Chinese In America Research Articles

CHINESE-AMERICANS’ POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT: FOCUSING ON THE IMPACT OF MOBILIZATION

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. …

Mark Twain in China by Selina Lai-Henderson

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...

Review: SubUrbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape and Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1923–1968

SubUrbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape Museum of Chinese in America, New York 24 September 2015–27 March 2016 Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1923–1968 Museum of Chinese in America, New York 24 September 2015–27 March 2016 If the United States, sprawling and diverse, can be difficult to see, the milieu of new immigrants, especially poor ones, is even less visible. A pair of exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America helped bring that world into focus: SubUrbanisms , which explored the lives of Chinese immigrants in twenty-first-century Norwich, Connecticut; and Chinese Style , which documented the mid-twentieth-century career of Chinatown-born architect Poy Gum Lee. SubUrbanisms , curated by Stephen Fan, a young Chinese American architect who grew up, in part, in Norwich, told the fascinating story of Chinese workers lured from New York City beginning around 2001 to work at Mohegan Sun, the massive casino complex developed by the Mohegan Tribe in the late 1990s on the site of a shuttered plant that made components for nuclear reactors. Norwich, like much of southeastern New England, industrialized early. A century ago, its bustling mills attracted thousands of new immigrants from the Lower East Side, mostly Italians and Jews (including several of my great-grandparents). As industry waned, however, downtown faded, and those who remained, like Americans coast to coast, spread out to a new ring of tract houses and commercial strips. It is here, rather than …

Expanding the Scope of Chinese American History

Expanding the Scope of Chinese American History

Unfolding Chinese American History

Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion. New-York Historical Society Museum & Library. Louise Mirrer, President and CEO; Marci Reaven, Curator and Vice President for History Exhibitions; John Kuo Wei Tchen, Chief Historian; Cynthia Lee, Assistant Curator. September 26, 2014 April 19, 2015. http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibitions/ chineseamerican/. Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving. Museum of Chinese in America. Nancy Yao Maasbach, President and Director; Herb Hoi Chun Tam , Curator and Director of Exhibitions; Yue Ma , Director of Collections; Cynthia Lee, Project Advisor. September 25, 2014 March 1, 2015. http://www.mocanyc.org/exhibitions/waves_of_identity/. Memory Prints: The Story World of Phillip Chen. Museum of Chinese in America. John Kuo Wei Tchen , Curator. September 25, 2014 March 1, 2015. http://www.mocanyc.org/exhibitions/past/. Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office. Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, Gallery. Noah Fuller and John Kuo Wei Tchen, Curators; Mark Tseng Putterman, Associate Curator. October 3, 2014 March 13, 2015. http://www.nyu-apastudies.org/2012/haunted-files-the-eugenicsrecord-office/.

