUNCED. Michael Chang, 31, tennis player known for his incredible hustle and for being one of the first Asian-Americans to make it in the game; after losing to Fernando Gonzales of Chile in the first round of the U.S. Open; in Flushing Meadows, New York. After turning pro at age 17, Chang burst into the tennis world with a win at the French Open in 1989. In 1997, he was the No. 2 tennis player in the world. Chang said he would devote his time to promoting tennis in Asia...
...introduction to The Chinese in America, popular historian Iris Chang identifies her interest in the Chinese-American experience as stemming in part from her own childhood frustration with peers who insisted on seeing her? the daughter of Chinese immigrants in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois?as foreign, an outsider. That phenomenon, of course, persists today. Chang notes that when American Olympic figure skater Michelle Kwan lost a competition to a teammate, MSNBC's headline read: AMERICAN BEATS OUT KWAN...
...Chang says she believed she had "a personal obligation to write an honest history of Chinese America, to dispel the offensive stereotypes that had long permeated the U.S. news and entertainment media." She traces the lineage of such attitudes through 150 years of Chinese immigration. (America's first female Chinese arrival, Afong Moy, was brought to New York to serve as a living curio in a museum exhibition .) The stories of successive waves of Chinese newcomers who were witnesses and participants in America's most dynamic moments?the Gold Rush, construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, Reconstruction, the civil-rights movement...
...Which makes it all the more disappointing that the narrative in The Chinese in America is too often drowned out by Chang's shrill homilies on the politics of identity . In a discussion of the formation of benevolent associations in San Francisco's Chinatown, she writes: "The white man's government had demonstrated that its mission was to suppress, not protect, Chinese interests." At times, her legitimate attempts to tackle negative racial stereotypes get lost in a flurry of equally clich?d?and occasionally jingoistic?tributes to Chinese-ness. After quoting an American who is impressed that the first foreign-language...
...Chang is at her weakest when writing about the history of China itself. Her sketch of the country her subjects left behind reads sometimes like an overly romantic travel guide and at others like a nationalistic mainland textbook. On one page, China's borders include Tibet and Xinjiang (which were by no means part of China throughout all 5,000 years); two pages later, without respecifying her geographic boundaries, she writes that "out of the welter of dialects only one written language had emerged." What about Tibetan, Uighur, Mongolian? Chang is particularly hard on the Manchus, the northern-dwelling nomads...