“No Chinese Should Obey It”

Between Two Worlds: Chinese Immigrant Children and the Production of Knowledge in the Era of Chinese Exclusion

Reviewed by: Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–1882 Arnoldo De León Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848– 1882. By Najia Aarim-Heriot. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. 312. Foreword, acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0252073517. $25.00, paper.) Until very recently, historians treated Chinese immigration to the United States as an experience distinct from that of European groups. Similarly, they attributed attitudes toward the Chinese as rooted in forces unique to the western United States, namely labor competition. Najia Aarim-Heriot takes such older understandings to task, exploring instead the links between racism toward African Americans and the Chinese, and noting similarities between Asian and European immigration. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–1882, has many purposes. It seeks to integrate the Chinese experience into the scholarship of U.S. immigration; determine the causes behind efforts to ban immigration from China; rebut the standard interpretation that attributes Chinese exclusion to labor competition; place apprehensions about the Chinese presence in the West within the context of Reconstruction politics and other national currents; and to show proof that labor, politicians, the courts, and U.S. presidents all account for the anti-Chinese movement that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. With such purposes in mind, Aarim-Heriot focuses on post–Civil War movements that deprived blacks of rights, finding a similar campaign unfolding against the Chinese living in the American West. Numerous debates occurred during Reconstruction, according to the author, regarding the place of African Americans and the Chinese within the American political and social milieu. Then, when Radical Republicans moved away from their commitment to insure African American rights, the lot of the Chinese suffered concurrently. Anti-Chinese attitudes nationally became increasingly hostile after Redemption occurred in the South during 1870s, Aarim-Heriot observes, and such attitudes culminated in the contentious debates of the era that produced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The book is persuasive in its thesis that the Chinese became victims of "Negroization" and that American immigration policy toward the Chinese rested on racist ideology grounded in antiblack attitudes. It is equally convincing in arguing that it was a national movementand not solely the reaction of labor groups in the Westthat accounts for the virulent treatment of the Chinese in the West and the prohibition placed on their immigration to U.S. shores. It is obvious, furthermore, that the later immigration policies adopted by the United States toward European immigrants had their origins in the Chinese exclusion campaigns. Many of the earlier explanations regarding Chinese American history consequently lose credibility under the weight of Aarim-Heriot's research. So falters the understanding that Chinese immigration policy was disconnected from the one applied to Europeans. Arnoldo De León Angelo State University Copyright © 2007 The Texas State Historical Association

Collaboration and Translation: Lin Yutang and the Archive of Asian American Literature Richard Jean So (bio) In spring of 1947, Richard Walsh, editor in chief of the John Day Publishing House, wrote a letter to his star author, Lin Yutang, the famous Chinese diasporic writer and novelist. Walsh had invited Lin to relocate to the United States from China several years earlier. The radical 1930s in China had been unkind to Lin: as a self-described liberal, he had become the target of a mounting Chinese Communist backlash, earning the scorn and hostility of a growing number of leftist writers. In 1935, with the help of Walsh and Pearl Buck, whom he had befriended earlier in Shanghai, Lin fled to America in hopes of reconstructing his literary career outside the nation. The intervening decade proved far kinder to Lin. Between 1935 and 1945, Lin published three bestselling novels, including A Moment in Peking, that catapulted him to American fame and celebrity. He became the toast of the New York literary world and found admirers among writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and W. H. Auden. Lin’s partnership with John Day, as well as the sponsorship of Walsh, no doubt played a significant role in his sudden and massive rise to literary fame. Walsh and Buck commissioned his first novel, and carefully edited, revised, and marketed every book he wrote in the US. In the spring of 1947, sensing a hot new literary topic, they asked him to write a new kind of a novel—a [End Page 40] “Chinese-American” novel that dealt exclusively with the “experiences of the Chinese in America” (“To Lin” 30 Sept.). Lin happily agreed to their suggestion and quickly began the task of writing Chinatown Family, what would become the first Asian American novel published by a major publishing house and explicitly marketed as what Walsh and Buck would call “Chinese American” literature.1 One small obstacle, however, stood in the way of this project: Lin knew virtually nothing about Chinese Americans or the Chinese American experience. Despite his self-identification as a Chinese immigrant, Lin operated in a rarefied world of the cultural and social elite, far from the tussle and toil of Chinatown’s working poor. Thus, the project of writing Chinatown Family evolved into a complex collaborative venture between Lin, Buck, and Walsh. Ironically, Buck and Walsh, who had earlier organized the campaign to overturn the Chinese Exclusion Laws, knew far more about the Chinese in America than Lin.2 They represented a cohort of experts on Chinese America to whom Lin deferred in the writing process. Walsh regularly sent historical and sociological studies of Chinese Exclusion to Lin and established contacts for him at the Chinese embassy; he poured over Lin’s drafts of the novel and meticulously corrected perceived historical errors in his representations of Chinese Americans. Artistic autonomy succumbed to an aggressive form of editorial collaboration, while research replaced inspiration and sociology supplanted narrative. Ultimately, the suppression of authorial independence only thinly masked a clear political and ideological purpose. Walsh and Buck’s investment in the repeal of Chinese Exclusion did not end in 1943; rather, they imagined Lin’s novel as generating a distinct vision of what Chinese America might look like in its wake: a micro US-China nation. The period between 1943 and 1950, a period often overlooked in Asian American Studies, signaled a new but uncertain era in Asian American social life. Suddenly, there existed the category of the legal Chinese American immigrant; yet, given the slowness of actual legislative change, a visible population of such subjects paradoxically had yet to fully emerge. The idea of a thriving modern “Chinese America” existed in mind if not yet in reality, and Walsh and Buck had a clear notion of what that should look like. The writing of Chinatown Family thus came to embody a crucial site in the production of new discourses of Asian racial identity in the US. What at first glance appears to be a rather mundane process of editorial handling in fact articulates a dynamic terrain or place of ideological formation. Here I want to underscore the physicality invoked by...