Messengers from the US-Chinese Past

Messengers from the US-Chinese Past Elena Barabantseva The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority by Madeline Y. Hsu. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 335. $35.00 cloth, $35.00 e-book. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. Second edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. Pp. xiv + 368. $30.00, paper. Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943 by Emma Jinhua Teng. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Pp. xvii + 331. $29.95 paper, $29.95 e-book. Chinese and Americans: A Shared History by Xu Guoqi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 332. $39.95. What matters in accounts of shared history? Whose stories should be included and count as history? The four books under review in this essay speak to these questions in distinct ways, but often refer to the same people, events, regions, and places. These studies differ in their analytical scope, subjects of inquiry, and sources, yet follow a similar research trajectory, focusing on informal contacts, marginalized experiences, and familial relations linking the United States and China. [End Page 441] Through the analysis of people-to-people relations in particular political contexts, the books show how political discourses and agendas in the two countries marked and shaped human experiences relating to citizenship and rights, law, identity, and social values. Relations between China and the United States changed during the late nineteenth century. In China, a growing interest in Western learning and technology preceded the antiforeignism of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In the US, until antimiscegenation laws and the Chinese Exclusion Act were passed in the 1880s, curiosity, fascination, and openness to a different culture and philosophy of life dominated national sentiments toward Chinese. This is the historical juncture at which the analyses in the four books start. In Chinese and Americans, Xu Guoqi examines newly discovered private letters and documentation tracing the legacy of personalities and cultural and educational initiatives that shaped the historical trajectory of the US and China’s bilateral relations. Emma Jinhua Teng’s Eurasian traces the life stories of mixed-race couples and their families across the Pacific. Madeline Hsu’s The Good Immigrants looks at the changing status of the Chinese student immigrant population in the US from their relative exclusion to their celebration as a “model minority.” Island assembles the poetic and oral-history legacy of Chinese migrants detained on Angel Island off the coast of San Francisco, which served as an immigration processing facility during the early twentieth century. The Fragments of Chinese-American History In Chinese and Americans, Xu explores “cultural internationalism” as a theme in the history of the US and China through the life stories and legacies of prominent individuals. He is interested in popular exchanges in the context of formal interstate relations, with a focus on “shared dreams, hopes and frustrations, excitements and disappointments” (p. 2). He distinguishes his approach from the state-centered accounts of US-China relations that dominate the field of diplomatic history. Through an account of people-to-people relations in the areas of cultural and educational exchanges, he paints a nuanced history of [End Page 442] US-China relations, reaching the conclusion that China’s strong desire for internationalization has been countered by the determined efforts of the West to “shut out” the Chinese (p. 206). If there is one central figure whose life and work left a significant mark on the joint history of the US and China—and thus created space to tell the stories in these four books—it is Anson Burlingame, one of the characters discussed in Xu’s Chinese and Americans. Xu meticulously takes the reader through the main events of Burlingame’s career and his lifelong efforts to serve as an envoy between the two states. After the violent opening of China to the world following the Opium War—at a time when the Qing court refused to send resident ministers abroad—Burlingame became China’s first...

A New Historicist Analysis of the Rewriting of Chinese American History in Donald Duk

Frank Chin creates the methods of recovering the lost history of Chinese Americans in his book Donald Duk. He constructs the male heroism through traditional Chinese culture, challenges American education of history through describing the changing process of Donald’s attitudes towards anything about China, and rewrites his version of Chinese American history by analyzing the relation between dreams and reality. Thus Chin achieves his strategy to subvert “History” with “history.” This paper intends to give a new historicist analysis of the rewriting of Chinese American history in Chinese American literature through Donald Duk by Frank Chin.

A Cultural Crossroads at the “Bloody Angle”

In the early twentieth century in New York City, the tongs of Chinatown established themselves as one of the most resilient, and clever, organized crime enterprises in Lower Manhattan. Through spectacular violence and shrewd political dealings, they survived by adapting to, and helping to shape, the evolution of Chinese America. Groups like the Hip Sings and On Leongs, inspiring awe and fear, spiced a chaotic urban stew in which race, class, and politics bubbled into a peculiarly American amalgam. But the tongs were never mere street criminals. These sophisticated organizations represented a formative period in New York’s Chinatown and the Chinese American community. Though rooted in Chinese culture, the tong was a uniquely American response to the racist oppression and political disenfranchisement of the Chinese, who were criminalized and legally excluded under immigration codes until the 1940s. The changes that the tongs underwent, in both their public image and their economic and political activities, reflected evolving, often contradictory, relationships with local law enforcement, civil society, and transnational political movements. Previous scholarship on the tongs is sparse, yet the tong wars appear in numerous literary, cultural, and analytical works on Chinese American history. The article examines the histories of two rival tongs with similar political underpinnings, the Hip Sings (協勝堂) and On Leongs (安良堂), who negotiated cultural and political boundaries to build power in the emerging Chinese American community. During the Exclusion Era, which lasted roughly from the late 1800s through 1943, the tongs consolidated their power by curating elements of tradition and Western urban society. In response to local, national, and global social change, the tongs continually honed and recast their public roles in Chinatown as the community came of age in modern America.

Analysis of the Myths, Photographs and Laws in China Men

The presentation of myths, photographs and laws in China Men, thematically related to Chinese American immigration stories, is an important strategy to reconstruct Chinese American history. By citing photographs and presenting law, Kingston reclaims her male ancestors’ past and subverts the monologue of American official history. By rewriting myths, Kingston exposes the dilemma of Chinese Americans and deconstructs a series of American myths such as the myth of America as a melting pot, the myth of Gold Mountain, the myth of freedom and democracy; these myths provide a way for Kingston to write Chinese Americans into American history.

