Chinese In America Research Articles

Teaching Transnational Asian American History Using a Human Rights Approach: Illustrating with Chinese American History

As an increasing number of states mandate or consider the incorporation of Asian American history into school curricula, educators and curriculum developers are actively responding to this growing demand. Recognizing the transnational nature of Asian American history and the explanatory power of Asian Critical (AsianCrit) Theory in addressing this complexity, I advocate for the pedagogical effectiveness of a human rights framework. This framework provides a valuable scaffold for students’ learning and the development of a transnational perspective. After reviewing multiple typologies of Human Rights Education, I propose that the C3 Inquiry framework offers a robust model for implementing Human Rights Education. This approach provides a comprehensive strategy for teaching about, through, and for human rights within the context of teaching and learning about Asian American history. To illustrate this approach, a sample unit plan focusing on key moments in Chinese American history is presented.

Cultural Manifestation of Overseas Chinese in America from the Show “Fresh Off the Boat”

Cultural Manifestation of Overseas Chinese in America from the Show “Fresh Off the Boat”

Visitor experience as translation

Abstract This paper explores the museum visitor experience as a form of translation. It argues that if a given exhibition can be seen as a cultural translation, then it is also true that the visitor’s reading of that exhibition constitutes a further layer of translation, as the visitor enacts their own transformation of the culture on display. The paper draws on intertextuality as a means to understand the ways in which this transformation occurs. It delineates a three-level typology of intertexts employed by the visitor and considers how the use of such intertexts constructs the visitor’s positionality in regard to the exhibition. The paper focuses on data from a diasporic museum, the Museum of Chinese in America, and applies a methodology involving analysis of TripAdvisor reviews and post-visit diaries to the online museum. The paper concludes that diaspora museums are a case in which the particular nexus of identity issues at work provide a more complex view of the visitor experience as translation.

The Chinese Labor Experiment: Contract Workers in the Northeastern United States, 1870–1880

ABSTRACT In the early 1870s, three employers in the northeastern United States experimented with hiring Chinese men from California and Louisiana to work in factories in North Adams, Massachusetts; Belleville, New Jersey; and Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Searching for an alternative to their unionizing White workers, the employers sought to capitalize on the belief that Chinese migrants were a cheap and docile source of labor. This article examines the historical roots of Chinese labor in the United States, the stereotype of the Chinese worker, and why White fears of a “yellow peril” stealing jobs largely failed to materialize but nonetheless influenced future anti-Chinese legislation. Widespread interest in replicating the labor experiment declined in part because the Chinese workers themselves asserted control over their movement and subverted their employers’ expectations. This article aims to highlight the agency of those Chinese laborers and expand upon West Coast–centric perspectives on nineteenth-century Chinese American history.

