Chapter 6 explores US survivors’ activism in the last three decades of the twentieth century through the lens of health, illness, and medicine. Radiation illness – physical and psychosocial – continued to concern US survivors. Women were frequently primary caretakers in Asia and Asian America, spurring female survivors to consider radiation illness from both patients’ and caregivers’ perspectives. This dual challenge became a driving force for US survivors to form trans-Pacific coalitions with Japanese and Korean survivors. US survivors’ understanding of illness that placed psychosocial factors at its center drew attention from the broader Asian American community, also plagued by the lack of resources for culturally aware medical and social services. Unlike the earlier medical exams conducted on US survivors by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, US survivors’ grassroots activism proved capable of producing a solution fitting their needs. One distinct accomplishment of their activism was the creation of biannual health checkups conducted in America by Japanese physicians familiar with radiation illness, funded by the Japanese government and supported by the Asian American community.

Chapter 4 examines US survivors‘ history after they came or returned to America. Particularly, the chapter highlights US survivors‘ memories of rebuilding their lives in a society that regarded Asians as both “perpetual foreigners” and ‘model minorities.’ Many Japanese American families included both those who had been in a Japanese American incarceration camp and those who had been attacked by the bomb. Many considered it best if their experiences were forgotten or left unspoken while they focused on their work and family lives. Some survivors served in the Korean War, while many others quietly grappled with the fear of radiation illness that might strike them anytime. Among Korean and Japanese military brides who came to America in these decades, too, their physicians’ lack of understanding about radiation effects became a concern. Social isolation, as well as physical ailments, became part of US survivors’ radiation illness. Throughout, the chapter focuses on how their layered silence about their experiences embodied an unspoken, yet powerful, norm for Asian America in the Cold War culture of conformity.

This chapter uncovers how the 1947 Partition of India shapes South Asian America in particular, and Asian America more generally. Engaging with recent Asian American studies of war and displacement, it situates Partition in its wider history of decolonization and the emergent Cold War from 1930 to 1970, to show how it constitutively shapes South Asian American literature about the circuits of travel, migration, internment, and displacement that link Asia and Asian America. In this period, South Asian writers and critics like Santha Rama Rau circulated back and forth between the USA, England, and Asia, and produced writing that reflected on race relations in the USA and under empire; the traumatic mass migrations of 1947; and the geopolitical and ideological conflicts linked to the Cold War that shaped decolonization in Asia. Daiya traces the linkages between the 1947 Partition and subsequent border conflicts and war in South Asia, including Tibetan refugees’ exile in India, the little-discussed 1962 war between India and China, and Chinese-Indians’ ensuing, traumatic internment. This chapter shows how inter-Asia solidarities and conflicts, along with US involvement, shaped South Asia in this period of radical transformation and realignment in Asia, and for Asian America.