"Quiet Odyssey" by Mary Paik Lee.

Life in the United States was anything but heavenly for Asian Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As vividly described in Mary Paik Lee's autobiography, "Quiet Odyssey", a very large majority of the Asian American population residing in America during this time period "never had enough money for a normal way of life" (Lee, p.9). They usually had to resort to difficult physical labor to barely get by, jeopardizing their health in …

…wisely advises that Lee "always watch the wife's reaction to whatever [that happens] and try to please her" (44) whenever she visits a white family's home. He knows, like many other Asian Americans, that they would have to "learn to get along with everyone" (p. 16) to survive in America. They took extra precautions to make sure not to "cause ill feeling towards [their] people," and to "prove to Americans that [they] are also human beings" (p. 103).