Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972

Abstract

On March 22, 1969, in Portsmouth Square, a public gathering place in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a group of young Chinese Americans calling themselves the Red Guard Party held a rally to unveil their “10 Point Program.“ Clad in berets and armbands, they announced a Free Breakfast program for children at the Commodore Stockton school, denounced the planned destruction of the Chinese Playground, and called for the “removal of colonialist police from Chinatown.“ The Red Guard Party’s style, language, and politics clearly recalled those of the Black Panther Party, with whom they had significant contact and by whom they were profoundly influenced (AAPA Newspaper March 1969 1; Lyman 20-52). At the rally, the Red Guards performed an Asian American version of black nationalism by adopting the Panthers’ garb, confrontational manner, and emphasis on self-determination. Many years later, the Asian American playwright and critic Frank Chin dismissed the Red Guards’ rally as a “yellow minstrel show“ (Terkel 310). But while Chin rejected the Red Guards’ performance as a vain attempt to imitate blackness, in 1971, just two years after the rally, he offered his own dramatic take on the interplay between Asian Americans and blacks in his play The Chickencoop Chinaman. Widely acknowledged as a germinal work of Asian American literature, Chin’s play explores the relationship between Asian American identity and blackness by featuring Chinese American and Japanese American protagonists who associate with, claim sympathy for, and exhibit speech and dress patterns most commonly associated with African Americans. Set in the late 1960s, The Chickencoop Chinaman chronicles the adventures of Tam Lum, a fast-talking Chinese American, and his Japanese American sidekick, Kenji, as they attempt to produce a film about the career of their childhood hero, the African American boxer