American Life

“Red and blue appear in stark contrast with one another on the map of America. But the even more profound divide is the alienation in our hearts.”

This work is a striking analysis of the struggles faced by American society, written from the perspective of a Chinese professor of history who spent 60 years of his life in the US. As both an insider and outsider to this country, Cho-yun Hsu is able to perceive what many other Americans may take for granted, and it is this viewpoint—together with his decades of experience teaching history at the University of Pittsburgh—that make this work so unusual and worthwhile.

This work analyzes American history through a wide range of topics, including culture, politics, economics, industrialization, class, ethnicity, the urban-rural divide, and more. Expertly analyzing the origins of the tension and conflict between different classes and ethnic groups in American society, this book seeks to offer a way forward from a humanistic perspective, in the hope that American society may be renewed through collective efforts, and find a new path.

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This book represents reminiscences from the life of a sojourner, and it is a diagnostic report dissecting the ills of American society, or still more a moving epic brimming with pensive lament, as it vividly outlines how the American social and political system has moved step by step toward decline.

—Yun-han Chu, Academician of Academia Sinica

As someone who has lived in and written about China and Taiwan for many years, I found this a brilliant turning of the tables: an astute long-term resident of the United States, using his lens as someone raised in the greater China world, to look at America’s problems and foibles. One of the great contemporary thinkers in the Sinophone world, Cho-yun Hsu gives us a lucid explanation of the problems he sees engulfing his adopted homeland and the lessons from the Chinese world that might help save it.

—Ian Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Professor Cho-yun Hsu has provided a compelling account of life in America since the late 1960s to date—its ups and downs, glories and challenges, and dreams and compromises. His vantage point as a Chinese historian informs his reflections and insights into a nation in troubled times.

—David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University