Exhibitions for Social Justice by Elena Gonzales

Reviewed by: Exhibitions for Social Justice by Elena Gonzales Sarah J. Seidman (bio) Exhibitions for Social Justice By Elena Gonzales. New York: Routledge, 2019. 212 pages, 6" × 9", 45 b&w illus. $128.00 cloth, $37.56 paperback, $37.56 e-book. Elena Gonzales's Exhibitions for Social Justice is a valuable handbook on museums that mount exhibitions explicitly engaged with social justice. Not intending to rationalize the need for this kind of work, Gonzales instead seeks to provide support and evidence-based examples for people working in this field. By drawing a bit on neuroscience, Gonzales focuses on how best to engage viewers; what leaves the most lasting impression with them; and how that can lead to an array of impact and actions over time. Although the book was published in 2019, it remains as relevant as ever, as museums and their employees have grappled with their content, collections, and in some cases their very existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gonzales presents an optimistic take on the importance of museums, arguing that socially engaged work is both doable and meaningful. A range of scholars and readers may find Gonzales's work compelling. The book is directed at people who study or work in museums, with worksheets and checklists at the back of the book. The introduction offers a useful engagement with literature in the field, but overall, the book is accessible and readable to practitioners with a range of backgrounds and training. It is also valuable to public historians and to historians who want to think about how the narratives they craft are received by broad audiences. That said, there is not much specific to New York history or institutions—other than a brief mention of the early iteration of the Museum of Chinese in America—as a deliberate choice on the author's part. Gonzales focuses on inland and international institutions, with Chicago museums (art museums, history museums, zoos, and aquariums) at the heart of the book. Still, the case studies, of which there are a lot, both speak to, and transcend, place and allow Gonzales to make the larger points that animate her work. Chapter 1, "From Empathy to Solidarity," introduces foundational terminology for the book. As someone who has written about solidarity and social movements, I was fascinated to see this term being used in the museum context. Gonzales argues that before we reach solidarity between museum staff and visitors, we must work to propagate empathy in museums. To do that, we must challenge "groupness"—through bringing in those historically considered outsiders to museums or to a particular museum's community—and engage in hospitality. Hospitality initially sounded like a for-profit consumer model, but the example Gonzales gives, of the historic house museum Hull-House serving tea to visitors in what [End Page 408] was activist and Hull-House founder Jane Addams's bedroom, makes a powerful case for the application of this concept (30). The crux of the first chapter shows how exhibition content that emphasizes individual narratives can engender empathy. Gonzales gives several examples, but dwells on the children's exhibition at the Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam, dedicated to Dutch resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II. Gonzales discusses Holocaust museums throughout the book with admirable nuance, and here shows how the exhibition provides glimpses into Dutch experiences by physically building house-like structures for four people who were children during the war. She moves toward solidarity using her own experience as a curator on the show Roots, Resistance, and Recognition: Who Are We Now? (2006) at the National Museum of Mexican Art, which explored Mexican and African Americans solidarity in the United States and Mexico and created an institutional priority to extend solidarity to African American museum goers. She also shows how solidarity can function between institutions themselves, through networks such as the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, which left me curious for more examples of employee and institutional solidarity and how that can shape content. The second chapter argues that physical experiences, in addition to "resonant content," imparts visitors with lasting memories of their museum visits (58). In addition to touching on Stephen Greenblatt's classic essay "Resonance and Wonder...

엔젤섬이민국의 가려진 이야기: ‘깨어진 꿈’

Angel Island Immigration Station: the Hidden Stories on the Wall - Angel Island Immigration Station;Chinese Exclusion Act;Paper Son and Daughter;Chinese American Immigration History;U.S. Immigration History

Immigration Attorneys and Chinese Exclusion Law Enforcement: The Case of San Francisco, 1882–1930

Abstract 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.

Erasure and Reclamation: Centering Diasporic Chinese Populations in Oregon History

This essay provides an overview of early Chinese American history and introduces the key themes of the Oregon Historical Quarterly special issue on the Chinese diaspora in Oregon. It asserts that the history of Chinese people in Oregon should be centered within the state’s history because doing so compels a rethinking of Oregon’s earliest waves of colonization and economic, political, and social development. The articles in this special issue illustrate how Chinese people were transnational historical actors, navigating a social and cultural terrain that was often unwelcoming and oppressive. They humanize early Chinese settlers in ways that avoid reliance on, or reinforcement of, Orientalist stereotypes and Eurocentrist assumptions as well as a tendency to reduce Chinese immigrant experiences to either resistance or victimization. Each contribution in this special issue helps undo nearly two centuries of erasure and reclaims the place of Chinese people in the history of Oregon.

Collecting and Archiving Asian American Stories During COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a dramatic rise in anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York has been trying to document the experiences of Chinese Americans as they navigate through this tumultuous time. While the collecting effort started out strong, they began to falter when an unforeseen event caused the social priorities of the country to shift dramatically. This shift has also cause cultural institutions like MOCA to rethink their responsibilities in the face of social change and how they can use their platform as thought leaders.