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out, Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a gatekeeping nation. Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources - including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters - Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

Nearly sixty years ago, Henry R. Luce envisioned that the twentieth century was first century as a dominant power in the world.(1) His famous vision of American Century showed America's commitment to exert upon the whole world the full impact of American influence. At century's end, it seems appropriate to assess how the United States attempted to exert its influence, particularly to spread American-style freedom and democracy in its foreign policy and to evaluate its relations with East Asia, particularly with China over the last one hundred years. To begin thinking about America's engagement with China historically, World War II provided a special stage for an American image of an American-oriented China. Because of the war, the United States came to embrace a vision of a strong and independent China emerging in postwar Asia. How did this new vision emerge in the American imagination, and how did it affect America's East Asian policy? This essay examines how the United States transformed its China policy to promote China as an equal state in international relations during World War II. In particular, it focuses on the repeal of racially discriminatory legislation against the Chinese in 1943. By examining the process of repeal, we can see that the abolition of the discriminatory laws against the Chinese not only marked a historic turning point in America's China policy in wartime, but also had a great impact on the transformation of America's East Asian policy in the postwar period. Formation of Chinese Exclusion Policy The first Asian immigrants to enter the United States were Chinese, lured to California by the Gold Rush of 1848. By 1850 there were over 20,000 Chinese immigrants in the United States, most of them in California. Railroad construction in the United States during the 1860s further accelerated the influx of Chinese laborers. There were 63,199 Chinese in the United States in 1870. Ten years later there were 105,465 Chinese in America, over ninety percent of who settled on the Pacific Coast.(2) As the number of Chinese increased, however, Caucasian workers in California began to resent Chinese laborers. The Chinese were considered culturally and racially inferior and a threat to wage levels and working conditions. By the mid-1870s, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the growth of the white labor force in the West, and the nationwide economic depression all encouraged white working men to turn against the Chinese. With the development of anti-Chinese sentiment in the Pacific states, especially in California, on May 6, 1882, the U.S. Congress enacted a bill prohibiting Chinese immigrants from entering the United States.(3) The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first racially restrictive immigration law in American history.(4) The emergence of this discriminatory legislation initiated a gradual process of immigration restriction based on race. The enactment of this legislation marked the end of the free immigration era in American history. This discriminatory law not only had long-term repercussions for America's relations with China, but also affected overall immigration policy and internal politics. On the other hand, it can also be considered as merely the first step in the growth of anti-Asiatic legislation. Following enactment of this law, Asian immigration became a constant target of American nativism and racism. Subsequently, the Immigration Act of 1924 stopped the flow of immigrants from Asia into the United States. Emergence of the Sino-American Alliance On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked on Pearl Harbor. That sudden attack led directly to a reversal of America's anti-Chinese immigration policy. The day after the attack, the United States together with China declared war on Japan, and the two countries became allies immediately. The special wartime alliance between China and the United States initiated a far-reaching transformation in America's East Asian policy, especially its China policy. …

