They were Americans.
“Chinese Americans” is a racial slur.
They were Americans fighting for America.
Their ancestry is no more important than their hair color.
Unfortunately the book is very expensive and hard to get. My family is of Chinese descent and my uncle was wounded three times in WW II. Once was at Anzio and James Arness (Gunsmoke) was also in the same unit and landing craft where he was also wounded. My mother and father still remember they had to wear buttons that said they were Chinese not Japanese as children.I look forward to seeing this.
You’ll need to take up your posted comment with Ms. Chang. I’m just relaying the book’s title.
The use of the term “Chinese-Americans” was important because some were needed in the CBI theaters as translators working with Chang Kai-shek’s Nationalists/Kuomintang forces and civilians (who save hundreds of downed American fliers and soldiers from the Japanese).
My late friend Gen. Bernie Yoh, was a very young Kuomintang general (See: “SACO - Sino-American Combined Operations” book for details.
My father was a Jewish-American who spoke Yiddish so he worked with German POWs. My uncle was a German refugee who was commissioned as an Interpretor and sent back to Europe to interrogate German POWs.
Your ethnicity/religion often is an indicator of those who are needed in certain types of military and civilian wartime roles - translators, radio broadcasters/interceptors, liaisons - the Japanese-American gun coordinate spotters in the Pacific; the American Indian Navaho Code-Talkers, and the Nisei troops in Europe, esp. the 442nd).
Many thousands of American and allied lives were saved because of American whose ethnic/religious/etc upbringings gave them a linguistic/cultural tool with which to aid the Allied cause.
We must salute them, not fight over an identity word that is NOT meant as a slur.
In Vietnam, I met a Honduran black man who enlisted in the US Army so that he could become an American citizen (not many Vietnamese spoke Spanish/English from what I heard); there was a Hungarian refugee turned US citizen as a military advisor to the PSDF around Pleiku in the Central Highlands, who enlisted to help pay back and support the USA for saving him from communism and he wanted to help save others from it; a Jewish AMA doctor in Bac Lieu who was there on a six month voluntary tour - AMA sponsored; a black American advisor at the base of Chau Phu Mt., Chau Doc Province, with his white American partner.
We are all Americans in our hearts (if you are not a hardcore leftist), but sometimes a sub-identity has useful skills associated with it, usually linguistic/cultural.
Be proud of all these Americans, hyphenated or not. I am.