A New History of Asian America

267 Pages·2013·5.759 MB·English

by  Shelley Sang-Hee Lee

A New History of Asian America
A New History of Asian America is a fresh and up-to-date history of Asians in the United States from the late
eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on current scholarship, Shelley Sang-Hee Lee brings forward the
many strands of Asian American history, highlighting the distinctive nature of the Asian American experience
while placing the narrative in the context of the major trajectories and turning points of U.S. history.
Covering the history of Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Southeast Indians as well as Chinese and
Japanese, the book gives full attention to the diversity within Asian America. A robust companion website
features additional resources for students, including primary documents, a timeline, links, videos, and an
image gallery.
From the building of the transcontinental railroad to the celebrity of Jeremy Lin, people of Asian descent
have been involved in and affected by the history of America. A New History of Asian America gives twenty-
first-century students a clear, comprehensive, and contemporary introduction to this vital history.
Shelley Sang-Hee Lee is Associate Professor of Comparative American Studies and History at Oberlin
College. She is the author of Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America.
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A New History of Asian America
SHELLEY SANG-HEE LEE
3
First published 2014
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
The right of Shelley Sang-Hee Lee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee, 1975–
A new history of Asian America / Shelley Sang-Hee Lee.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Asian Americans—History. 2. Asian Americans—Cultural assimilation. 3. Asian Americans—Politics and government. 4. United States
—Race relations. I. Title.
E184.A75L45 2013
973′.0495—dc23 2013001775
ISBN: 978–0–415–87953–8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978–0–415–87954–5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978–0–203–44107–7 (ebk)
Typeset in Dante
by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Orientalism before Asian America
2 The Asian Diaspora in the Pre-Exclusion Years
3 Making a Living: The Politics and Economics of Work before the 1930s
4 Social Intimacy and Asian American Communities before World War II
5 Racism and the Anti-Asian Movements
6 Response and Resistance
7 Americanization, Modernity, and the Second Generation through the 1930s
8 Asian Americans and the Crucible of World War II
9 Asian America in the Early Cold War Years
10 The Vietnam War, Southeast Asians, and the Transformation of Asian America
11 Politics and Activism in Asian America in the 1960s and 1970s
12 The Watershed of 1965 and the Remaking of Asian America
13 Reckonings: Asian America in the Late Twentieth Century
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
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Acknowledgements
I am thankful to the many individuals whose support and encouragement made the completion of this book
possible. First, are the numerous scholars, past and present, who have dedicated themselves to building and
growing the field of Asian American history. This book stands on your shoulders. My editor Kimberly Guinta
receives my utmost gratitude for her guidance, enthusiasm, and patience throughout the process. I cannot
thank her enough. Students at Oberlin College were instrumental in the conceptualization and completion of
this book, through their contributions in class, participation in “focus group” discussions about Asian
American history, and helpful research assistance. The following deserve particular mention: Angus Chen,
Laura Dellplain, Aki Gormezano, Aly Halpert, Rachel Ishikawa, Joelle Lingat, Tim Ng, Tuyet Ngo, Eric
Oeur, Karl Orozco, Skylar Sweetman, and Ted Young. Colleagues at Oberlin provided a constant supply of
good cheer, professional support, and intellectual camaraderie over the last five years, which helped sustain me
through the writing of this book. They include Pablo Mitchell, Renee Romano, Gina Perez, Meredith
Raimondo, Wendy Kozol, Marko Dumancic, Pawan Dhingra, and Len Smith. Other friends and fellow
Asian Americanists to whom I owe a great debt for their advice and wisdom are Celine Shimizu, Karen
Leong, Judy Wu, Scott Wong, Xiaojian Zhao, and Gordon Chang. Finally, I thank my family in California
and in-laws in the Pacific Northwest and, as always, my husband, Rick Baldoz. This book is dedicated to our
daughter Kaya.
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Introduction
A New History of Asian America provides readers with an updated, interpretive synthesis of Asian American
history. It was written primarily with undergraduate students and newcomers to the field in mind, but I hope
that specialists will find the text useful and appreciate the ways in which this book pays tribute to their
scholarship and visions.
Asian American history, a subset of the broader field of ethnic studies, has been a robust and dynamic area
of study for nearly forty-five years. The study of Asians in America long precedes the late 1960s, but it was
out of the struggle to establish ethnic studies curricula and uncover the “buried histories” of people of color in
America that the first generation of “Asian Americanists” emerged and pioneered a field that has grown by
leaps and bounds. In the early days of Asian American history, much of the work revolved around collecting
community voices and histories and carving out a space for the field in the academy. The histories were new
and the validity of this kind of inquiry not entirely accepted. When it came to engaging the broader field of
U.S. history, Asian Americanists’ efforts revolved around asserting that people of Asian descent had a place in
the American past, whether as targets of racism or key players during important historical developments.
There was also an urgency driving the early scholarship; the stories of old-timers still living needed to be
recorded, the injustices of episodes like Japanese wartime internment and Chinese exclusion had to be
stressed, and the stories of Asian people’s contributions to building the nation needed to be told. Framing
much of this work was the imperative to demonstrate that Asians in America were not foreigners, but rather a
people with a long history in this country and hence a rightful claim to American identity and belonging.