The Chinese Americans are the largest American Asian ethnic group. They immigrated to the United States in the 19th century where many of them provided cheap labor which helped the development of the West Coast of the United States. However, the U.S. Congress passed the “Chinese Exclusion Act” in 1882. Over the succeeding approximately 60 years, Chinese could not enter the United States as legal immigrants. During these 60 years, the Japanese began entering to the United States beginning in the 1890’s. Japanese immigrants filled the labor shortage caused by the prohibition of Chinese immigration to the United States. However, in 1924, the U.S. Congress passed the “National Origin Law” in which, like the Chinese, the Japanese also lost the right to immigrate into the United States. Unfortunately for the Japanese, with the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, while Chinese became America’s good friends, and in 1943 the Chinese Exclusion Act was abolished, suddenly all Japanese were the enemy. The influence of the sudden change in policy during this period is a very interesting discussion topic. In this thesis, we will discuss the Chinese in America from 1882 until 1943; and the relationship between Chinese and Japanese Americans from the 1890s until 1943 during which time they both helped each other and also contended with each other. Both have a history of being squeezed onto the fringes of the American society and being refused American citizenship. During the war, from 1941-43, while Chinese were accepted as friends, Japanese Americans had to choose between supporting America, or following their parents in supporting Japan and therefore being imprisoned in America for the duration of the war. Both Chinese and Japanese chose to become part of American society.

Reviewed by: Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture Min Zhou Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture. Edited by Sucheng CHANMadeline Y. HSU. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008. Pp. xx, 266. History and historiography have been central in the emerging field of Chinese American studies. This anthology, edited by Sucheng Chan and Madeline Hsu, uses a cultural history framework that weaves together personal narratives, family histories, case studies, and event analyses to show the lives of Chinese Americans “in more complex, intricate, and intriguing ways” (p. xvi). Sucheng Chan’s introductory chapter offers an excellent and comprehensive literature review to demonstrate the synergy in Chinese American history and historiography. Chan identifies five periods of Chinese American historiography: partisan writings between the 1850s and the early 1920s, social science studies in the mid-1920s to the 1960s, works by Asian American and European American scholars in the late 1960s to the early 1980s, works by university-based historians between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s, and cultural histories since the late 1990s. Chan focuses on three genres in the works of the pre-Asian American Movement — partisan tracts, social science studies, and Chinatown “guides” or exposés (p. 2). She plows widely and digs deeply into the field of Chinese American studies, not merely showing readers what has been done but also paying attention to the legacy of the Asian American Movement and raising profound issues of great theoretical import and practical significance. As always, Chan takes issue with two prevailing perspectives — that of victims being exploited in the United States and that of agents and decision makers capable of making sensible choices that shape their lives. Her actor-oriented approach shows how individuals make history and initiate adaptive responses to the social, economic, and political milieu in which they find themselves. Her passionate and extraordinary commitment to building and defending Chinese American studies and Asian American studies is remarkable. I cannot think of another scholar of Chinese American studies who covers such a broad range of topics, and who always successfully connects the human dimension to the key philosophical and social science concerns. Chan’s introduction is without a doubt a useful guide to the vast literature on Chinese American history and historiography. The anthology consists of seven chapters arranged in chronological order. The chapter by Mae Ngai, “History as Law and Life,” tells the story of a Chinese immigrant family from the late 19th to early 20th century. Ngai questions the canonical assumption that all immigrants necessarily follow a general path of Americanization, socioeconomic mobility, and political inclusion. She points to [End Page 294] the limits of the democratic-political culture in the incorporation of immigrants and argues that the trajectories of exclusion and inclusion are closely entwined. Through her analysis of an 1885 civil rights case, Tape v. Hurley, in which the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese children could not be excluded from public schools, Ngai demonstrates how the two trajectories converged in a process of ethnic middle-class formation as the legal status of the Chinese in America was being adjudicated in court. The Tape family was an example of the emerging brokering class of the time. Members of this brokering class, serving as transportation agents, immigration-bonds brokers, labor contractors, and language interpreters, were both liminal and powerful figures. Because they were bilingual and bicultural, they were needed and distrusted by both the Chinese and the Europeans. Indispensable for the resettlement and protection of the immigrant laboring classes, they promoted incorporation while simultaneously invested in the exclusion of the immigrants as a means of achieving wealth and social status. Ultimately the brokers’ involvement in illegal immigration and their advocacy for civil rights were an integral part of their struggle for survival and advancement. The chapter illustrates how immigration and exclusion created a site for wealth accumulation and social status attainment and how the entwined processes of inclusion and exclusion produced constraints for some and opportunities for others within the Chinese American community. Josephine Fowler’s chapter, “The Activism of Left-Wing and Communist Chinese Immigrants, 1927–1933,” builds on Him Mark Lai’s study of activism among...

