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In August of 1895, a ship called the SS Coptic approached the coast of Northern California. On that boat was a passenger from San Francisco, a young man named Wong Kim Ark who was returning home after visiting his wife and child in China. He'd taken trips like this before, and expected to come back to the city he was born in, to his life and friends. But when the ship docked, officials told him he couldn't get off. The customs agent barred him according to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants. Though Wong Kim Ark had been born in the U.S. and lived his whole life there, the agent said he was not a citizen.

Wong was moved from steamer to steamer for months. But he was able to contact representatives from the Chinese Six Companies, a consortium of Chinese business owners that often hired legal representation for people subject to discrimination. His subsequent legal battles culminated in the 1897 Supreme Court case United States. v. Wong Kim Ark: a case that would forever change the path of American immigration law, and play a pivotal role in the ongoing battle over who gets to be a citizen of the United States.

If you would like to learn more about Wong Kim Ark's story:

You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers by Amanda Frost

American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship by Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov

He Famously Fought For His U.S. Citizenship. Where Are His Descendants Now? by All Things Considered

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In August of 1895, a ship called the SS Coptic approached the coast of Northern California. On that boat was a passenger from San Francisco, a young man named Wong Kim Ark who was returning home after visiting his wife and child in China.

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The book list includes titles on Asian Americans and Asia for children, young adults, and educators.

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By Wayne Au and Moé Yonamine

Candles at the Massage Parlor Outreach Project Vigil for Atlanta Massage Workers.
March 22, 2021, Seattle. Photo courtesy of Melissa Ponder.

Although the recent increase in anti-Asian attacks has been hard for all of us, the murderous killing spree in Atlanta has our families, our youth, and our communities spiraling. From a Japanese teacher in Seattle's Chinatown-International District being assaulted by a man wielding a sock filled with rocks, to the robbery and killing of an Asian American elder in Oakland, to the elderly Asian American woman shoved and spit on in White Plains, New York, to the punching of an Asian man in North Portland, Oregon, these attacks both traumatize and activate us as Chinese American and Okinawan American educators personally. They connect us to our own experiences with hate in this country, and they highlight the deeply rooted history of white supremacy in violence against Asian people.

What is happening now is nothing new. The racism, the devaluing of life of Asian and Asian Americans, the dehumanizing of immigrant workers, the fetishism of - and violence toward - Asian women have been perpetuated throughout U.S. history. What's more, the monolith that "Asians" are somehow one, single identity and image, invisibilizes the diverse racial and ethnic groups that our communities represent, and dehumanizes us both as individuals and as a collective. The white supremacist "model minority myth" has perpetuated a fake hierarchy, pitting people of color against each other for an unattainable proximity to whiteness.

As much of the country attempts to reflect and raise awareness, Asian and Asian American students from various states are choosing not to return to school, disproportionately absent from hybrid classes. The rise in hate crimes has resulted in fear for their own physical safety, both in and out of the school community. Students ask:

Am I safe? Will I be next?

Why hasn't our community's safety been a priority?

Will anyone protect me from the violence?

Do I matter?

To our Asian/Asian American students:

Please know that you are powerful and important. Your safety is an urgent right and we believe you. The weight of white supremacy is not your burden, although the activism you choose to lead in this moment will no doubt be invaluable for future generations. Resting is revolutionary. Turning off to take care of you is strong. So is demanding justice and organizing together on your terms. We will rise and we will collectivize across the nations. Asian Americans, you are beautiful.

Massage Parlor Activist JM Wong speaks to the crowd at the Massage Parlor Outreach Project Vigil for Atlanta Massage Workers. March 22, 2021, Seattle. Photo courtesy of Melissa Ponder.

To our Asian/Asian American teachers and educators:

Please know that we see you. We know that the trauma of the moment impacts you triply: Not only are you having to process your own emotional health right now, you are also potentially holding up your Asian American students, and you are also likely negotiating the complex issues of being forced to return to face-to-face schooling during the pandemic.

To our Asian family, who have resisted other movements for racial justice:

We ask you to hold onto this moment, this feeling. We ask you to remember it when we're out in the streets yelling Black Lives Matter after the death of another Black person at the hands of the police; Remember it when you hear of the next ICE raid on undocumented workers or see immigrant children still kept in cages; Remember it when you hear about yet another missing or murdered Indigenous woman or see tribal nations fighting for sovereign control over their lands; Remember it when you hear about the targeting and profiling of the Muslim community, or the demands for climate justice from frontline Pasifika peoples. We ask you to remember this moment, this feeling, and understand that we are all linked through the oppression of white supremacy.

To our Black, Brown, Indigenous, and white educator family:

It is clear to us that in this moment, not only do many Asian Americans not know their own history, but a lot of folks in other communities do not know our history either. We don't blame anyone, since we know how our country's educational system works to support racism and Eurocentrism, and the sad fact is that we still have very little K-12 curriculum on Asian Americans. What we see and know is that this limited historical memory shapes - in bad ways - how folks make sense of, and respond to, the rise in anti-Asian violence.

As you learn or unlearn Asian American history, teach about the oppression from white supremacy, but also about the movements, activists, and solidarity across movements.

Teach about the long history of violence against Asian Americans, and how ignoring that history is itself a form of violence.

Teach about how pandemics have been used to justify anti-Asian violence.

Teach how "Anti-Asian racism never stopped being an outgrowth of U.S. imperialism."

Teach about Asian Americans and important moments in People's History.

Teach the PBS Series "Asian Americans" and use the accompanying curriculum developed by Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

Teach "A Different Asian American Timeline," which places Asian American history in the context of race and capitalism in the United States.

Teach about the incarceration of the Japanese Americans during WW II, from their imprisonment in local fairgrounds, to Japanese Latin Americans being rounded up internationally.

Teach about the true diversity of Asians and Asian Americans, from Indigenous Okinawans who have been colonized and resisted colonization by both Japan and the United States, to Filipinos who have struggled against the imperialistic regimes of Spain and the United States.

Teach that it is time to retire the term Asian Pacific American, because it marginalizes Indigenous Pasifika Island peoples.

Teach about the murdered women in Atlanta: Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng, and say their names correctly using the Asian American Journalists Association pronunciation guide.

Teach the "Hidden Stories that Give Rise to Violence Against Asian American Women."

Teach about the police killings of 20-year-old, Vietnamese American Tommy Le, 30-year-old Filipino American Angelo Quinto, and 19-year-old Chinese American Christian Hall, because it is important for both Asian and non-Asians to understand that, even though we do not face the same level of police violence as Black folks, even for Asian Americans, the police are not our friends.

Teach about the murder of Vincent Chin, beaten to death by white laid-off autoworkers in Detroit, who blamed him for the rise of the Japanese car industry.

Teach about the 1989 school shooting in Stockton, California, where a gunman opened fire on a schoolyard filled mainly with Asian American children, killing five and wounding more than 30.

Teach about the 2012 white supremacist attack on a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in which six people were killed.

Teach about the Asian American Movement, and the dynamic history of Asian American activism in the United States.

Teach about the history of tensions and solidarity between Asian American and Black communities.

Teach about the Third World Liberation Front, a multiracial coalition of Black, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American students in the San Francisco Bay Area who together, through protest, started the movement for Ethnic Studies.

Teach about the Myth of the Model Minority as a form of anti-Asian racism and as a racist myth used as a "wedge" against other communities of color.

Teach about Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, and their solidarity work with the Black community.

Teach about the Movement for Black Lives and the Black Lives Matter at School respective statements in solidarity with Asian Americans facing violence.

Teach about early instances of interracial solidarity, like when Frederick Douglass spoke out against growing anti-Chinese violence in the United States and the movement for Chinese Exclusion.

Teach about the organizing for Asian-Black solidarity happening in Oakland.

Teach across K-12 using books by and about Asian Americans.

There is so much more to teach about Asian America, and we obviously don't have enough curriculum. But this is a start.

As author Jeff Chang reminds us in the foreword to Karen Ishizuka's Serve the People, "There was a time ... when the term 'Asian American' was not merely a demographic category, but a fight you were picking with the world...."

It is a fight that requires solidarity - not just solidarity among Asian Americans, but with all communities battling for racial justice.

The time has come again to fight for Asian Americans and for Asian Americans to fight. In doing so, we need to remember that the enemy is white supremacy, the enemy is the myth of the model minority, the enemy is anti-Blackness, the enemy is imperialism, the enemy is settler colonialism, the enemy is environmental racism. It is a fight that requires solidarity - not just solidarity among Asian Americans, but with all communities battling for racial justice. It is a fight that requires us to teach and learn about each other, together, in struggle.

Wayne Au (Wayne.wk.au@gmail.com) is a Professor in the School of Educational Studies at University of Washington Bothell and is a long time Rethinking Schools editor.

Moé Yonamine teaches high school Ethnic Studies in Portland, Oregon. She is a Rethinking Schools editor.

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Dear Educators, It Is Time to Fight for Asian America

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What is happening now is nothing new. The racism, the devaluing of life of Asian and Asian Americans, the dehumanizing of immigrant workers, the fetishism of - and violence toward - Asian women have been perpetuated throughout U.S. history.

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Our collection database is a work in progress. We may update this record based on further research and review. Learn more about our approach to sharing our collection online.

If you would like to know how you can use content on this page, see the Smithsonian's Terms of Use. If you need to request an image for publication or other use, please visit Rights and Reproductions.

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Our collection database is a work in progress. We may update this record based on further research and review. Learn more about our approach to sharing our collection online. If you would like to know how you can use content on this page, see the Smithsonian's Terms of Use.

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Behind an ornate archway with a tiled, curved roof in Los Angeles's Chinatown, a solemn golden statue of Chinese revolutionary leader Dr. Sun Yat-Sen sits alone. Although it's a sunny August afternoon, most of the souvenir stores and art galleries surrounding him in the usually busy Central Plaza marketplace are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, doors locked shut behind heavy metal gates. The craggy Wishing Well at the center of the shopping zone is bone dry.

The eerie silence breaks as a figure-spotting me-emerges from underneath an unlit "Phoenix Imports" neon sign. "Come on in!"

Born and raised in Chinatown, Phoenix Imports owner Glenn SooHoo has witnessed the growth, decline, and revitalization of his neighborhood over the past 50 years. Since as early as Lunar New Year in January, L.A.'s Chinatown-and other such enclaves across North America-has been in crisis, buffeted by the twin traumas of xenophobia and a public-health crisis.
(Related: America has a long history of scapegoating Asian immigrants.)
"The virus is hampering business and the tourist industry," says SooHoo. "At New Year's, we had our 121st Golden Dragon Parade celebration, and only like 10 percent of the people showed up. The virus didn't have anything to do with Chinatown, but it being associated as an Asian thing by the president, people just got that phobia about it."

As historic Chinatowns struggle during the pandemic, it's worth looking at why residents-and visitors-flocked to them in the first place.

A land of opportunity-and gold

Chinatowns have been in the U.S. for more than 170 years. The first one, in San Francisco, served as an unofficial port of entry for Chinese immigrants escaping economic and political chaos in the mid-1800s. Men sought their fortunes in the California Gold Rush, and when mining waned, they found work as farmhands, domestic helpers, and in the 1860s, as workers for the Transcontinental Railroad. These men needed sleeping quarters, clean clothes, and hot meals after long days of grueling labor; this led to a proliferation of housing, laundry services, and restaurants in burgeoning, Chinese-centric neighborhoods.

As the immigrants fanned out around the country seeking more work, Chinatowns mushroomed all over the United States. At one time, there were more than 50 of them.

But these Chinatowns were also borne out of growing racial tension and discrimination in housing and employment. After the abolition of slavery, Chinese immigrants provided a cheap source of labor, leading to resentment from the white working class, especially during the Long Depression from 1879 to 1896.

Beginning in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Acts severely limited immigration for more than 60 years. Anti-Chinese sentiment resulted in street brawls, race riots, and even lynching and massacres. During that time, many Chinatowns were destroyed by fire or natural disasters or abandoned by people fleeing the violence.

Immigrant cities rising from the ashes

While the earliest Chinatowns comprised modest wooden and brick buildings, the Asian motifs-pagodas, tiled roofs, bamboo-shaped fonts, and dragon imagery-we see today came about as a way to promote tourism. When the original San Francisco Chinatown was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and the devastating fire that followed, a group of wealthy Chinese merchants saw an opportunity to combat anti-Chinese sentiment by giving their neighborhood a flashy makeover.

Until then, San Francisco's Chinatown was thought of as a seedy, crime-ridden ghetto, rife with opium dens, gambling, and prostitution. The Chinese merchants hired Scottish-American architect T. Paterson Ross and engineer A.W. Burgren to design a new Chinatown, incorporating religious iconography and architectural elements of the 10th-13th century Song dynasty.

The new neighborhood was a fantasy vision of China, a country neither man had ever visited. A prominent Chinese-American businessman, Look Tin Eli, spearheaded the project as a new city with "veritable fairy palaces filled with the choicest treasures of the Orient." The strategy worked: San Francisco's Chinatown was reborn as an "exotic" destination for Western tourists.

Other Chinatowns followed suit, adopting similar aesthetics. After Los Angeles' original Chinatown was torn down in 1933 to make way for a new Union Station, Chinese community leaders organized efforts to rebuild Chinatown a few miles away. Prolific L.A. architects Erle Webster and Adrian Wilson modeled the open-air Central Plaza in the new Chinatown after the Forbidden City in Beijing, with restaurants, souvenir shops, grocery stores, bakeries, and nightclubs featuring musical performances.

But some Chinatowns took a different tack. Instead of projecting a family-friendly atmosphere, Chinatowns in Chicago and New York City promoted a kind of "slum" tourism, where white tourists were invited to revel in the sights, sounds, and smells of poor, ethnic neighborhoods. Visitors dined at chop suey restaurants, peeked into opium dens, and maybe witnessed a tong (Chinese secret society) gang fight in the alley.

From bustle to bust and back

Chinatowns' fortunes rose and fell over the ensuing decades. In 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act and immigration opened up again. In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act removed quotas based on national origins, which led to an explosion of newcomers from China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Cambodia. Chinatowns, once again, became the first stop for many immigrants.

Peter Ng, CEO of Chinatown Service Center (CSC), moved to L.A. from Hong Kong in the 1970s. "When I first got here, my parents and I lived inside Chinatown," he says. "Everyone was conducting business inside Chinatown. There were only a couple of authentic Chinese restaurants back then, so everyone came here. It was really a thriving time." CSC was founded in 1972 to provide health, housing, and advocacy to the growing community.

The '60s also marked turbulent times in American history. Washington D.C. 's Chinatown was devasted when Chinese-owned stores were looted and buildings were burned down during the weeklong 1968 riots triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Civil unrest and urban decay, along with the search for more housing and job opportunities, prompted immigrants to move away from Chinatowns in D.C. and other cities, giving rise to new satellite Asian communities in places like L.A.'s San Gabriel Valley and New York's Flushing, Queens. "The Chinese diaspora is cast so far and wide even within large metros that a single hub for Chinese people is no longer practical or desirable," says journalist Eddie Lin, who grew up in L.A.'s Chinatown in the '70s.
(Related: This photographer captured family life in New York City's Chinatown.)
But before the pandemic, downtown living in many cities had gained popularity and commercial developers had started paying attention to once-neglected Chinatown real estate. Luxury apartments and trendy restaurants took over rent-controlled buildings and mom-and-pop stores. As a result, gentrified Chinatowns in cities like D.C. and San Jose, California, were reduced to shadows of their formerly vibrant selves, with only a handful of Chinese restaurants and arched gateways left standing.

With the pandemic, xenophobia and hope

Enter President Donald Trump and the coronavirus pandemic. "Unfortunately, Trump's rhetoric around the virus and beyond has empowered even more horrific and racist acts since COVID," says Hoi Leung, curator of the Chinese Culture Center (CCC) of San Francisco. California has tallied at least 800 hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders since the pandemic began.

Alarmed by anti-Asian sentiment and the downturn in business, many Chinese Americans are fighting back. This year, CCC partnered with artist Christine Wong Yap for the Art, Culture, and Belonging in Chinatown project, for which people were asked to submit their personal recollections of San Francisco's Chinatown. Through intentional art and educational programming, CCC hopes visitors and residents view the neighborhood like a museum, "where it becomes an interactive site to deepen their understanding and sense of belonging through engaging with stories, people, and history," Leung says, cautioning that without care and activism, Chinatowns will eventually disappear.

For millennials Victoria Lee and Jennifer Tam, Manhattan's Chinatown has always held a special place in their hearts. Growing up, Lee spent weekends with her grandmother who lived in Chinatown, while Tam moved to Chinatown a decade ago from Houston, Texas.

After seeing the economic impact COVID had on the neighborhood, the two friends started Welcome to Chinatown, a nonprofit supporting the area's small businesses with additional resources and revenue streams. "The business impact happened much earlier in Chinatown than in the rest of New York City, due to the rise of xenophobia," Tam says. "We're here to help say, 'Chinatown will always be open for business.'"

Tam and Lee spotlight various businesses on their Instagram page, raise funds to feed the senior community, and partner with local artists to create merchandise like tote bags and mugs. "Welcome to Chinatown is a love letter to Chinatown, a way to give back to a community that has given so much to us," Tam says. To Tam and Lee, the neighborhood still embodies much of the Chinese-American experience. "It's important to us that we preserve the narratives and stories that have been built here," Tam says.

Hard work and resilience

In L.A., sun-bleached red lanterns line the green awning of a brick building. Next door, the concrete parking lot has been converted into an outdoor dining space with potted plants, umbrellas, and string lights. Hop Woo was one of a handful of restaurants that remained open during the pandemic. "We've never closed," says chef-owner Lupe Liang. "During the stay-at-home order, we changed to takeout. And now, we have a beautiful space for outdoor dining."

When Liang and his wife, Judy Cen, opened Hop Woo in L.A.'s Chinatown in 1993, they started with just eight tables. Hop Woo grew to be a thriving business with more than 150 tables, serving garlicky lobster noodles and barbecued meats to a diverse crowd of tourists and locals. "We've been in Chinatown for 27 years and we've always been busy," Cen says, "except for this year."

A few blocks north of Hop Woo at Phoenix Imports, SooHoo is working to ensure his shop's future. SooHoo's grandfather, She Wing SooHoo, launched a gift shop called Chew Yuen Company in 1938, one of the first businesses in Central Plaza. When She Wing retired, Glenn's father Walter took over the family business, opening a storefront next door and renaming it Phoenix Imports.

"We've been here for 80 years," he says. "We've been through everything, good and bad, and whatever it is, we're still going to be here. I'm not here to make money, I just want to keep this Chinatown alive for the next generation."

Rachel Ng is a Los Angeles-based writer who specializes in food and travel. Follow her on Instagram.

Andria Lo is a Berkeley, California-based photographer. Her book Chinatown Pretty celebrates the street style and wisdom of senior citizens in Chinatowns across America. Follow her on Instagram.

A version of this story appears in the July 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine.

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Why does the U.S. have so many Chinatowns?

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Behind an ornate archway with a tiled, curved roof in Los Angeles's Chinatown, a solemn golden statue of Chinese revolutionary leader Dr. Sun Yat-Sen sits alone. Although it's a sunny August afternoon, most of the souvenir stores and art galleries surrounding him in the usually busy Central Plaza marketplace are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, doors locked shut behind heavy metal gates.

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All racial identities are interrelated. This timeline places Asian American history in the context of race, colonialism, and capitalism. Starting in 1441, time periods are marked by major historical shifts, and events are organized by overlapping struggles over land, labor, and empire.

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The Tacoma Riot of 1885 and Seattle Riot of 1886 drew national attention to the burgeoning coastal cities in Washington territory for their forced expulsion of their Chinese populations by angry-and largely white-mobs. The actions were part of a brutal wave of anti-Chinese violence that rocked the American West in the second half of the 19th century, displacing more than 20,000 Chinese people; between 1849 and 1906, there were at least 200 purges of Chinese residents in California alone. In response, the U.S. government issued more restrictive immigration policies that created a precedent for race-based immigration quotas.

Chinese in the American West

The first Chinese settlers in America came in the wake of the California Gold Rush of 1849, which drew prospectors from across the globe. Railroads raced to connect the East and West coasts as part of America's rapid Westward expansion.

By the 1860s, Chinese immigrants began settling in the Seattle area. They found work digging mines, canning salmon, logging in nearby forests and laying railroad tracks. The new arrivals were overwhelmingly male; the discriminatory Page Act of 1875 had sharply curtailed the number of Chinese women entering the United States.

Anti-Chinese resentment was fueled by white laborers, many of whom were recent immigrants themselves. Racial biases meant employers paid Chinese workers less than their white peers-a disparity that caused them to be accused of undercutting their competition.

"Many Chinese workers sent remittances back to their families in China, so lived fairly frugally," says Gordon H. Chang, professor of history and humanities at Stanford University and author of Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. "White workers, many of whom were supporting families locally, saw the Chinese as a difficult group to compete with. Employers were savvy in knowing how to play off ethnic groups against one another."
READ MORE: Building the Transcontinental Railroad: How 20,000 Chinese Immigrants Made It Happen
The Chinese Exclusion Act and Growing Anti-Chinese Violence

The Chinese Exclusion Act, signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur in 1882, suspended Chinese immigration for 10 years and denied Chinese immigrants the right to become U.S. citizens. "The 1882 act is a political act passed in part as a palliative measure to placate the white population without provoking the Chinese government to close its doors [to trade]," says Chang. "Because it was a compromise, it didn't satisfy most of the adamant anti-Chinese elements in the West." Problems with enforcement, loopholes and time limits further angered anti-Chinese labor interests.

Increasingly frustrated by the law's "failed promise," local communities turned to violence, says Beth Lew-Williams, associate professor of history at Princeton University and author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. In some cases, angry laborers massacred Chinese miners at places like Sqak Valley in Washington territory and Rock Springs in the Wyoming territory and Hell's Canyon in Oregon. More often, says Lew-Williams, systematic expulsion became the method of choice: "Vigilantes used boycotts, arsons and assaults to swiftly remove the Chinese from their towns and prevent their return."
READ MORE: Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, This Anti-Immigration Law Targeted Chinese Women

Courtesy of the Washington State Historical Society at WashingtonHistory.org.

The Tacoma Riot: November 3, 1885

On September 28, 1885, the Washington branch of the Knights of Labor held a meeting to address the "Chinese question." Led by the city's German-born mayor, Jacob Weisbach, the group set a deadline to remove all Chinese from the Tacoma-Seattle corridor: November 1, with committees formed to enforce the decision should the Chinese refuse to depart. "Tacoma is unique because...the removal of the [Chinese] population was so completely orchestrated," says Jean Pfaelzer, author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans.

On November 3, 1885, fire bells rang out, signaling the gathered vigilantes to round up the remaining 300 Chinese residents of Tacoma. They carried clubs and pistols to "drive us like so many hogs," recalls eyewitness Tak Nam. Local merchant Lum May recalled the mob of 500-which included the town's mayor, judge and city councilors-"broke forcibly into the houses, smashing in doors and breaking in windows."

"Chinese residents were told they had just a few hours to pack. They were marched to the railroad crossing nine miles outside of town on foot," Pfaelzer says. Driving rain soaked bodies already bogged down with whatever worldly belongings they could carry. Once at the tracks, they were forced to purchase their own fare to Portland, Oregon. Those who couldn't afford a ticket or who didn't fit on the first train began to walk along the rails their countrymen had laid. Two men died from exposure.

Within four days of the expulsion, Tacoma's two Chinatowns had been burned to the ground. Though the identity of the lead perpetrators, known as the "Tacoma 27," was well known, not a single one was convicted.

Courtesy of the Washington State Historical Society at WashingtonHistory.org., Edward N. Fuller ephemera collection

Seattle Riot of 1886: February 6-9, 1886

Fear of growing violence prompted 150 Chinese residents of nearby Seattle to flee. Washington's governor, Watson Squire, contacted President Grover Cleveland, who sent federal troops to Seattle for 10 days to keep the peace. "The federal troops are what keep Seattle from burning to the ground," says Pfaelzer. "But as soon as they're removed...all hell breaks loose."

By February, more than half of Seattle's Chinese population had fled, leaving just under 400 residents. On February 7, 1886, an angry mob led by the Knights of Labor invaded Chinatown. They rounded up every resident they could find, putting them into wagons and dragging them to the harbor. Eyewitness Chang Yen Hoon recalled: "During the riotous proceedings the residence of Mr. Chan Yee Hee was invaded by the mob and his [pregnant] wife was dragged downstairs from the second story and out on the street by the hair of her head." She later miscarried.

At the harbor, the mob attempted to force the amassed group to board the steamship Queen of the Pacific, bound for San Francisco. There was just one problem: They didn't have the fare to book passage. "Nobody wants to pay to send them to China, and deportation laws were complicated," says Pfaelzer.

By day's end, 89 people had been loaded onto the Queen of the Pacific, leaving 215 trapped in a warehouse, surrounded by the mob. A plan to deport the remaining Chinese via rail to Tacoma was thwarted, sending the mob into a spiral of destruction. They began attacking the homes of citizens who employed Chinese house servants-including Mayor Henry Yesler's.

That Monday, U.S. Justice Roger Greene called for all Chinese on the ship and in the warehouse to be brought to court and asked if they wished to stay or leave. Only 16 came forward wishing to stay, yet funds were still short to purchase passage for the remaining population. The Knights of Labor grudgingly agreed that the remaining Chinese could stay until a second ship, the Elder, arrived the following week.

As the Chinese residents filed out to temporarily return to their homes, the mob outside the courtroom opened fire. A military escort surrounded them and fired back. Five mob members were shot, with one succumbing to his injuries. Governor Squire declared martial law and issued a curfew to all residents of Seattle.

When the Elder sailed out of port six days later, most of the remaining Chinese population was aboard.

Impact of the Seattle and Tacoma Riots

A sum of $276,619.15 was paid to the Chinese government by Congress as compensation for the expulsions. The displaced, meanwhile, never saw payment.

The forced removal of Chinese immigrants became known as "the Tacoma method"-and spread across the West. Congress, seeking to restore the peace, passed a more stringent Chinese Exclusion Act, the Scott Act, in 1888. "Local violence helped to birth race-based border control policies that continued until the mid-20th century," says Lew-Williams.

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asian american and pacific islander history

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When West Coast Cities Tried to Drive Out Their Chinatowns

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The Tacoma Riot of 1885 and Seattle Riot of 1886 drew national attention to the burgeoning coastal cities in Washington territory for their forced expulsion of their Chinese populations by angry-and largely white-mobs.

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As today's Chinese immigrants make their homes outside cities, what will become of the tight-knit urban communities that previous generations built?

PHILADELPHIA--A standard feature of any trip to New York, San Francisco or Philadelphia is a stop in Chinatown for dim sum or bubble tea. These cities' famous ethnic neighborhoods have long drawn tourists as well as working-class Chinese immigrants searching for a home in their new country.