Our Home Is Here: History, Memory, and Identity in the Museum of Chinese in America

This study looks at the Museum of Chinese America, located in Chinatown, New York City, in which the Chinese American identity is represented through a memory project. The experience of Chinese immigrants in America is understood in 3 sets of tensions. Despite an attempt to create an identity with flexibility and diversity, the making of Chinese American history is still dominated by the national narrative, with the challenges of marginalization of certain subgroups of Chinese immigrants and the “great men” narrative of history. The article suggests that exploring the global scope and the diversified targeted audiences in the museum could facilitate a better understanding of Chineseness in interaction with other migration experiences.

"China and the Pursuit of America's Destiny: Nineteenth-Century Imagining and Why Immigration Restriction Took So Long"

Traditional accounts of the exclusion of Chinese from America emphasize the racial, economic, cultural, and political hostility of whites and suggest that exclusion was an inexorable process. This essay, instead, asks why did exclusion legislation actually take a relatively long time to pass through Congress? The question helps re-cast our view of 19 th century Chinese immigration and leads us to appreciate the sentiment that welcomed the arrival of Chinese as part of the broader project of linking America with China for trade, evangelical, and other purposes. The arrival of Chinese in America, in the eyes of important Americans, was part and parcel of the country's grand destiny.

On the Reconstruction of the Chinese American History in China Men

Approaching from Michel Foucault’s notion of history, mainly his counter-memory, the paper explores how Kingston reconstructs Chinese American history through the main strategy of counter-memory—talk-story. Through retelling how the male immigrants in her family participated in constructing America, rooted in America and served in the army, Kingston, with these transgenerational adventures as an archetype, discloses the discontinuity of American history and reconstructs an alternate Chinese American history from the perspective of Chinese Americans. The counter-memory in China Men highlights Chinese Americans’ outstanding contributions, prowess and masculinity, thus helping to carve a place for Chinese Americans in American history, recreate the new images of Chinese Americans and subvert the stereotypical images of Chinese Americans as submissive, feminine, and lack of manhood and prowess.

Disambiguating the Term “Chinese”: An Analysis of Chinese American Surname Naming Practices

AbstractThe term “Chinese” can refer to an ethnicity, a group of people, or language(s). This conflation makes disentanglement especially difficult, yet not disambiguating perpetuates an oversimplification of a nation, languages, peoples, and cultures. While this blanket term collapses plurality into a monolithic entity, the converse seems to hold when looking at Romanized naming practices of Chinese Americans. The alphabetic rendition of Chinese American names draws relatively clear boundaries of country of origin and general time of arrival to the United States. This paper problematizes the term “Chinese” and looks at the Chineses like Cantonese and Hoisan-wa, which have long overlooked histories in the United States and hold critical clues to disambiguating the cultural and linguistic pluralities of what many would lump together as an immutable term. These findings have implications for using this naming phenomenon to raise linguistic awareness and for the teaching of Chinese American history.

Chinatown Then and Neoliberal Now: Gentrification Consciousness and the Ethnic-Specific Museum

This article explores the intersection of cultural tourism, gentrification, and urban development in the neoliberal period by examining the complex and ambivalent relationship between an “ethnic-specific” cultural institution and a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Through a case study of the Museum of Chinese in America's (MoCA) profile, history, and community involvement in Manhattan's Chinatown, this article suggests that small to midsize ethnic-specific museums relate to the social and spatial transformations inherent in gentrification through a mechanism called gentrification consciousness. This mechanism helps to explain how an institution whose history, mission, and politics might indicate a resistance to gentrification is confounded and constrained by the larger neoliberal landscape. Offering little in the way of substantive alternative funding and space, neoliberal urban development touts tourism and culture as key routes to economic development with gentrification as a “natural” and beneficial by-product of such development for both the surrounding neighborhood and for individual cultural institutions. An analysis of the unique relationship of smaller ethnic-specific organizations to gentrification processes complicates discussions about museums and gentrification as well as potentially identifying methods and measures of institutional success that do not rely so heavily on neoliberal logics and policy prescriptions.

