Basically please make up an interview with an Asian American whose parents live in Hawaii & could identify with the history of how Chinese American first came to Hawaii as “coolies” or forced worker. Please insert as many historical fact as possible and relate it to the life of this interviewee.
For the final paper assignment (about 10 pages, double-spaced, 12 point Times or Times New Roman font, one-inch margins, due June 3), you will interview a familiar person and then interpret that person’s life within a broad historical context. The person does not need to identify as an Asian American, but should be someone you would like to know more about (e.g., a relative, co-worker, teacher, neighbor, acquaintance). I advise against choosing someone younger than thirty years old. How has the course of Asian American history shaped this individual’s experiences? How have the historical forces presented in the lectures and readings affected her or him? The final paper requires you to do the following over the course of the quarter: 1. By April 15 at the very latest, choose a person to write about and schedule an interview. Prepare questions related to the course to ask during the interview (e.g., on migration, work, race, gender, community, family, sexuality, war). If you plan to write on an organization, talk to the organization’s staff and clients about their pasts, hopes, frustrations, etc., and keep a research journal every week. 2. Conduct your interview. Take careful notes or record the conversation. Rather than simply proceeding down your list of questions, listen carefully to the responses and ask follow-up questions as appropriate. If you are writing on an organization, continue to keep a research journal of your experiences, conversations, and observations. 3. Review your notes and decide which personal or organizational experiences and historical themes you want to focus on. Do not worry if parts of the interview or the research journal prove unusable. You may need to schedule additional interviews to clarify matters or to obtain more information. Organize your interview notes or your research journal (about 7-10 pages, double-spaced, typed) and submit to your TA by May 13. 4. Meet with your TA or the instructor to discuss your ideas and potential argument (sign-up sheets will be circulated in May). You should have a clear sense of your argument, which explains your subject’s experiences or the organization’s trajectory in relation to the broader history, before you begin writing your paper. 5. Select and organize specific evidence from the person’s experiences or the organization’s history and the course’s readings and lectures to support your argument. Making an outline of your paper may prove extremely useful. Examples from the course do not need to correspond chronologically to the person’s or the organization’s history. For instance, you may discuss representations of Asian American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to interpret an individual woman’s experiences in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 6. As you write the paper, stay focused on developing and supporting your argument. At least half of the paper should be devoted to explaining and discussing the broader history with specific examples from the readings and lectures. But please be sure to relate them clearly and explicitly to the person’s experiences or to the organization’s history.