But as China's economic booms propels more high-skilled, affluent immigrants to the United States, American Chinatowns are starting to fade. Census data shows that many Chinese immigrants are bypassing these traditional gateway communities and moving straight to the suburbs. Many say they want the same good schools for their children and suburban conveniences that many other Americans have.

They tend to identify more with their white, American neighbors than with typical Chinatown residents."It's about social stratification," says Andrew Leong, an associate professor of law, social justice, and Asian American studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. "Most of those newer immigrants come from Mandarin-speaking places and they consider themselves much more educated than the country bumpkins in Chinatown." (There, Cantonese is more commonly spoken.)

Leong says Chinatowns on the East Coast are becoming a lot less Chinese. He and a group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania recently studied the Chinatowns of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and found that gentrification and rising housing costs were making it hard for blue-collar immigrants to live there. Their study found that in 1990, Asian residents comprised 45 to 75 percent of the three Chinatown neighborhoods. Twenty years later, they made up 42 to 46 percent. During that time, the white population doubled in Philadelphia and Boston's Chinatown neighborhoods.

As wealthier immigrants move to the suburbs and downtown real estate gets more expensive, urban Chinatowns are at risk of becoming ghost towns."They'll just be tourist traps-Disneyfied. You won't find a lot of Chinese walking around, unless they are tourists themselves," says Leong.

America's new Chinatowns are basically strip malls in the suburbs, says Leong. The town of Exton, an affluent suburb of Philadelphia where the average home value is about $340,000, is a good example of one. During a recent visit, I noticed a handful of Chinese restaurants and grocery stores scattered among big-box retailers like Walmart and Toys "R" Us. In 2000, only six percent of Exton's residents were Asian. Now, about 20 percent are. Many Indian and Chinese immigrants who live there work for big financial and pharmaceutical companies in the area.

Cheryl Wang, a risk analyst for a large U.S. bank, lives in Exton with her husband and their two children. She says about half of her neighbors are Asian and the other half are white. Wang, 42, is representative of many of the new Chinese immigrants: She has two master's degrees, one in information sciences and the other in business administration, and has spent most of adult life in the Philadelphia suburbs. She avoids Chinatown at all costs. "Our backgrounds are very different-we speak different languages," says Wang, who speaks Mandarin. "I really dislike [Chinatown]. It's not as clean as the suburbs and there are a lot of crowds." Wang says she prefers the peacefulness of the suburbs, where, unlike in China, she doesn't need connections to get her children into good schools.

About 33 miles away from Exton, the Friendship Arch welcomes visitors to Philadelphia's Chinatown. Cantonese merchants from southern China first began settling there in the late 1800s, opening up laundromats, restaurants, and grocery stores. Many had originally arrived from out west in search of gold, but the violence of white workers competing with them for jobs eventually pushed many of them to cities on the East Coast. Growing anti-Chinese sentiment across the country led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese workers from moving to the United States and from obtaining U.S. citizenship. With few exceptions, it wasn't until the Immigration and Nationality Act was passed in 1965 that the United States began welcoming non-European immigrants again.

Now, Chinese people in the United States are more likely to come from Taiwan, and China's Fujian and Guangdong provinces, places where Mandarin is becoming more common than Cantonese. Today's Chinese immigrants are also more likely to be wealthy, arriving in the United States with professional degrees or obtaining them at American universities. In 2014, the average annual income for a Chinese immigrant in the United States was about $38,000, more than double the average in 1990.

Chinese people now make up the third-largest immigrant group in the United States, after Mexicans and Indians. China is also the country with largest number of foreign students at American colleges and universities, and the second-largest recipient of employer-sponsored work visas, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

The rise in wealth of a typical Chinese immigrant over the years has changed the ways that businesses cater to new arrivals. Dan Tsao, who owns Metro Chinese Weekly, the largest Chinese newspaper in Philadelphia, says some of his biggest advertisers are car dealerships and high-end stores. Years ago, most of the ads were being bought by small Chinatown grocery stores and restaurants. Now, about half are American companies trying to reach rich Chinese families."Every week we have a full-page ad from BMW or Honda," says Tsao, who recently moved his newspaper's office from Chinatown to the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd.

Tsao says he doesn't want his American-born children to forget their Chinese roots. Catering to those like him, half a dozen Chinese schools have popped up in the suburbs of Philadelphia in the past two decades. Every Sunday, Tsao's 8-year-old son joins more than 700 other children for class at Guang Hua Chinese School, where they learn to read and write in Mandarin as well as as how to dance and draw in classical Chinese styles.

Heng You, the school's principal, opened Guang Hua in 1998 because she wanted her American son to learn Chinese. "He couldn't talk to grandma on the phone anymore," she says. Sure enough, there was high demand for classes on Mandarin and Chinese culture in near Abington, the suburb where she lives. Chinese immigrants who live there are much more likely to lose touch with Chinese culture than those living in the tighter-knit Chinatown neighborhoods, she says.

She says most American-born Chinese children don't understand at first why they should spend their Sundays learning Chinese culture and language. "I have to show them that they will be so much more valuable to society if they combine the best of both worlds," says You. "Later they start to enjoy it."

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As today's Chinese immigrants make their homes outside cities, what will become of the tight-knit urban communities that previous generations built? PHILADELPHIA--A standard feature of any trip to New York, San Francisco or Philadelphia is a stop in Chinatown for dim sum or bubble tea.

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The general public also exhibited a powerful fascination for Chinatown's opium dens (even though their patrons were often non-Chinese), and soon wealthier uptowners began to engage in a practice called "slumming." This popular pastime was essentially class tourism: sightseeing in impoverished neighborhoods to see how the poor lived. The slummers came to Chinatown with the intent to stare at murder sites and tour opium dens (which were sometimes faked), and often stayed to eat and shop.

Meanwhile, a particular Chinese American cuisine was developing in America, distinct from the regional fare of places like Guangzhou and Chaoshan, where many immigrants came from. It began with mining camp and transcontinental railroad cooks, who resourcefully used local vegetables, dried seafood, and canned ingredients from San Francisco to construct some semblance of the food of home - substituting shredded cabbage for bean sprouts, for example. The evolution continued as savvy cooks reformulated dishes for non-Chinese palates, since, as the 20th century dawned, Chinese restaurants were increasingly patronized by non-Chinese diners.

Chop suey - a flexible, thrown-together stir-fry - may be the earliest Chinese American dish, with chow mein featuring crunchy noodles its close follower. But the perfect example of this new, cobbled-together cuisine might be egg foo young: a wok-fried omelet full of Chinese vegetables, and sometimes meat or seafood, smothered in European-style brown gravy, and plunked on top of fluffy and fragrant polished rice. Though Chinese American cuisine evolved in the 1970s, as diners' and restaurants' attention shifted to regional Chinese cooking imported to local kitchens, the old-fashioned menu still lives on in New York City's neighborhood carryout restaurants, and in a handful of the older places still found on those original blocks of Manhattan's Chinatown, like Hop Kee and Wo Hop.

The borders of Manhattan's Chinatown remained firmly fixed for nearly 80 years after 1882: an area of approximately eight blocks bounded by Canal Street on the north, Bowery on the east, Baxter Street on the west, and Worth Street on the south. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed by the Magnuson Act of 1943; it allowed Chinese immigrants to enter the country legally, but their right to own property and establish businesses was still restricted. It wouldn't be until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that Chinese citizens and immigrants were granted full rights, and Chinatown began to expand again.

Between 1965 and 2000, Chinatown swelled to 10 times its earlier size, growing to occupy much of the Lower East Side. While the original neighborhood had traditionally been a Cantonese enclave, the makeup of the residents began to shift in the 1960s, with a wave of immigrants from Hong Kong coming in the late '60s and early '70s and another arriving around the time when the former British colony was returned to China in 1997. The American loss of the Vietnam War brought many ethnically Chinese immigrants people who'd once lived in the Mekong Delta to the neighborhood, and Vietnamese restaurants soon became a fixture of Chinatown, especially on Baxter, Centre, Hester, and Grand streets. Others came from Malaysia and the Philippines.

But by far the largest group of newcomers came in the 1980s, hailing from Fujian, a province on the southeast coast of China. They spoke a dialect very different from Cantonese, and had trouble communicating with earlier Chinatown residents. East Broadway - originally a largely Jewish street - became almost wholly Fujianese, as many cafes, vegetable stands, fish markets, temples, employment agencies, and bus ticket sales offices sprung up. Many of the immigrants arrived illegally and at great personal risk, paying smugglers known as "snakeheads" as much as $40,000 apiece for the privilege.

The influx of Fujianese immigrants transformed many parts of the Lower East Side, particularly on Eldridge and Forsyth streets (in addition to East Broadway) - sometimes taking over former Cantonese restaurants, but more often establishing new places all their own. Migrants from Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, brought Fuzhounese cuisine, known for its light sauces and fresh preparations. These restaurants often specialized in dumplings and hand-pulled noodles sold at extremely low prices, as the new immigrants worked for very low wages, and couldn't afford meals that cost more than a few dollars. These cheap eateries also attracted students and other New Yorkers intent on dining inexpensively.

But this new Chinatown population also had a cuisine very different from the Cantonese food that had long been the neighborhood's mainstay. Along Division Street and East Broadway emerged a series of small cafes that displayed their wares in the windows, 30 or more selections at a time (today priced at three for $5) which came with a big plate of rice and a perfunctory cup of soup. Ensconced in metal pots were small fried fish, tiny dried scallops stewed with green vegetables, fried eggs, pork-stuffed fish balls, and lychee pork.

Manhattan's Chinatown became something of a national capital for the country's new Fujianese population, many of whom arrived here only to depart on discount buses for other cities - Boston; Philadelphia; Alexandria, VA; Charlotte, NC, and beyond - to work in Chinese restaurants and other businesses. The transplanted Fujianese would return periodically to New York's Chinatown to stock up on familiar groceries and other supplies not available in their new homes, riding the same network of discount buses, which soon also became a source of cheap transit for budget-minded students and European backpackers.

In the new century, suddenly there was an influx of immigration - increasingly through legal channels - from various Chinese provinces, a change reflected in the number of regional cuisines represented in the neighborhood's restaurants. In 2000, there were suddenly nearly a dozen restaurants specializing in the food of Shanghai, with its braised pork shoulders and orange-scented lion's head meatballs. A restaurant called Joe's Shanghai, opened in 1995, launched a craze for Shanghai soup dumplings, which became a citywide obsession.

Fiery Sichuan cuisine continued to grow in popularity; a fad had started on the Upper West Side in the 1970s and zoomed to new heights nearly 40 years later. Soon there were restaurants with menus hailing from Henan, Xi'an, and Beijing itself - though many northern Chinese immigrants from places like Dongbei, Qingdao, and Tianjin chose to settle in the Chinatown in Flushing, Queens, a newer enclave which had once been (and still partly remains) a Taiwanese neighborhood.

Additional Chinatowns sprung up in Elmhurst, Queens (favored by Chinese from Southeast Asia); Sunset Park, Brooklyn (originally occupied by wealthier Cantonese, but now increasingly Fujianese); and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn - which almost didn't qualify as a Chinatown due to the dispersal of Chinese businesses among Russian, Italian, Turkish, Central Asian, and Central American ones. Meanwhile, Manhattan's Chinatown has gradually suffered encroachment from the young and affluent, and storefronts that were once Chinese have become cocktail bars, coffee shops, and hip restaurants. Still, the original core of the neighborhood is intact, and promises to remain so for many decades to come. After all, it's one of the city's most visited, loved, and culturally valuable neighborhoods. ■

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The Making of Manhattan's Chinatown | MOFAD City

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The general public also exhibited a powerful fascination for Chinatown's opium dens (even though their patrons were often non-Chinese), and soon wealthier uptowners began to engage in a practice called "slumming." This popular pastime was essentially class tourism: sightseeing in impoverished neighborhoods to see how the poor lived.

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On a Friday evening in January, people spilled out of a storefront into an alleyway in San Francisco's Chinatown. Neighborhood business owners, parents with young children, and artists in warm coats chatted with one another. Nearby, youth from a martial arts school practiced with wooden staffs under the alleyway lights.

The occasion was the opening of "Eat Chinatown," a photography exhibit at 41 Ross, a gallery run by the Chinese Culture Center and the Chinatown Community Development Center (Chinatown CDC) in what's considered the oldest alley in the city. For the exhibit, photographer Andria Lo and writer Valerie Luu researched and documented local eateries. The artists focused on legacy businesses that have been in the neighborhood for more than 30 years - such as Capital Restaurant, Hon's Wun-Tun House, and Eastern Bakery - not new upscale additions, such as Mister Jiu's, where a five-course tasting menu costs $105.

Today, Chinatowns like this one are often located in the heart of large cities, making them vulnerable to gentrification.

Originally formed at the edges of downtowns, Chinatowns held on as such commercial and residential areas expanded. Collectively, they represent more than 150 years of immigrant survival since the first wave of Chinese immigration began in the 1850s. "Chinatowns used to be ghettos because of segregation," said Peter Kwong, a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College in New York City. "After the 1965 Immigration Act, you have a resurfacing of Chinatowns all throughout the United States, and particularly in the East Coast."

That is far from the case today. An Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) study of Chinatowns in three East Coast cities found that the number of white residents in Chinatowns was growing at a faster rate than the overall white population in those cities. "In fact, the white population in Boston and Philadelphia's Chinatown doubled between 2000 and 2010 while the white populations decreased in those cities overall," the authors wrote. In New York's Chinatown, among all racial groups, only the white population had grown in the decade leading to 2013 when the study was released.

Although the details may be different in each Chinatown, the results of rising numbers of white residents is the same: the displacement of low-income immigrants. In Boston, luxury towers have replaced traditional row houses, making the area look more generic and less like Chinatown. In New York, garment factories that used to employ immigrants have been turned into doctors' offices and gyms. Contemporary art galleries have moved in, paying four to five times the rent that was paid by the bakeries and herbal medicine shops they supplanted. In San Francisco, families that cram into single room occupancy (SRO) hotels are being pushed out. Once regarded as the housing of last resort, the rooms are now being marketed to tech workers and students.

Community groups have adopted a variety of strategies to slow gentrification down. Chinatown CDC uses both "hard" and "soft" approaches, said Erika Gee, a senior planner with the organization. The "hard" approach involves organizing residents, bringing media attention to evictions, and advocating for government policies that protect tenants. The "soft" arts and culture approach also touches on community issues, "But it's a celebration of what Chinatown is, what people's experiences are, and doing it in a way that reaches people in a positive way," Gee said.

Chinatown CDC views the "Eat Chinatown" exhibit as a way to tell the stories of the people behind the restaurants and bakeries. For example, the artists wondered why so many of Chinatown's old eateries have a diner aesthetic with counter seating. They learned that due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, men couldn't bring their families from China. Bar seating allowed them to eat full meals by themselves, instead of in the more typical family style.

The ongoing construction of the Central Subway, which will add a terminal in Chinatown, has resulted in a loss of revenue for businesses in its path, and rising concerns for the character of the area. "What is it going to look like after the subway opens? ... Are new people going to come in and want different types of things in Chinatown and are willing to pay higher rents? That's an issue that we're watching and concerned about," Gee said.

In Boston, Angie Liou, executive director of Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC), says Chinatown is being hemmed in from all directions by market-rate developments. "This is a capitalist country. So when the real estate market is hot, it goes quickly in the matter of a few years," she said." The developments drive up property values. "Some people might think, 'That's a bad thing?' What you have to know about Chinatown is that the vast majority of long-term residents are renters," she said. "Home ownership is very, very low here, so when you're talking about renters and property values going up, that's to their detriment." While ACDC can build affordable housing units, those projects take a long time.

A 2016 report found that the median rent in Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) neighborhoods increased by 74 percent from 2000 to 2014, compared to the national median rent increase of 53 percent. The report was jointly produced by the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development and the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement.

Giles Li is executive director of Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center (BCNC), which is charged with opening an arts center in a new mixed-use development. This community space will offer programming for residents, old and the new. "There's nothing I can do to slow macroeconomic forces, but maybe if we can get the new residents of Chinatown engaged in this community as residents and as members of this community, maybe that will mitigate the negative impact of gentrification," he said.

Peter Kwong, the Hunter College professor, believes it may be too late for many Chinatowns.

Most Chinatowns are no longer truly vibrant immigrant communities where people work, live, shop, and socialize, he said. "By and large, the people have scattered and working-class Chinese tend not to concentrate in areas like these because there's very few jobs." New York City's Chinatown is the one exception because of a large base of jobs, he said. "We are basically the very last stand," he said of anti-gentrification efforts in New York's Chinatown.

Kwong criticized mixed-income developments as contributing to gentrification. "Even though they may add units, they're still introducing affluent people into a low-income neighborhood," he said. He also questioned the value of arts and culture efforts. "After you see a show, what do you do? What do you do about these people driven out? ... You're an artist? These are the things you do? Okay. But don't tell me you are doing something significant in terms of social impact," he said.

Liou thinks interactive arts and culture events such as ACDC's popular outdoor film screenings give residents the opportunity to talk to each other. "I don't think they necessarily understand that there may have been other residents who have been displaced from where they were living, which is not a comfortable conversation, I realize," she said. "I think that's the first step toward some sort of understanding and empathy."

But Kwong argues that the best way to halt displacement is through rezoning and laws that protect tenants. For the past eight years, the Chinatown Working Group, a coalition of more than 50 organizations and residents, has worked on a rezoning plan that would restrict height limits, create anti-harassment laws targeted at landlords, generate affordable housing, and protect small businesses in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. The Department of City Planning has rejected the plan, but advocates are not giving up. They continue to hold demonstrations on a regular basis outside City Hall to call attention to the issue.

One night in September, the Chinatown Art Brigade, a collective of artists and activists, projected a series of large-scale, multilingual messages onto buildings. The messages were written by residents. "Who did you replace when you opened your gallery? Your bar? When you built your condo??," one of the projections read.
Melissa Hung is journalist covering arts and culture, communities of color, immigration, and criminal justice. Follow her @fluffysharp.

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Chinatowns Across The Country Face Off With Gentrification

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On a Friday evening in January, people spilled out of a storefront into an alleyway in San Francisco's Chinatown. Neighborhood business owners, parents with young children, and artists in warm coats chatted with one another. Nearby, youth from a martial arts school practiced with wooden staffs under the alleyway lights.

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Several Chinese workers who helped build the Central Pacific Railroad found refuge in Belleville, NJ.

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Chinese Immigrants and the Gold Rush | American Experience | PBS

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Chinese immigrants first arrived in San Francisco in 1848. By the end of the 1850s, they made up one-fifth of the population in the Southern Mines.

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The custom of Jewish families dining out at Chinese restaurants, especially on Christmas Day, has long been a joking matter. "According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5749," one quip goes. "According to the Chinese calendar, the year is 4687. That means for 1,062 years, the Jews went without Chinese food." Even Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan made light of the tradition during her Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. Granted, Chinese restaurants are typically among the few businesses open on December 25th, but it turns out that there are historical and sociological reasons why these two cultures have paired so well.

In a 1992 study, sociologists Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine focused their attentions on New York City, where there are substantial Jewish and Chinese immigrant populations. No matter how different the cultures may be, they both enjoy similar foods: lots of chicken dishes, tea and slightly overcooked vegetables. For Jewish newcomers, Chinese cooking offered a new twist on familiar tastes. Then there's the matter of how food is handled, a matter of great importance to observant Jews. Chinese food can be prepared so that it abides by kosher law, and it avoids the taboo mixing of meat and milk, a combination commonly found in other ethnic cuisines. In one of their more tongue-in-cheek arguments, Tuchman and Levine wrote that because forbidden foods like pork and shellfish are chopped and minced beyond recognition in egg rolls and other dishes, less-observant Jews can take an "ignorance is bliss" philosophy and pretend those things aren't even in the dish.

Chinese restaurants were also safe havens, the sociologists observed. Jews living predominantly Christian parts of the city might have to contend with the longstanding tensions between those groups. Furthermore, an Italian restaurant, which might bear religious imagery ranging from crucifixes to portraits of the Virgin Mary, could make for an uncomfortable dining experience. A Chinese eatery was more likely to have secular decor.

There was also the sense among some Jewish participants in the study that Chinese dining, with exotic interiors and the strange-sounding menu items, was a delightfully non-Jewish experience. Furthermore, like visiting museums and attending the theater, Chinese restaurants were seen as a means of broadening one's cultural horizons. "I felt about Chinese restaurants the same way I did about the Metropolitan Museum of Art," one of the study's unnamed interview subjects remarked. "They were the two most strange and fascinating places my parents took me to, and I loved them both."

For a fuller explanation on how this dining trend came about, you can read Tuchman and Levine's study online . And if you have memories of a Chinese restaurant experience, share them in the comments section below.

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Why Did Jewish Communities Take to Chinese Food?

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The custom of Jewish families dining out at Chinese restaurants, especially on Christmas Day, has long been a joking matter. "According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5749," one quip goes. "According to the Chinese calendar, the year is 4687. That means for 1,062 years, the Jews went without Chinese food."

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When and why did Jews start eating Chinese food on Christmas? Grab your chopsticks and dig in as NPR's Robert Siegel speaks with Rabbi Joshua Plaut about this holiday tradition.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

What is the most American thing a Jew can do on Christmas? Well, for me, it's to go to work. Let one more Christmas observer have the day off. But when it's time to send out for lunch on Christmas Day, I do as so many of my co-religionists do - I send out for Chinese food. Chinese food on Christmas has become as American Jewish as apple pie. And as part of our exploration of holiday traditions, we have invited Rabbi Joshua Plaut to our studios. He's the author of "A Kosher Christmas: 'Tis The Season To Be Jewish." Welcome to the program.

JOSHUA PLAUT: Glad to be here. Thank you.

SIEGEL: You have a chapter in the book called "We Eat Chinese Food On Christmas." How long has this been going on?

PLAUT: At least since 1935, according to The New York Times, which cites that a man by the name of Eng Shee Chuck brought chow mein on Christmas Day to the Jewish Children's Home in Newark, N.J. That's the first written citation of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas.

SIEGEL: It's either the discovery by Jews of Chinese food on Christmas or the discovery of Jewish customers by a Chinese restaurant on Christmas, whichever way you want to look at it.

PLAUT: Probably both.

SIEGEL: Probably both. And this has developed. This has become quite common over the years.

PLAUT: Yes. Actually, Jews eating and Chinese restaurants goes back to 1899, when the American Jewish Journal - a weekly publication - criticized Jews for eating at non-kosher restaurants and singling out, in particular, Jews who flocked to Chinese restaurants. So this marriage between Jews and Chinese food really goes back to when Jews and Chinese people were immigrants in the United States.

SIEGEL: Which raises the question of a phrase sometimes used to describe Chinese food - safe trayf, using the Hebrew word for un-kosher food, trayf. What's the deal here?

PLAUT: Jews in Chinese restaurants are eating all sorts of non-kosher food items such as shellfish, pork products which are hidden in a wonton or in some type of eggroll. And so you're able to partake in this wonderful delicacy without actually knowingly eating this non-kosher food item. Also, in Chinese restaurants, there is no use of milk. So this is a place you can engage in eating this food that seemingly is OK and kosher but really is not and still have a smile and delight in it without feeling guilty.

SIEGEL: (Laughter) As you document in this chapter of your book, by the 1950s, the allure of Chinese food on Christmas Day - when we should say the Chinese restaurants were open, no small thing that - the allure became the stuff of, to use the technical term, shtick. It was food for comedy as well as for the body, yeah?

PLAUT: Yes. It was mentioned in television skits with Alan King and Buddy Hackett. Sid Caesar joked about it on the Caesar comedy hour mocking or making a parody out of Jews eating in Chinese restaurants and not knowing how to order or communicate with the waiters. It's very funny that Philip Roth in "Portnoy's Complaint" talks about how Chinese restaurant owners thought that the Jews and Yiddish-inflected English was the King's English.

SIEGEL: So one could go there and feel pretty well established in the Chinese restaurant?

PLAUT: Honestly. The Chinese restaurant was a safe haven for American Jews who felt like outsiders on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. If you go to a Chinese restaurant, you become an insider. You can celebrate somebody else's birthday and yet be amongst friends and family and members of the tribe, thereby the outsider on Christmas becomes the insider.

SIEGEL: So do you have a Christmas Day ritual that involves Chinese food?

PLAUT: No, I don't. I used to go sit on Santa Claus' lap growing up as a child in Great Neck the son of a rabbi. But we would go out and look at - when I was a child - the beautiful lights on the trees in our neighborhood in Great Neck. And then we would go to Rockefeller Center and go skating. And I asked my mother later while I was working on this book, how could you take me, the son of a prominent rabbi and civil rights leader, out to sit on Santa Claus' lap? And she said, why not? All Americans did it, and you were as comfortable in your Jewish identity. So why not enjoy the holiday season?

SIEGEL: (Laughter) I see. I see. And to carry your mother's insight and wisdom forward, there's really nothing wrong with non-Jewish American Christian families having a little Chinese food on Christmas also.

PLAUT: I think we are like "Fiddler On The Roof" yelling tradition. Americans eating Chinese food on Christmas has become an American tradition. And it's just something that's become part of the holiday spirit. And it's part of the season of joy that - it's one of our minor contributions as Jews in America to the American way of life.

SIEGEL: Well, Rabbi Joshua Plaut, thanks so much and merry Christmas.

PLAUT: I wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy holidays and a good peaceful New Year.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Why Do Jewish People Eat Chinese Food On Christmas?

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When and why did Jews start eating Chinese food on Christmas? Grab your chopsticks and dig in as NPR's Robert Siegel speaks with Rabbi Joshua Plaut about this holiday tradition. ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: What is the most American thing a Jew can do on Christmas? Well, for me, it's to go to work.

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I Am Not Your Asian Stereotype | Canwen Xu | TEDxBoise

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Citations are generated automatically from bibliographic data as a convenience, and may not be complete or accurate.

Chicago citation style:

Farwell, Willard B, John E Kunkler, E. B Pond, and Bosqui Eng. & Print. Co. Official map of "Chinatown" in San Francisco. San Francisco: Engraved & printed by Bosqui Eng. & Print Co, 1998. Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2012593519/.

APA citation style:

Farwell, W. B., Kunkler, J. E., Pond, E. B. & Bosqui Eng. & Print. Co. (1998) Official map of "Chinatown" in San Francisco. San Francisco: Engraved & printed by Bosqui Eng. & Print Co. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2012593519/.

MLA citation style:

Farwell, Willard B, et al. Official map of "Chinatown" in San Francisco. San Francisco: Engraved & printed by Bosqui Eng. & Print Co, 1998. Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2012593519/>.

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Official map of "Chinatown" in San Francisco

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Cadastral map showing names of owners, businesses, "Chinese occupancy," "Chinese gambling houses," and "White occupants." "The map and colors show only the first, or street floor of Chinatown and the occupancy of same." LC copy annotated in pencil Available also through the Library of Congress Web site as a raster image.

