In 2022–23, Pew Research Center conducted the largest survey ever of Americans of Asian ancestry. Now 24 million strong, this group is the fastest growing, and in many ways the most transformative, racial and ethnic group in the United States. As part of its landmark study, Pew researchers convened hundreds of people in eighty-five different focus groups, capturing a “snapshot in time” of the constantly evolving Asian American experience. 

Co-published by Third State Books and Pew Research Center, Everyday Americans: Asians in the U.S. Today by Neil G. Ruiz uses Pew’s remarkable data set as a springboard to paint one of the most in-depth portraits available of Asian America. Much of American culture, including social-science research, has long treated Asian Americans as a monolith. But doing so erases the multifaceted experiences of Asians in America; it ignores the fact that, a racial group, Asian Americans have the greatest income inequality in the U.S., or that wide gaps in access to education. From the arrival of Chinese laborers in the nineteenth century to the influx of Southeast Asian migration in the twentieth, 

The Center’s mission for than a quarter century has been to “allow the voice of the people to be heard.” Everyday Americans is the culmination of Pew Research Center’s multiyear initiative to make Asian Americans more visible by filling those data gaps, conducting the largest nationally representative survey of the community to date. What resulted is a comprehensive understanding of how Asian Americans navigate the U.S., and how they understand their unique identities, experiences, and struggles. In Everyday Americans, head researcher Neil G. Ruiz braids his own experience with that of the individuals his team interviewed and the data they collected to connect statistics to human voices. The result is an eye-opening text rooted in personal narratives. 

Simultaneously informational and approachable, this book tells the story of how Asian Americans, being in between two worlds, navigate what it means to be both: Asian and American.