NEW DEAL ART IN THE NORTHWEST: THE WPA AND BEYOND by Margaret Bullock

457 Reviews 1970s. The book ends with a discussion of the continued popularity of Chinese medicine, particularly as a gentler, low-cost alternative to western biomedicine and the expensive drugs and treatments associated with it. Shelton describes how Chinese doctors, like Ka-Kit Hui, founder and director of the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine, have established practices and institutes devoted to the study of the therapeutic effectiveness of Chinese medicine and are exploring ways to integrate biomedical science with traditional Chinese therapies. Herbs and Roots primarily focuses on the period following the discovery of gold in California , which brought thousands of Chinese to the United States seeking an opportunity for a better life and a chance to “strike it rich.” It continues through the mid twentieth century, when Chinese medicine began to flourish and gain greater popularity among non-Chinese patients. Shelton discusses the diametric reception of Chinese medicine in the United States among a non-Chinese audience: from fascination, admiration, and praise to revulsion and criticism. Chinese medicine was simultaneously praised by White Americans for its effectiveness, gentleness , and reliance on natural ingredients, while being derided for supposedly being unscientific and superstitious. Chinese doctors were caught in the middle of an ongoing battle between “regular” and “irregular medicine” during the early-to-midnineteenth century. That battle pitched physicians promoting the heroic system of medicine, which relied on harsh chemical treatments and “bleeding, blistering, and purging” to remove toxins from the body, against practitioners promoting gentler, less invasive, and less toxic “alternative” therapies such as homeopathy. Later, Chinese medicine practitioners were caught in the fight over “scientific” and “unscientific ” medicine during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shelton discusses how Chinese medicine practitioners frequently fought against anti-Chinese narratives that portrayed Chinese medicine as exotic, Oriental, unscientific, superstitious , magical, and mystical. She argues that Chinese doctors fought against negative stereotypes and anti-Chinese legislation through the court system, White testimonials, occasional bribery, educational advancement, and by using stereotypes associated with Chinese medicine to their advantage. She argues that, despite numerous struggles and anti-Chinese sentiment, Chinese doctors and other Chinese medicine practitioners continued to expand their practices and that traditional Chinese medicine remains a popular “alternative” treatment to western biomedicine. Shelton incorporates a broad range of sources in her exploration of the Chinese doctors in the American medical marketplace, and she is one of the very few historians of Chinese medicine in the United States who cites the role and work of archaeologists in understanding types of therapies and the material signatures of treatments used by Chinese immigrants to the United States. The book reads well, follows a set timeline, provides sufficient context for understanding how Chinese physicians established their practices in the United States, and how they were both accepted and rejected by the medical community and the public. This book would appeal to anyone interested in learning more about the history of Chinese medicine in the United States as well as scholars of nineteenth-century medicine, and of Chinese American history. Sarah Heffner Sacramento, California NEW DEAL ART IN THE NORTHWEST: THE WPA AND BEYOND by Margaret Bullock Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, 2020. Illustrations. 240 pages. $39.95 cloth. In March 1933, just over three years following the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president. His administration soon enacted back- 458 OHQ vol. 121, no. 4 to-work programs with head-spinning urgency. Government officials quickly realized the importance of extending relief to workers in the art world and over the following decade, crafted programs not only to lift artists out of poverty, but also to boost the flagging morale of a nation. New Deal Art in the Northwest is the first comprehensive exploration of how these art programs, often lumped together under the New Deal or Works Progress Administration (WPA) banner, played out in the Northwest in Region 16, specifically, Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho. It is also the catalogue for the traveling exhibition, Forgotten Stories: Northwest Public Art in the 1930s. The core of the book, a culmination of nearly twenty years of research by Margaret Bullock, comprises three chapters: the first covers the Public Works of Art...

Reclaiming America: the quest for home in Shawn Wong’s Homebase

ABSTRACTWith its dynamic narrative, Shawn Wong's Homebase recounts the story of four generations of a Chinese family searching for a homebase on the land of the United States. Personal experiences, family chronicles, and Chinese American history are portrayed through various forms, including short stories, correspondences, student essays, memories, and dreams. A major theme of the novel is geographically and spiritually “reclaiming America,” or attempts by Chinese Americans to make the United States their “real” home. The protagonist's way to reclaim America involves revisiting landmarks and other places in the United States where his father and grandfather had traveled, through which he tries to discover the meaning of his own life in the United States and thereby to find his personal identity and home in this country. In drawing the topography of Chinese American history, Shawn Wong not only inscribed Chinese American presence on those places where the protagonist's forefathers had lived and worked, but also used legends to implant their heritage into those soils. Shawn Wong hopes that through his writing he can build for Chinese Americans a history, a cultural foundation with myths and legends of their own. Only when a people's myths spread over the land they inhabit can the land truly be considered theirs. The Chinese American identity shaped in Homebase is heroism, rooted in the ethnic identity of the male Chinese American in the American West, and this is the “home” that the protagonist as well as many other Chinese Americans ever quest for.