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The Workingmen's Party of California pamphlet, which is representative of widespread anti-immigration sentiment, attacks President Ulysses S. Grant and calls San Francisco's Chinatown "rampant with disease." On May 8, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act-the only immigration law in the United States history that targeted a specific country. The act suspended immigration from China to the United States and prevented Chinese who were already in America from going home and reentering the country, effectively stranding thousands of Chinese men and women in the United States. However, between 1882 and 1943, when the act was repealed, tens of thousands of Chinese came to America illegally.

Questions for Discussion

View the pamphlet cover and the introduction. Then apply your knowledge of American history in order to answer the questions that follow.

1. Under what conditions and for what purpose were Chinese originally encouraged to immigrate to the United States?

2. Why did the Workingman's Party of California decide to oppose Chinese settlement as a "nuisance"?

A printer-friendly version is available here.

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1880 | the workingmen’s party of california pamphlet

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which is representative of widespread anti-immigration sentiment

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attacks president ulysses s. | the workingmen’s party of california pamphlet

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which is representative of widespread anti-immigration sentiment

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attacks president ulysses s. grant and calls san francisco’s chinatown "rampant with disease." on may 8

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president chester a. arthur signed the chinese exclusion act—the only immigration law in the united states history that targeted a specific country. the act suspended immigration from china to the united states and prevented chinese who were already in america from going home and reentering the country

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effectively stranding thousands of chinese men and women in the united states. however

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tens of thousands of chinese came to america illegally.

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San Francisco's Chinatown, 1880 | The Workingmen's Party of California pamphlet, which is representative of widespread anti-immigration sentiment, attacks President Ulysses S. | The Workingmen's Party of California pamphlet, which is representative of widespread anti-immigration sentiment, attacks President Ulysses S. Grant and calls San Francisco's Chinatown "rampant with disease."

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Block for block, no neighborhood has more history

The first Chinese immigrants arrived in San Francisco in 1848, beating out the famed '49ers with months to spare.

That makes Chinatown an older and more established San Francisco tradition than even the Gold Rush itself. Although in geographic terms it's but a drop in the vast ocean of modern San Francisco, no neighborhood has left a larger mark on city history.

Some of these Chinatown landmarks have long since vanished, some have endured into the present day, and some are in flux, still extant but now quite changed from what first made them noteworthy.

Here's just a glimpse of the neighborhood's hallowed history, from 1850 to today.

Read More

Chinatown has long been SF's most densely populated neighborhoods-largely due to racist anti-immigrant policies that crammed as many people into a few blocks as possible.

The historic alleyways are crucial to making sure it remains navigable, although that's not necessarily the reason they were all built, as many important routes already existed when they were absorbed into Chinatown's growing borders.

Fortune cookies, of course, are an American rather than Chinese tradition. In fact, the Chinatown Merchants Association claims that in the '90s, fortune cookies were marketed in China as "genuine American" treats.

Japanese immigrant Makoto Hagiwara (designer of the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park) usually gets the credit for inventing the treats, and they proved a big hit at the 1915 Worlds Fair.

The Ross Alley Fortune Cookie Factory opened in 1962, and why it's not the first place every Chinatown tourist goes we'll never know.

The stalwart Golden Dragon operated on Washington Street for decades, but unfortunately it's still probably best remembered for the Golden Dragon Massacre, a gang hit in 1977 that left five people dead-none of them the intended targets of the attack.

In this day and age you'd at least be obliged to change the name of the place after that, but the Golden Dragon moniker endured.

The Chinatown Telephone Exchange opened in 1901. For decades, tireless operators routed calls to every business and residence in the neighborhood, memorizing the entire directory and speaking multiple Chinese dialects so as to properly direct calls in the days before established phone numbers and dials. The pagoda building, now a bank, dates to 1909, a replacement for the original, destroyed structure.

Kee Joon Lee, originally from China's Canton district, sold the owners of the six-story Grant Street building finished in 1966 on the dream of rooftop fine dining with elegance and class overlooking Portsmouth Square.

Lee's daughter Barbara Yee recalled in 2014, ""When it started, people couldn't even go up there to eat unless you wore a tie. If you didn't have a tie, they had a tie ready for you."

Empress of China's 2015 closure still smarts, but the location and Empress nam e will not remain vacant.

In August of 1850, San Francisco Mayor John Geary invited Chinese immigrants to march in a funeral procession he'd organized in the memory of recently deceased US President Zachary Taylor, ending in Portsmouth Square.

During the oratory, a judge told the immigrants "You stand among us as equals." The unexpected recognition so pleased community that it sent Geary a thank you note signed on behalf of all "China Boys." It was the first time the city acknowledged Chinatown as a community.

And here's one Chinatown landmark that actually has almost nothing to do with Chinatown-on roughly this spot on Grant Street in 1835, the first private residential home in what would one day become San Francisco was raised.

Back then the spot was a trackless wilderness, and in a certain sense today it's almost as obscure-the plaque marking the location is pretty much impossible to notice if you're not looking for it.

Mary's was not the first church in Chinatown, however, as the Presbyterian congregation opened in 1853. Six years later it served an even more important function as the initial site for Chinatown's first neighborhood school.

State law segregated primary schools, leaving Chinatown residents to petition the city for years before getting an educational space of their own. Later the "Chinese School" would change its name and open up the classroom to the children of immigrants from other Asian countries.

Incidentally, Portsmouth Square was home to the first public school in California, opened in 1847, one year before the first Chinese immigrants arrived in San Francisco.

Chinatown's first YMCA opened in 1911 and remains an institution to this day, but the stunning YWCA building on Powell Street (now the Chinese Historical Society of America HQ) is by rights the bigger icon thanks to the design by Julia Morgan.

But note that the Morgan building didn't come along until the 1930s. When the YWCA first opened in 1916, it operated out of a reformed saloon on Stockton Street.

Founded in 1874 as the Occidental Mission Home For Girls, Cameron House's original mission was liberating immigrant women from forced sex work.

Because the law prohibited Chinese immigration for decades, women had to be smuggled into the country, putting them at the mercy of exploitative rackets. These days Cameron House operates as a family services agency.

The testimony of 19th-century San Francisco police chief James Cook explains that residents conferred names of their own on the side streets and byways of Chinatown.

St Louis Alley, for example, was better known as "Fo Sue Hong,"or "Fire Alley," owing to a memorable fire that once broke out there. Sacramento Street was instead "Tong Yen Guy," or China Street, and Spofford Alley better known as "Sun Louie Sun Hong," or New Spanish Alley.

Asking for directions using the official street names was useless, Cook claimed. "But if you gave him the Chinese name [a local] would know immediately" where you wanted to go.

After the 1906 earthquake City Hall smelled an opportunity to banish Chinatown to the fringes, planning to relocate the community to what is now Bayview. But the Chinese Family Associations and the Chinese Consulate refused to budge.

Chinatown merchant Look Tin Eli seized on the idea of hiring non-Chinese architects and contractors to rebuild the neighborhood in homage/pastiche styles of classical Chinese architecture, a bid to increase its appeal as a tourist destination and cultural redoubt.

The Sing Chong Building was one of the first of the "new Chinatown" structures to open, along with the Sing Fat building on the other side of the street.

The inscription reads in part: "Champion of Democracy, lover of mankind, proponent of friendship and peace among the nations based on equality, justice and goodwill."

Sun Yat Sen, the Chinese political revolutionary who labored for years to create a democratic republic in China, came to Chinatown while in exile from his home country, seeking financial and political support for his cause. The Dragon Gate on Grant bears a quote by Sun on the archway.

The statue, installed in the late '30s, is the product not of one of Sun's Chinatown devotees but of Italian-American artist Beniamano Bufino.

Installed in 2017, Carmel artist Steven Whyte's piece titled Women's Column of Strength proved instantly controversial with some, as it prompted San Francisco's sister city of Osaka to cut diplomatic ties with SF. But Whyte and the city stand by the figures, which represent the women who suffered sexual slavery in China during World War II.

The first of Chinatown's famous Six Companies, the Kong Chow Company opened on Pine Street in a locale that it would stick with for over 100 years before eventually relocating to its present spot on Stockton Street. The 520 Pine address is now a parking garage.

The neighborhood's Benevolent Associations served as a kind of safety net, helping immigrants who were suddenly divorced from the social structure of their homeland and who couldn't rely on city government for much of anything.

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The history of Chinatown's greatest landmarks

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Block for block, no neighborhood has more history The first Chinese immigrants arrived in San Francisco in 1848, beating out the famed '49ers with months to spare. That makes Chinatown an older and more established San Francisco tradition than even the Gold Rush itself.

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Background Essay on San Francisco's Chinatown

This short essay describes the origins of San Francisco's Chinatown, as well as some of its major economic, political, and social facets. The essay also describes the challenges San Francisco's Chinese community faced from the city's white politicians and residents.
Introduction:
While there are many Chinatowns across the United States and around the globe, San Francisco's Chinese community is the oldest, largest, and most visually recognizable urban Chinese American enclave.

As more and more Chinese immigrants migrated into northern California in search of fortune and work, San Francisco Chinatown served as their home away from home, a comfortingly familiar place in an alien and oftentimes hostile land.

Chinatown during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a vibrant and resilient community. Everything that a Chinese person needed or wanted was available within its dozen or so square blocks: work, food, benevolent associations, entertainment, newspapers, education, and religious houses were some of the many accessible amenities.

The streets teemed with life as residents went about their daily business and outside visitors came to experience San Francisco's "Little Shanghai."
Architecture/Space:
San Francisco Chinatown grew organically around Portsmouth Plaza, the city's first public square and civic center. Chinatown was centrally located on valuable real estate, a fact that contributed to many efforts to relocate the community or eradicate it all together. However, the community remained at its original site, expanding its borders in all directions.

"Old" Chinatown, the enclave before 1906, was the subject of political debate for city politicians and officials who oftentimes deemed the area an eyesore and a health hazard. After 1906 earthquake and fire reduced Chinatown to smoldering ashes, there was a movement by the Reconstruction Committee to move the Chinese to the outer reaches of the Richmond district.

In an effort to save their community from being uprooted, Chinese leaders convinced municipal leaders and the neighborhood's white landlords that the "New" Chinatown should be rebuilt in a distinctive Oriental style that would attract more tourism and business. The results were the familiar curved eaves, colorful street lanterns, recessed balconies, and gilded facades that we associate with Chinatown.
Business/Politics:
Chinese San Francisco during the late 19th century was contained within a dozen or so square blocks. A self-sufficient and insulated community, with its own unique government and politics, early Chinatown was almost a separate city within San Francisco.

Chinese who came from the same regions in China formed district benevolent associations when they arrived in the United States. The associations served as social and welfare institutions where immigrants could locate people from their native districts, socialize, receive monetary aid, and express opinions in community affairs.

There were also family benevolent associations for people with the same surnames. A resident of Chinatown oftentimes belonged to benevolent associations for both his district and his extended family.

The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, more commonly known as the Chinese Six Companies, dominated the political landscape. Originally formed during the 1850s by the Ning Yuen, Hop Wo, Kong Chow, Yeung Wo, Sam Yup, and Yan Wo district associations (the Sue Hing Association was added later), the Six Companies was the most powerful organization in Chinatown, authorized to speak on behalf the Chinese throughout the United States.

Its Board of Directors and Board of Presidents consisted overwhelmingly of wealthy merchants who translated their economic good fortune into political power. The Six Companies dealt with city, state, and national governments regarding issues of immigration and persecution, always retaining a Caucasian attorney to be its spokesman and correspondent with the world at large.
Community - A World Apart:
Chinatown was a tight-knit community whose residents were familiar with one another. Parents allowed their children, who were highly cherished, to roam the streets without supervision during the day. Photographer Arnold Genthe, who included Chinese children among his favorite subjects, deftly captures Chinatown as a children's playground.

However, the day was not filled only by play. Chinese culture considers education to be one of life's most important assets, and Chinatown's children were schooled in a wide array of subjects. Their textbooks covered mathematics, grammar, and social studies along with many among other topics.

Separated families and friends kept up correspondence. Chinese-language newspapers provided another means of communication. A number of dailies competed for the Chinese reading public, but the Chung Sai Yat Po was the oldest and most prominent.

The use of print media was not restricted to newspapers. Theatres printed programs of nightly offerings, with photographs accompanying descriptions of plays and actors. The Chinese attended many cultural activities including theatrical performances literary societies, poetry clubs, and art collectives.
Outsiders Looking In:
The exotic sights, smells, and customs of San Francisco Chinatown drew visitors even before its reconstruction after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. Personal accounts, pamphlets and books, along with thousands of photographs reveal a fascination with the neighborhood and its people.

Among the greatest attractions for visitors to Chinatown was its "underworld," consisting of highbinders, opium dens, and prostitution. Restaurants and merchant establishments offered visitors more conventional destinations. Those who wanted to experience Chinese culture and religious practices headed to the theatres and the joss houses.

Tourism had always been a key element of Chinatown's economy, but after the rebuilding of the community during the early 1900s, even more sightseers flooded into the area.

Well-known photographers Carleton Watkins, I.W. Taber, and Arnold Genthe were just three of the many who catered to the public's desire to capture glimpses of the Chinese community. Other visitors, however, had ulterior motives for exploring Chinatown.

City leaders, union organizers, journalists, and authors used "first-hand" descriptions of the enclave for their own purposes, whether it be to drum up political support or sell copy. Most of the time, this involved portraying the Chinese quarter in an unflattering, oftentimes derogatory light.

Municipal reports, political pamphlets, and other printed literature reflect the widespread negativity regarding Chinatown that proved so useful in garnering votes or capturing imagination about urban imagination.

Source | "San Fransisco Chinatown," The Regents of the University of California, 2005, http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/chineseinca/sfchinatown.html.
Item Type | Article/Essay

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Background Essay on San Francisco's Chinatown · SHEC: Resources for Teachers

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This short essay describes the origins of San Francisco's Chinatown, as well as some of its major economic, political, and social facets. The essay also describes the challenges San Francisco's Chinese community faced from the city's white politicians and residents.

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The circle approach is grounded in a Native American philosophy and practice that values individuals as they build and maintain supportive relationships and communities. Circles are used by hundreds of tribes in North America, including the Ojibwe and Lakota. The circle process provides an alternative to the style of discussion that involves debate and challenging each other. Instead, circles create a safe and non-hierarchical place in which each person can speak without interruption. It encourages respectful listening and reflection.
from: https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/introduction-circles

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Restorative Practices at Schoolcraft Community Schools - Basic Elements of a Community Building Circle

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The circle approach is grounded in a Native American philosophy and practice that values individuals as they build and maintain supportive relationships and communities. Circles are used by hundreds of tribes in North America, including the Ojibwe and Lakota. The circle process provides an

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There are SOOOO many kinds of questions that can be great for a circle, it all depends on your goals and your group. Is it a quick check-in circle or a longer sharing circle? Do you have 5 people or 25? Are circles new to them or has this group been doing circles together for months? Are they 5th graders or 11th graders? Do you have a specific topic or issue that needs addressing? (If the purpose is to address a specific conflict, please contact Molly or Jill.) .

A great way to get students involved and invested in the circle process is to invite them to submit questions. Maybe have a box where they can drop questions any time. You'll want to give these a quick review to remove anything really inappropriate, but remember, silly can be great for building community. After some experience you can invite students to take a turn as Circle Keeper as well!

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Restorative Practices at Schoolcraft Community Schools - Circle Questions

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There are SOOOO many kinds of questions that can be great for a circle, it all depends on your goals and your group. Is it a quick check-in circle or a longer sharing circle? Do you have 5 people or 25? Are circles new to them or has this group been doing circles together for months?

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Every year in our classroom, we do many community building activities at the beginning of the year, after a long break, and when we needed a reset. Many years I also had a community circle at the end of the day, where we would reflect on our day and get to know each other just a little bit better.

Throughout the years, I have collected questions that I could ask students to promote community. The questions below range from surface-level to more thoughtful and are great for any elementary grade.

Ways to Use these Questions to Build Community

There are many ways to use these questions throughout the school year. Here are a few ideas:

Community Building Circle at the beginning or end of the day

Think-Pair-Share after recess

Inside-Outside circle

Line of two groups of students who share with one student then move down the line

Musical Partners, where students find a partner, ask and answer the question and then trade questions

Have students choose a number and answer that question

The beauty of these questions is that you can use them to establish classroom routines around student sharing. Use them to practice expectations of taking turns and how you want students to move around the classroom.

These questions and prompts are also great for opinion writing. Most of them center around expressing student ideas. Use them for your opinion writing unit.

You can also use them for journals! The possibilities are endless.

67 Questions to Build Community

1. What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?

2. What's your least favorite type of candy?

3. What's your favorite television show?

4. What's your favorite class?

5. What's your favorite color?

6. What's your least favorite food?

7. If you could move anywhere, where would you live?

8. What's your favorite movie?

9. What's your favorite vacation spot?

10. What's your favorite sport?

11. What do you want to be when you grow up?

12. Where do you want to go to college?

13. What's your favorite hobby?

14. What's your dream job?

15. Who is most inspiring to you?

16. If you could go to any point in history, where would you go?

17. Who is your favorite person in history?

18. What's your favorite car?

19. If you could be any animal, what would you be?

20. If you could change one thing about the world what would it be?

21. If you could have one animal as a pet what would it be?

22. If you could be a wild animal, which one would you choose and why?

23. If you could improve on any gift that you have what would it be?

24. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

25. If someone could predict your future, would you want yours predicted? Why or why not?

26. If you could change one event in history, what would it be?

27. What's your favorite type of food?

28. What are you most afraid of?

29. What's your greatest accomplishment so far?

30. What motivates you?

31. What would you change about today?

32. What's your favorite soda?

33. What's your favorite book or movie?

34. What is something that you really want to do in your lifetime?

35. What would be one of the first things you would do if you became president?

36. What's your first memory?

37. What is one thing that you like about yourself?

38. What is something you do that bothers other people?

39. If you had three wishes what would they be?

40. What do you enjoy doing with your family?

41. What is your favorite thing to do during recess?

42. What do you like to eat in the lunchroom?

43. What are you looking forward to learning about this year (week, month)?

44. What are three things that you do every day?

45. What is your favorite fairytale?

46. What is your favorite book character?

47. What do you like to do on a rainy day (sunny day)?

48. Are you organized or messy?

49. Name one thing you would like to have in the future.

50. If you could be any place in nature, where would you go?

51. What is a positive quality that you have?

52. Name something that you've done recently for the first time.

53. Name something that you've never done, but would like to try.

54. Tell about something for which you are thankful.

55. If this week of your life were a movie or book, what would the title be and why?

56. If you were a plant, what kind would you be and why?

57. If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be and why?

58. If you could have dinner with anyone living or dead, who would it be and why?

59. If you were to have a tattoo for a week, what would it be and why?

60. Close your eyes and imagine yourself ten years from now. Where are you? What are you doing?

61. Pick a word to describe your future. Why did you choose that word?

62. Talk about something happening in the world that concerns you.

63. Talk about something happening in the world today that excites or inspires you.

64. Talk about your favorite season and what you love about it.

65. What superpower would you like to have and why?

66. If you could change your name would you? What would you change it to?

67. Talk about a funny or scary adventure you had with a friend.

Even More Sponge Activities for Your Classroom

These questions make great sponge activities or brain breaks. I always keep several ideas of activities we can to with an extra 5-15 minutes. Here are 80 different ideas!

More Back-to-School Ideas

Would you like MORE back-to-school ideas that you can use in your classroom this year? Check out theses ideas.

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67 Questions to Build Community in an Elementary Classroom

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Every year in our classroom, we do many community building activities at the beginning of the year, after a long break, and when we needed a reset.

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Goals for Community-Building Circles

We feel connected to other people when we sense that they see us, know us, and care about us. That's what connection circles are about: being seen, being heard, being known, and developing affection. Therefore, the objectives for these circles are that students will feel:

Implicit Questions of Connection

Whenever we humans are in a group we have several unspoken questions, and we immediately begin searching for social cues that will help us answer them. These questions are:
There are many strategies to get answers to these questions. In most classrooms every student is intensely engaged in investigating, testing, and refining their strategies to find and shape the answers to these questions, and then managing what they learn. Most misbehavior can be easily understood as part of this investigation. For example, when a clique of students makes a point of excluding one or two students, at one level they are dealing with the question of "What is my place in the social structure?" The behaviors of the students who are excluded may be investigations into "How can I be seen in a way that feels good to me?"

Circles are an ideal venue to support these investigations. They can be used to develop connections, understanding, belonging, affection, agreements, and trust. Even when circles are not explicitly about restorative dialogues (dealing with a specific conflict), if they are helping to connect people in a positive way they are fundamentally restorative because they help to restore a culture that is positive and healthy and safe.

Basic Connection: The Check-in Round

Near the beginning of every circle is a check-in round. A question is put into the circle, and the talking piece is passed so that everyone in the circle can answer.

Almost any low-risk, relevant question will do. The key is that everyone has a chance to have their voice heard, and to reveal something about their inner lives so that others can see them, and they can feel seen. See if you can identify a question that is also about something relevant to an actual social situation prevailing in the class.

Students love to suggest questions for check in and check out. It's good to let them do so, especially when they've had experience with a few circles. When students contribute questions they feel ownership and responsibility for the circle. One way to get student questions is to ask for several ideas and then choose one or combine a couple. Often it's good to add "and why" to a student's question; for example a student may suggest "What is your favorite movie." Modify this to "What is your favorite movie, and share two reasons why."

Type of Circle: Basic, Popcorn, Fishbowl, Spiral

Many classrooms dedicate a circle to discussing how to bring problems that students are noticing to the attention of the whole class, so together the whole class can work to solve the problem. Convene a circle and ask the students for ideas about what kinds of problems might be appropriate to bring to circles for discussion. Then ask what a good procedure might be for naming these problems. Let students contribute ideas until they arrive at a solution. A typical solution is to have a box into which students can put notes about problems they feel should be discussed in circle. Some circles can be dedicated to this discussion. Basic and fishbowl circle formats are useful for this (see lesson plans). These circles can give students the feeling of being empowered. They can also help teachers who feel they have been carrying the burden of classroom problem solving by themselves experience the relief of having students who partner with them in this important task. See lessons 5 and 6 in Part Three for detailed descriptions of circles of this type.

Story of the Day

Type of Circle: Basic, Popcorn, Small Group

After a field trip or other special event where students have had an unusual experience, their learning is greatly enhanced by this type of circle. Gather students into the circle and, using the talking piece, invite them to tell a story in which something is shared from their day that was meaningful or interesting to them. You may have to model this; this activity is best done as a story in which there is a bit of plot. It can help if you suggest they tell it in the third person: "A boy was wandering on the trail one day when spotted a rabbit..." Encourage them to add details. As they students to each other's stories they may realize their day was richer than they had previously been aware of. To close this circle invite comments from students about one thing that stood out for them.

Something Special

Type of Circle: Basic

This is a version of show and tell that works for any age.

Invite each student to bring something special from home to share with the class. Be sure to discuss what is and is not appropriate to bring.

Remind them the day before the circle.

Be sure to put a nice large fabric on the floor in the center of the circle for this activity.

In the circle, go around and have each student in turn show their something special and put it in the center on the fabric. Encourage them to arrange their item so it becomes part of a collage or sculpture. Some students may forget to bring an item; it works very well to simply have them describe what they would have brought and what it means to them, and then to have them pantomime placing the object in the center with the others.

If time permits, invite students to share a second round focusing on what they thought about telling the class, but did not say. Almost always this second round will be more intimate than the first round.

After everyone has shared take a few moments to appreciate the objects in the center. You can ask students if they notice any patterns, similarities, or differences in what people shared.

To close the circle, have each student in turn pick up their item (including the imaginary items placed by those who forgot to bring something) and return to their seats while the whole class "remembers out loud" what they shared about the item and why it is special to them. We learned this last part about remembering out loud from a 4th grade class that invented it spontaneously, and we have used it ever since. It is often a very touching and bonding event.

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We feel connected to other people when we sense that they see us, know us, and care about us. That's what connection circles are about: being seen, being heard, being known, and developing affection.

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A Community Circle is a safe discussion space in which students and the teacher sit in a circle so that all members' faces are visible to one another. What distinguishes a Community Circle from a group discussion is that Community Circles are explicitly used as an opportunity for students to build community. In a Community Circle, the teacher participates as an equal member of the classroom, facilitating discussion rather than directing it. To give space for students to share their authentic voice, teachers can have students submit topics or have students lead the discussion. Community Circles increase motivation and engagement, empowering students by giving them an opportunity to express differing thoughts and opinions in a safe, non-judgmental space.
Essential Components to Community Circle:

Circle: All students face each other without barriers between them

Talking Piece: Object held by speaker (e.g. feather, rock, sea shell, etc.) that gets passed around the circle

Facilitator: Student or teacher

Student-Centered: From setting the agreements (rules) to leading the discussion, all aspects of Community Circle are student-led

Routine: A set list of steps for the group to follow during the Community Circle

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A Community Circle is a safe discussion space in which students and the teacher sit in a circle so that all members' faces are visible to one another. What distinguishes a Community Circle from a group discussion is that Community Circles are explicitly used as an opportunity for students to build community.

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Against Empire: Taiwan, American Studies, and the Archipelagic

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Against Empire: Taiwan, American Studies, and the Archipelagic

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This book project will be the first monograph on the political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students during the late Cold War (1960s through 1980s). It fills a significant lacuna in Asian American historiography and offers an extensive social and political analysis of a group and set of experiences shaped by the global Cold War in ways that have often been erased, overlooked, or misunderstood.

Typically regarded as an apolitical model minority group, many Taiwanese of this generation were in fact overwhelmingly political - shaped by multiple imperial and colonial identities, and influenced by the global social movements of their times. Student migrants created pervasive social networks that served as a lasting infrastructure for transpacific activism. University campuses became key sites of political formation and struggle, as students both perpetrated and became victims of extralegal surveillance by the ROC government.

Although the conditions of their migration served U.S. interests and depended upon the United States' entangled relationship with the Republic of China, these activists fought to make Taiwanese visible and legible as a people subject to injustice and deserving of self-determination. The involvement of foreign students and their allies - faculty, administrators, politicians, and human rights activists - in a Cold War transpacific drama that played out on university campuses received substantial media attention in those decades, but has been virtually forgotten now. While this project is a testament to the lives and activism of a generation of Taiwanese migrant activists, it also raises significant questions about historical legibility, the politics of scholarship, and the lingering epistemological effects of Cold War relations of power.

Cheng, Wendy. "The Taiwan Revolutionary Party and Sinophone Political Praxis in New York." 2019 (Fall). Amerasia Journal. Special issue on Asian American activism coedited by Diane Fujino and Robyn Rodriguez. DOI: 10.1080/00447471.2019.1665962

Cheng, Wendy. "'This Contradictory but Fantastic Thing': Student Networks and Political Activism in Cold War Taiwanese/America." 2017. Journal of Asian American Studies 20:2, 161-191.

Cheng, Wendy. "The Bold and Unruly Legacy of Chen Wen-chen." New Bloom Magazine (July 2, 2021). https://newbloommag.net/2021/07/02/chen-wen-chen-legacy/; reprinted in Pacific Times (太平洋時報) (July 6, 2021)

Cheng, Wendy. "Refuting the Silences of Taiwanese/American History: The Case of Chen Yu-hsi." Forum essay. 2021. American Quarterly 73:2, 343-48.