This article examines the historical correlations between Chinese exclusion law enforcement and the career patterns of immigration attorneys in San Francisco. Built on a rich historiography about Chinese exclusion and state formation in the United States, it views these attorneys as a unique interest group to make sense of their intermediary role between the administrative state and the transnational Chinese community. Drawing from both traditional sources and a collection recently made public by Stanford University, it looks at three groups of Euro-American lawyers who, for five decades, dominated the business of Chinese immigration legal services at the Golden Gate: lawyers from the private sector, former United States attorneys, and officials-turned-attorneys who emerged in the late 1910s. The article argues that these lawyers’ background and priorities closely corresponded and evolved with the decline of judicial review and the rise of the immigration authorities’ near-plenary power over the project of exclusion. The lawyers’ work provides fresh insights into the key paradox in the history of Chinese exclusion, that despite its constant search for efficiency, local enforcement of the exclusion laws often reduced the anti-Chinese policy to routinized, counterproductive procedures. It finds that many US attorneys and immigration inspectors who later chose to become attorneys for the Chinese had been diligent federal employees. Their shifting positions prove bureaucratic malice towards Chinese immigrants to be anything but monolithic and challenge historians’ established dichotomy between an anti-Chinese state and Chinese in America.

This chapter explores the 1954 closing of Ellis Island in the context of Chinese New Yorkers who were profoundly affected by the Red Scare. All immigrant radicals faced the threat of deportation, but this was particularly significant for Chinese who were more likely to be illegally in the United States, who were closely surveilled and who were suspected even if they were not radicals. Despite the end of Chinese exclusion in 1943, Chinese immigrants in New York and across the country remained particularly vulnerable to the threat of deportation. These threats fostered anxieties about Chinese people’s loyalties and place within the United States. Throughout the postwar period, deportation practices were expanded through four intersecting practices: voluntary departure procedures, parole practices, locally contracted detention centers, and the extension of inspection and deportation to airports throughout the United States. These practices dispersed immigration regulation away from traditional stations, leading to the closing of Ellis Island.

Reviewed by: Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship by Edlie L. Wong Lyndsay Campbell Wong, Edlie L. Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship. New York & London: New York UP, 2015. Pp. 304. Edlie L. Wong's Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship explores a range of literary texts produced between the 1850s and World War I to show how the processes of racialization of the Chinese diaspora, mainly in the United States, intersected with evolving post-Reconstruction concepts of American citizenship. Wong recovers and examines a variety of largely forgotten literary and journalistic genres about the phenomenon of Chinese immigration to, and presence in, the United States. She threads together the relationships between racializing discourses around African Americans and Chinese residents through an exploration of travel narratives about "coolie" labour in Cuba, journalism exposing white labour's fears in California, apocalyptic Chinese invasion narratives (harbingers of new forms of science fiction), and Chinese and English literary sentimentalism, which protested the treatment of Chinese in the United States and its expanding Pacific empire. Wong's incorporation of transpacific literary forms, including Chinese-language writing, into the corpus of the literature of the United States—which, by extension, would locate American literature in a kind of literature of the Pacific—is one great contribution that this book makes. Employing a highly theorized approach to literary and journalistic texts, Wong's Racial Reconstruction contributes an important chapter to the long, vexed, sad, and complex story of race in America, a story that continues to unfold. Wong demonstrates the roles that norms and assumptions around labour, religion, and family played in the racializing discourses that generated what Wong calls a "dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion" (3). This "dialectical configuration" structured arguments around the rights of both African Americans and those characterized as Chinese, wherever they were born or raised. She illuminates the wondrous illogic that permitted men viewed as abject virtual slaves (though of course bound by exploitative contracts) to be seen simultaneously as a looming [End Page 334] threat to the very existence of the (white) United States. She suggests how the characterization of African Americans-no longer susceptible to enslavement but still subordinate-inflected the characterization of Chinese residents as fundamentally unassimilable. She shows the absence of Chinese women-because they were legally excluded from the country-being interpreted as a sign of how very different the Chinese in America were in their approaches to familial relations and thus, again, in their assimilability. Wong weaves into the text the way that the supposed "heathenism" of Chinese residents in the United States also set them apart, and she links this religious angle to refusals to accept indigenous people's claims to American citizenship during the same period. I would have been curious to learn more about whether and how characterizations of people of Spanish and Mexican descent in California and the rest of the Southwest also inflected the racialization of Chinese immigrants and their descendants, in the nation as a whole or in the Southwest. Wong's discussion of journalistic depictions of the purported threat to white labour in California suggests that racialization was at least to some extent region-specific, with newspapers and stories-even if they circulated nationally-being interpreted against a regional or local context. Wong's discussion of literary forms is punctuated by treatment of legal milestones-cases and statutes-which created intolerable, frequently unstable, and even incomprehensible legal situations not only for migrant Chinese workers but for their American-born children. The literary and the legal were mutually constitutive. The contemporary echoes make these stories even harder to read than they would be if they could be comfortably relegated to the bad old days of the distant past. Relying on a solid base of legal historical scholarship, Wong describes the development of the doctrine that the decisions of immigration officers are not reviewable in courts and that Congress (not the president, it should be noted) has plenary power to make laws to defend the nation, even though this power is not among the enumerated powers that the states, through...