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

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

“Strangers from a Different Shore”

Abstract This exploratory research examines archival representations of Chinese in America in collections dating from before and during the Chinese Exclusion Era (1860–1943), both in mainstream institutional archives/special collections repositories and in smaller community-based archives. Using critical race theory as a methodological framework and an interpretivist case study approach, this research shows a continued lack for transparency surrounding archival description and archival representations within such collections and an uneven distribution of resources across institutions that collect and preserve materials on early Chinese in America. The report identifies the difficulties of balancing evolving terminologies and changing archival descriptive standards/technology and the need for collaboration among bibliographers, catalogers, archivists, historians and activists in creating archival descriptions in collections about the Chinese in America.

The Chinese Junk <i>Keying</i> and American Racialization of Chinese

As the first Chinese wooden boat that ever reached the United States, the Keying, with its 40 Chinese sailors who composed the hitherto largest group of Chinese in America, not only satisfied Americans’ curiosity at Chinese junks and Chinese people, but prompted a nationwide attempt at racializing Chinese from 1847 to 1848. This prototypical Chinese racialization features a configuration in which Chinese were triangulated vis-a-vis American whites and nonwhites. Whites occupied the upper corner of the triangle, commanding discursive tools of mass publications to position Chinese relative to whites themselves and other minority groups on America’s racial ladder. Chinese were defined as an inferior, pitiable racial other that resembled Indians in appearance and stood somewhere in between Mexicans and blacks in terms of racial advancement. The triangular paradigm continued to function in American racialization of Chinese even after the departure of the Keying for Britain in February 1848, though with noticeable modifications.

The Chinese and the Stanfords: Nineteenth-Century America’s Fraught Relationship with the China Men

ABSTRACTThis essay explores nineteenth-century America's complicated and often contradictory relationship with the Chinese who were brought to the American West as labor. In particular, the tensions between the political positions and personal experiences of Leland Stanford – railroad magnate, California governor, and founder of Stanford University – reflect the vexed attitudes encountered by the Chinese as they helped build the United States in the nineteenth century. Citing public discourse of the period on the presence of the Chinese in America, along with Stanford’s varied views on it, the essay describes how Stanford’s own awareness of the significant contributions of Chinese labor was at odds with the politically expedient anti-Chinese rhetoric he often espoused. In addition, the perspectives of Chinese workers employed by the Stanfords are detailed here, representing their agency as social subjects.

The Amazing History of the Chinese Typewriter: Thomas S. Mullaney The Chinese Typewriter

The Amazing History of the Chinese TypewriterThomas S. Mullaney The Chinese Typewriter Michela Bussotti (bio) The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Pp. 504. Hardcover $34.95.) sheds light on a little explored subject while at the same time delivering a study on communication and information technology in China from the end of the Empire to the establishment of the Communist system (1840 to ca. 1950). The book is based on extensive research into both archival and material sources: Mullaney explains that he has worked in archives all over the world (p. 32) and he provides a list of around thirty machines referenced in his research (pp. 401–3). In New York in January 2019, an exhibition of his collection was organized by the East Asia Library of Stanford University at The Museum of Chinese in America. Before the notes (pp. 337–400), readers will find a Table of Archives, a list of historical figures mentioned in the book, and a Character Glossary (pp. 323–36). The book, which contains a substantial number of tables and black-and-white photographs, ends with a Bibliography of Sources (pp. 401–55) and an Index (pp. 457–81). It is possible that the book will receive a mixed response due to the style of presentation of its content: it is rich in details and digressions, which some readers will find fascinating and others less so. This is true of the opening pages, in which the unusual order of the Parade of Nations at the 2008 Beijing Olympics is used to describe the (non-alphabetical) nature of the Chinese language, and in which the author explains that most of the technologies used in information services and the reproduction of scripts over the course of the last 200 years—Morse code, monotype and linotype, typewriting, optical character recognition, etc.—were developed with a [End Page 896] Latin alphabet in mind (p. 9). Indeed, the "Introduction" (pp. 1–33) is largely dedicated to a reflection on the Chinese language, a subject that informs the whole book. Its characters, seen as symbols of unity and continuity, were also perceived, in some quarters, sometimes in China itself, as an obstacle to progress. Mullaney details for us the discovery of Chinese techno-linguistic modernity, but the narrative is anything but one of the triumphal transfer of Western technology to the East. History is made up of sometimes awkward attempts at progress, of complicated circumstances, and dramatic events. The Chinese typewriter often found itself in a "compromised space" and was eventually put to one side. The book opens with a presentation of the Smith Premier double-keyboard typewriters of the 1890s. Later, firms like Remington and Olivetti imposed, on a global scale, a unique model with a single-shift keyboard. Different styles of writing could be mastered by modifying this basic model. Chinese was not one of them. This led to the emergence of the notion of a lack of "technological fitness" due to the defective adoption of imported information technologies. The enormous, ridiculous machines featuring characters traced over in caricatured representations a hundred years ago are no more than a reflection of this approach (chapter 1, "Incompatible with Modernity," pp. 35–74). In "Puzzling Chinese" (chapter 2, pp. 75–121), Mullaney introduces three useful and much-used approaches to typewriting: "common usage," or the classification of characters on the basis of their use; "combinatorialism," which consists in thinking of characters as an ensemble of graphic elements to be associated and disassociated; and "surrogacy," the establishment of a symbolic system for characters. This last approach was first exemplified by Morse, in which Chinese was translated into Arabic numerals for telegraphic transmission and was thus assimilated with the secret languages used at the time (with the additional specificity that Chinese did not have a plaintext version). The first two approaches were associated with the activities of William Gamble (electrotyping) and Marcellin Legrand (typography). In both cases, the objective was to "rationalize" the production of fonts according to how often they were used, and to produce punches that made it possible to reset different elements of individual characters as well as to create matrices. In chapter 3 ("Radical...