Wendy Cheng and Chih-ming Wang. "Against Empire: Taiwan, American Studies, and the Archipelagic." Introductory essay to coedited forum of same title. 2021. American Quarterly 73:2, 335-41.

Cheng, Wendy. "Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America" (by Chih-ming Wang). Book review. 2014. Journal of Asian American Studies 17:3: 382-85.

Cheng, Wendy. "Taiwanese Americans." Encyclopedia entry. 2014. Asian American Society: An Encyclopedia. SAGE Publications.

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Taiwanese/American Migration and Cold War Politics

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This book project will be the first monograph on the political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students during the late Cold War (1960s through 1980s). It fills a significant lacuna in Asian American historiography and offers an extensive social and political analysis of a group and set of experiences...

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Taiwanese/American Migration and Cold War Politics

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Taiwanese/American Migration and Cold War Politics

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This book project will be the first monograph on the political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students during the late Cold War (1960s through 1980s). It fills a significant lacuna in Asian American historiography and offers an extensive social and political analysis of a group and set of experiences shaped by the global Cold War in ways that have often been erased, overlooked, or misunderstood.

Typically regarded as an apolitical model minority group, many Taiwanese of this generation were in fact overwhelmingly political - shaped by multiple imperial and colonial identities, and influenced by the global social movements of their times. Student migrants created pervasive social networks that served as a lasting infrastructure for transpacific activism. University campuses became key sites of political formation and struggle, as students both perpetrated and became victims of extralegal surveillance by the ROC government.

Although the conditions of their migration served U.S. interests and depended upon the United States' entangled relationship with the Republic of China, these activists fought to make Taiwanese visible and legible as a people subject to injustice and deserving of self-determination. The involvement of foreign students and their allies - faculty, administrators, politicians, and human rights activists - in a Cold War transpacific drama that played out on university campuses received substantial media attention in those decades, but has been virtually forgotten now. While this project is a testament to the lives and activism of a generation of Taiwanese migrant activists, it also raises significant questions about historical legibility, the politics of scholarship, and the lingering epistemological effects of Cold War relations of power.

Cheng, Wendy. "The Taiwan Revolutionary Party and Sinophone Political Praxis in New York." 2019 (Fall). Amerasia Journal. Special issue on Asian American activism coedited by Diane Fujino and Robyn Rodriguez. DOI: 10.1080/00447471.2019.1665962

Cheng, Wendy. "'This Contradictory but Fantastic Thing': Student Networks and Political Activism in Cold War Taiwanese/America." 2017. Journal of Asian American Studies 20:2, 161-191.

Cheng, Wendy. "The Bold and Unruly Legacy of Chen Wen-chen." New Bloom Magazine (July 2, 2021). https://newbloommag.net/2021/07/02/chen-wen-chen-legacy/; reprinted in Pacific Times (太平洋時報) (July 6, 2021)

Cheng, Wendy. "Refuting the Silences of Taiwanese/American History: The Case of Chen Yu-hsi." Forum essay. 2021. American Quarterly 73:2, 343-48.

Wendy Cheng and Chih-ming Wang. "Against Empire: Taiwan, American Studies, and the Archipelagic." Introductory essay to coedited forum of same title. 2021. American Quarterly 73:2, 335-41.

Cheng, Wendy. "Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America" (by Chih-ming Wang). Book review. 2014. Journal of Asian American Studies 17:3: 382-85.

Cheng, Wendy. "Taiwanese Americans." Encyclopedia entry. 2014. Asian American Society: An Encyclopedia. SAGE Publications.

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Taiwanese/American Migration and Cold War Politics

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This book project will be the first monograph on the political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students during the late Cold War (1960s through 1980s). It fills a significant lacuna in Asian American historiography and offers an extensive social and political analysis of a group and set of experiences...

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A new report from the Pew Research Center estimates that between 195,000 and 697,000 people of Taiwanese descent live in the United States, rectifying a previous analysis that conflated Taiwanese and Chinese Americans and drew fierce backlash from the Taiwanese diaspora.

The study, which was released earlier this month, draws on desegregated data from the 2019 American Community Survey.

For Taiwanese American activists who have, for decades, fought for political visibility and global recognition for Taiwanese independence from China, the correction is a step in the right direction.

"Being part of a democracy is about having a voice," Christina Hu, the director of civic engagement at the Taiwanese American Citizens League, told NBC Asian America. "The first step to that is recognizing that we exist."

In April, Pew published a demographic report on Asian Americans that categorized self-identified Taiwanese people as part of the larger Chinese population, noting that "it is difficult to directly identify Taiwanese Americans confidently and distinctively with the data from the Census Bureau." (Self-reported Okinawans, the indigenous people of Japan's Ryukyu island chain, were also hidden from the dataset.)

More than 500 Taiwanese and Asian American leaders of prominent community organizations penned an open letter to the think tank demanding an apology and explanation for what they saw as an erasure of the Taiwanese community. They noted that the conflation of Taiwanese and Chinese Americans is particularly offensive given that China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, has engaged in an increasingly aggressive campaign to wipe out the island's international identity.

"Part of our response to the original report is that Taiwanese people have been denied agency for so long," said Leona Chen, the editor-in-chief of the nonprofit news site TaiwaneseAmerican.org and a signatory of the letter. "There's a sense that you have to protect something that's constantly threatened and historically endangered."

Pew said the author of the study was not available to comment.

Only 17 countries, not including the U.S., recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. Global corporations from airlines to fashion brands, fearful of losing access to China, the world's largest consumer market, have scrapped marketing initiatives that acknowledge Taiwanese sovereignty. At the same time, Beijing has ramped up military activities near the island and warned Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, whose Democratic Progressive Party opposes unification, that independence " means war."

But identifying as Tawainese on Census Bureau forms, Chen said, is more than just an expression of ethnic pride: it's also "intellectually precise data reporting" that determines how much funding a community gets.

"We want to communicate that being Taiwanese isn't a political choice," she said. "It's a fact of who we are."

The U.S. census has never included Taiwan in its race and ethnicity category. In both the American Community Survey and the decennial census forms, the question about racial identity includes boxes for only six Asian subgroups, such as Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese. Respondents who wish to identify as Taiwanese have to check a box that says "Other Asian" and write in "Taiwanese."

Since 1990, the Taiwanese American Citizens League has conducted grassroots campaigns to encourage Taiwanese Americans to self-identify on every census count. The group's Write in Taiwanese Census Campaign ahead of the 2020 survey leveraged bilingual social media advertising, as well as community events such as food festivals and arts and crafts festivals.

The updated analysis from Pew revealed overlapping responses to three survey questions used to determine racial identity. Almost everyone who wrote in "Taiwanese" as their race also said they have Taiwanese ancestry or were born in Taiwan. But only half of the people who said they were born on the island chose "Taiwanese" as their race or ancestry.

Hu said the discrepancies underscore the need to improve the census format and invest more money to educate ethnic minorities about how to identify themselves.

"The questions themselves mean different things to different people," she said, noting that not everyone feels that "Taiwanese" is a race and that many Taiwanese immigrants have Chinese ancestry but still consider themselves Taiwanese. Some people might not know they can write in an answer when there are check boxes under a question.

The movement to promote self-identity on the U.S. census forms started in the 1970s and 80s with the first wave of Taiwanese immigrants, most of whom were pursuing graduate degrees in engineering and medicine. During Taiwan's 38-year martial law era, which ended in 1987, many were spied upon by the Nationalist government of China and blacklisted" from returning home. In Taiwan, students were fined and punished for speaking Taiwanese in schools.

"The Taiwanese issue was that Chinese nationalists were in charge of the government while the majority of Taiwanese people were always voiceless," said Ho Chie Tsai, a community organizer and founder of TaiwaneseAmerican.org. "Being in America gave them this freedom to affirm their identity."

In the U.S., political dissidents used demographic surveys as a vehicle to assert ethnic pride and support for Taiwanese independence. Some of the first civic and political organizations aimed at promoting Taiwanese heritage and culture, such as the Taiwanese American Citizens League, the Taiwanese Association of America, and the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, were formed during this period.

As the Taiwanese diaspora expanded over the years, Tsai said, the goals and scope of the movement have broadened.

"Now it's more of an effort of: we should be participating more in U.S. politics, and to do that we need to identify ourselves as Taiwanese Americans," he said.

Tsai said he's encouraged to see that more than 375,000 people opted to write in "Taiwanese" under the ancestry question in the 2019 American Community Survey. Though the figure is likely still an undercount, he said it's a marked improvement from results from the early 2000s, when fewer than 145,000 people claimed Taiwanese ancestry.

The results reflect a growing understanding of and pride in the Taiwanese identity: less than a third of Taiwanese people consider themselves Chinese, according to a Pew Research Center report from 2020.

For young Taiwanese Americans who actively push back against any reference to being Chinese, the determination to express and preserve their heritage is deeply informed by history.

"Where young people have a different attitude is that we're very fortunate," Chen said. "We got to inherit a lot that our parents and grandparents fought for. We have to protect something that's so young and fragile."

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Taiwanese in U.S. insist their identity is not a 'political choice'- but must be a census option

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A new report from the Pew Research Center estimates that between 195,000 and 697,000 people of Taiwanese descent live in the United States, rectifying a previous analysis that conflated Taiwanese and Chinese Americans and drew fierce backlash from the Taiwanese diaspora. The study, which was released earlier this month, draws on desegregated data from the 2019 American Community Survey.

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international relations and national security

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What you need to know about China-Taiwan tensions | CNN

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US President Joe Biden's warning the US would defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression has made headlines around the world - and put growing tensions between the small democratic island and its neighboring autocratic superpower back under the spotlight.

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China has sent warships, including an aircraft carrier, into the seas around Taiwan.

Beijing's latest show of military force followed a meeting on Wednesday in California between Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen and US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

China sees self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be under Beijing's control.

But Taiwan sees itself as distinct from the Chinese mainland, with its own constitution and democratically-elected leaders.

Where is Taiwan?

Taiwan is an island, roughly 100 miles from the coast of south-east China.

It sits in the so-called "first island chain", which includes a list of US-friendly territories that are crucial to US foreign policy.

But China insists that its intentions are purely peaceful.

Historical sources suggest that the island first came under full Chinese control in the 17th Century when the Qing dynasty began administering it. Then, in 1895, they gave up the island to Japan after losing the first Sino Japanese war.

China took the island again in 1945 after Japan lost World War Two.

But a civil war erupted in mainland China between nationalist government forces led by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong's Communist Party.

The communists won in 1949 and took control in Beijing.

Chiang Kai-shek and what was left of the nationalist party - known as the Kuomintang - fled to Taiwan, where they ruled for the next several decades.

China points to this history to say that Taiwan was originally a Chinese province. But the Taiwanese point to the same history to argue that they were never part of the modern Chinese state that was first formed after the revolution in 1911 - or the People's Republic of China that was established under Mao in 1949.

The Kuomintang has been one of Taiwan's most prominent political parties ever since - ruling the island for a significant part of its history.

Currently, only 13 countries (plus the Vatican) recognise Taiwan as a sovereign country.

China exerts considerable diplomatic pressure on other countries not to recognise Taiwan, or to do anything which implies recognition.

Can Taiwan defend itself?

China could attempt to bring about "reunification" by non-military means such as strengthening economic ties.

But in any military confrontation, China's armed forces would dwarf those of Taiwan.

China spends more than any country except the US on defence and could draw on a huge range of capabilities, from naval power to missile technology, aircraft and cyber attacks.

Much of China's military power is focused elsewhere but, in overall terms of active duty personnel for example, there is a huge imbalance between the two sides.

That help could come from the US which sells arms to Taiwan.

Until now, Washington's policy of "strategic ambiguity" has meant the US has been deliberately unclear about whether or how it would defend Taiwan in the event of an attack.

Diplomatically, the US currently sticks to the "One-China" policy, which recognises only one Chinese government - in Beijing - and has formal ties with China rather than Taiwan.

But in May last year, US President Joe Biden appeared to harden Washington's position.

Asked whether the US would defend Taiwan militarily, Mr Biden replied: "Yes."

The White House insisted that Washington had not changed its position.

Is the situation getting worse?

Relations between Taiwan and China deteriorated sharply following a visit to the island by the then US House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in August 2022.

Beijing condemned Ms Pelosi's visit as "extremely dangerous".

China launched a series of military exercises, including the firing of ballistic missiles, focused on six danger zones around Taiwan, three of which overlapped the island's territorial waters.

Taiwan said the move, which forced ships and planes to find routes around those areas, violated its sovereignty and amounted to a blockade.

Tensions between China and Taiwan had already been increasing.

In 2021, China appeared to ramp up pressure by sending military aircraft into Taiwan's Air Defence Zone, a self-declared area where foreign aircraft are identified, monitored, and controlled in the interests of national security.

The numbers of aircraft reported peaked in October 2021 at 56 incursions in a single day, with Taiwan's defence minister saying relations were the worst they had been for 40 years.

Since then there have been 22 days with more than 20 incursions reported.

Taiwan made data on plane incursions public in 2020.

China's coastguard claims it has the legal authority to stop and inspect shipping in the area around Taiwan.

On Wednesday, it said "on-site inspections" on some vessels would commence.

Taiwan has objected to the move and has instructed Taiwanese vessels not to co-operate with attempts to board and inspect them.

Taiwan's economy is hugely important.

Much of the world's everyday electronic equipment - from phones to laptops, watches and games consoles - is powered by computer chips made in Taiwan.

TSMC is a so-called "foundry" - a company which makes chips designed by consumer and military customers. It is a vast industry, worth almost $100bn (£73bn) in 2021.

A Chinese takeover in Taiwan could give Beijing some control over one of the world's most important industries.

Are the Taiwanese people worried?

Despite the recent tensions between China and Taiwan, research suggests that many Taiwanese people are relatively untroubled.

Almost two thirds (64.3%) replied that they did not.

Separate research indicates that most people in Taiwan identify as Taiwanese - embracing a distinctly different identity.

This article was amended in July 2022 to provide more historical background about Taiwan's status.

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Tension between China and Taiwan has risen and what happens next matters to us all.

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Parachutes and Yes We Will by Kelly Yang

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Parachutes and Yes We Will by Kelly Yang

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https://www.kellyyang.com/#books

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Dani De La Cruz, Claire's new host sister, couldn't be less thrilled that her mom rented out a room to Claire. An academic and debate team star, Dani is determined to earn her way into Yale, even if it means competing with privileged kids who are buying their way to the top.

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Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

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Professor Emeritus Judy Yung is a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco Chinatown. She received her Master's in Library Science and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. She worked as a public librarian and community journalist before joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, where she taught courses in Asian American history, women's studies, oral history, and mixed race.

Dedicated to reclaiming Chinese American and women's history, she has written numerous books and articles about Chinese immigration and Chinese American women and served as a historical consultant to the Chinese Historical Society of America, the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, and many other historical and film projects through the years.

Judy Yung is the recipient of book awards from the Before Columbus Foundation, Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), and Western History Association; as well as the AAAS Lifetime Achievement Award and UC Santa Cruz's Excellence through Diversity Award and Excellence in Teaching Award.

She currently resides in Santa Cruz with her husband Eddie Fung and their Scottish Fold, Sparkie.

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Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (Naomi B. Pascal Editor's Endowment)

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In the early twentieth century, most Chinese immigrants coming to the United States were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. There, they were subject to physical exams, interrogations, and often long detentions aimed at upholding the exclusion laws that kept Chi...

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Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2008

So are these the oriental horde, the unassimilable immigrant menace to America's proud Anglo heritage? You can see them in old black-and-white family photos on the pages of Bitter Melon. They all look something like Bing Fai Chow, pictured on the cover on his porch in 1976: small, bent, work-hardened people with a hardly inscrutable weariness in their eyes. No immigrant stock has ever been received more cruelly and ungenerously in America by the older immigrant stocks than the Chinese. Recruited by American capitalists deliberately to undercut wages to America's working poor, they were execrated by labor - brutalized, burned out, murdered, excluded, condemned to celibacy and familylessness, and slandered beyond words. But still they came, as I've recounted in my recent review of the book Island, and stayed.
Bitter Melon is the autobiography, in photos and oral histories, of a very small town in the delta of the Sacramento-San Joaquin rivers in central California. Locke was built on rented land in 1915 by a group of immigrants from the Zhongshan area of southern China. It thrived for a time as a river port supplying San Francisco with fresh vegetables, and it had a era of infamy providing gambling, drugs, and prostition to the good white citizens of the Bay Area and the state capital Sacramento. Then it simply grew tattered and ramshackle, as young people left and old people waited to die. By various quirks of land title and court procedure, Locke became a living ghost town. I visited it by bicycle many times in the late '60s and '70s. I may well have taken snapshots of Mr. Chow's house myself. By then, outsiders had begun to scratch their livings in Locke, farmworkers mostly, Filipino and Latino. In 1971, a photographer named James Motlow came to live in Locke; perhaps his work is responsible for saving the ghost town as a State Park, surrounded now by endless atrocious commuter non-communities, acres of McMansions and McTickytackies, all built where they shouldn't be on floodplains protected only by the earthern levies built by the unwelcome Chinese. If I sound scornful and elitist, so be it; go and have a look yourselves!

Did the "Celestials" assimilate? Not exactly. They have concentrated in certain urban neighborhoods, married each other more often than not, continued to prefer dim sum to bacon-and-eggs, not commonly accepting Christian doctrines... and they've committed the unpardonable sins of excelling financially, beating the WASPs on the SATs, and staying out of prisons. America is less a Melting Pot than a Baling Press, in which the vibrant 'others' of the world have been squeezed into a multi-cultural bundle.

But there is great strength in bundled fibers.

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Bitter Melon: Inside America's Last Rural Chinese Town

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"A town like no other," Locke, California celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2015. This Centennial edition of BITTER MELON is the most recently updated version of this classic book. Immerse yourself in the stories from this unique town the Sacramento Bee once described as "The Monte Carlo of Cal...

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America for Americans

A History of Xenophobia in the United States

(New York: Basic Books, 2019); Updated 2nd edition (paperback) with a new epilogue on xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021)

Buy Now:

REVIEWS and IN THE NEWS

Winner, American Book Award

Winner, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, Adult Non-Fiction

Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award Finalist

2020 Richard Frisbie Adult Nonfiction Award Honoree

2020 Minnesota Book Award Finalist

Reviewed in: Publisher's Weekly | Kirkus Reviews (starred); profiled in: The New Yorker; excerpted in: The Atlantic; highlighted by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New York Public Libraryas one of the most important books illuminating the Trump era and informing essential issues in the 2020 election

Featured in Best Book Lists in

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PRAISE

"As Erika Lee brilliantly shows, xenophobia has forever been an integral part of American racism. Forcing us to confront this history as we confront its present, America for Americans is essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society."
-Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning

"America for Americans is unflinching and powerful. Through extensive research and crystal clear prose, Erika Lee has masterfully tracked the phenomenon of xenophobia and its devastating effects on this nation's democracy and its people. Spurred on by unscrupulous politicians and key segments of the press, the cadence of fear, racism, and policy violence has rained down on immigrants since the colonial period and wreaked havoc on America's laws and claims of moral and human rights leadership. This is a must-read for all who need and want to understand how the 'leader of the free world' came to ban a religion, violate asylum laws, and lock babies in cages." -Carol Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage and One Person, No Vote

"The most comprehensive and chilling history of anti-immigrant sentiment in America ever written. With narrative authority and analytic precision, Erika Lee shows how xenophobia has shaped America more than the ideals embodied by the Statue of Liberty. An indispensable and sobering guide to the politics of our own time."
-Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

"Erika Lee's America for Americans is an insightful, thought-provoking book that helps us understand why the United States, a 'nation of immigrants,' could be the home to such longstanding and powerful anti-immigrant movements. Anyone who wants to fully understand why Americans are so divided over border walls, asylum policy, and sanctuary cities must read this outstanding book."
-Tyler Anbinder, author of City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

"America's xenophobic underbelly is laid bare by Erika Lee's meticulous chronicle, which begins well before 1776, when 'swarms' of Germans in the American colonies were labeled 'scum' and 'criminals,' and then details how those same hateful descriptions have been applied to Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Muslims, and others. This fascinating, timely, and important book makes it possible for us to stop repeating history and instead to build bridges based on our shared immigrant experiences."
-Helen Zia, author of Last Boat out of Shanghai and Asian American Dreams

"America for Americans is an intellectual tour de force wrapped in a vibrant, accessible narrative. Erika Lee reveals how hostility toward foreigners has profoundly influenced popular imagination and public policy, beginning with agitation over German settlers in early America. The exclusionist rhetoric, practices, and policies so prevalent today are nothing new, but echo back centuries of marking the boundaries of belonging. A timely, eloquent meditation on immigration, Lee's book demonstrates why history matters in understanding the contemporary resurgence of xenophobia and makes plain its shameful consequences (past and present) for individuals and the nation."
-Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America

"A 'nation of immigrants,' America badly needs a history of xenophobia, and in America for Americans, Erika Lee delivers. By distinguishing nativism from xenophobia, she shows how Native Americans and Africans were transformed into foreigners and how that xenophobia fueled racist attacks against immigrants. Neither natural nor inevitable, xenophobia is always promoted by those who benefit from it, and in this courageous book, Lee names the beneficiaries."
-Donna Gabaccia, Emerita Professor of History, University of Toronto

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A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2019); Updated 2nd edition (paperback) with a new epilogue on xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021) Buy Now: Winner, American Book Award Winner, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, Adult Non-Fiction Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award Finalist 2020 Richard

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“Hip, entertaining...imaginative.”—Kirkus, starred review *“Essential.” —Min Jin Lee * “A Herculean effort.”—Lisa Ling * “A must-read.”—Ijeoma Oluo * “Get two copies.”—Shea Serrano * “A book we&#

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Canton Footprints: Sacramento's Chinese Legacy

During the gold rush of 1849, Sacramento was the destination for many Chinese. Sacramento's place as the way station to the gold fields, the origin of the Transcontinental Railroad, and a center of California agriculture gave it a unique role in Chinese American History.
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Published by Chinese American Council of Sacramento, Sacramento, CA (2007)

ISBN 10: 1605309680 ISBN 13: 9781605309682

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Published by Chinese American Council of Sacramento (2007)

ISBN 10: 1605309680 ISBN 13: 9781605309682

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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. VERY GOOD. Crown and upper wrapper corners bumped somewhat heavily, upper corners of last several pages bumped, wrappers edgeworn, small stains on back cover. Inscribed and Signed by Author. 160 pp., color and b/w illus. Size: 4to. Inscribed and Signed by Author. Seller Inventory # 289917

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Choy, Phillip P.; Foreword by Marlon K. Hom

Published by Sacramento, California: Chinese American Council of Sacramento (2007)

ISBN 10: 1605309680 ISBN 13: 9781605309682

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9781605309682: Canton Footprints: Sacramento's Chinese Legacy - AbeBooks - Choy, Phillip P.: 1605309680

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Skip to main content Canton Footprints: Sacramento's Chinese Legacy During the gold rush of 1849, Sacramento was the destination for many Chinese. Sacramento's place as the way station to the gold fields, the origin of the Transcontinental Railroad, and a center of California agriculture gave it a unique role in Chinese American History.

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A "comprehensive...fascinating" (The New York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject.

In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But much of their long history has been forgotten. "In her sweeping, powerful new book, Erika Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the United States" ( Huffington Post).

The Making of Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. But as Lee shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both "despised minorities" and "model minorities," revealing all the ways that racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country.

Published fifty years after the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, these "powerful Asian American stories...are inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long overdue" ( Los Angeles Times). But more than that, The Making of Asian America is an "epic and eye-opening" ( Minneapolis Star-Tribune) new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today.

The Making of Asian America 1 Los Chinos in New Spain and Asians in Early America
Long before Asians came to the United States, they went to Latin America. The earliest came as part of Spain's Pacific empire stretching from Manila in the Philippines to Acapulco in New Spain (present-day Mexico)-an empire that had been built on Christopher Columbus' accidental "discovery" of America while searching for Asia.

Europeans, dating as far back as ancient Greece, had long been fascinated with Asia-including the Middle East and Far East-its people, its civilizations, and its fabled riches. 1 In the European imagination, Asia was Europe's polar opposite, its Other. Asia and Asians differed in "every respect" from Europe and Europeans, as the Greek physician and recognized father of medicine Hippocrates explained in the fourth or fifth century BCE. 2 For centuries this difference between East and West was the subject of endless speculation, informing a Western-held understanding of a masculine, conquering Europe and a feminized Asia ripe for conquest. 3 This worldview helped direct the West's search for Asia and influenced its presence there. It was also a significant factor in propelling Asian peoples to the Americas.

During the Roman Empire, trading networks were established that eventually stretched from the British Isles to the Indian subcontinent. European pilgrims, merchants, and others shared their first impressions of Asia through sporadic travel writings. Crusaders rediscovered Asia when they set off for the Middle East on their quest to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1095. Lasting almost 200 years, the Crusades gave generations of western Europeans firsthand knowledge of the Middle East and some idea of the vastness and richness of the rest of Asia. European travelers described the bizarre creatures, alien plants, and strange customs of the "East" and helped to define Asia as an "other world" that stood in opposition to Europe. 4

Sustained long-distance travel and trade between Europe and Asia followed the establishment of the Mongol Empire that stretched across Asia to the eastern fringes of Europe in the early thirteenth century. The so-called Pax Mongolica of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries brought Asia and Europe closer together as both Asians and Europeans ventured far from their homelands. Asian goods and Asia itself came within reach of more and more Europeans. During this period travelers could journey eastward and back in relative safety and those who returned found ready audiences for their tales of exotic lands and abundant riches. 5

Among the most well known in western Europe was the story of Marco Polo, a young Italian merchant who journeyed 15,000 miles throughout the Middle East and Asia over a twenty-four-year period at the end of the thirteenth century. The Travels of Marco Polo contained accounts of fantastical unicorns, exotic sexual customs, and mountain streams flowing with diamonds. Marco described the court of the Mongol leader Kublai Khan as having "so many vessels of gold and silver that none without seeing could possibly believe it." 6

Published in 1356, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville also told incredible tales of the East, becoming a highly popular and influential book among a large audience of Europeans interested in understanding the larger world and the place of both Asia and Europe in it. Written under a pseudonym and allegedly the autobiography of an English knight, it described the Holy Land, Egypt, Arabia, and China as a region filled with cannibals and headless beasts as well as tantalizing spices, gems, and abundant quantities of gold and silver. 7

By the dawn of the European age of exploration and conquest in the fifteenth century, wealthy Europeans had developed a growing taste for Asian imports such as spices, silks, and sugar, and they demanded more. Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama relied upon an Indian navigator to become the first European to sail directly to Asia from Europe in 1497. His route took him around the Cape of Good Hope along the Atlantic coast of present-day South Africa to the legendary spice routes of India. When he returned to Portugal two years later, his spice-laden cargo yielded a 600 percent profit, paved the way for Portugal's colonial empire in Asia, and spurred further European exploration of Asia that would last through the twentieth century. Profit was far from the only motivation. As England's Sir Walter Raleigh predicted in 1615, "whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself." 8

Technological advances in shipbuilding and navigation as well as breakthroughs in astronomy and geography made Europe's oceangoing exploration possible. Spanish seafarers used the latest oceanic sailing ships to explore the Pacific and followed the Polynesian voyagers who preceded them. By the late fifteenth century, the ocean sea was no longer a barrier and soon became a passageway to the other side of the world. 9

Inspired by Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus dreamed of Asia. His well-worn copy of Marco's Travels contained numerous comments in the margins; it was through these adventures that Columbus formed his impressions of the Christian converts and fabulous riches that Asia promised. When he and his crew first spotted land in the Caribbean on October 12, 1492, Columbus imagined that he would soon be viewing Asia's rich spice markets and gold-roofed houses. When he and his landing party rowed to the beach the next morning in the Santa María's launch, however, nothing matched the men's expectations.

