Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities: The Cold War of Chinese American Narrative

243 Pages·2021·2.35 MB·English

by  Heidi Kim

Illegal Immigrants/
Model Minorities
In the series Asian American History and Culture,
edited by Cathy Schlund-Vials, Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, and Rick Bonus.
Founding editor, Sucheng Chan; editors emeriti, David Palumbo-Liu,
Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ.
ALSO IN THIS SERIES:
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of Wars: A Hmong Fighter Pilot’s Story of Escaping Death and Confronting Life
(forthcoming)
Kavita Daiya, Graphic Migrations: Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora
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Heidi Kim
Illegal Immigrants/
Model Minorities
THE COLD WAR OF
CHINESE AMERICAN NARRATIVE
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Philadelphia • Rome • Tokyo
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
tupress.temple.edu
Copyright © 2021 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System
of Higher Education
All rights reserved
Published 2021
Materials from the Oscar Hammerstein II Collection at the Library of Congress used
by permission of Rodgers & Hammerstein: a Concord Company, www.concord.com,
on behalf of the respective copyright owners. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kim, Heidi, author.
Title: Illegal immigrants/model minorities : the Cold War of Chinese
American narrative / Heidi Kim.
Other titles: Asian American history and culture.
Description: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, [2021] | Series: Asian
American History and Culture | Includes bibliographical references and
index. | Summary: “Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities thinks through
two figures-the Chinese illegal immigrant and the Chinese model
minority-during the Cold War. Reading the two together sheds light on
how the discussion of Chinese Americans in both literature and archival
materials grapples with these constructs and creates competing usages of
and perspectives on Chinese American history”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020019246 (print) | LCCN 2020019247 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781439919019 (cloth) | ISBN 9781439919026 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781439919033 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Chinese—United States—History—20th century. |
Chinese—United States—Public opinion. | Chinese Americans in
literature. | Model minority stereotype—United States. |
Immigrants—Government policy—United States. | China—Emigration and
immigration—History—20th century. | United States—Emigration and
immigration—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC E184.C5 K48 2021 (print) | LCC E184.C5 (ebook) |
DDC 973/.0495—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019246
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019247
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Illegal Immigration in the Cold War 1
1 Narrative Cold War: Public Faces of Chinese America 25
2 Happy Families: Modeling the Minority in the Era of
Immigration Reform 59
3 Blood Tells: The Attack on Chinese American Family Ties 99
4 History, through Literature: Rewriting the Past after the
Confession Era 139
Epilogue: The Failure of the Model Minority Narrative? 177
Notes 187
Bibliography 209
Index 221

Acknowledgments
T
his work was supported by my wonderful colleagues at the Department
of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Caro-
lina, Chapel Hill (UNC), and a semester-long faculty fellowship at the
UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH), as well as a fellowship at
the Columbia University Center for American Studies.
I am grateful for helpful and stimulating conversations with many peo-
ple, including Leslie Bow, Tim Carter, Cindy Cheng, Sylvia Chong, Jennifer
Ho, Madeline Hsu, Cathy Schlund-Vials, my fellow IAH Fellows and pro-
gram director Michele Berger, and Ted Chapin of the Rodgers & Hammer-
stein Organization. For their support, I also thank Priscilla Wald and John
McGowan. Special thanks go to Ji-Yeon Yuh, in whose graduate seminar I
read several books of Asian American history and, although I didn’t know
it at the time, laid the foundations for this study. Jared Brown-Rabinowitz
provided valuable assistance with legal research and interpretation, as well
as Chinese translation. Bibliographic and data assistance was provided at
different times by research assistants Kevin Pyon and Dylan Thompson. A
portion of the discussion of Flower Drum Song in Chapter 2 was previously
published as “‘Flower Drum Song,’ Whitewashing and Operation Wetback:
A Message from 1961” in the Los Angeles Review of Books on September 22,
2016. Thanks to Sarah Munroe and Sara Jo Cohen for their support through-
out the review process and to all the other Temple University Press staff
viii / Acknowledgments
members who worked so hard, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, to
bring this book to print.
Research for this book was conducted at many institutes and archives
across the United States. My research on the papers of Jade Snow Wong at
the Library of Congress was funded by a Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship
and facilitated by the staff of the Asian Reading Room, particularly the in-
defatigable Pang Xiong; on another trip, the staff of the Music Division as-
sisted me in looking at the papers of Oscar Hammerstein. I thank Mark Ong
for his permission to quote from the papers and works of his mother, Jade
Snow Wong. I also thank the staff of the Princeton University Seeley Mudd
Manuscript Library; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts;
Special Collections at the main branch of the New York Public Library;
Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts; the Bancroft Library at
the University of California, Berkeley; and the Hoover Institution at Stan-
ford University. Last, the assistance of librarians and staff at my own institu-
tion has always been essential, particularly that of Tommy Nixon.
Finally, as ever, my thanks to my supportive family and friends, espe-
cially my newest and most cherished little family member.
Illegal Immigrants/
Model Minorities