Forgotten Histories: Chinese Americans in China

Abstract

In American Exodus, Charlotte Brooks spotlights the thousands of US-born Chinese Americans who left the United States for China during the first half of the twentieth century. Far from a minor phenomenon, this situation described up to half of all US-born Chinese Americans between 1901 and World War II (3). Yet, as a group, Chinese American immigrants to China have received little attention from scholars. Why? Brooks contends that their stories undercut popular nationalist narratives of the period in both the United States and China. In this deeply researched and lucid study, she exposes the myths. The idea that U.S. citizens of Chinese descent chose to leave the United States violates a long-standing American credo that people want to immigrate to its shores, lured by the promise of upward mobility. In reality, Brooks reminds us, Chinese Americans faced formidable racial barriers to social and economic integration. Here, she builds on a large body of ethnic studies scholarship documenting how even Asian Americans with advanced degrees and elite education struggled to find work outside of their ethnic communities. In Brooks’ mind, Chinese American immigrants to China illustrated the “contradiction between formal state and imagined racial nation” perhaps more clearly than any other group (11). As U.S. citizens, they had legal standing, but even this did not guarantee social or economic opportunity. Ultimately, their plight exemplified the “cancerous fiction” prevalent then, as now, that “only white people could ever be ‘real’ Americans” worthy of acceptance and inclusion (12).