Nevertheless, Columbus explored the surrounding islands over the next few months and returned to Spain in February of 1493 believing that he had accomplished his dream of reaching Asia. His accounts echoed the fantastical descriptions of exotic peoples and fabulous riches that numerous travelers to Asia had told before him. The new lands, he claimed, were full of boundless wealth and populations ripe for conversion to Christianity. Columbus would make three more voyages across the Atlantic to the New World before his death in 1506, forever convinced it was Asia. 10

* * *

Columbus's voyages and subsequent discoveries by other explorers such as Amerigo Vespucci helped Spain dispossess the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and establish its huge land-based American empire, Nueva España. 11 Between 1520 and 1540, the Spanish added over three quarters of a million square miles to their empire in the Americas. In 1519, Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés founded the town of Veracruz on the Mexican Atlantic Coast. The Aztec Empire was defeated by 1521, and Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incas of Peru a decade later. The wars of conquest and dispossession were violent affairs that cost many human lives among the indigenous peoples. But this death toll paled in comparison to the untold millions who perished as a result of the introduction of European diseases like smallpox.

Erika Lee is the granddaughter of Chinese immigrants who entered the United States through both Angel Island and Ellis Island. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She teaches history at the University of Minnesota, where she is also the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History and Director of the Immigration History Research Center. She is the author of The Making of Asian America, Angel Island (with Judy Yung), and At America's Gates.

**Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature**
**A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2015**
**New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice**

"Sweeping . . . Lee's comprehensive history traces the experiences of myriad Asian-American communities, from Chinese laborers in 1850s California to Hmong refugees in 1980s Minnesota. . . . The Making of Asian America shares strong similarities with other broad inclusive Asian-American histories, most obviously Ronald Takaki's Strangers From a Different Shore, first published in 1989. Lee's book doesn't radically depart from its predecessors so much as provide a useful and important upgrade by broadening the scope and, at times, deepening the investigations. . . . Fascinating. . . . I suspect Erika Lee will soon join [the canon of key Asian-American histories]."

- Oliver Wang, The New York Times Book Review

"In this fascinating retelling of the American creation story, Lee uses incisive scholarship, a wide historic lens and rich detail to fill in the long missing Asian-American pieces. Starting with ancient Greece and the Age of Exploration, from enslavement to modern day challenges, Lee tracks the epic Asian-American journey to North and South Americas, East Indies to West Indies, and in doing so, she breaks new ground and inverts the master narrative."

- Helen Zia, author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People

"A fascinating narrative. . . . Deftly weaving together a masterful synthesis of the existing literature with new information culled from hitherto untapped archival sources and with analytical insights on the global currents that have shaped the last five centuries, Erika Lee has created a richly textured tapestry enlivened by vivid stories of hundreds of individuals and groups who played significant, though often unsung, roles in the making of Asian America."

- Sucheng Chan, Professor Emerita of Asian American Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Monumental. . . . Lee handles her scholarly materials with grace, never overwhelming the reader with too many facts or incidents. She tells an American story familiar to anyone who has read Walt Whitman, seeking to capture America in all its diversity and difference, while at the same time pleading for America to realize its democratic potential. . . . Powerful Asian American stories . . . are inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long overdue."

- LA Times

"A well-written, panoramic view of Asian America from the colonial era to the present that sheds light on how Asian immigrants have sought to make their place in American society and, at the same time, continually changed it."

- Nancy Foner, coauthor of Strangers No More and Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY

"A sweeping study of the fastest growing group in the United States that underscores the shameful racist regard white Americans have long held for Asian immigrants. A historian of immigration whose ancestors hailed from China, Lee (History/Univ. of Minnesota) delineates the specific history of Asians in America-Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hmong, and others-while also lending a general sense of what immigrants have endured: discrimination in work, wages, education, and housing, and even incarceration during World War II. . . . A powerful, timely story told with method and dignity."

- Kirkus (starred review)

"Pokes holes in the 'model minority' myth by pointing out that Asians in the United States are overrepresented at both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, and that before World War II, the group was frequently portrayed as being incompatible with American society. An impressive work that details how this diverse population has both swayed and been affected by the United States. Highly recommended for readers interested in this important topic."

- Library Journal (starred review)

"Erika Lee's new narrative of Asian American history deserves consideration to complement, if not supplant, celebrated earlier syntheses. Incorporating compelling revisionist approaches, Lee peels back several centuries of time to locate the origins of Chinese in America to the founding of the Spanish empire in America in the sixteenth century. . . . She further insists on the mainstreaming of Asian American history in the United States."

- Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History and American Studies, Brown University

"In her sweeping, powerful new book, Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the United States."

- Huffington Post

"Epic and eye-opening."

- Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"An ambitious, sweeping, and insightful survey."

- Publishers Weekly

"Racism, as Lee shows, was the unifying factor in the Asian-American experience, bringing together twenty-three distinct immigrant groups, from very different parts of the world. . . . In the eyes of some, Asians in America are, Lee writes, 'perpetual foreigners at worst, or probationary Americans at best.' If Asians sometimes remain silent in the face of racism, and if some seem to work unusually hard in the face of this difficult history, it is not because they want to be part of a 'model minority,' but because they have often had no other choice."

- The New Yorker

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A "comprehensive...fascinating" (The New York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States.

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Driven Out exposes a shocking story of ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest when the first Chinese Americans were rounded up and purged from more than three hundred communities by lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians. From 1848 into the twentieth century, Chinatowns burned across the West as Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and fieldworkers, prostitutes and merchants' wives were violently loaded onto railroad cars or steamers, marched out of town, or killed.

But the Chinese fought back-with arms, strikes, and lawsuits and by flatly refusing to leave. When red posters appeared on barns and windows across the United States urging the Chinese to refuse to carry photo identity cards, more than one hundred thousand joined the largest mass civil disobedience to date in the United States. The first Chinese Americans were marched out and starved out. But even facing brutal pogroms, they stood up for their civil rights. This is a story that defines us as a nation and marks our humanity.

Jean Pfaelzer is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Delaware. She is author of The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form, among other books. She was Executive Director of the National Labor Law Center and was appointed to the Washington DC Commission for Women.

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Driven Out exposes a shocking story of ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest when the first Chinese Americans were rounded up and purged from more than three hundred communities by lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians.

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The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities" - peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values - in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership.

Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders.

By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.

Awards and Recognition

Winner of the 2016 AAAS Award for Best Book in History, Association for Asian American Studies

Winner of the 2014 Best First Book, Immigration and Ethnic History Society

Finalist for the 2015 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society

"Historian Wu sets the record straight, offering the manner in which Asians worked to overcome prejudice from the 1890s through more recent events, including WWII, the communist revolution in China, and the Korean and Vietnamese wars."- Choice

" The Color of Success provides an insightful account of not just race relations, but race making. . . . It is a remarkable illustration of how ethnic stereotypes have less to do with any innate racial or biological reality, and everything to do with the political dynamics of the societies in which we live."-Christina Ho, Australian Review of Public Affairs

"Wu's research is thorough: her list of news¬papers consulted is mind-boggling, she has read every book and article that matters and worked her way through a multitude of archives. Her argument is complex and has the ring of truth. Her prose is clear and graceful. The book is not really about Asian Americans; it is about Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans. But seldom has a scholar gone so deeply into two different ethnic communities and emerged with such subtle and far-reaching results. The Color of Success is a major intervention in American racial history."-Paul Spickard, Journal of American History

"Ellen D. Wu has produced a masterful work in The Color of Success that very well may prove to be the definitive study of the historical origins of the 'model minority' stereotype of Asian Americans."-Jonathan Y. Okamura, Patterns of Prejudice

"Wu's research is thorough: her list of newspapers consulted is mind-boggling, she has read every book and article that matters and worked her way through a multitude of archives. Her argument is complex and has the ring of truth. Her prose is clear and graceful. . . . [S]eldom has a scholar gone so deeply into two different ethnic communities and emerged with such subtle and far-reaching results. The Color of Success is a major intervention in American racial history."-Paul Spickard, Journal of American History

" The Color of Success embodies exciting developments in Asian American history. Through the lens of racial liberalism and cultural diplomacy, Ellen Wu offers a historically grounded analysis of the Asian American model minority in the contexts of domestic race politics and geopolitics, and she unveils the complexities of wartime and postwar national inclusion."-Eiichiro Azuma, University of Pennsylvania

"Tracing the history of Japanese and Chinese American racialization, this powerful and effective book illuminates the impact of war, international relations, and domestic politics through richly detailed narratives. Ellen Wu shows that the idea of Asians as the model minority began as an academic hypothesis and became a key feature for how race in the United States was conceptualized. This is an important work."-Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences

"The Asian American journey provides a crucial angle of vision for a nation whose understanding of its own history tends toward color-blind denials or the white-black binary. Through this lens, Ellen Wu has written an important analysis of mid-twentieth-century struggle and racial liberalism. The Color of Success is an illuminating and deeply researched book-its intellectual ambition reaches to the heart of U.S. political culture."-Matthew Jacobson, Yale University

"With rich archival detail and illustrative accounts, The Color of Success offers a distinct and important contribution to the vexing question of the model minority formation of Asian Americans in the middle of the twentieth century. The book has widespread relevance to comparative race relations, the politics of acculturation, the conspicuous limits of middle-class Americanism, as well as national loyalty and race neutrality."-Nayan Shah, University of Southern California

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The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities" - peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values - in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

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"Engrossing... The Chinese Americans' struggle for success, its costs and tenuousness, are major themes in Chang's highly readable, panoramic history.... Absorbing, passionate." - San Francisco Chronicle

"A thought-provoking overview of how the Chinese have been an integral part of American history... An exemplary achievement." - Christian Science Monitor

"Richly detailed... I know of no better introduction to this multilayered and emotionally charged story." - Jonathan D. Spence

"Comprehensive, beautifully written, filled with deft and passionate analysis-the definitive book on Chinese American history for a new generation. Iris Chang places today's Chinese Americans brilliantly into 150 years of U.S. history." - David Henry Hwang, Tony Award-winning playwright

Introduction vii

1. The Old Country: Imperial China in the Nineteenth Century 1

2. America: A New Hope 20

3. "Never Fear, and You Will Be Lucky": Journey and Arrival in San Francisco 29

4. Gold Rushers on Gold Mountain 38

5. Building the Transcontinental Railroad 53

6. Life on the Western Frontier 65

7. Spreading Across America 93

8. Rumblings of Hatred 116

9. The Chinese Exclusion Act 130

10. Work and Survival in the Twentieth Century 157

11. A New Generation is Born 173

12. Chinese America During the Great Depression 199

13. "The Most Important Historical Event of Our Times": World War II 215

14. "A Mass Inquisition": The Cold War, the Chinese Civil War, and McCarthyism 236

15. New Arrivals, New Lives: The Chaotic 1960s 261

16. The Taiwanese Americans 283

17. The Bamboo Curtain Rises: Mainlanders and Model Minorities 312

18. Decade of Fear: The 1990s 334

19. High Tech vs. Low Tech 348

20. A Uncertain Future 389

Notes 405
Acknowledgements 477
Index 481

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The Chinese in America by Iris Chang: 9780142004173 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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"Engrossing... The Chinese Americans' struggle for success, its costs and tenuousness, are major themes in Chang's highly readable, panoramic history.... Absorbing, passionate." - San Francisco Chronicle "A thought-provoking overview of how the Chinese have been an integral part of American history... An exemplary achievement." - Christian Science Monitor "Richly detailed...

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$33.95

Hardcover

Published: 18 January 2019

224 Pages | 91 illus., with 29 in color

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

ISBN: 9780190604615

Also Available As:

Ebook

This title is available as an ebook. To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider.

Bookseller Code (01)

Anne Anlin Cheng

Offers what is arguably the first sustained theory of Asiatic feminism, filling a glaring absence in critical theory

Brings legal history, cinematic history, and art history into a dynamic conversation

Proposes a brand new way to approach the well-rehearsed problems of racial and sexual commodification and objectification

Supplies original readings of previously overlooked materials: one of the most important habeas corpus cases of the 19th century, a fashion show at the Metropolitan Museum, a film by one of the great "race actresses" of the 20th century, and more

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Focusing on the cultural and philosophic conflation between the oriental and the ornamental, Ornamentalism offers an original and sustained theory about Asiatic femininity in western culture. This study pushes our vocabulary about the woman of color past the usual platitudes about objectification and past the critique of Orientalism in order to formulate a fresher and sharper understanding of the representation, circulation, and ontology of Asiatic femininity.

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"A riveting, beautifully written account...that foregrounds Chinese voices and experiences. A timely and important contribution to our understanding of immigration and the border."-Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn "The Chinese Must Go shows how a country that was moving, in a piecemeal and halting fashion, toward an expansion of citizenship for formerly enslaved people and Native Americans, came to deny other classes of people the right to naturalize altogether...The stories of racist violence and community shunning are brutal to read."-Rebecca Onion, Slate
The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited this violence and how the violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, Lew-Williams argues, Chinese expulsion and exclusion produced the concept of the "alien" in modern America.

The Chinese Must Go begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens. Across decades of felling trees and laying tracks in the American West, Chinese workers faced escalating racial conflict and unrest. In response, Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 and made its first attempt to bar immigrants based on race and class. When this unprecedented experiment in federal border control failed to slow Chinese migration, vigilantes attempted to take the matter into their own hands. Fearing the spread of mob violence, U.S. policymakers redoubled their efforts to keep the Chinese out, overhauling U.S. immigration law and transforming diplomatic relations with China.

By locating the origins of the modern American alien in this violent era, Lew-Williams recasts the significance of Chinese exclusion in U.S. history. As The Chinese Must Go makes clear, anti-Chinese law and violence continues to have consequences for today's immigrants. The present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the "heathen Chinaman."

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social science: ethnic studies: american: asian american & pacific islander studies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
political science: public policy: immigration

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited violence against Chinese workers, and how that violence provoked new exclusionary policies. Locating the origins of the modern American 'alien' in this violent era, she makes clear that the present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the 'heathen Chinaman.'

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From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliffs of the Sierra Nevada and laying tracks across the burning Utah desert. Their sweat and blood fueled the ascent of an interlinked, industrial United States. But those of them who survived this perilous effort would suffer a different kind of death—a historical one, as they were pushed first to the margins of American life and then to the fringes of public memory.

In this groundbreaking account, award-winning scholar Gordon H. Chang draws on unprecedented research to recover the Chinese railroad workers’ stories and celebrate their role in remaking America. An invaluable correction of a great historical injustice, The Ghosts of Gold Mountain returns these “silent spikes” to their rightful place in our national saga.

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Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad | Department of History

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From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliffs of the Sierra Nevada…

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About the Book

From Our Blog

About the Author

Reviews

Table of Contents

Media

Related Books

About the Book

Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

From Our Blog

About the Author

Manu Karuka is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Barnard College.

Reviews

"Empire’s Tracks comes at a critical juncture, which only compounds its appeal. It is a moment where monopolies breathe new life as seemingly benevolent multinational, e-commerce corporations; when oil pipelines continue to cut through North America despite opposition from Indigenous peoples (amongst others); and when threats of mass deportations emanate from the highest political offices. . . .Karuka’s sincere meditation on the historicity of war, finance and countersovereignty is deeply welcomed as it sensitises readers to the tragically unexceptional reality of the present."—LSE Review of Books

"A timely and provocative book, creating new ideas with which to re-examine the well-worn story of the railroad."—Society & Space

".Empire’s Tracks is impressive in its complexity, ambition, and ability to intertwine multiple processes in nineteenth-century continental history. Karuka concludes with a meditation on present-day U.S. imperialism and a call for Indigenous, feminist modes of decolonization: an urgent project with deep roots in Indigenous histories, cultures, and economies. Historians would do well to pay close attention."—Western Historical Quarterly

"This is an impressive piece of scholarship. While Karuka’s argument that US imperialism predates 1898 is not new, his sophisticated interdisciplinary approach sheds new light on the historical intersection of capitalism and imperialism. It will prompt readers to think critically about historical interpretation and responsibility, and the future consequences of our exploitative political economy."—Journal of Cultural Economy

"Empire’s Tracks powerfully and effectively portrays how US countersovereignty uses the railroad to stop the unraveling of its own claims to land and space through an unceasing campaign of extirpation and violence. Its contributions to critiques of settler colonialism and racial capitalism are substantial and are sure to be influential in years to come."—Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association

"Challenges existing scholarship and fields of study in profound ways. He transforms what, on its surface, appears to be a national American story into one of international, imperialist, and colonial history by reading contingency against assumed outcomes; decentering national creation myths; and foregrounding alternative Indigenous, Chinese, and other voices. In this, Karuka offers a case study for scholars of diplomatic history or international relations to turn inward to national histories they might otherwise overlook and consider new ways of bringing their expertise to seemingly domestic stories."—H-Net

"This fascinating, sophisticated book on the transcontinental railroad will produce more critical thinking on the part of readers than any railroad history they have ever read. Manu Karuka exposes the pageant of American exploration, expansion, engineering, and entrepreneurship as an imperialist project fueled by disturbing historical processes—Indigenous land expropriation, immigrant labor exploitation, and a “war-finance nexus”—but mythologized for a century thereafter as national destiny and Yankee ingenuity."—Journal of Arizona History

"Empire’s Tracks is impressive in its complexity, ambition, and ability to intertwine multiple processes in nineteenth-century continental history."—Western Historical Quarterly

"Empire’s Tracks serves as an invitation to recontextualize colonial narratives within the silences and erasures inherent in these narratives, uncovering and decolonizing communities of knowledge and relationship through the careful study of archives, rumors, oral histories, literary representations, maps, and collective memories."—Great Plains Quarterly

"Karuka provides an essential critique of U.S. political economy, adding layers to Asian settler colonial history and the Chinese railroad worker narrative."—Journal of Asian American Studies

"Karuka’s account refuses the more familiar liberal historiography of American exceptionalism that promises freedom through liberal democracy and progress through capitalist development, and in doing so, the author advances a number of bold arguments."—Native American and Indigenous Studies

“A tour de force. Beautifully written. A dramatic and compelling retelling of the history of the Transcontinental Railroad.”—Patrick Anderson, author of Autobiography of a Disease

“Stunningly original, Empire's Tracks reveals how the construction of infrastructure—the railroad—not only forms the US as a continental and global power, but simultaneously produces race, gender and class. Every student of critical race, indigenous, and feminist studies should read this book."—Joanne Barker, author of Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity

“A remarkable book. By centering histories of Lakota, Chinese, Pawnee, and Cheyenne peoples, this study displaces the univocal authority of railroad monopolies and demystifies the national history of westward expansion as a project of continental imperialism.”—Lisa Lowe, author of The Intimacies of Four Continents

“A brilliant must read for anyone who seeks to understand the United States.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

“Empire’s Tracks demands that we study racial capitalism and settler colonialism together to understand and critique the racial and colonial order known as the United States of America. It is an impassioned and imaginative work that deserves the widest audience possible.”—Moon-Ho Jung, author of Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation

“With clarity and purpose, this intersectional and theoretically sophisticated examination lays the tracks for future scholarship across disciplinary and inter-disciplinary fields concerned with understanding colonialism, gender and race.”—Mishuana Goeman, author of Mark My Words: Native Women (Re)mapping Our Nations

“Powerfully transformative. This book is more than historiography—it is a call to end conquest as the urgent work of all liberation struggles.”—Jodi A. Byrd, author of Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism

Read More >

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface

1 • The Prose of Countersovereignty
2 • Modes of Relationship
3 • Railroad Colonialism
4 • Lakota
5 • Chinese
6 • Pawnee
7 • Cheyenne
8 • Shareholder Whiteness
9 • Continental Imperialism
Epilogue: The Significance of Decolonization
in North America

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Media

Manu Karuka discussed Empire's Tracks at the California Historical Society.

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Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent g…

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https://global.oup.com/academic/covers/pop-up/9780199734788

Honor Title, Asian/ Pacific American Award for Literature

Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California's Santa Clara Valley

Cecilia M. Tsu

Explores the history of overlapping waves of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigration.

Examines how the participation of Asian immigrants in agriculture challenged, modified, and consolidated the white family farm ideal.

Uncovers an intricate world of rural intra-Asian relations characterized by interethnic cooperation and conflict against the omnipresence of white racism.

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Nearly a century before it became known as Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley was world-renowned for something else: the succulent fruits and vegetables grown in its fertile soil. In Garden of the World, Cecilia Tsu tells the overlooked, intertwined histories of the Santa Clara Valley's agricultural past and the Asian immigrants who cultivated the land during the region's peak decades of horticultural production.

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READER

STUDENT

EDUCATOR

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Winner of the 2022 Bancroft Prize
Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize

How Chinese migration to the world’s goldfields upended global power and economics and forged modern conceptions of race., The Chinese Question, The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, Ma…

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Passage to the Golden Gate: a History of the Chinese in America to 1910

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AbeBooks.com: Passage to the Golden Gate: a History of the Chinese in America to 1910: Book is in excellent condition with pictorial boards. Book shows no wear. Binding is solid and square, covers have sharp corners, exterior shows no blemishes, text/interior is clean and free of marking of any kind.

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Described by others as quaint and exotic, or as depraved and threatening, and, more recently, as successful and exemplary, the Chinese in America have rarely been asked to describe themselves in their own words. This superb anthology, a diverse and illuminating collection of primary documents and stories by Chinese Americans, provides an intimate and textured history of the Chinese in America from their arrival during the California Gold Rush to the present. Among the documents are letters, speeches, testimonies, oral histories, personal memoirs, poems, essays, and folksongs; many have never been published before or have been translated into English for the first time. They bring to life the diverse voices of immigrants and American-born; laborers, merchants, and professionals; ministers and students; housewives and prostitutes; and community leaders and activists. Together, they provide insight into immigration, work, family and social life, and the longstanding fight for equality and inclusion. Featuring photographs and extensive introductions to the documents written by three leading Chinese American scholars, this compelling volume offers a panoramic perspective on the Chinese American experience and opens new vistas on American social, cultural, and political history.

Judy Yung, Professor Emerita of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is author of the award-winning Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (California, 1995) among other books. Gordon H. Chang, Professor of History at Stanford University, is editor of Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects (2001)and author of other books. Him Mark Lai, Adjunct Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, is author of Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (2004), and other books.

list of illustrations
preface
acknowledgments

part i: early chinese immigrants, 1852-1904

Songs of Gold Mountain Wives

Norman Asing, To His Excellency Governor Bigler (1852)

The Founding of Golden Hills News (1854)

Sing Kum, Letter by a Chinese Girl (1876)

Documents of the Chinese Six Companies Pertaining to Immigration

A Memorial from Representative Chinamen in America (1876)

A Memorial to the State of California to Bar Prostitutes (1868)

A Letter Writing Campaign to Discourage Immigration (1876)

The Second Exhumation and Return of the Remains of Our Departed Friends to the Homeland (1876)

Wen Bing Chung, Reminiscences of a Pioneer Student (1923)

Wong Hau-hon, Reminiscences of an Old Chinese Railroad Worker (1926)

Huang Zunxian, Memorandum No. 29 to Envoy Zheng (1882)

Memorial of Chinese Laborers at Rock Springs, Wyoming (1885)

Saum Song Bo, A Chinese View of the Statue of Liberty (1885)

Huie Kin, Reminiscences of an Early Chinese Minister (1932)

Bow On Guk (Protective Bureau) (1887)

Wong Chin Foo, Why Am I a Heathen? (1887)

Yan Phou Lee, Why I Am Not a Heathen: A Rejoinder to Wong Chin Foo (1887)

Jee Gam, The Geary Act: From the Standpoint of a Christian Chinese (1892)

Elizabeth Wong, Leaves from the Life History of a Chinese Immigrant (1936)

Kam Wah Chung Letters (1898-1903)

part ii: life under exclusion, 1904-1943

Ng Poon Chew, The Treatment of the Exempt Classes of Chinese in the U.S. (1908)

Detention in the Wooden Building (1910)

Chin Gee Hee, Letter Asking for Support to Build the Sunning Railroad (1911)

Chinese-American Citizens' Alliance, Admission of Wives of American Citizens of Oriental Ancestry (1926)

Gong Yuen Tim, "Just plain old luck and good timing:" Reminiscences of a Gold Mountain Man (1988)

Helen Hong Wong, "I was the only Chinese woman in town:" Reminiscences of a Gold Mountain Woman (1982)

Pardee Lowe, Second-Generation Dilemmas (1930s)

Anna May Wong, I Am Growing More Chinese-Each Passing Year! (1934)

Declaration of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (1933)

Chinese Women's Association Condensed Report for the Years 1932-1936

Happy Lim, Song of Chinese Workers (1938)

Lim P. Lee, Chinatown Goes Picketing (1938)

Liu Liangmo, Paul Robeson: The People's Singer (1950)

Jew Baak Ming, The Founding of McGehee Chinese School (1944)

Eddie Fung, "There but for the grace of God go I:" The Story of a POW Survivor in World War II (2202)

Gilbert Woo, One Hundred and Seven Chinese (1943)

part iii: becoming an integral part of america, 1943-2003 000

Chinese News Service, San Francisco Chinese Papers Blame Immigration Practices in Suicide of Chinese Woman (1948)

Eddie Gong, I Want to Marry an American Girl (1955)

Hsue-shen Tsien, My Bitter Experience in the United States (1956)

Maurice Chuck, Father and Son (1995)

Ah Quon McElrath, "We gave workers a sense of dignity:" The Story of a Union Social Worker (1982)

Sheila Chin Morris, "All the daddies were Chinese and all the mommies were white:" Growing Up Biracial in Minnesota (2002)

Bonnie C. Lew, "I always felt out of place there:" Growing Up Chinese in Mississippi (1998)

Johnny Wong, "It was not a winnable war:" Remembering Vietnam (1998)

Jeffery Paul Chow, "I am a Chinaman:" An Interview with Frank Chin (1970)

L. Ling-chi Wang, Major Education Problems Facing the Chinese Community (1972)

On the Normalization of Relations Between China and the U.S.

