According to the _Oxford English Dictionary_, the first appearance of “disability” occurred in the mid-­sixteenth century. Its adjectival form, “disabled,” follows shortly thereafter in the linguistic record. It appears that from the beginning, the three definitions of disability that persist today—­“a lack of ability (to discharge any office or function),” “a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses, or activities,” and “a restriction framed to prevent any person or class of persons from sharing in duties and privileges which would otherwise be open to them”—­coexisted with one another. A now-­obsolete meaning, disability as financial hardship, disappeared from use in the nineteenth century. The field of Asian American studies has seen a recent surge of scholarship that addresses disability. A Modern Language Association convention panel, a special issue of _Amerasia Journal_, and several monographs—­all appearing in the past few years—­together mark this acceleration of interest. Although ethnic studies was, at first, somewhat slow to initiate dialogue with disability studies, the conversations that scholars have generated of late speaks to the shared intellectual and political commitments of these fields. Disability studies was founded in the 1990s in ways that reflected the cultural changes in the wake of the Americans...