“Learning Cantonese will help us”: Elementary school students’ perceptions of dual language education

ABSTRACTThough Cantonese has been spoken in the United States since the 1880s, very little is known about the attitudes of younger Cantonese speakers and learners and their ideas about their bi/multilingual identities. We fill this gap by reporting findings from focus group interviews with 14 fourth and fifth graders attending a Cantonese-English DLI school. We asked participants to discuss their beliefs about bi/multilingualism, their experiences with the DLI program, and their future aspirations using Cantonese. Three main themes resulted from the focus groups: utilitarian and intrinsic ideologies, the need for contextualizing language learning, and their general perceptions about their schooling experiences and building communicative repertoires. Specifically, findings show that students were expressive in discussing languages as a resource, the role of Cantonese in Chinese American immigration history, and the tensions between Cantonese and other more “economically useful” languages like Mandarin. Our data call for heightened attention to young learners’ language ideologies and the need to better understand the complex ways learners see themselves as bi/multilingual individuals and their various intrinsic and instrumental perceptions of language learning and use.

Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship by Edlie L. Wong

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...

The Legal Education of the First Chinese American Admitted to the New York Bar in the Twentieth Century and his Crusade to End Discrimination Against Ethnic Chinese in America

AbstractThis article attempts to reveal how a typical first generation Chinese American activist set out to go to law school to learn the skill set to help fight against racial prejudice directed at the Chinese in the early twentieth century. It examines how Hua Chuen Mei, a first-generation Chinese American lawyer was educated and trained in America; it primarily traces his undergraduate and law school education at Columbia and New York University Law School from 1910–1914 to show how he overcame the odds and excelled academically to complete his undergraduate and law degree programs with flying colors. It revisits his extracurricular activities to understand what motivated early Chinese immigrants like him to seek legal education, and what issues were uppermost in the mind of a typical Chinese American law student in that era.

Relocation of Cultural Identity in Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Maxine Hong Kingston, born in California, America in 1940, is a celebrated Chinese-American writer. And she is the most representative female writer in promoting the prosperity of Chinese-American literature in the late 20 century. As a Chinese American writer’s unique identity, she pays special attention to Chinese-Americans in her works. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book is her first real novel published in 1989. Its publication brought strong social shock and numerous literary critics and scholars to evaluate her works from different perspectives in a variety of literary theory. Unlike her previous works, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book transfers the focus from the reconstruction of Chinese-American history to the Chinese American cultural identity. Through careful reading of the text, this paper, with Homi K. Bhabha’s post-colonial theory as a theoretical base, aims to explore the reconstruction and relocation of cultural identity after cultural perplexity and disillusionment, trying to open up a new way out for Chinese-Americans.