Proclamation by the Chinese Six Companies of San Francisco (1971)

Gilbert Woo, A Turning Point in Chinatown (1979)

Sadie Lum, Asian American Women and Revolution: A Personal View (1983)

Shui Mak Ka, "In unity there is strength:" Garment Worker Speaks Out at Union Rally (1982)

Kitty Tsui, The Words of a Woman Who Breathes Fire (1983)

Helen Zia, The New Violence (1984)

Lily Wang, A Journey of Bitterness (1999)

Fu Lee, Immigrant Women Speak Out on Garment Industry Abuse (1993)

Jubilee Lau, Chinese and Proud of It (1996)

Marilee Chang Lin, Learning to See the Man Himself (1997)

Ellen D. Wu, The Best Tofu in the World Comes from . . . Indiana? (1998)

Binh Ha Hong, Reflections on Becoming American (1999)

Chang-Lin Tien, Affirming Affirmative Action (1995)

Alethea Yip, Countering Complacency: An Interview with OCA Director Daphne Kwok (1996)

"One mile, one hundred years:" Governor Gary Locke's Inaugural Address (1997)

Kristie Wang, A Second-Generation Call to Action (1999)

Cheuk-Yin Wong, The Los Alamos Incident and Its Effects on Chinese American Scientists (2000)

David Ho, "We are Americans:" The Story behind Time Magazine's Man of the Year (2003)

chronology of chinese american history
chinese glossary
bibliography
index

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Described by others as quaint and exotic, or as depraved and threatening, and, more recently, as successful and exemplary, the Chinese in America have rarely been asked to describe themselves in their own words.

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Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Kevin Scott Wong, Jason Oliver Chang

Yale University Press, Jan 1, 2017 - Asian Americans - 321 pages

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An essential collection that brings together the core primary texts of the Asian American experience in one volume

An essential volume for the growing academic discipline of Asian American studies, this collection of core primary texts draws from a wide range of fields, from law to visual culture to politics, covering key historical and cultural developments that enable students to engage directly with the Asian American experience over the past century. The primary sources, organized around keywords, often concern multiple hemispheres and movements, making this compendium valuable for a number of historical, ethnic, and cultural study undergraduate programs.

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An essential collection that brings together the core primary texts of the Asian American experience in one volume An essential volume for the growing academic discipline of Asian American studies, this collection of core primary texts draws from a wide range of fields, from law to visual culture t…

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Li, her mother, and her brother journey from China to America to join their father in San Francisco. But they are detained at the Angel Island immigration center, where Chinese Americans are subject to harsh treatment and questioning. Will Li be able to answer the detailed questions about her former home, and why she wants to come to America? Or will she fail the tests and be deported?

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Li, her mother, and her brother journey from China to America to join their father in San Francisco. But they are detained at the Angel Island immigration center, where Chinese Americans are subject to harsh treatment and questioning. Will Li be able to answer the detailed questions about her former home, and why she wants to come to America?

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HK, China, Asia news & opinion from SCMP's global edition | South China Morning Post

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Your source for credible news and authoritative insights from Hong Kong, China and the world.

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Hung Liu in NMWA’s Great Hall; Photo by Emily Haight

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Our guest writer is Shirley Jennifer Lim, Associate Professor of History at SUNY Stony Brook, UCLA alumna (M.A., Ph.D.) and the author of Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern (Temple University Press, 2019). The book, which involved research at the Archive Research and Study Center, explores how the trailblazing actress' work "shaped racial modernity and made her one of the most significant actresses of the 20th century." This blog was made possible by the Myra Reinhard Family Foundation.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is the most important repository of Anna May Wong's (1905-1961) American motion picture and television work. Through these archival treasures, it is possible to re-evaluate the Chinese American actress as a pathbreaking artist. Here are just a few of the highlights.

Wong's first starring role was in The Toll of the Sea (1922, available for free viewing online). The first feature-length general release film to utilize two-color Technicolor, the innovation in color showcased the 17-year-old Wong's stirring gestures and elaborate costumes. Most strikingly, the film registers how Wong's photogenic face evoked an impressive array of emotions ranging from despair to exuberance. The film, however, re-worked the imperial Orientalist trope of Madame Butterfly. For example, Wong's clothing in The Toll of the Sea situated her as non-modern and thus (her and China) as a colonial subject. The title cards show Wong, a native Californian, speaking ungrammatical pidgin English. Frances Marion, one of the most famous screenwriters in Hollywood who would later win two Academy Awards, wrote the script. The film provided ample evidence of Wong's ability to command the screen and led to many opportunities including portraying the Mongol slave in the Thief of Baghdad (1924).
My China Film / Bold Journey: "Native Land"

One of the gems of Wong's oeuvre is the documentary-like film My China Film (1936), which Wong herself directed and produced. To the best of my knowledge, the only extant research copy is held at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The film footage of her one and only trip to China shows moments such as Wong being fitted by a Shanghai tailor for cheongsams and her and her father enjoying the view over their ancestral village. Made immediately after she was rejected for a leading role in the MGM film The Good Earth (1937), this film shows Wong as an innovative filmmaker who created her own opportunities when there were none in Hollywood. This film challenges the prevailing misunderstanding that the low point of Wong's life was The Good Earth casting rejection. Once MGM casted Luise Rainer and Tilly Loesch as leads, the ever-resourceful Wong resumed her previously made plan to film her trip to China. Wong's self-created film was shown two decades later on February 14, 1957 as an episode of the ABC television program Bold Journey, "Native Land."

A fascinating contrast to Wong's My China Film is the Hearst Metrotone News newsreel "Anna May Wong Visits Shanghai, China" (1936, available for free viewing online). What is striking is that the two films display completely different footage of the same trip. As the titles imply, My China Film revealed the geographic range of her visit to China, whereas the newsreel exhibited only Shanghai. More importantly, Wong's film comes across as her personal pilgrimage, the newsreel as a star's promotional tour. The Hearst newsreel depicts a Hollywood version of Wong's trip, complete with press conferences and visits to film locales and leading hotels. In the newsreel, the labor of a film star is made visible, whereas, for the most part, in her own film this labor is erased.

"Anna May Wong Visits Shanghai, China" opens with a shot of Wong standing on a boat on the Huangpu River surrounded by roughly 20 reporters taking notes and snapping pictures with their cameras. Although the version housed at the UCLA Film & Television Archive does not have sound, Wong is shown at the center of the coverage, listening to and answering the reporters' questions. Depicting a day in the life of a movie star, the next scene in the assemblage focuses on a luxury car pulling up to the famous Park Hotel. The newsreel captures Wong admiring Chinese calligraphy, on a Chinese film set watching intently the actors being filmed, and various street scenes. Throughout this coverage audiences could view Wong as the glamorous great lady visitor to China. Since Wong's My China Film would not air for the American public for another two decades, the Hearst newsreel provided an opportunity for American and global audiences to witness her time in Shanghai.

After her trip to China, Wong starred in three Paramount Studio "B" films, King of Chinatown (1939), Daughter of Shanghai (1937), Island of Lost Men (1939), the first two of which cast her in breakthrough roles as American professional women. King of Chinatown marked the pinnacle of Wong's Chinese American professional roles. Her character, Dr. Mary Ling, has the medical skills to do what no other doctor could do; she saves the life of the leading male protagonist. Based on a real-life Chinese American woman, Dr. Margaret Chung, Wong's role represents a modern American woman who is proud of her Chinese heritage [1]. Although it is a "B" movie, it was considered important enough to merit national mainstream magazine attention. In a two-page photoessay, Click magazine captured Wong's real-life training in which she witnessed kidney surgery so she could convincingly "wring every ounce of emotion" as Dr. Mary Ling [2]. What makes King of Chinatown particularly interesting is that instead of circumventing the threat of miscegenation by killing Wong's character, a rival assassinates the male lead. This is in direct contrast to movies in which Wong's character dies in order to avoid the threat of interracial relations. Thus King of Chinatown marks a significant break from Wong's cinematic oblivion as resolution. The very last scene of the film depicts Wong, wedding ring on finger, seated next to her husband Bob Li, played by Korean American actor Philip Ahn, while flying to China with medical equipment.

Watch the Archive's Hearst Metrotone News footage of Anna May Wong in Shanghai
References
1. For more on Dr. Margaret Chung, see Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, "Was Mom Chung a "Sister Lesbian"? Asian American Gender Experimentation and Interracial Homoeroticism," Journal of Women's History, Vol 13 No. 1 (Spring).

2. Click, December 1938, 8-9.

Please note: the UCLA Film & Television Archive Research and Study Center is currently closed due to UCLA's response to COVID-19. Subscribe to the Archive's email newsletter for updates on reopening and learn how to plan a research visit to view available titles in the future.

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Archival Treasures: Anna May Wong in Hollywood and China | UCLA Film & Television Archive

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Our guest writer is Shirley Jennifer Lim , Associate Professor of History at SUNY Stony Brook, UCLA alumna (M.A., Ph.D.) and the author of Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern (Temple University Press, 2019).

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Fifty years ago, Alexander Weiss found long-lost poems carved into the detention barracks walls. This discovery led to the Angel Island Immigration Station's rebirth as a National Historic Landmark. To commemorate this golden jubilee, we present Voices of Resilience, an online exhibition celebrating poems from the site's history as well as poems submitted by the public.

Eighty years have passed since the Immigration Station was closed on Angel Island. The poems left behind carry themes that have transcended time, gender, age, and ethnicity. Today, contemporary voices continue the tradition of writing poetry to express issues faced in our modern world.

AIISF's Voices of Resilience, curated by Russell Nauman, Operations Manager and Edward Tepporn, Executive Director

Angel Island Immigration Station Board of Directors
Buck Gee, President; Rosemarie Nahm, Vice President; John Cu, Secretary; Dien Yuen, Treasurer; Darlene Chiu Bryant; Paul Chin, Heather Fong; Richard Lui; Nobuko Saito Cleary; Natalie Huen; and Sonny Lulla
Special Thanks
Charles Egan, Henry Wong, Genny Lim, Felicia Lowe, Joanne Poon, Chen Yi, Judy Yung, Him Mark Lai, Xing Chu Wang, Family of Alexander Weiss, Yui Poon Ng, Ursula Kwong-Brown, Hak Hee Kang, Jikyung Hwang, Elaine Fong, Bruce Mui Ghent, Tammi Miller, Tamar Ashdot, Bob Dougherty, Brooke Laur, Andi Wong, Del Sol String Quartet, Alison Harrington, Rabea McCullough, Atria Rondone, Calvin Ong, Victoria Ong, Susie Oy Lum Fong, Victoria Fong, Chris Chan, Skyler Chin, Sonia Lake, Nellie Wong, Flo Oy Wong, Sabrina Haechler, Trevor Bukowski, Ken Sato, Marta Sato, Kristin Sato, Matthew Sato, Marjorie Sato-Bukowski, Ingrid Skog-Sato, Jessica Bukowski, Kelly Sato-Haechler, April Yee, Paige Brooks, and Grace Wing-Yuan Toy

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Voices of Resilience Online Poetry Exhibit | Angel Island Immigration Station - San Francisco

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Fifty years ago, Alexander Weiss found long-lost poems carved into the detention barracks walls. This discovery led to the Angel Island Immigration Station's rebirth as a National Historic Landmark. To commemorate this golden jubilee, we present Voices of Resilience , an online exhibition celebrating poems from the site's history as well as poems submitted by the public.

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Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial Monument Project

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Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial Monument Project

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The Forgotten Railroad Workers Monument completed May 10, 2019

Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial Plaza - Completion Fall 2020

Monument Description and Concept

Gold Run, California

The common element for the monument is utilizing the granite from the Sierras as the ground plane and providing the platform for the benches and the stone portal. The granite is true to the stone that the Chinese workers had to dig, toil, pick, and blast through to lay the tracks of the future transcontinental railway. The monument is emblematic of the difficult labor through the Sierras. The tracks, rail bench backrests and symbolic railroad ties provide allegorical references to the railway.

The configuration of the plaza opens toward the parking area, creating a forecourt into the main part of the plaza. Flush railroad tracks and symbolic railroad ties are inset into the forecourt leading to the sculpture. The sculpture sits on a four-foot high stone pedestal over the iron tracks, providing a literal translation of the workers laying the tracks for the railroad. The tracks continue and pierce into the woods, and dissipate into the air, expressing the feeling of never ending tasks to complete this work.

The pedestal is relatively close to the sidewalk so that it is clearly visible to vehicles entering the parking lot and to pedestrians walking to the facilities. Visitors can get a better appreciation of the workers up close and read the expressions as shown in the sculpture. The dedication plaque and information plaque will be mounted on the pedestal. Granite seating is provided alongside of the sculpture and facing back towards the entrance. The stone benches are arranged to provide seating adjacent and afar from the sculpture to allow for different viewing opportunities. The backrest is formed of horizontal railroad tracks. Donor plaques will be laid between the continuous railroad tracks that form the backrests of the granite benches. Two large, uncut Sierra granite boulders are set at where the inlaid tracks cross the path of the granite benches as a stone portal as another literal translation of the railroad workers blasting through the mountains and hills.

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Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial Project

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The Forgotten Railroad Workers Monument completed May 10, 2019 Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial Plaza - Completion Fall 2020 Monument Description and Concept Gold Run, California The common element for the monument is utilizing the granite from the Sierras as the ground plane and providing the platform for the benches and the stone portal.

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The desert of far northwestern Utah stretches 60 miles from the arid border of Nevada to the saline-crusted shores of the Great Salt Lake. The terrain is exceedingly flat, punctuated only by the intermittent dry arroyo, rocky hill or volcanic cinder cone. Horned lizards and jack rabbits dart between thorny shrubs and scrawny box elder trees. Apart from the occasional cattle ranch or sheep-herding camp, the landscape appears desolate and lonely, forgotten in the expanse of geologic time.

But in a place called Terrace, identified today by little more than a single, bullet-ridden informational sign staked into the desert soil, a close look reveals a colorful story camouflaged in the sand. Scattered among dunes and tumbleweeds are small glass bottles, ceramic jars and abandoned wooden railroad ties, clues to a surprising history.

From outside a small excavation pit, Karen Kwan and Margaret Yee watch as a researcher carefully extracts a scrap of linen clothing from the buried ruins of a house. A few yards away, another researcher brushes dirt from a ceramic bowl intricately painted with bamboo and floral motifs.

Terrace was established by Chinese railroad workers in 1869, when construction crews were racing to connect the eastward and westward tracks of the railroad 70 miles from here at Promontory Summit. Eventually, simple wood structures rose on both sides of Main Street, housing hotels, clothing stores, restaurants, railroad machine shops, even a 1,000-volume library specializing in science, history and travel literature. Because water was scarce, engineers constructed an aqueduct from hollowed-out timber, funneling water from mountain springs that were miles away. At its peak, the town was home to some 500 residents, and it welcomed hundreds more each year, mostly rail and wagon-train travelers.

In 1903, Terrace burned in a fire, and after the railroad was rerouted 50 miles south-straight across the Great Salt Lake-the following year, the town was abandoned. But researchers have returned, seeing the ghost town as an ideal site to learn not only about the workings of a remote railroad town but especially about the immigrant community that thrived here. "Terrace had all the different activities that you would expect in a frontier town," says Michael Sheehan, an archaeologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. "But it wasn't just a railroad town. It was a microcosm that offers a glimpse into class, ethnicity, even international relations." For descendants of Chinese railroad workers, such as Kwan and Yee, the research also allows them to recover a part of their heritage that was thought lost to history. "Archaeology like this is important," Kwan says, "because it puts the individual back into the picture."

The dream of a single, continuous railroad that would unite America's east and west coasts dates back to the 1830s, not long after the introduction of the country's first steam locomotive. A transcontinental railroad would shrink a dangerous, cross-country wagon-train journey of six months or more to less than a week, and it would open vast stretches of the West to new settlement. But it wasn't until 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, that Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Pacific Railway Act, which finally undertook to make that dream a reality. "There is nothing more important before the nation," he'd once said, "than the building of the railroad to the Pacific."

The legislation granted huge swaths of federal land and substantial funds to the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroad companies to connect Sacramento to the nation's existing rail network terminus in Nebraska. Both railroad companies held ceremonial groundbreakings in 1863, complete with crowds, bands and parades, but the war prevented real construction from getting underway until 1865.

That spring, James Strobridge, the Central Pacific's construction supervisor, put an ad in the Sacramento Union seeking 5,000 skilled laborers to begin blasting a path through the High Sierra. Given the job's punishing conditions, no more than a few hundred people even replied, most of them, Strobridge later said, "unsteady men" who "would stay a few days . . . until pay-day, get a little money, get drunk, and clear out."

Faced with a herculean project and no workforce, a railroad official named E.B. Crocker proposed a controversial plan to bring on a 50-person crew of Chinese workers who'd immigrated to California to mine for gold. According to Chris Merritt, an archaeologist and Utah state preservation official, most railroad officials believed the Chinese workers were "unskilled" and "too feminine for hard labor," but the crew swiftly set records for rail laying. So the railroad dispatched recruitment emissaries to China's rural Guangdong Province, which was then plagued by a civil war. "Southern China was in turmoil," says Gordon Chang, a historian at Stanford University and the author of 2019's Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. "Wars, ethnic conflicts and economic insecurity were scourges, and young people were leaving to seek work and support their families from afar."

Altogether, the Central Pacific Railroad hired an estimated 12,000 Chinese workers, some as young as 12. The Chinese workers, at that time the largest industrial workforce in American history, made up 90 percent of the Central Pacific's total labor force. (The Union Pacific, by contrast, did not employ Chinese laborers.) But when Chang started looking into the subject as a young historian, in the 1970s, he was shocked to discover that he could find scarcely any information about them. Nearly all of the scholarship about the railroad's construction centered on the European and American workforces. Chang has devoted much of his career to piecing together their history, and in 2012 he co-founded the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, which now includes the most comprehensive collection of historical documents and oral histories on the subject.

"Without employingChinese workers, the meeting at Promontory Summit would have never happened."

The Chinese workers carried out an exceptional feat. After blasting and cutting through granite in the Sierra Nevada, they expediently laid track across the Great Basin. Chang and other historians attribute their success in part to the diversity of their training. Before migrating to the United States, many Chinese workers were architects, blacksmiths, woodworkers, cooks, doctors and farmers. Their varied skill sets allowed crews to function as miniature communities, capable of tackling complex problems encountered along the railroad grade-not only problems of engineering, such as building railroad trestles, but also maintaining large field camps in the remote desert. It also enabled crews to acquire much-needed supplies, such as cookware, medicine and even food, often imported from China at a cheaper price than could be obtained by the railroad company or in nearby towns, which gouged prices for immigrant workers.

This communal cooperation was critical, because Chinese crews were routinely marginalized, subjected to poor treatment, racist oversight and negligible support from their employers. According to the Central Pacific's own disclosures, white workers earned $35 a month on top of full room, board and equipment. Chinese workers, by contrast, earned a salary of $30 and nothing else. "Not only were they paid less than their white counterparts," Chang says. "They also had to pay for their food, supplies and medicine, all of which the railroad company provided to white workers." What little money the Chinese workers saved, they sent back to their families. Despite these challenges, Chinese crews completed 690 miles of track to meet the Union Pacific builders at Promontory, Utah, in May 1869. "Without employing Chinese workers, the meeting at Promontory Summit would have never happened-period," Merritt says. Yet not a single Chinese employee was welcomed at the Promontory ceremony.

After the railroad was completed, thousands of Chinese workers stayed on as employees of the railroad. They were forced to live on the edges of railroad towns and larger cities. White mobs repeatedly attacked Chinese neighborhoods. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, 28 Chinese coal miners (all former railroad workers) were killed in an attack that drove hundreds more from town. In Los Angeles, 18 Chinese residents were lynched in a single day, including at least one child. Reno, Nevada's Chinatown was burned to the ground twice in 30 years. "Almost every Chinese community in the western United States in the 19th century suffered destruction," says Chang. "Fire and forced expulsion was their lot." In formal censuses, the U.S. government often recorded Chinese immigrants living in railroad towns simply as "Chinaman" or ​"Chinawoman" in place of their names. They were barred from obtaining citizenship, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited further immigration, which prevented many railroad workers from reconnecting with their families.

Those who returned to China faced challenges of their own, sometimes preferring not to speak about their experiences. In time, personal histories recorded in diaries or letters home were lost, or were likely destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in 1966, when such documents could have been branded as anti-nationalist and disloyal to the Communist government.

Between the community's exclusion in the United States and the upheaval it faced in China, its history slowly vanished. Of the 12,000 Chinese workers employed by the railroad, researchers have identified the names of just a few dozen. Still, their impact on establishing Chinese communities across the American West is unmistakable. Shortly before the start of the railroad project, census records estimated that there were 34,933 Chinese immigrants living in the country. By the time the railroad was completed, the population had nearly doubled, as family members joined relatives in places like Terrace or in other newly formed Chinese communities. By 1880, 105,465 Chinese immigrants had settled in the United States, forming anchors for many of the modern-day Chinatowns found today across the West.

Chris Merritt was walking through the remains of Terrace a few years ago, doing a general archaeological survey of Utah's railroad towns, when he saw what looked like a dense concentration of Chinese artifacts eroding out of a log-lined depression in the ground. Located at the edge of town, these finds strongly indicated that he'd found Terrace's Chinese neighborhood. After Merritt and Ken Cannon, an archaeologist whose team specializes in remote sensing, confirmed several buried structures using ground-penetrating radar, Merritt and Sheehan, of the Bureau of Land Management, spoke with local descendants of railroad workers in Salt Lake City, including Karen Kwan, president of the Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association and Utah's first Chinese American state representative, about a collaborative project to assist the descendant community in rekindling a connection to their past.

In the fall of 2020, researchers, preservation officials and several volunteers, including descendants of Chinese workers, returned to Terrace. Instead of focusing on the most obvious architectural features around the site-heaps of bricks and earthen depressions marking the foundations and basements of Main Street-the archaeologists would focus on the Chinese neighborhood. In particular, they planned to conduct the first ever complete excavation of a house for Chinese workers along the railroad line.

Within moments of breaking ground, the team was astonished by the artifacts they encountered, which were remarkably well preserved in the arid climate. Broken rice bowls depicting intricate bamboo leaf paintings (a type known as bamboo style, made in the Pearl River Delta in southern China) connected the occupants to their original home province. The handle of a traditional Chinese soupspoon indicated that rather than using readily available pewter cutlery, the workers took extreme care in transporting fragile implements across the globe. "The items that are there, my ancestor, my great-great-great-grandfather may have touched, may have owned," Kwan said. "To me it feels personal."

The archaeologists also found glass gaming pieces from Go, the Chinese strategy game, which had been lost underneath the house's floorboards, as well as silk fabric from a torn garment, the leather sole of a child's shoe, an apparent Buddhist altar built from a wooden crate, and an inkstone used for drafting correspondence. The inkstone left a particular impression on Merritt. "This one piece transcends the objective world we often build in archaeology," he told me. "It was owned by a literate man who left home, and he sat in Terrace and wrote letters to his family, who he maybe never saw again. I sit here and wonder, 'Did his letters ever make it home?'"

Sifting the soil, the researchers also discovered melon seeds, peanut shells, desiccated dates and fish bones, some of which appear to come from China. With the help of recent funding from the Register of Professional Archaeologists, Cannon will continue to study the food and resource connections between Terrace and mainland China by analyzing animal bones, charred seeds and plant pollen from the site-all part of a larger project to understand how Chinese workers supported themselves through trade that stretched across the Pacific. By examining connections between the Terrace workers and their home villages, the archaeologists hope to shed light on the reciprocal support that must have helped sustain both communities through difficult circumstances.

One of the most surprising discoveries was made not in the Chinese district but on Main Street. While cataloging glass bottles, the team uncovered pieces of soy sauce containers, rice wine bottles and Chinese teacups near the remains of an unidentified building. Given the density of Chinese-specific food-related objects, Merritt and Sheehan believe they stumbled across a Chinese business, possibly a restaurant, laundry or grocery store that was never mentioned in official Terrace records. This exciting discovery suggests that while much of the Chinese population in Terrace lived on the periphery, they were also more involved in the central community than previously thought. "While we know there was a clear segregation between the two populations," says Sheehan, "this business in the middle of Main Street shows us that the two communities must have been more integrated on a deeper level."

But not everything they found was cause for celebration. The researchers noticed shovel holes dug into building foundations and carefully sorted piles of broken artifacts on the ground-signs that amateur collectors and treasure hunters have scoured the ghost town for valuables. Sheehan bemoaned the crucial pieces of history that could be lost. "When people take an artifact out of context and put it on a mantel, it ends up in a landfill someday," he said. For Kwan, the lack of protective oversight was personal. "It feels as if the government has allowed somebody to come into my property to take something from me."

Ultimately, the archaeologists and descendant community hope to better protect the site from amateur collectors. The Bureau of Land Management recently constructed a fence around a portion of the site, and in January Kwan introduced legislation in the statehouse to protect archaeological sites and prioritize public education about cultural heritage and conservation. But the researchers acknowledge that, even if the bill is passed, there is only so much formal regulation can do. "Until people can see an artifact as being a rare key to a community's lost past, and not just a pretty object, they will continue to be taken," Merritt says.

On the last day of the field season, as researchers prepared the workers' house for final measurements and photographs before they would refill it with dirt to preserve the structure, several descendants lit incense, which wafted in thick clouds over heaps of fruit, sweets and mandarin cake stacked on a table next to the excavation pits. The descendants bowed one by one over the structure, in respect and remembrance for their relatives and the sacrifices they made while working in this remote town. Margaret Yee, who owns Utah's oldest operating Chinese restaurant, had prepared a lunch of fried rice, noodles, wontons and short ribs as a gesture of thanks to the researchers who are helping her community reconnect with its heritage. Yee's family has worked as cooks since they first arrived to help construct the railroad. Unpacking a container of rice as dust-covered researchers lined up at her cook tent, she smiled and said, "I feel connected to my family today. Together, we are continuing their story."

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What Archaeologists Are Learning About the Lives of the Chinese Immigrants Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad

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The desert of far northwestern Utah stretches 60 miles from the arid border of Nevada to the saline-crusted shores of the Great Salt Lake. The terrain is exceedingly flat, punctuated only by the intermittent dry arroyo, rocky hill or volcanic cinder cone. Horned lizards and jack rabbits dart between thorny shrubs and scrawny box elder trees.

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Just shared with me by the Lee Association.  Seems to be a high school project that could inspire others, as well as a resource for the upper grades!

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Open full screen to view more

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Towns in the Sierra Nevada with a Chinese Presence (1848-1882) - Google My Maps

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This map was produced by twenty-four San Marino High School students during the summer of 2022, with junior Jenny Zheng receiving credit for all the technical work. The map not only seeks to reveal the name and location of the Sierra Nevada towns with a Chinese presence in the mid-to-late 1800s, but it also seeks to reveal what various online articles have to say about the Chinese presence in each of these towns.

