In her book manuscript, "Love of Luxury: Japanese American Respectability and Its Discontents, 1908-1942," Dr. Lau analyzes the rise of respectability among Japanese American communities in California during the pre-war era of exclusion. Utilizing newspapers, immigration hearings, church journals, oral histories, and the Survey of Race Relations, Dr. Lau found that Japanese immigrant elite encouraged respectability projects, including proper gender roles and restraint from popular culture, in order to claim civil rights and social status. First, the Japanese immigrant elite encouraged proper gender roles, including women's domesticity and anti-gambling manhood, in order to align with the liberal, pro-Japanese project of "America-Japan friendliness" that highlighted benevolent assimilation and proposed the Japanese as a solution to so-called Black depravity and Eastern European unassimilability. Second, after failing to compete against the anti-Japanese campaigns that successfully prevented Japanese access to citizenship, the immigrant elite turned towards cultivating the second generation in racial excellence by discouraging participation in social dances during the Jazz Age. These projects of respectability set a structure of feeling around the model minority that would be embraced in the Great Depression and World War II. By tracing a failed and more intimate history of the model minority in the 1920s, Dr. Lau maps the relationships between post-World War I anti-immigrant nativism, transnational racial liberalism, intra-ethnic class conflict, and comparative race and gender formations.Her manuscript contributes to 20th century US histories of race relations by reperiodizing the model minority from the 1950s to the 1920s. She traces a longer history of racial liberalism that propositioned the model minority as a solution to race problems before its widespread acceptance during the Cold War. Secondly, her work contributes to transpacific histories of US and East Asia by re-reading the yellow peril, typically rehearsed as Japanese takeover through male aggression, as the racialized fear around women's productive and reproductive labor. This re-reading centers the roles of women, gender, and the family in transnational ideas of empire building and national debates over race and immigration. In summer 2019, Dr. Lau plans to present a full manuscript to the University of Illinois Press for their Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History and Asian American Studies series.