Subsequent generations of Asian American historians have sustained and enhanced the vitality of the field
while taking it in new directions and offering more challenging and critical interpretations of Asian American
and U.S. histories. At times it is impossible to isolate much of the recent scholarship within a single genre of
history, as scholars have done as much to develop Asian American history as they have to reinterpret such
subjects as Reconstruction history, the history of the Cold War, legal history, and urban history. Additionally,
the field has become increasingly theoretically and conceptually innovative, illuminating such analytical
concerns such as transnationalism, diaspora, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. More than just an
interesting and distinctive narrative about people who crossed the Pacific to make new lives in America, Asian
American history now compels us to view American history and society anew.
In A New History of Asian America, I have attempted to synthesize the older and recent literature to give an
updated narrative of Asian American history. For the established histories and perspectives I mainly consulted
the major textbooks in the field, namely Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore; Sucheng Chan’s
Asian Americans; Roger Daniels, Asian America; and H. Brett Melendy, Asians in America. While differing in
style and somewhat in thematic focus, they generally presented Asians as participants in “immigrant
America,” working against the traditional elision of this group from immigration, racial, and ethnic histories.
While not seeking to supplant their narratives, A New History of Asian America supplements them by
incorporating new and reconsidered insights drawn from the last twenty years of historical scholarship in
Asian American history. In particular, the book extends the chronology both backwards and forwards,
considering the years prior to major Asian immigration, and provides more detailed discussions of the history
after World War II. It also gives greater attention to Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Southeast Asians,
whose experiences have been the subject of fewer historical studies than the Chinese and Japanese. While the
book was not completely able to overcome the imbalance—as the current scholarship remains skewed due to a
number of factors including accessibility and scope of sources—it has attempted to address it considerably.
Finally, A New History of Asian America seeks to foreground new themes and narratives in Asian American
history that go beyond the simple story of newcomers working, surviving, enduring hardship, and overcoming
the odds. It is also a history about American power and inequality, interethnic tension and competition, glass
ceilings and racial profiling, and economic, racial, and patriarchal privilege.
That said, I should also acknowledge what this book does not do. The scholarship I have drawn upon to
incorporate into this synthesis reflects my view of the significant turns in the field. It is also selective and
subjective. For instance, it does not employ post-national or transnational frameworks as organizing concepts
and is primarily concerned with Asian American experience in and engagement with the United States, and
American identity and institutions of power. One of the current and very exciting trends in Asian American
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history and American studies more broadly is the turn toward transnationalism. Asian Americanists have
contributed much to this with research on the Pacific Northwest borderlands, comparative U.S.–Canada
studies, and hemispheric approaches of migration and exclusion politics. While this work is generative and
groundbreaking, I have chosen not to make such approaches central to this book due to the limitations of
length and my belief that the U.S. nation and issues of national identity and policies remain highly salient and
merit continued focus.
I believe a book like A New History of Asian America is needed now because over forty years since the
founding of ethnic studies, the place of fields like Asian American history is at once entrenched and
vulnerable. The field has made real strides and its leading practitioners are respected and recognized by both
Asian American studies and history associations. They teach in ethnic studies, American studies, gender
studies, and history departments. They also serve as deans and public intellectuals. Colleges and universities
outside the West Coast continue to add Asian American history to their curricula. That said, plenty of signs
indicate that these and other achievements remain limited and tenuous. Its impact on the broader public
consciousness has been modest at best. This is seen, for instance, in the slowness with which Asian American
history has appeared in high school curricula, and regular appearance of ill-informed articles by non-specialists
on subjects like Japanese internment (when there are plenty of specialists who might be consulted for such
pieces or perhaps even be asked to write them).1 This suggests that much work remains to be done and to
keep writing and teaching Asian American history. Another urgency that informs A New History of Asian
America is the fact that ethnic studies is in danger. Among many administrators and faculty, it was never a
legitimate field, but in today’s climate of scarcity and cutbacks, its opponents are taking advantage of the
circumstances to call for its reduction or elimination. Especially alarming is that many of the attacks are driven
by xenophobia and narrow-minded thinking about what constitutes American history and identity, points of
view that ethnic studies was established to interrogate and remedy.
In the vein of traditional immigration histories, A New History of Asian America seeks to tell stories of
people who migrated to and made new homes in America. However, its ultimate objective is not to celebrate
them, or to weave a narrative of progress or decline. Its main goal is to highlight the distinctiveness of Asian
American experience and to interrogate, through the lens of Asian America, the salience of race in American
history: its centrality to notions of American identity and citizenship, how it has oppressed and excluded
people, how its meanings have changed, and how people have negotiated it. Chapter 1 explores Orientalism in
Western thought and in early America, as a cultural and intellectual pre-history to major Asian migration.