Collaboration and Translation: Lin Yutang and the Archive of Asian American Literature

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...

Before Internment, Between Nations, Beyond Integration: Asian Migration Studies in the Shadow of Yuji Ichioka, Him Mark Lai, and Edgar Wickberg

In the last two years, a pair of giants of Chinese American and Overseas Chinese migration history have passed away—Him Mark Lai and Edgar Wickberg. As each passing led to an examination of his individual impact upon scholarship, it is perhaps fitting that all of us who have benefited from the foundational work that an earlier generation of scholars performed pause a moment to take stock. A decade ago, the historian Valerie Matsumoto guest edited a special issue of Amerasia entitled and Historians in the Making, which featured reflections by Him Mark Lai and Yuji Ichioka (who passed away in 2002) about their pioneering work as scholars.1 Another essay reflected upon the work of Alexander Saxton, who helped found the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, and I wrote an essay for the volume that used the rather inelegant conceit that, in the field of Asian American history, we were all dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. In the last decade, it does seem even more striking that a genera...

Him Mark Lai, 1925–2009: The Dean of Chinese American History

Him Mark Lai, 1925–2009: The Dean of Chinese American History

Eulogy for Professor Him Mark Lai

Eulogy for Professor Him Mark Lai Rick Bonus On behalf of all AAAS members, the AAAS Executive Board and the Editorial Board of the Journal of Asian American Studies, we would like to extend our heartfelt condolences to the family of the late Him Mark Lai. Often called “the dean of Chinese American history,” Professor Him Mark Lai was a self-trained pioneering scholar who worked avidly towards legitimizing Chinese American Studies. His selfless commitment to this field, and to the larger field of Asian American Studies, has made him a great role model for many scholars, teachers, and activists. He leaves a legacy of scholarship and service that will last for generations to come. Rick Bonus President Association for Asian American Studie Him Mark Lai, 1925–2009: The Dean of Chinese American History Him Mark Lai, an internationally renowned archivist and historian of Chinese America and a highly respected leader of the community, died peacefully on Thursday, May 21, after a long struggle with cancer and other complications. For his immense contributions to Chinese American history, Prof. L. Ling-chi Wang of Asian American Studies at UC [End Page 369] Berkeley called him “the Dean of Chinese American history.” He was 84 years old. Him Mark Lai was born on November 1, 1925 in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Lai was the first in his family to begin life in America. His mother, Dong Hing Mui, was raised in Guangzhou while his father Maak Bing—from Chunghaa Village, Nam Hoi county—entered the United States under the paper name of Lai. But he passed his true ancestral roots to his five children by giving them each the middle name of Mark. Since his childhood in Chinatown, he was an avid reader and collector of books in both Chinese and English. Like many Chinatown children before World War II, he started schooling at both Commodore Stockton Elementary School and Nam Kue Chinese School. From there, he went to Francisco Junior High School and Galileo High School. He excelled in both public and Chinese schools. During his final year at Galileo High, he also won a citywide essay contest for which he was honored at a student body rally. Upon graduation from high school, he expressed his desire to go to college. However, his father urged him to go for a job in the city’s shipyards, pointing out that racism had prevented his own employer, a university graduate, from working in his profession. Him Mark refused and his irresistible desire was supported by his mother. Toward this end, he worked part time for 25 cents an hour at a sewing factory while attending first in the City College of San Francisco for two years. He completed his mechanical engineering degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1947. Between work and study, Him Mark found time to join the San Francisco chapter of the Chinese League for Peace and Democracy, an organization opposed to American interference in China’s Civil War, 1945–1949. In late 1949, he started volunteering for the Chung Sai Yat Po, the first daily paper to support the new People’s Republic of China, and became also a member of organizations active in persuading students to return to China to serve the new overnment. He also joined the Chinese American Democratic Youth League, more familiarly known as Mun Ching, where he met Laura Jung, a young new immigrant, whom he eventually married in 1953. Laura became his life-time companion and steadfast supporter and collaborator in his work on Chinese American history until he died. Since he never learned how to drive, his countless [End Page 370] research trips criss-crossing the U.S. could not have been accomplished without the ever-present love, care, and devotion of Laura. With his hope of returning to China thwarted, he settled for a job in Bechtel Corporation as a mechanical engineer. The profession provided him both security and income and allowed him to pursue his real passion: the study of Chinese history and culture. During the McCarthy era in 1950s, introducing the Chinese community to the songs, music, folk dances, and vernacular dramas of the New China through Mun...

