The Chinese in America: A Narrative History is a non-fiction book about the history of Chinese Americans by Iris Chang. The epic and narrative history book was published in 2003 by Viking Penguin. It is Chang's third book after the 1996 Thread of the Silkworm and the 1997 The Rape of Nanking. Chang was inspired to write the book after relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she had conversations with key figures in the Chinese-American community. She spent four years researching and writing the book, having conducted interviews and reviewed diaries, memoirs, oral histories, national archives, and doctoral theses.

The book provides an overview of Chinese immigrants to the United States and their descendants. It covers several waves of migration: the first was triggered by the California gold rush and the first transcontinental railroad in the 1850s, the second after the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, and the third after China's reform and opening up after the late 1970s. The book describes the discrimination that the Chinese experienced including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the holding of arrivals at Angel Island Immigration Station, and the Wen Ho Lee case. It covers how Chinese Americans engaged in activism against the oppression such as the 1867 Chinese Labor Strike, suing plantation owners who breached agreements, and protesting against the United States' shipping scrap metal to Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War. She weaves people's stories into the overarching historical narrative including vignettes about the "Siamese twins" Chang and Eng Bunker, the news anchor Connie Chung, the architect Maya Lin, the horticulturalist Lue Gim Gong, the Air Force officer Ted Lieu, the author Amy Tan, the actress Anna May Wong, and the entrepreneur Jerry Yang.

Alongside some negative reviews, the book received mostly positive reviews. Reviewers praised the book for being engaging, well-written, and comprehensive. They liked its numerous anecdotes about Chinese Americans. Some commentators criticized the book for being unbalanced, occasionally lacking depth in certain areas, and with a narrative that could be clearer. An audiobook version was released in 2005.

Iris Shun-Ru Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1968 to Shau-Jin and Ying-Ying Chang, two Taiwanese scholars who had received doctorates from Harvard University. When Chang was born, the couple were Princeton University postdoctoral researchers. Mandarin Chinese was Chang's first language, and she learned English in preschool. After skipping a grade, 17-year-old Chang began her studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She initially planned to major in computer science and mathematics. In her third year, she changed her major to journalism. As a student, she reported for The Daily Illini, the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times and interned at Newsweek. She graduated in 1989 and relocated to Chicago where she reported first for the Associated Press and subsequently for the Chicago Tribune.

Chang resigned from her position at the Chicago Tribune in 1990 to enroll in Johns Hopkins University's science writing master's curriculum. She was 23 years old and several months into the Johns Hopkins courses when the publisher Basic Books gave her a book deal, making her its youngest author. The book was about the scientist Qian Xuesen, who, in the midst of the McCarthy era, was deported back to China, where he established its missile initiative. Chang finished her Johns Hopkins studies in 1991 and published the Qiang book, Thread of the Silkworm, in 1995. Despite receiving favorable reviews, the book was not commercially successful.

Chang was inspired to write her next book, The Rape of Nanking, after attending a Cupertino, California, conference in 1994. The conference was about Japanese war crimes, particularly the 1937 Nanjing Massacre when Japan stormed China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. After seeing horrendous images at the conference, she decided to write about the massacre. Chang spent over two years on investigating and writing the book. She was in Nanjing for a month in 1995 to talk to the victims; she separately talked to the Japanese soldiers who perpetrated the massacre. Researching the war crimes deeply impacted her, causing her to have nightmares and routinely cry. Published in 1997, the book received positive reviews and spent 10 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. The book catapulted her into the spotlight; she appeared on television shows and President Bill Clinton asked her to be a guest at Renaissance Weekend.

Following her relocation to the San Francisco Bay Area, Chang became drawn to the history of Chinese Americans in the middle of the 1990s through conversations with key figures in the Chinese-American community. She began working on The Chinese in America in 1999 and completed it in four years. Having been emotionally drained from writing The Rape of Nanking, she said working on The Chinese in America was "like a vacation" that allowed her "to recover from the wounds of writing Nanking". Chang was motivated to write the book owing to the American media's propagation of "offensive stereotypes" about Chinese Americans. Chang described how the Chinese were depicted in animations as having pigtails, slanted eyes, and buck teeth. In movies, Chinese men and women were depicted as secret agents and sex workers, respectively. The Chinese were shown in textbook drawings as using "long, claw-like fingernails to consume snails".

While writing The Chinese in America, Chang consulted diaries, memoirs, oral histories, national archives, and community newspapers. She conducted numerous interviews and incorporated the story of her family. Chang relied on newly written doctoral theses, a significant number of which were from students who had been born in China. On multiple computers in her house, she catalogued her research in around 4,000 database items. She described the writing process as not challenging but that determining what to include and what to omit was the challenging part.