Family Amnesia (Book Talk)

Family Amnesia (Daylight Books, 2024) is a visual tribute and love letter honoring author Betty Yu's Chinese American family roots in the United States. The art book explores her family's multi-generational resilience and resistance through mixed-media collages, her grandfather’s photographs, and own captured images and archival material.

This book project honors the past and current lives of Asian Americans and immigrants in the U.S. by examining the incalculable and traumatic impact that historical events like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act continue to have on the Asian American experience—a painful part of our American history. Yu's book reclaims that narrative through her own personal family story, featuring her grandfather’s role as a founding member of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of NY, her mother’s plight as a garment worker who became a labor organizer, and her sister’s legacy as a community activist. Though her family story may not be unique, it is part of the larger collective Asian-American immigration experience.

Yu's book project reminds us that the rise of COVID-related anti-Asian violence is part of a larger history of systemic racism. As the U.S. government and corporate-run media continue to vilify China as a global threat, Family Amnesia recalls the anti-China and anti-Asian paranoia and hysteria that created the policies such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1942 Executive Order that placed Japanese-Americans into incarceration camps. The book also draws visually on geo-political history, recalling narratives that mocked China as the "sick man of Asia '' and demonized the Chinese as a “Yellow Peril.”

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Host or Publisher Asian American / Asian Research Institute - CUNY