Chinese American Death Rituals ─ Respecting The Ancestors

American anthropologists and historians survey Chinese American funerary rituals and ceremonies from the late 19th century to the present, to show the various ways Chinese Americans have resolved tensions between assimilation into the mainstream culture and their strong Chinese heritage. Their topics include Cantonese rites for death and ghost-spirits in an American city, Chinese cemeteries and burial practices in the interior Pacific northwest, remembering ancestors in Hawai'i, and the Chinese mortuary tradition in San Francisco's Chinatown. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Sue Fawn Chung is an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is an advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a member of the NTHP's Diversity Council, and an advisor to Preserve Nevada, the statewide preservation organization. She serves on the Board of Museums and History for the state of Nevada. Her fields of specialization are late Qing history and Chinese American history. She has published numerous studies on Chinese Americans. Priscilla Wegars is the founder and volunteer curator of the University of Idaho's Asian American Comparative Collection, a repository of artifacts and documentary materials essential for the study of Asian American archaeological sites, economic contributions, and cultural history. She edited Hidden Heritage: Historical Archaeology of the Overseas Chinese (1993) and wrote Polly Bemis: A Chinese American Pioneer (2003) and "Polly Bemis: Lurid Life or Literary Legend?" in Wild Women of the Old West, edited by Glenda Riley and Richard W. Etulain (2003).