Chapter 2 gives a broad overview of early Asian immigration to the United States, focusing on Chinese,
Japanese, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Filipinos and framing these migrations as functions of larger diasporic
movements during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters 3 and 4 describe major facets of
Asian American experience during the 1800s and early 1900s, with the former focusing on work and labor,
and the latter on family, community, and social intimacy. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with anti-Asian racism, also
during the pre-World War II decades, with attention on the mechanisms of racism and discrimination and
how Asian Americans responded and resisted. Chapter 7 deals mainly with the interwar years and explores
themes of modernity, youth culture, and the Great Depression. Chapter 8 examines Asian America during the
World War II years with particular attention on how the experiences of Japanese Americans diverged from
those of other Asian Americans, as well as how the United States came out of the war embracing an ethos of
liberal multiculturalism. Chapter 9 traces how this ethos unfolded amidst Cold War fears and the shifting
place of Asian Americans in 1950s and early 1960s America. Chapters 10 and 11 discuss major developments
impacting Asian America from the late 1960s and 1970s, namely the post-Vietnam War Southeast refugee
migration and the Asian American movement. Chapter 12 foregrounds the Immigration Act of 1965 and
how this legislation heralded a new era for revived Asian immigration, and Chapter 13 surveys key
developments in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
Supplemental pedagogical material can be accessed on the book’s website, which includes additional
images, study questions, primary documents, and an historical timeline.
Notes
1 For instance, see Edward Rothstein, “The How of an Internment, but Not All the Whys,” New York Times, December 9, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/arts/design/heart-mountain-interpretive-learning-center-review.html?pagewanted=all.
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Orientalism before Asian America 1
The question of when Asian American history begins is a complicated one. If looking for the first known
presence of a person from Asia on American soil, we might consider the findings of a 2007 Canadian
archaeological project, which theorized that North America’s first inhabitants were seafarers from the
Japanese islands who sailed the coastal waters of the North Pacific about 16,000 years ago.1 Using this as a
starting point for Asian American history, however, does little to illuminate the long and continuous presence
of Asians in the United States and North America. We could instead begin with the appearance of discrete
populations of Asians in what is now the United States. Here we might look to 1763, when Filipino sailors
aboard Spanish galleons on the Manila–Acapulco trade jumped ship and settled in the New Orleans area. Yet
another approach would be to start with more sustained and large-scale migrations that led to a permanent
presence of Asians in America. In this case, the California gold rush, which drew tens of thousands of
Chinese in the late 1840s and early 1850s, stands out. Finally, we could start when persons of Asian descent in
the United States consciously identified themselves as “Asian American.” This would make for a brief history,
as it was not until the late 1960s that activists proclaimed an Asian American identity that rejected old labels,
signaled pan-Asian solidarity, and made assertive claims to American belonging.
This is all to say that pinpointing when and where Asian American history begins, while an interesting
exercise, can detract from a productive exploration of the subject. Rather than seeking to mark a definitive
starting point for when Asians and Asian Americans become a presence in U.S. history, I suggest we first
reflect upon what constitutes a presence. Here, it helps to consider ideas as well as bodies, and in this regard,
it is important to note that traditions in Western thought about Asia, or the “Orient,” long predating the
nineteenth century migrations informed the Asian American experience. Having inherited much cultural
baggage from Europe, white Americans, from the dawn of independence, displayed distinct attitudes about
Asia and the differences between Europeans and Asians, which in turn would shape how they viewed and
treated Asian people in America. While the particular ideas about Oriental–Occidental difference changed
over time and place, they pivoted consistently on a presumption of Western superiority and evinced a
simultaneous fascination with and revulsion of the “East.” Such thinking not only shored up Western,
European—and subsequently white—identity, but also helped to rationalize political, economic, and military
domination and interventions over “weak” Asian powers.
I realize that Westerners’ (i.e., white people’s) perceptions of Asians in history may seem an unconventional
way to begin an exploration of Asian American history. To do so might implicitly give too much weight to
racism and the views of outsiders, and marginalize or make secondary the agency, distinctiveness, and vitality
of Asian American people and their communities. This is not the book’s intention, and as the reader will see
in the chapters that follow, the lives and viewpoints of Asian Americans themselves are the centerpiece of A
New History of Asian America. I do believe, however, that the discussions in this chapter are crucial because
they underscore how Asian immigrants did not enter a blank slate. Their experiences were not shaped just by
the baggage and expectations they brought with them, but also by the society they came into. Furthermore,
while racism is not the only or most important theme in Asian American history, it is, I emphasize, a critical
one that merits a sustained exploration.
As former colonial subjects, Americans in the late eighteenth century had a much different relationship
with Asia than Europe did, although they inherited the outlook that Asia was an exotic and otherworldly
place. As the young nation grew and matured over the nineteenth century, its perception of the “East”
underwent numerous permutations, from a land of mysterious, ancient knowledge and desired luxury goods to
a barbaric place to be opened, dominated, and civilized. However, more than just a far-flung part of the world
and the site of Western civilization’s opposite, Asia—its people and things—would become intimately tied up
in notions of American freedom and nationhood at key historical junctures. Furthermore, these moments—
during which dominant thought with respect to East–West difference and the inherent foreignness of people
from the “Orient” crystallized—revealed stark intellectual and ideological boundaries that cast Asians and
Asian Americans as outsiders from the national civic body.
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