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Walk East - YouTube

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李子柒 Liziqi - YouTube

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这里是李子柒YouTube官方频道哦～欢迎订阅：https://goo.gl/nkjpSx Please subscribe to 【李子柒 Liziqi 】Liziqi Channel on YouTube if you like my videos 本人未在中国大陆以外开设任何销售渠道 So far Liziqi has not set up any distribution channels outside China mainland. 目前没有任何官方粉丝后援会哦~ So far I don't have any official fan clubs~ 新浪微博：https://weibo.com/u/2970452952 Facebook公共主页：https://www.facebook.com/cnliziqi/ YouTube公共频道：https://www.youtube.com/c/cnliziqi

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One Immigrant in the Chinese Exclusion Era

Spring 2004, Vol. 36, No. 1

By Robert Barde

© 2004 by Robert Barde

Quok Shee, age twenty, endured nearly two years of detention on Angel Island. (Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, NARA Pacific Region [San Francisco])

Chew Hoy Quong and his "alleged wife," Quok Shee, crossed my path quite by accident, two among thousands of Chinese would-be immigrants who had tried to enter the United States in 1916. Their experience was one of hardship, tenacity, and sadness. It was unusual, and it was puzzling, for through it runs a thread of mystery.

Their story begins in the thirty-fourth year of the Chinese Exclusion Act. It is a tale now more than eighty years old. Today it seems dramatic; back then it surely passed unnoticed. No newspaper headlines, no memoirs. Only the public record remains, a folder of documents in which brief portions of their lives were written down, assembled, and preserved with bureaucratic thoroughness: Investigation Case File no. 15530/6-29 at the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region (San Francisco) in San Bruno, California.

Quok Shee's "investigation case file" is more than an inch thick, begun in September 1916 and not closed until August 1918. That startled me, for it meant that for almost two years Quok Shee had been held in detention at the Angel Island Immigration Station. As I leafed through her file, the dry and dated pages jumped to life. She had been repeatedly interrogated, denied access to a lawyer, plagued by depression, subjected to smallpox, isolated from a husband she scarcely knew yet who was her only contact in America, pulled this way and that. One hundred and fifty pages of legalistic maneuvering, inquisitorial interrogations, medical evaluations, intrigue, and court orders-all over the attempt of one little Chinese woman to enter the United States.

Her case was not ordinary, but then neither were the times, the place, nor the other characters. Scandal was not a stranger to Angel Island, populated by a spectacular assortment of honest and dishonest immigrants, officials faithful or corrupt, an ambitious investigator-knight errant, smugglers, lawyers of every stripe, racists, and do-gooders. Such a setting, with its rancid undertone of moral ambiguity, was part and parcel of enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its equally racist successors.

Here is the story of Quok Shee and her "alleged husband" (as the Immigration Service always referred to him), Chew Hoy Quong-or at least the part we can document. The official record is stored safely in the National Archives: their testimony, the memorandums of immigration officials, and the lawyers' appeals. If we listen carefully, we can imagine their voices, sense the times, and feel the dramas that once swirled around Angel Island.
Coming to America
In 1916, entering the United States was relatively easy for most would-be immigrants. Only in 1875 had the federal government begun to regulate immigration, prohibiting the entry of members of "loathsome classes" as undesirable immigrants. By 1916 the list of undesirables had grown to include those with all sorts of physical or mental defects that might prevent one from earning a living, paupers and those likely to become a public charge, contract laborers, assisted aliens, criminals, prostitutes "or females for any immoral purpose," persons with contagious diseases, felons, polygamists, anarchists, and the illiterate. And those debarred under provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The Chinese were the only race of people to be singled out by the United States for special treatment through immigration legislation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882, was intended to end the arrival of Chinese laborers into the United States and to bar Chinese from naturalization. Only certain classes of Chinese were even allowed to enter the United States. They included merchants, teachers, consular officials, tourists, and the wives and children of such exempt individuals. Chinese residing in the United States before 1882 were also allowed to leave and return. The act was initially effective for ten years, but it was renewed once and then, in 1904, made permanent. It was finally repealed in 1943.

How effective were the Chinese Exclusion Acts at excluding the Chinese? For the last half of the 1870s, immigration from China had averaged less than nine thousand a year. In 1881, nearly twelve thousand Chinese were admitted into the United States; a year later the number swelled to forty thousand. And then the gates swung shut. In 1884, only ten Chinese were officially allowed to enter this country. The next year, twenty-six.

By 1916 the numbers had inched upward; a total of 1,762 ethnic Chinese were officially admitted as immigrants, about average for the decade. Still, the Chinese population of the United States was shrinking. In 1880, it had been over 105,000; by 1916 it had dwindled to around 65,000.

Chew Hoy Quong had first come to California as Congress was debating the Chinese Exclusion Act. He arrived in San Francisco from Hong Kong in 1881 and immediately went to work in his uncle's store on Washington Street. When the uncle died in 1896, Chew inherited the business. Like many other merchants, he saw his store destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906. He told immigration authorities that he had run a company near Stockton until 1915, when he joined the Dr. Wong Him Company, a Chinatown firm dealing in herbs and medicines.

Having lived in the heart of the San Francisco Chinese community for nearly thirty years, Chew Hoy Quong probably knew the procedures for immigrating to the United States. He would have known that if Chinese merchants wanted to leave the country and re-enter, their firms were required to register with local authorities. The Dr. Wong Him Company had done so. On February 2, 1915, Chew joined the firm, investing a thousand dollars to buy out the share of one of the founding partners. As part owner of a legitimate business, he could now apply to the Immigration Service for a Form 431, which he did on March 25. When this was approved, he became entitled to leave the United States. More important, he became entitled to return- and to bring with him any wife or children he might have.

Carefully, Chew had laid the groundwork for the next, and perhaps last, big change in his life: to find a wife and get married. On May 15, 1915, at age fifty-five, he boarded the SS Manchuria for Hong Kong. He later testified that, using a go-between, he met a Hong Kong woman named Lee Shee who had a daughter whom she hoped to marry off: Quok Shee, age twenty.

Chew subsequently testified that on February 21, 1916, he and Quok Shee were married. We do not know when Chew told his bride that they would be going to Gan San ("Gold Mountain"-i.e., the United States). Perhaps her mother told her that the prospective husband resided in the United States. Or perhaps Quok Shee only found out after the wedding. But she had over five months to adjust and prepare for the future, five months during which she and Chew said they lived in rented space on the third floor of a Hong Kong building.

It was probably in June or July that Chew arranged for passage back to America on the Japanese ship Nippon Maru. Ship owners in the business of transporting immigrants clearly understood that should a passenger be turned back or delayed at the U.S. port of entry, the shipping line would incur additional costs-the immigrant's upkeep on Angel Island and, should the would-be immigrant be refused entry, the responsibility of transporting that person back to the country of origin.

Thus the Toyo Kisen Kaisha line, owner of the Nippon Maru, had an incentive to see that their passengers' documents-especially their evidence of good health-were in order. In Hong Kong, Quok Shee was taken to the TKK office, where she presented her photograph and obtained a certificate stating that she was free of hookworm and trachoma.

On August 3, 1916, the Nippon Maru sailed from Hong Kong, arriving in San Francisco on September 1. From the ship's passenger list, signed by Captain Nagano as required by American law, we know that she carried 188 passengers: 90 Japanese, 75 Chinese, and 23 others of various nationalities (mostly Europeans and Americans). Among the Chinese were Chew Hoy Quong and his wife of six months, Quok Shee. Quok Shee had crossed the Pacific, but in many ways her journey to America had just begun.
Arrival
For most non-Asian passengers, whether immigrants, returning citizens, or passengers in transit, passing through the port's health and immigration controls would have been done quickly. Visas were not necessary, and there were few formal requirements for entry. But for Chinese like Quok Shee and Chew Hoy Quong, the process was quite different. Along with the Nippon Maru' s other Chinese passengers hoping to enter the United States, they were taken to Angel Island, several miles away in San Francisco Bay.

Perhaps 300,000 persons passed through the Angel Island Immigration Station between 1910 and 1940. For Chinese, it was the principal place of entry into the United States. Perhaps 75 percent of the Chinese entering through San Francisco were detained there for some period. Compared to the tens of millions who passed through Ellis Island in New York, Angel Island was a small operation. But it figures large in the history and folklore of immigration to California, a very visible reminder of the ordeals of those who passed through it, and of the country's determined efforts to keep them out.

As an outpost of the Immigration Service, Angel Island led a short and rather unhappy life. It had long been considered unsatisfactory by the time it was closed, following a fire, in 1940. From the beginning it was a source of dissatisfaction for both immigrants and immigration officials. The island was assigned the role of enforcing the grossly unfair Chinese Exclusion acts, and that this was done in a callous manner only compounded the injury and resentment. Firsthand testimony-some carved into the very walls-of former detainees speaks of injuries physical and emotional. Quok Shee and her husband were about to enter that labyrinth.
"Twenty Questions," Played for Keeps
The next day, September 2, J. P. Hickey, acting assistant surgeon of the U.S. Public Health Service, examined Quok Shee. He would have found her to be four feet, nine inches tall, able to read and write, and without a penny to her name. He signed her "Medical Certificate of Release." One hurdle had been cleared, but the couple was still held in the island's detention center.

On September 5 Quok Shee and her "alleged husband" were interrogated by the Chinese Division of the United States Immigration Service. The interrogation was an expected-and dreaded-part of the entry process for most Asians. The standard interrogation always contained a minimum of fifteen to twenty questions; Chew was asked more than one hundred.

Chinese immigrants complained bitterly about the interrogations, whose unnerving, inquisitorial style were liable to trip up even the most honest immigrant. Immigration inspectors were convinced that many of the Chinese trying to enter as children or wives of resident Chinese were, in fact, fraudulent. These suspicions were not unfounded; many entering males were "paper sons" (i.e., fictitious sons), and there probably was a trade in women being brought in for "immoral purposes." Chew Hoy Quong would certainly have been aware of the interrogation that loomed before them, and surely he and his wife used the long trip from Hong Kong to prepare for it.

There were two initial interrogations: one for Quok Shee and a separate one for Chew Hoy Quong. Both were conducted by Inspector J. B. Warner (through interpreters) and stenographer H. F. Hewitt. Quok Shee's case file contains the verbatim transcripts of both interviews.

Whereabouts in Hong Kong did you marry this woman?
C: Number 20 Wah Hing Street-west.

How was the bedroom lighted?
C: From a window in the hall.
Q: The bedroom was lighted from a window in front of the building.

How was the parlor lighted?
C: From a window facing the street.
Q: From a window in front of the building.

How was the parlor furnished?
C: One table, two chairs, one mantel clock; that is all.
Q: Clock and round table, 4 chairs, American, one cuspidor and looking glass.

Did you ever visit your home village after you married this woman?
C: Yes. I went home once.
Q: Yes. A number of times. I don't remember how many times.

How long did you remain?
C: Altogether six days, that is, including the time it took to go back and forth.
Q: 10 some odd days-a number of times.

Have you any children who you claim as yours?
C: My blood brother, Chew Kai Quong, gave one of his sons to me, who I adopted. I now, at this age, will probably have no children and therefore he gave me this boy to look after the ancestral service at home. . . . My brother brought him to Hong Kong to bid me good bye before I left for the United States.

Did he visit your home?
C: Yes.

How long did he remain there?
C: They stayed in the same building during his visit, on the second floor-Sun Chung Co.
Q: I don't know. They never mentioned it.

Are you positive this woman is your wife?
C: Yes.

You were married according to the Chinese custom?
C: I was married according to the Chinese new custom.

What is the Chinese new custom?
C: Chinese custom except there is no worshipping.

Are you positive you are not bringing this woman to the United States for an immoral purpose
C: Yes.

Inspector Warner must have entertained some doubts about their story. Later that same day, he and stenographer Hewitt recalled Chew for further questioning. He was "cautioned to be careful in his answers."

I want to know how many times you visited your village after your marriage
Only once.

Are you positive of that?
I am positive I only made one trip. . . .

Were you away from your village at any other time?
No.

Are you positive of that?
I was in Macao; a friend of mine invited me to a celebration there, for two days, on two different occasions.

Were those the only times you were ever away from your wife?
Yes.

Later that day, Inspector Warner made a favorable recommendation: he, at least, was convinced, and Quok Shee was on her way to being admitted to the United States. Or so it seemed.
More Questions
In fact, the Immigration Service did not release Quok Shee. Chew Hoy Quong was already a legal resident and free to enter the country, which he did on September 5. But something was amiss, and Quok Shee remained in detention on Angel Island. More ominously, the Immigration Service wanted to talk to Chew again.

On September 13, Chew took the 8:45 a.m. steamer from pier 7 back to Angel Island. He and his wife were again subjected to extensive questioning: 115 questions were put to Chew, 65 to his "alleged wife." As before, they were questioned separately and given no chance to talk to each other. This time, the interrogation was conducted by "Law Officer" W. H. Wilkinson. Again, only the stenographer and an interpreter were present. The same questions were asked again and again, each time in a slightly different way, brusquely jumping back and forth. The point was to catch them out and "prove" that they were not husband and wife.

This time, the interrogations explored how the "alleged husband's" story diverged from that of his "alleged wife." Wilkinson's questions focused on three areas: Quok Shee's knowledge of the furnishings and other occupants of the building they inhabited in Hong Kong, Chew's visit(s) to his native village, and the matter of getting onto the ship in Hong Kong. For example:

What kind of a clock did you have in your parlor?
C: We had a metal case clock on the table in the parlor (indicates about six inches square).
Q: It was a large clock hanging on the wall . . . in the parlor. . . . Wooden.

Wilkinson was more than skeptical. After the interrogations, he wrote a "Memorandum for the Commissioner." In it, he emphasized the following discrepancies, in addition to the number of visits made by the alleged husband to his home village:

The husband and wife disagreed on the nature and number of occupants on the second floor of their Hong Kong building.

The husband said that their apartment on the third floor was on the top floor, while the wife stated that there were people living above her.

The husband testified that the apartment had a metal clock, while the wife said it was made of wood.

Chew's adopted son lived on the ground floor during his visit, but the wife never saw him.

The husband and wife disagreed about the number of men accompanying them from the house to the steamer (SS Nippon Maru).

Wilkinson's conclusions were brief but brutal: "In view of the fact that the above contradictory statements appear incompatible with the relationship claimed, I recommend that the applicant be denied admission."

Charles Meehan, inspector-in-charge of the Immigration Service's Chinese Division, immediately informed Quok Shee that she had been refused admission: a form letter was drawn up and read to her through interpreter Chin Jack. The next day, Commissioner White wrote to both Quok Shee and the Chinese consul general, informing them that her application to land had been denied. The brisk "Notice to Rejected Chinese Applicant, Under Rule 5" was thoughtfully printed in both English and Chinese. Quok Shee was advised that she had two days to launch an appeal.

Detail of letter denying Quok Shee admission to the United States. (Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, NARA Pacific Region [San Francisco]) image

Two days for a poor immigrant to get a lawyer? Who would take such a case? Had she known what lay in store for her, she might have resisted engaging one. She surely had no idea how long and how tortuous her struggle would be.
Enter the Lawyers
Quok Shee's being denied admission was a setback, but Chew Hoy Quong was not unprepared. As soon as he sensed that something was amiss-probably when he was called back for further questioning-he immediately engaged the services of the San Francisco legal firm of McGowan and Worley, well known as specialists in the problems of Chinese immigrants. There was also a whiff of the less-than-respectable about them. Alexander Worley had frequent run-ins with the Immigration Service and with the courts, and neither he nor George McGowan was shy about taking on unpopular cases.

These were competent lawyers, and it was not at all unusual for them to be defending Chinese clients. The Chinese in California had a long history of using American lawyers and the American legal process to fight the Chinese Exclusion Act and its various successors, as well as discriminatory local ordinances. They also launched many legal actions against specific instances of unfair application of the exclusion laws. In the first ten years of the Exclusion Acts, more than 7,000 legal appeals were filed by Chinese, and between 1891 and 1905, an additional 2,600. There was plenty of work, and no shortage of able and willing white lawyers to earn the fees.

McGowan took charge of Quok Shee's case and went right to work. On September 11, acting on behalf of Chew as the "alleged husband," he requested Quok Shee's records, including the report of the examining inspector and the review of the law officer. These, however, were withheld by the Immigration Service because "said report does not contain any evidence whatsoever." Eventually, this refusal would be used against the government, but its initial effect was to keep Quok Shee on Angel Island.

McGowan and Chew kept testing the government's resolve to exclude Quok Shee. On September 22 they filed a sworn affidavit in which Chew states his background as a law-abiding citizen, provides details on his marriage to Quok Shee and their stay in Hong Kong, and shows how discrepancies in their interrogation testimony could be easily explained.

The affidavit was forwarded to Commissioner White on September 23, along with two other documents: a request to interview Quok Shee and a nine-page "Application to Re-open Case: Misunderstanding of purport of questions propounded and mistake of effect of Chinese customs bearing upon competency and relevancy of certain inconsistencies on the face of the record."

McGowan tried to use to his clients' advantage existing notions of how alien and incomprehensible were the ways of the Chinese. He quoted at length from Things Chinese, a book first published in 1892, to demonstrate how Chinese customs are different from "civilized" ones, especially those that concern the status and treatment of women. In trying to explain discrepancies in their testimony, Quok Shee's lawyer argued that Chinese women were sheltered, uneducated, unworldly, and basically, incompetent: "Matters of this kind only go to show that too much has been expected in this examination of the testimony of this Chinese wife."

Commissioner White was not in the least persuaded. On September 26 he notified McGowan and Worley that their request to reopen the case was denied. Further, the request that Quok Shee be able to confer with her "alleged husband" and with her lawyer was also denied. The next day McGowan tried appealing to whatever sense of compassion the Immigration Service might have:

This applicant having been held incommunicado at your station since the 1st day of September, 1916, she having been kept separate, apart, and away from her husband during all of that time, the husband now desires to request that he be permitted to see, talk to, comfort and console his wife, who journeyed with him to this country on the same boat and to whom you have denied admission.

The Immigration Service was not in the compassion business. Permission was denied.

For McGowan and Worley, the next stage was to appeal to higher-ups in Washington: to the secretary of labor. On September 28, Commissioner White in San Francisco forwarded a copy of Quok Shee's file to Washington. In the dossier was all the Immigration Service's information on Quok Shee that had been shown to McGowan-and some that had not.

This administrative appeal, too, was rejected on November 21, 1916, when the secretary of labor ordered that Quok Shee be deported, "said deportation to take effect Saturday, the 25 day of November, 1916." It seemed that Quok Shee's attempt to enter the United States had failed and that, after three months in captivity on Angel Island, she would be forced to return to China.
An Alleged Wife: One Immigrant in the Chinese Exclusion Era, Part 2
Robert Barde is Deputy Director, Institute of Business and Economic Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

Articles published in Prologue do not necessarily represent the views of NARA or of any other agency of the United States Government.

Purchase This Issue

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One Immigrant in the Chinese Exclusion Era Spring 2004, Vol. 36, No. 1 By Robert Barde © 2004 by Robert Barde Quok Shee, age twenty, endured nearly two years of detention on Angel Island.

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Chinese Exclusion 1882-1944

Citation: Application for Visa, Ng Shee, 1931. Case file 2500/9086. RG 85, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives at Boston.
...it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or having so come after the expiration of said ninety days to remain within the United States.
--An act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to the Chinese, May 6, 1882. RG 11, National Archives

From 1882 to 1943 the United States Government severely curtailed immigration from China to the United States. This Federal policy resulted from concern over the large numbers of Chinese immigrants, competition with American workers and a growing nativism. As a result, an act (22 Stat.58) was enacted on May 6, 1882 to suspend immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years; permitted those Chinese in the United States as of November 17, 1880, to stay, travel abroad, and return; prohibited the naturalization of Chinese; and created a "Section 6" exempt status for teachers, students, merchants, and travelers.

This document is from a file in the National Archives at Boston. This is an application for a visa by Ng Shee who hopes to join her husband in Waltham, MA, where he owns a laundry business. The file consists of as set of documents that were used to authenticate the identity of a person who was coming to America. They include the application for a visa, the husband's petition, a map that Ng Shee drew of her village, and an interrogation of her. Documents such as these are typical of the approximately 25,000 files pertaining to Chinese Exclusion in the National Archives at Boston. They were used to ensure that people seeking to immigrate to the US adhered to the immigration regulations of the times.

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Chinese Exclusion 1882-1944 Citation: Application for Visa, Ng Shee, 1931. Case file 2500/9086. RG 85, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives at Boston. ...it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or having so come after the expiration of said ninety days to remain within the United States.

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https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Jung_Sai_Garment_Workers_Strike_1974

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Historical Essay

by Harvey Dong

Listen to an excerpt from "Jung Sai Garment Workers Strike of 1974: 'An Earth-Shattering and Heaven-Startling Event'" read by author Harvey Dong:

Previous stop: People's Food System
Next Stop #8: GI resistance to Vietnam

Impressed by the resoluteness of 135 striking Chinatown garment workers, the Chinese Times wrote an editorial in its July 27, 1974, issue entitled "Chinese Women Workers of the Great Chinese American Sewing Factory Demonstrate Against Exploitation." The editorial stated, "Unexpectedly, these once subservient che yi ah shen ah mu (sewing factory aunties), once considered ru gao yang zhi fu (as subservient goats and sheep) are demanding their rights. They have been shouting, clapping, shouldering picket signs and demonstrating against the exploiting class. This is a shi po tian jing (earth-shattering and heaven-startling) event and has created a new page in Chinatown history."

Jung Sai garment factory workers picket line, 1974.

Photo: Cathy Cade, Union WAGE collection, Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University

Labor disputes involving less than several hundred workers are often discounted as insignificant. But the influence and effect of this dispute far outweighed its numbers. The 1974 Jung Sai garment workers strike began with widespread public support encompassing almost a year of strike activities, sixty-four arrests, and court injunctions. This united body of immigrant workers inspired popular support from community, student, and working-class populations throughout the San Francisco Bay area. The 135 strikers were mainly Chinese immigrant women with two men. Their interaction with hundreds of Asian-American activists and supporters became an important turning point for Asian-American activism in the San Francisco Bay Area. The strike encouraged further immigrant activism, energizing a grassroots movement among Chinese immigrant workers facing similar unfair labor practices.

Located at 646 Washington Street in San Francisco, the Jung Sai factory was a large Chinatown plant owned by Esprit de Corps, a manufacturer and designer of contemporary clothing for young people. In Cantonese, Jung means Chinese and Sai means West but the factory name was translated in English as "Great Chinese American" (GCA). The combination of the two characters, Jung and Sai, projected a meaning of symbiotic cooperation between the Chinese employees and Western management. But to the workers, the term "Jung Sai" represented harassment, intimidation, speed-ups, lack of breaks, and low wages. To the women, "Jung Sai" was a metaphor for the one-sided power of Western manufacturers over Chinese immigrant labor-an imbalance that had to change.

135 strikers from the Chinatown Jung Sai garment factory rallied at Portsmouth Square in 1974.

Photo: Asian Community Center Archive Group

The workers' subsequent strike redefined that relationship. Whenever Jung Sai was mentioned after 1974, community residents associated the words with workers' resistance. What began as a single-issue unionization strike in one factory evolved into a multi-faceted campaign against exploitation and oppression of Chinese immigrants.

by Harvey Dong, from his essay "Jung Sai Garment Workers Strike of 1974: 'An Earth-Shattering and Heaven-Startling Event'" in the anthology "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78" (City Lights Foundation: 2011), edited by Chris Carlsson.

Find the book at City Lights!

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Historical Essay by Harvey Dong Listen to an excerpt from "Jung Sai Garment Workers Strike of 1974: 'An Earth-Shattering and Heaven-Startling Event'" read by author Harvey Dong: Previous stop: People's Food System Next Stop #8: GI resistance to Vietnam Impressed by the resoluteness of 135 striking Chinatown garment workers, the Chinese Times wrote an editorial in its July 27, 1974, issue entitled "Chinese Women Workers of the Great Chinese American Sewing Factory Demonstrate Against Exploitation."

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https://aaww.org/chinatown-garment-strike-1982/

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Beyond dim sum restaurants and new bubble tea and dessert cafes, historic sites of resistance line Chinatown's streets.

On Mott Street, over 20,000 garment workers - almost entirely women - once marched down the center of Chinatown to Columbus Park on a warm Spring day in 1982. They donned union hats and raised picket signs to press for the renewal of their union contracts. United, immigrant Chinese American women called for workers' rights that would forever impact U.S. labor history.

In fiery speeches that were met with enthusiastic applause and cheers, women leaders exposed the plight of working women, and extolled the Chinatown community to carry on with the struggle for better wages and better working conditions.

Within hours, dozens of garment shop owners called the union, finally agreeing to renew the workers' contracts. That day, Chinese women won a historic victory in labor rights, securing wage increases and benefits for tens of thousands women workers in the city.

I first saw the black and white photo of elderly immigrant Asian women a decade ago when I was in high school. I was just beginning to be exposed to Asian American history in afterschool youth programs. A friend had shared it on Facebook. My initial reaction: shock- I had never seen or heard about protest being something grandmothers in my community participated in; and then curiosity- what was this moment in Chinatown's history and why had no one told me about it before?

One brisk Fall afternoon, I meet May Chen in the lobby of her long-time friend and co-organizer Connie Ling's apartment building. Carrying a chocolate cake from Tous Les Jours Bakery, May leads me upstairs to meet Connie and Alice Ip, another core organizer of the 1982 strike. Our meeting day happens to be Connie's birthday.

"It's small but it's been my home for many years," Connie says, seating us in her living room and offering us coffee and oranges. May lays out baked goods.

These three women are Chinatown OGs - core organizers of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union's (ILGWU), that led the 1982 Uprising. The strike lives vividly in their memories and though retired from their union work today, they tell of those times with the tenacity and spirit as if it had happened yesterday.

"My mother-in-law's job was to cut the thread. Mine was to sew the garments," Connie said, convivially.

"She got a needle pricked in her finger once and she had a bandage that was like a big ice cream," May chimed in, laughing.

"The work was really hard for me," Connie chuckled. "Like so many other women, I didn't have any experience sewing clothes."

"We did it for our livelihoods," Alice added in Cantonese. "The garment shops were in such a high demand for workers that they gave us the opportunity to learn. So even if your hands shook and you were scared, you had to do it."

"The machines were so fast," May added.

"I've been pricked countless times," Alice said.

Connie arrived in New York after national quotas were eliminated with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. Traveling with her family who fled the political turmoil in their home province in Mindanao in the Philippines, she arrived in New York City in 1967 and began to work in a garment shop three weeks later.

Nine years later, Alice immigrated to the U.S. in 1976 and began working in a garment shop her second day in New York City.

May, born and raised in Boston, came to ILGWU from years of prior labor organizing work and education activism. Unlike Alice and Connie, she was the first generation born in the U.S. and became politicized during the civil rights movement and student strikes in the 60s. After years of union organizing and teaching Asian American Studies in California, she moved to New York City in 1979 and joined the ILGWU after the strike in the 80s. She would become the legal assistant and educational director of the union, involved in Chinatown's activism for the next decades. It was in the union that she met Connie and Alice.

