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Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jaas.1999.0004

1097-2129

George Anthony Peffer,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

Reviewed by: Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era George Anthony Peffer Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era. Edited by K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. This volume seeks to accomplish two stated objectives. First, the editors are attempting to present “corrective histories,” (p. viii) that challenge earlier generations of assimilationist and “sojourner” scholarship relative to the development of Chinese American communities. Second, they “want to introduce the voices of Chinese Americans—persons with names and individualized life stories—into the historical record.” (p. ix) Their pursuit of those tasks appears most determined to uncover historical markers necessary to identify when the term, “Chinese American,” first emerged as a psychological rather than merely a demographic reality. Compiling an abundant collection of “firsts,” seven independent chapters embrace this quest to reclaim a people’s heritage and heroes. In “Cultural Defenders and Brokers,” Scott Wong examines defenses composed by Chinese American scholars to counter public attacks on their community. Their essays reveal a diversity of perspectives among elite immigrants of the nineteenth century, which Wong cites as evidence that a transition from China-focused to America-focused lives had already begun well before exclusion. However, an oppressive anti-Chinese environment obscured this growing Chinese American consciousness because intellectuals “were forced to focus more of their attention on defending their presence than on developing an identity with an accompanying body of literature to define and celebrate their existence in America.” (p. 32) Qingsong Zhang then analyzes the career of Wong Chin Foo in “The Origins of the Chinese Americanization Movement.” Forced into exile by official hostility toward his reform activities in China, this reluctant immigrant organized New York’s naturalized Chinese Americans into the Chinese Equal Rights League, founded in 1884. Serving as organizational secretary and editor of the Chinese American, credited as the “first Chinese newspaper on the East Coast,” Wong inspired “perhaps the first attempt by the Chinese to identify themselves as ‘Americans of Chinese origin’ rather than as ‘sojourners’ or ‘subjects of the Yellow Emperor.’” (p. 49) In “Exercise Your Sacred Rights,” Renqiu Yu focuses on the political activities of New York’s Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA). Following its founding in 1933, CHLA success in combating local discrimination quickly made it the largest Chinese occupational organization in the city. From that position of strength, leaders founded the China Daily News in 1940, and [End Page 108] 108 attempted to promote democratization of both the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in China. Although those latter initiatives failed, Yu cites their reform agenda as evidence that the CHLA’s immigrant membership had embraced American democratic values and developed a “Chinese American consciousness . . . as they began to think positively of themselves as Americans with a Chinese heritage.” (p. 74) Sue Fawn Chung devotes “Fighting for Their American Rights” to the same theme as its predecessor, tracing the history of the San Francisco-based Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA) from its establishment in 1895 to the present. The group’s organizational milestones include publication of the Chinese Times, which “made its debut [in 1924] as the first successful Chinese daily newspaper owned, edited and published by Americans of Chinese ancestry,” (p. 113) the admission of Noel Lim as its first female member in 1976, and the election of Virginia C. Gee as its first female lodge president in 1991. Finally, Chung interprets the CACA’s significance in Chinese American history: “In 1895, these Chinese Americans rebelled against the Chinese culture of Chinatown that stressed conformity to the old ways, but neither were they accepted into the Euro-American society. Therefore, they created their own niche, with one foot in each tradition.” (pp. 117, 118) In “Race, Ethnic Culture and Gender in the Construction of Identities among Second-Generation Chinese Americans,” Sucheng Chan reviews twenty-eight autobiographies, spanning the 1880s–1930s period, of individuals belonging to their community’s economic elite. Borrowing terminology utilized by some feminist scholars, Chan notes that “. . .whereas Chinese American young men felt the sting of racism in the public arena most keenly, Chinese American young women were more concerned with escaping the...