This is a striking, original portrait of the Chinese Six Companies (Zhonghua huiguan), or Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, the most prominent support organization for Chinese immigrants in the United States in the late nineteenth century. As a federation of “native-place associations” (huiguan) in California, the Six Companies responded to racist acts and legislation by organizing immigrant communities and employing effective diplomatic strategies against exclusion. The book substantiates recent arguments that Chinese immigrants were resourceful in fighting for their rights and argues that through the Six Companies they created a political rhetoric and civic agenda that were then officially adopted by Qing court officials. Out of necessity, these officials turned to the Six Companies for assistance and would in time adopt the tone and format of its programs during China’s turbulent transition from a tributary system to that of a modern nation-state. Eventually the Six Companies and Qing diplomats were defeated by a coalition of anti-Chinese interest groups, but their struggle produced a template for modern Chinese nationalism—a political identity that transcends native place—in nineteenth-century America. The book redefines the historical significance of the huiguan, paying close attention to the transnational experience of the Six Companies, which provides a feasible framework for linking its diplomatic activism with Chinese history as well as the history of Chinese Americans and Sino-American relations.

Policy Statement on the Incarceration of Undocumented Migrant Families: Society for Community Research and Action Division 27 of the American Psychological Association.

Reviewed by: Mark Twain in China by Selina Lai-Henderson Hongmei Sun Selina Lai-Henderson. Mark Twain in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. 164 pp. $45.00 (cloth). The title of this book might be misleading, but not necessarily in an unwelcome way. If you expect this book to be about the reception of the work of Mark Twain (1835–1910) by the general public in China, you are getting more than that. In fact, a larger section of the book (the first three chapters) is about Twain’s changing political opinion about China and American imperialism. After a thorough review of how Twain’s view of China and Chinese immigrants was transformed, the final two chapters focus on the reception of Mark Twain’s work in China, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. Thus, Selina Lai-Henderson provides a broad overview of Mark Twain as an American writer on the international stage, following recent publications such as Tsuyoshi Ishihara’s Mark Twain in Japan: The Cultural Reception of an American Icon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), Susan K. Harris’s God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Hsuan L. Hsu’s Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (New York: New York University Press, 2015). The three chapters delineating Twain’s transformed view of the Chinese and the United States as an empire draw on historical records, other historical studies of Twain, and short analyses of Twain’s political commentaries. Lai-Henderson describes the change in Twain’s views by noting that, despite growing up in a “pre–Civil War, slave-holding town imbued with conservatism and white supremacist ideas, Twain had come a long way by the time he denounced American imperial missions abroad” (12). Chapter one is devoted to Twain’s adventures in the American West in the 1860s and his change of opinion toward the Chinese in America at this stage of his life. When he worked as a journalist in New York, shortly after he had left his home in Hannibal, Missouri, he described the Chinese as “human vermin.” His adventures in the American West, especially his experience in San Francisco during the time of a huge influx of Chinese labor, allowed him to grow into someone who showed sympathy to the Chinese, as indicated in writings such as his “Chinese Slaves” (1864), “China at the Fair” (1864), and “Our Active Police” (1865). Returning to the eastern United States, Twain continued to write against racism and social injustice to the Chinese in America. Lai-Henderson includes a discussion of the play Ah Sin (1877) in this chapter and reinterprets the image of Ah Sin, whom many other Twain scholars see as problematic and stereotypical, as a character who actually subverts racist stereotypes. Chapter two recounts Twain’s two voyages to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaiian Islands) in 1866 and 1895 and compares his attitudes on each trip toward Chinese coolie labor. Twain’s first visits occurred when the coolie trade was rapidly growing, and Twain’s description of it indicates that he was “more concerned about coolie trade being beneficial to American business and the extension of America’s empire across the Pacific” than about the Chinese, although