How To Be Chinese in Mississippi: Representation of a Chinese Grocer in Cynthia Shearer's <em>The Celestial Jukebox</em>

Cynthia Shearer’s novel The Celestial Jukebox illustrates the Mississippi Delta of the 21 st century, yet visitors to Madagascar, Mississippi still see a society where a white planter looks the role of the oppressor and the Chinese American grocer looks exotic and out of place. This article examines specifically the novel’s representation of the Chinese grocer (Angus Chien), which defies stereotypes and challenges historical representations of Chinese workers in the Delta. Regardless of the threats posed by the new socioeconomic order of Madagascar, Angus, influenced by his personal experience living among oppressed peoples, makes an emotional commitment to his business and to his town. Angus’s decision to stay combats essentialist “looks” of Chinese in America that suggest changing socioeconomic conditions should make him out of place twice over, that is, both culturally and economically.

Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture Yong Chen Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture. Edited by Sucheng Chan and Madeline Y. Hsu. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2008. Put together by two leading scholars in the field, Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture represent an important contribution to the study of Chinese American history. Sucheng Chan has authored some of the best monographs on Chinese American history and edited several highly regarded anthologies. Madeline Y. Hsu, author of critically claimed Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000) has emerged as an international visible scholar. Not intended to provide paradigm-shifting theories or comprehensive coverage of Chinese American history, the anthology offers an important framework through the notion "politics of culture," which is articulated in the preface written by Chan. It points to the centrality of culture in American political life and the Chinese struggles for political and socioeconomic justice. Equally important is her terse yet insightful analysis of three other key terms: diaspora, transnationalism, and globalization. The introduction, also by Chan, gives us a most comprehensive historiographical account of Chinese American history. Her discussions in the preface and introduction help us appreciate the intellectual importance and coherence of the book. Covering diverse domestic and translational developments since the late nineteenth century, the following seven chapters demonstrate a remarkable degree of coherency and represent the latest and highly original scholarship. Some of them deal with topics that [End Page 277] have not yet received sufficient attention, while others offer new insights into familiar topics. Concentrating on food, an immensely important but long-ignored aspect of Chinese life, Hsu shows "the continued salience of ethnicity in Chinese American lives even as cold war ideologies proclaimed their increasing acceptance into the American mainstream" (173) in chapter 5. Dealing with immigrants from Changle of Fujian Province in chapter 7, Xiaojian Zhao affords us a valuable opportunity to closely look at the experiences and mentality of a newest group of Chinese Americans, who are reshaping the face of the Chinese community in New York and elsewhere. Andrea Louie's chapter 6 investigates a different kind of Pacific voyage: young Chinese Americans visiting China under the "In Search of Roots Program" (195) and offers sophisticated analysis of its ramifications on identity, class, and gender. Also dealing with transnationalism, chapter 3 by Karen Leong and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu discusses Chinese American activities in support of China during the Sino-Japanese war. In chapter 4, K. Scott Wong draws attention to domestic impacts of transnationalism, showing how international developments changed war-time perceptions of Chinese Americans. So does Josephine Fowler's examination of pre-war left-wing activism in chapter 2. Providing a refreshingly in-depth look at another familiar topic—the Chinese American struggles for civil rights, in chapter 1 Mae M. Ngai reveals the experiences and roles of key players in Tape v. Hurley, an 1885 California Supreme Court case, prohibiting the exclusion of Chinese from public schools. In short, the intellectual insights of this compelling volume will benefit scholars of Chinese America as well as Asian America and immigration and ethnicity. Yong Chen University of California-Irvine Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association