students. Each chapter deals with the kind of education received in the home
country, how widely available it was, how equal or unequal the society was, and
what were the circumstances under which the emigration of children like these
occurred. The latter part of each chapter, on the other hand, deals with the edu-
cation the children have received in the United States. Also throughout the book,
instead of dwelling on a relatively narrow range of children who perform spec-
tacularly well, I try to discover the educational situation among the more ordi-
nary children.

The countries and regions covered are listed in the table of contents. In 1990,
people from these places plus their children who were born here numbered nearly
7.3 million (see Table. 1.1 ). By 1996, the figure had reached 9 million. Other coun-
tries who had sent few immigrants are not dealt with. Nor are those for which lit-
tle information exists in English. (These include Burma, Indonesia, Thailand,
Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and several countries such as Ladakh and Sikkim.)

The order of the chapters is roughly chronological in terms of when the first
sizable numbers of immigrants came from a specific country. As a result of the
great increase in Asian immigration since 1965 (see Table 1.2 ), most Asian-
Americans are presently immigrants. Following are the percentages of each
group who were immigrants in 1990: ²

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