sympathy can be detected (37). Twain’s practical attitude toward justifying the coolie trade goes along with his support of Chinese rights. His friendship with Anson Burlingame (1820–1870) was a positive influence on his support for Chinese rights in America. Twain penned “The Treaty with China: Its Provisions Explained” (1868) in support of the Burlingame Treaty, wherein he defended the rights of Chinese [End Page E-9] immigrant workers to vote and to acquire citizenship in the United States. By the time of Twain’s second trip to the Sandwich Islands, he had become increasingly disillusioned with European and American colonialism, and “it was now the Anglo-Saxon crowd that he came to denigrate as the real ‘human vermin’ for their claims to moral superiority” (44). Lai-Henderson points out that Twain’s travelogue Following the Equator (1897) proves that, although he had not addressed the “Chinese question” since Ah Sin...

Abstract. This study examines the factors that explain Chinese-Americans' political engagement. Many studies of Chinese-Americans have focused on areas other than their political attitudes/behavior and have been mainly conducted on populations outside the U.S. The present study pays special attention to the effect of political mobilization. Drawing on segmented assimilation theory, the present study regards the mobilization of immigrants by political parties or organizations into mainstream political process as one of the contexts of reception. As a result of China's nondemocratic political systems, Chinese immigrants might have different political values and different ideas about taking part in the political process. Thus, special efforts are needed to encourage Chinese-Americans to become more politically active. The regression results show that the mobilization variables consistently displayed a significant impact, regardless of the different modes of political engagement. Party contact encouraged nonvoting activities, voter registration, and voting among Chinese-Americans, and organization contact led to stronger interest in politics and more active participation in nonvoting activities. Keywords: Chinese-American, political participation, mobilization, party, organization 1. Introduction This study examines the factors that explain Chinese-Americans' political engagement. In the U.S., Chinese-Americans are categorized as Asian-Americans. Greater numbers of Asian-Americans are increasingly playing a role in various aspects of the country. Although previous studies have examined the political attitudes and behaviors of Asian-Americans, most have tended to assume that Asian-Americans are a homogenous, monolith group (DeSipio, Masuoka, and Stout 2008). Therefore, they have framed Asian-Americans as a unified block vote. As noted in an earlier study (Ong and Scott 2009), given the increased diversity within Asian-American communities, additional analyses are needed to yield a deeper understanding of the individual subgroups of Asian-Americans, as well as that of other minority groups, such as blacks and Latinos. The present study starts from the idea that the political attitudes/behaviors of Asian-American subgroups differ greatly from each other and that these subgroups must be disaggregated based on ethnicity and examined separately in depth. Chinese-Americans are the largest segment of the Asian-American population in the U.S. Their numbers increased from 2,432,585 in 2000 to 3,347,229 in 2010 (U.S. Census Bureau 2000, 2010).The Chinese were one of the first of the immigrant populations in Asia to emigrate to the U.S. in the 1880s (Kim, Linton, and Lum 2015). Given the long history of Chinese-Americans in the U.S., the extremely scant research on the political attitudes and behaviors of Chinese immigrants is surprising. This is not to say that there has been no scholarly attention given to Chinese-Americans. However, many studies of Chinese-Americans (Lu, Samaratunge, and Hartel 2013, Guo 2013, Kim, Linton, and Lum 2015, Ng et al. 2015, Chung 2013) have focused on areas other than their political attitudes/behavior (e.g., education, employment, work experience, family life, and social mobility). For example, Lu, Samaratunge, and Hartel (2013) investigated professional Chinese immigrants' acculturation attitudes in the workplace. They found that among the four types of acculturation attitudes (assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization), the majority of Chinese immigrants exhibited attitudes of separation and marginalization, which are related to low affective workgroup commitment. From an economic perspective, Guo (2013) argued that recent Chinese immigrants have encountered multifaceted barriers in employment and language and that these barriers have resulted in unemployment, poor economic performance, and downward social mobility. Chung (2013) studied the impact of family roles on ethnicity among the children of Chinese immigrant families. …

The Reconstruction of the Image of Chinese Female Immigrants in Full Moon in New York, Siao Yu, and Finding Mr. Right Kaby Wing-Sze Kung This article explores the changing cinematic images of Chinese women immigrants in the United States, focusing on three films by directors from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, respectively, in order to demonstrate ways in which contemporary transnational Chinese cinema introduces alternatives to established stereotypes. Full Moon in New York (1989) by Stanley Kwan (關錦鵬), Siao Yu (1995) by Sylvia Chang (張艾嘉), and Finding Mr. Right (2013) by Xiaolu Xue (薛曉璐) all illustrate how the social, political, and economic changes that have taken place in China since the 1980s have inspired contemporary Chinese filmmakers to construct new images of Chinese female immigrants. The new transnational Chinese cinema develops female characters who are more complex than the stereotypical images of the Lotus Blossom or the Dragon Lady (Tajima 309), and introduces elements of Chinese culture that are less known to Western viewers. To this end, the characters may represent stronger traditional views, as in Kwan's film; may adapt multicultural traits, as in Chang's film; or may be American Dreamers, as in Xue's comedy. In the early history of Chinese immigrants in the United States, Chinese women were stereotyped as "exotic curios, sexual slaves, drudges, or passive victims" (Yung 3). Based on these stereotypes, most Hollywood films portrayed Chinese women in a derogatory manner. In "Lotus Blossoms Don't Bleed: Images of Asian Women," Renee Tajima states that "Asian women in film are, for the most part, passive figures who exist to serve men, especially as love interests for white men (Lotus Blossoms) or as partners in crime with men of their own kind (Dragon Ladies)" (309). In light of this, the images of Asian women in American cinema could be confined to two types: "the Lotus Blossom (also known as China Doll, Geisha Girl, shy Polynesian beauty), and the Dragon Lady (Fu Manta's various female relations, prostitutes, devious madames)" (309). One prominent example of a Lotus Blossom is featured in the aptly [End Page 424] named film Lotus Blossom (1921), starring Lady Tsen Mei, while one famous example of a Dragon Lady is Anna May Wong's character in Thief of Baghdad (1924) (Tajima 309). Owing to deep-rooted prejudice, many influential forms of Western popular culture have marginalized Asian women (Uchida 167); in order to create new images of Chinese immigrants, the three directors discussed here use Self-Orientalism to deconstruct traditional Western stereotypes and then reconstruct images of Chinese women immigrants by focusing on depicting their female characters' personal frustrations and struggles while living in the United States. Although the three directors are from different Chinese locales and depict different types of problems that Chinese immigrants in America face in different eras, they all focus on female immigrants' struggles for survival in their new milieu. They depict Chinese female immigrants as powerless, with no choice but to stay in America. In light of this, comparison of these three films reveals different facets of the images of Chinese female immigrants. Xiaolu Xue, from China, Sylvia Chang, from Taiwan, and Stanley Kwan, from Hong Kong, each bring distinct backgrounds, idiosyncratic ideas, and particular filmic techniques to the depiction of Chinese immigrants to the United States. Each film also presents the experiences of Chinese female immigrants in a different historical period: Full Moon in New York is set in the 1980s, Siao Yu was filmed in the 1990s, and Finding Mr. Right was made in the 2010s. Stanley Kwan's Full Moon in New York tells the story of three Chinese women in New York. Zhao Hong (Siqin Gaowa) who is from mainland China, has just married Thomas, an American-born Chinese man, and is trying to adjust to her new American lifestyle. However, she is not completely content, as she longs to bring her mother to America. Li Feng Jiao (Maggie Cheung) is from Hong Kong and is burdened with managing a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, working as a real estate agent, and confronting her homosexuality. Wang Hsiung Ping (Sylvia Chang), an actress from Taiwan, attends multiple auditions for stage performances without much success. The...