Connie is the tallest of the three women, short brown hair tinted with highlights. She speaks enthusiastically. May sits next to her, hair tied up in a ponytail, voice firm and gentle. Alice, chair at the end, dons dark auburn hair, soft red lipstick, and speaks reflectively.

"The good bundles that were easy to make were called 'sih yauh gai, soy sauce chicken' - they were the styles quicker to make and learn, that could earn you more money," Connie said, switching between English and Cantonese. "At first, I thought they were talking about a dish."

The laughter of the three women rose to the plant-lined sunlit windows to their left. "You'd say 'sew a soy sauce chicken.' When the styles were changed and it was hard to make, we'd call it 'zyu gwat, pork bone'" Alice continued. Pork bones were too difficult to eat.

Alice and Connie worked in garment factories in New York City at a time when immigration revitalized the garment industry. Jobs were available for anyone who wanted to work then and required no need for English fluency. By the late 1970s, Connie's third year in the U.S., four in 10 Chinese families had members working in the garment industry.

By 1980, four years after Alice arrived, there were 25,000 Chinese garment workers employed in 430 shops. Women made up over 80 percent of the workforce. This period was a new experience for many Chinese women, 85 percent of whom were married; they were allowed, for the first time, to leave homes en masse and earn a living.

"Before there were garment factories, women didn't have that much work," May said. "They had to sit in the apartment and look out the window all day because their husbands won't allow them to go outside. So when the factories opened, they were so happy. Since the workplace was all women, some of the husbands said 'okay, you can go out and earn a little money.'"

Canal Street hosted a heavy concentration of garment shops. Conditions varied. Overcrowding was common and buildings were often old and neglected. The shops presented hazardous conditions for workers, including inducing tuberculosis from poor ventilation and kidney and gastric problems from dehydration and long hours working under stress.

Women had to deal with over 10-hour workdays and they were paid by piece. The $3.35 minimum wage was often ignored and instead, workers were paid based on the number of clothing that they made and style-sewed; for skirts and jackets, for instance, the workers were paid 50 cents a piece. The more pieces they sewed, the more they earned. According to the union during that time, garment workers on average earned $5,500 annually in reported wages in 1981, after accounting for seasonal and part-time work.

In 1982, Connie and Alice were hired as business agents to represent the workers of unionized garment factories to handle negotiations and grievances. At the time, more and more shops were unionizing because of the mutual benefits between shop owners and workers. Their main role was to act as the liaisons between the union and management, and represent the interests of the workers. As women, the positions were not easy for them.

"I went to garment factories and was advocating for workers to have holiday pay. One owner, who was part of a gang, pulled a gun on me," Alice said, sitting across from me. Her voice was loud and clear. She waved her finger as she continued to describe that day in the 80s when she almost met death in a Chinatown garment factory.

"And I wasn't afraid. I said to him, 'Do you know who I am? You're the owner, of course I know who you are. But do you know who I am?' He wanted to scare me, so I pretended I wasn't afraid."

Her conviction that day rang loud to her storytelling today, over 30 years later. During that time, she regularly visited the workers in many of the garment shops, like many other union representatives and organizers.

"I said to him, 'You're trying to harass me now. I gave up everything to work this job. God decides if I live or die. I don't care. If you want to kill me now, come on."

At the last words, she switched from Cantonese to English with a delivery reminiscent of the men protagonists in action movies before opening fire.

"Then he hurriedly stowed away his gun and told his boys to hurry up and bring me some coffee. He then said, 'if there's a problem, let's talk about it.'"

As Alice finished her story, next to her, May and Connie burst out laughing. Those moments were now long past that they could be met with humor.

That same year, contractors refused to agree to terms that were already agreed upon by the manufacturers and the union. Instead, they threatened to take away holidays and other benefits. Workers were furious and resistance in everyday conversations filled the subways, grocery stores and homes. Threat of a strike became a greater reality. Workers soon joined together, speaking on radio stations, phone banking, handing out leaflets in the streets to organize and mobilize fellow workers to join the strike.

The day of the strike finally came on June 24.

"On the day of the strike, some women were so afraid of participating that they hid in the bathrooms of the shops," Connie said. "We had to go door-to-door, opening the bathroom door to get them to join."

Over 20,000 mostly women workers participated in the strike that day. They filled the streets and marched down Mott Street to Columbus Park. There were so many people that the crowd poured onto Canal Street two streets away. Union officials and workers delivered impassioned speeches that fired up the crowd.

"The Chinatown bosses' attempt to break our union is like a grasshopper trying to stop a car in its tracks. They are daydreaming in broad daylight and acting like a blind bat trying to knock down a tree," Shui Mak Ka's voice boomed at the podium. A garment worker and core organizer of the 1982 Strike, she addressed thousands.

I met Shui Mak Ka one Sunday afternoon shortly after I sat down with Connie, Alice and May. Upon learning that I am doing a story on the Uprising, another Chinatown OG Karen Low immediately insisted I had to also speak with Shui Mak, whom she calls Mrs. Ka. Karen was a member of I Wor Kuen, a Marxist-Leninist Asian American collective formed in 1969 in Chinatown, inspired by the Black Panthers and Young Lords.

Mrs. Ka speaks Cantonese and Karen helps interpret union words I do not understand. Although I speak Cantonese, union and strike vocabulary words were ones I never learned before. In our interview, Mrs. Ka speaks loudly and with an impassioned fierceness.

"Take a picture of this shirt," Mrs. Ka, who is nearing her 90s, says, holding up the white ILGWU T-shirt she keeps on her armchair in her midtown apartment.

Her living room is filled with stacks of photo albums, magazines, and t-shirts. Her son and filmmaker Shing Ka is sitting on the couch adjacent to me after gently placing a pot of green tea between Karen and I.

"They gave me a stack of papers to read from at the podium. And I said 'waste of time.' What did I say? Quite simply, we workers must be united. It's not yet spring, unless all flowers blossom. We cannot rely on a single worker's power, but we need all the workers together," she says. Her speech at the protest march quoted lines from Mao Zedong, former Chairman of the Communist Party of China.

Following the speeches, the workers marched- a Chinese dragon, union banners, drums and cymbals in tow. Once the rally began, the union's office received endless calls from employers finally conceding and agreeing to sign the contracts. By late afternoon, all but one shop had signed the contract.

"We must dig the man out of the hole," Mrs. Ka said at the time, referring to the last boss. "I said to them, 'Brothers and sisters, who knows the owner of this shop, on 22 Bayard Street, 4th floor? Who knows this boss?' There was a woman, who patted her heart, and said 'Mrs. Ka, I know him! I know where he goes to eat lunch. I'll go find him.'"

Mrs. Ka gestured to her own heart, imitating the woman decades ago. "She found him and we demanded that he sign the last contract. We forced him and he signed all of it."

I was sitting across from her in her living room, jaw-dropping at her fighting spirit for the livelihoods of her peers at all costs. Karen translated for me my next question, "What inspired you to keep going no matter how hard things got?"

Mrs. Ka began explaining her sense of justice since her childhood. Her son, Shing, answered in English, quietly as she spoke, "She was born that way. Her character is like that. It's the way she was born."

After the Uprising, the ILGWU became more active in the Chinatown community in supporting Chinese members and addressing the social issues affecting the community. The strike in itself also made it known that Chinese women workers organized actively for their rights and would not let ethnic ties with Chinese employers stifle their fight for economic justice.

As a result, employers held back on wage cuts and withdrew their demand to take away holidays and key benefits. The strike paved the way for increased bilingual staff for workers, English classes and transportation services.

"The community really saw the strength of mobilization," May said. "That's why the next year after, there was the fight against the jail."

Months later, the city moved to build a jail in the heart of Chinatown. In addition to behind-the-scenes meetings and organizing efforts, 12,000 people marched from Chinatown to City Hall to protest the city's plan. The jail was still eventually built, with the city government saying it needed its location there because of its proximity to the courts, a similar argument made for the expansion of the current jail in Chinatown under Mayor de Blasio's plan to close Rikers. The community then compromised to gain back a piece of the land next to the jail, which became the Chung Pak building that housed a senior residence, day care, and health center.

Members of the ILGWU, including May Chen, meanwhile, went on the co-found the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, the first national organization for Asian Pacific American union members. All of the women joined ILGWU staff and continued to be involved in the labor movement.

"The next generation needs to learn how to organize. Know that other people's issues are your own. If you don't organize, you too will lose all of your benefits," Mrs. Ka added.

Today, the garment industry is almost nonexistent in Chinatown, after 9/11 and after labor was outsourced to other countries. Chinatown continues to change, with the neighborhood facing rapid gentrification and thousands of residents displaced. What remains true is that, like in 1982, Chinatown community members continue to organize.

The 1982 Strike is a testimony to the immigrant women's strong sense of social justice and resolve to organize and fight for meaningful and lasting change. Although it seems that the 1982 Strike has been fading from public memory, it is part and parcel of the rich history of Manhattan's Chinatown that should never be forgotten.

Listen to Shui Mak Ka discuss the 1982 Garment Strike.

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How Chinese American Women Changed U.S. Labor History

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Beyond dim sum restaurants and new bubble tea and dessert cafes, historic sites of resistance line Chinatown's streets. On Mott Street, over 20,000 garment workers - almost entirely women - once marched down the center of Chinatown to Columbus Park on a warm Spring day in 1982.

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It happened somewhere between mile 92 and 119.

The Chinese railroad workers were grading and digging tunnels across a stretch of the Sierras when they decided to lay down their tools. It was the end of June 1867 and snow still covered the mountain tops.

The men, many of them from Canton in southern China, had demands: They wanted pay equal to whites, shorter workdays, and better conditions for building the country's first transcontinental railroad.

So they put them to their employer, the Central Pacific Railroad, and a strike was on.

"This project, the railroad, going through the mountains was the largest engineering project in the country at the time," Hilton Obenzinger, associate director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University, told NBC News.

"And this work stoppage was the largest labor action in the country at that time," he added.

This month marks the 150th anniversary of the historic eight-day strike, which began on June 25. It ended after Central Pacific director Charles Crocker choked off food, supplies, and transportation to thousands of Chinese laborers who lived in camps where they worked.

While the railroad made no concessions, Obenzinger said the action helped counter the image that the Chinese were docile and wouldn't fight for their rights.

"They learned that the Chinese could not be taken for granted," he said.

Chinese laborers made up a majority of the Central Pacific workforce that built out the transcontinental railroad east from California. The rails they laid eventually met track set down by the Union Pacific, which worked westward.

On May 10, 1869, the golden spike was hammered in at Promontory, Utah.

Hiring Chinese began as an experiment after a January 1865 advertisement seeking 5,000 laborers netted only a few hundred, Obenzinger said. Those who took the jobs did so for a time, eventually heading to the Nevada silver mines for better wages and the prospect of striking it rich, he noted.

Facing a labor shortage, Crocker suggested recruiting Chinese, a group that earlier had worked on the California Central Railroad and the San Jose Railroad, according to the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. They also had history as strike breakers when Irish masons walked off the job, Obenzinger added.

But Crocker's plan hit opposition amid anti-Chinese sentiment, stemming from the California Gold Rush, that gripped the state. Among those against it was construction superintendent James Strobridge.

"He didn't think they were strong enough," Obenzinger said.

Strobridge also worried the whites wouldn't work alongside the Chinese, according to Obenzinger.

But Strobridge yielded and the Central Pacific tested out 50 Chinese workers in 1865, Obenzinger said. They were among the 50,000 to 60,000 Chinese living in California that year, hailing from Sacramento, San Francisco, and the gold-mining towns of the Sierra Nevada, according to Obenzinger.

The experiment a success, the railroad hired additional groups of 50, but the Chinese labor pool in California soon ran out, Obenzinger said. So the Central Pacific arranged with labor contractors to bring workers directly from China, he said. They arrived by boat beginning in July 1865.

Two years later, between 80 and 90 percent of the Central Pacific workforce was Chinese; the rest was of European-American descent, mostly Irish, Obenzinger said. Some 8,000 Chinese focused on building the tunnels while another 3,000 laid track.

By contrast, the Union Pacific had no Chinese and was overwhelmingly Irish, according to Obenzinger.

Disparities between Chinese and white workers set the stage for the June 1867 work stoppage. The Chinese had seen a pay increase from $31 to $35 per month by Spring 1867, but it fell short of the $40 monthly salaries whites were pulling in, Obenzinger said.

They were also toiling longer hours, often under dangerous conditions, whipped or restrained if they left to seek employment elsewhere. And unlike whites, the Chinese had to foot the bill for their lodging, food, and tools, according to the project.

When the strike went down on June 25, 1867, some 5,000 Chinese were at work between the California towns of Cisco and Truckee, just west of the Nevada border.

As far as job actions go, this one came with little drama.

"They went to their camp and they sat," Obenzinger said. "Crocker was amazed. He reported that if there had been that number of white laborers on strike, it would've been impossible to control them."

But Crocker was also concerned.

"They felt if they did concede, the Chinese would be bossing them," Obenzinger added.

The strike was also cutting into profits. Both the Central Pacific and Union Pacific were paid through government subsidies by how many miles of track they laid down, according to the project. Speed translated into dollars, and the workers knew this.

Reports at the time suggested the Union Pacific may have orchestrated the job action to disrupt the Central Pacific's momentum, though Obenzinger said there was no evidence of this.

As the standoff wore on, an idea was floated to bring in recently freed slaves as strike breakers, according to the project. Crocker, meanwhile, took the step of cutting off all food and supplies to the Chinese laborers, hoping that starvation would force them back to work.

It did.

"Charles Crocker, superintendent of the Central Pacific Railroad, who returned last night from the work at Summit and Truckee River, reports that with exception of one or two gangs, all the Chinamen have resumed work," reads a July 3, 1867, article in the Daily Alta California. "No increase of pay, except increase made before the strike or decrease in time, has been allowed them."

In the months after the golden spike was driven, Chinese workers hired by other railroads staged a few smaller job actions over not being paid, according to the project.

Chinese were also sent elsewhere across the country to build new lines. In some states, such as Washington and Texas, Chinese encountered hostility, according to the project.

The 1867 strike was one of a number of actions taken by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who have a long history of being active in the labor movement, according to executive director Alvina Yeh of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, a national labor organization.

Yeh pointed to Filipino and Japanese sugar plantation workers striking in Hawaii, as well as labor actions by Chinese garment workers in San Francisco and New York City, all of them happening in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"I think that our community continues to fight in many different kinds of cases for better wages and a safer workplace," Yeh told NBC News.

In the end, the Chinese never got pay parity with the Irish while building the transcontinental railroad, Obenzinger said. But their strike a century and a half ago was not necessarily in vain. Obenzinger said they believe the Chinese, to some degree, eventually won many of their demands.

"There's some evidence that the abusive treatment was lightened up...it was thought that they were able to make progress," he said.

Yeh said failed strikes have also benefitted advances in the overall labor movement.

"No matter what, even if strikes are ultimately unsuccessful, I think it tells an important story about how workers continue to be exploited in the country for profit and how they continue to organize," she said.

Unanswered questions remain about the 1867 labor action. Obenzinger said they are working with Irish-American historians to learn, for instance, whether any Irish stood in solidarity with the Chinese. The Irish, after all, were known as a group that fought fiercely for their rights, taking unscrupulous employers to task.

That Stanford University has undertaken this project also holds significance.

Leland Stanford, a wealthy former California governor who ran under an anti-Chinese immigrant platform, was also president of the Central Pacific. The railroad made Stanford even richer, and to honor their son who died of typhoid fever, the Stanfords later founded the school that bears their name.

Some Chinese even worked on early construction of the university's foundations, Obenzinger said.

"Whereas he [Stanford] spoke out against the Chinese, in a lot of instances he spoke very highly of the Chinese," Obenzinger said. "It was a mixed bag."

As the first transcontinental railroad prepares to mark 150 years since its completion in 1869, Stanford researchers are still working to unearth more details about the lives of the Chinese who accomplished one of the greatest American engineering feats of the 19th century.

Part of that includes taking oral histories from descendants of Chinese railroad workers, Obenzinger said, in an effort to learn what they know of their ancestors and what happened to their families.

"Everybody knows Chinese worked on the railroad, there's a paragraph in every textbook," Obenzinger said. "But that's about all they know - and that's what we're trying to correct."
Follow NBC Asian America on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. CORRECTION (June 21, 2017, 1 p.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated that the Chinese railroad workers did not encounter tension in Washington State. The Chinese faced violence during the Tacoma riot of 1885.

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150 years ago, Chinese railroad workers staged the era's largest labor strike

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It happened somewhere between mile 92 and 119. The Chinese railroad workers were grading and digging tunnels across a stretch of the Sierras when they decided to lay down their tools. It was the end of June 1867 and snow still covered the mountain tops.

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Our History | Asian Americans for Equality

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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/six-decades-ago-flower-drum-song-featured-hollywood-s-first-n899576

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A glamorous Hollywood film with a nearly all-Asian cast makes a splashy debut, telling the story of young Asians living in America who must overcome the meddling of family to be with their true loves. That describes the new Hollywood blockbuster "Crazy Rich Asians," scheduled for release on Aug. 15, but nearly six decades ago it was also "Flower Drum Song."

Based on the 1957 novel "The Flower Drum Song" by Chinese-American author C. Y. Lee, "Flower Drum Song," the Broadway musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, premiered in 1958. The story was adapted into a film in 1961, becoming the apparent first major Hollywood studio film about - and starring - Asian Americans.

Set in San Francisco's Chinatown, the romantic comedy follows a Chinese woman who immigrates to the U.S. for an arranged marriage. But the man she's supposed to marry, a nightclub owner, is in a relationship with a showgirl. Clashes with parents, love triangles, and misunderstandings play out through musical numbers to a happy ending. A trailer at the time advertised the film as "ancient traditions clashes head on with modern romance."

While critics did not consider it the best work of Rodgers and Hammerstein, it was "still unbelievably popular and powerful," said Heidi Kim, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The film was a pop culture phenomenon, reviewed in major papers, and its stars - Miyoshi Umeki, Nancy Kwan, Jack Soo, and James Shigeta - went on to successful careers in entertainment.

"It was probably the portrayal of Chinese Americans that more Americans saw than anything else," Kim said.

The playwright David Henry Hwang, who adapted the musical for a Broadway revival in 2002, recalls the film with affection.

When he was a kid, he avoided any movies or TV shows with Asian characters. "I developed this instinct for knowing that what I saw would probably make me feel bad and I wouldn't know how to analyze it any further than that as a kid," he said.

But "Flower Drum Song," with its dazzling musical numbers, was an exception. "It was a virtually all-Asian cast and it had an actual romance between an Asian man and an Asian woman, which we still don't see much of today," Hwang said. "And it had an Asian male romantic lead, which we still don't see much of today."

Over time, though, the portrayals of Chinese Americans in "Flower Drum Song" troubled some Asian Americans, said Peter X Feng, associate professor of English and women & gender studies at the University of Delaware.

"The musical has a very simplistic version of assimilation, namely that the immigrant generation is 100 percent Chinese and doesn't understand the American-born generation and that the American-born generation is completely uninterested in Chinese culture and completely wants to assimilate," he said, noting that the novel is more nuanced.

"Flower Drum Song" was not unique in this way, though. It fit into the mainstream narrative at the time of immigrants as resistant to assimilation, which was judged negatively, Feng said. "And the younger generation is trying too hard to assimilate and has lost their Chinese culture - and that makes them pathetic," he explained.

Nancy Wang Yuen, author of "Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism" says that the themes in "Flower Drum Song" remind her of the 1927 musical film "The Jazz Singer" in which a young man defies the traditions of his Jewish family. It's a typical American story of old world versus new.

"White ethnics once upon a time were new Americans coming to the country and exploring identities and trying to find out what it means to be American," she said. "And the movie 'Flower Drum Song' was an exploration of what it means to be American again."

When Hwang went to college in the '70s and began to analyze the musical more deeply, he realized that some of its depictions of Chinese Americans were stereotypical.

"It's basically an outsider's view of Chinatown," he said. "If you take 'Grant Avenue,' the song, and you look at that lyric, 'You travel there in a trolley / In a trolley up you climb, / Dong! Dong! You're in Hong Kong,' who is coming up the trolley? It's someone who is not from Chinatown. It's a tourist point of view of Chinatown."

For a long time I think people would think about it as a guilty pleasure for Asian Americans, that even though it had a lot of stereotypes, there was just this joy to seeing a film with a nearly all Asian-American cast.

For the revival, Hwang kept the songs, but rewrote the script radically into an Asian-American critique of race relations. In his version, the young immigrant woman, Mei Li, is fleeing the Cultural Revolution and the song "Chop Suey" is not a happy musical number about the virtues of assimilation, but a kitschy send-up of what white tourists want to see of Chinatown.

For all its frivolity and its simplistic take on an immigrant community, though, the original film touched upon serious issues. The immigrant Mei Lei is undocumented, a departure from the novel that must have been introduced by Rodgers, Hammerstein, and their collaborators, Kim said.

"It's really fascinating just to think that when they were creating what they had to know, given their reputation, would be this blockbuster musical and then film about Asian Americans, starring Asian Americans, that they felt it was necessary to include the plot thread about illegal immigration in order to portray the community," said Kim, who wrote an article about the topic.

And the fact that it was a nearly all-Asian American cast endeared it to many in the community.

"For a long time I think people would think about it as a guilty pleasure for Asian Americans, that even though it had a lot of stereotypes, there was just this joy to seeing a film with a nearly all Asian-American cast," Kim said. "And not only that they're Asian Americans, but they're having a good time singing, dancing, speaking fluent English."

"I think Rodgers and Hammerstein - despite the faults of the musical - were very daring and progressive and bold to write a show which essentially, and perhaps simplistically, but nonetheless depicts Asians, Chinese Americans, as fully American and to look for all Asian cast as much as they could find," Hwang said.

It was the only Broadway musical written about Asian Americans, he noted, until "Allegiance," in 2015.

Nancy Kwan, who played the Americanized showgirl Linda Low in what she calls "a light, fluffy film," recalls it fondly. Just the other day, she caught a glimpse of it on someone's TV and felt that it held up well. "I've always loved the film because I think it was very groundbreaking, looking back, for Asian Americans," she said. "It opened a lot of doors for the actors, people in the business."

At the time, though, she didn't realize what a legacy it would leave. "I took it in stride. I said, 'All Asians? Great! Great!'" Kwan said. "I think it's still unusual today to see all Asians singing and dancing. And you can't go wrong with Rodgers and Hammerstein!"

She plans on seeing "Crazy Rich Asians," which is based on the best-selling novel by Kevin Kwan, a distant relative. "I hope the film does well financially because, as you know, Hollywood is all about the bottom line," she said. "And then it would help a lot to get more films also made with Asians.
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Six decades ago, 'Flower Drum Song' featured Hollywood's first Asian-American cast

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Nearly six decades before "Crazy Rich Asians," "Flower Drum Song" brought an Asian-American cast to a Hollywood studio production.

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♪ ♪ (distant rumbling) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: January 20, 1900.

The skies above Oahu were black with smoke.

(fire crackling) Bubonic plague had been discovered in Honolulu's Chinatown and panicked health officials were doing everything they could to try to stop the spread.

DAVID MORENS: In those days, they didn't really understand how plague was transmitted, so the public health approach was isolate people.

They would wall off a whole area with police and checkpoints and wouldn't let anybody in or out.

But if they couldn't stop the problem, they would often do targeted burnings of buildings.

(hose spraying, people shouting in background) Their point of view is, you know, "We don't care what you do.

"If you have to burn the place down, just make sure that you contain this epidemic."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Desperate residents fled their burning homes as the fire spiraled out of control.

(people shouting) And mobs of white residents stood by with clubs and revolvers-- threatening to kill any Asian who tried to skirt the exit lane out of the quarantine zone.

♪ ♪ (fire crackling, water spraying) NAYAN SHAH: This is the Black Plague of the Middle Ages that wiped out one-third of the population in Europe.

♪ ♪ So, we have this sense if it wasn't stopped, the consequences would be unbearable.

NARRATOR: The fires burned for 17 days and left nearly all of Chinatown in ashes.

4,500 of its residents were homeless.

The most feared disease in history, bubonic plague, was an unsolved mystery.

It had decimated the populations of Europe and North Africa in two separate pandemics over hundreds of years, and the third was now raging across Asia.

♪ ♪ This was the start of the steamship era.

So now disease and people and goods can travel around the world incredibly quickly.

And the bubonic plague spreads along Hong Kong, spreads to Japan, it spreads to India, and millions of people start dying.

♪ ♪ At that time, there was still a medieval sense of what this disease was and how it was spread.

Many people thought it was "miasma"-- bad air-- or it was simply a disease of filth.

♪ ♪ Other people thought that this is only a disease of rice eaters.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Racism and ignorance were already in the air as the bubonic plague made its silent way across the Pacific.

♪ ♪ It would arrive in North America for the first time in history where it would spark nationwide terror, denial, and blame.

♪ ♪ Two men would try to stop it, struggling with not only the scientific unknowns, but unanticipated forces of politics, commerce, and race.

(seagulls squawking, waves lapping) ♪ ♪ (seagull squawking) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: June 28, 1899: in the cold morning fog, a lone Italian crab fisherman made an unsettling discovery.

Two bodies were floating face down in San Francisco Bay.

♪ ♪ The previous morning, the Japanese steamship, the Nippon Maru, had arrived in San Francisco from Hong Kong, stopping at Shanghai, Yokohama, and then Honolulu.

Ominously, she flew a yellow flag: the international signal indicating disease.

♪ ♪ MARILYN CHASE: When the Nippon Maru entered San Francisco Bay, two stowaways, who evidently were ill, jumped overboard into the bay waters.

And when their bodies were recovered, the local doctors found them to be suspicious.

NARRATOR: Unnerved by both their autopsy findings and recent reports of plague in Asia, the city doctors immediately sent their results to Joseph Kinyoun, the nation's foremost plague authority, and the newly appointed head of the Marine Hospital Service on nearby Angel Island.

CHASE: Angel Island in San Francisco Bay had a quarantine station where cargoes and passengers were checked for all kinds of disease by the doctors of the Marine Hospital Service.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The Marine Hospital Service had been established 30 years earlier to treat sick seamen.

(indistinct chatter in background) But the idea of "public health" had since evolved into a matter of national concern.

The MHS was now charged with fighting the spread of epidemics using federal powers of quarantine and surveillance.

♪ ♪ RANDALL: Their main responsibility was protecting the people of the United States from the spread of disease around the world.

So, there were Marine Hospital Service officers stationed in Rome, in London, in Asia.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Just weeks into his posting, Kinyoun knew better than anyone that hospitals around the world were reporting 90% death rates from the plague.

And that millions had already perished from a pandemic that had been raging since the 1850s.

Although no one knew why, rats and filth had long been associated with plague.

Kinyoun ordered the "Nippon Maru" to be disinfected and checked for vermin before having all 55 passengers quarantined on Angel Island.

♪ ♪ Then he faced the most critical step of all: determining how the men had died.

JOSEPH HOUTS JR.: Kinyoun suspected plague.

And there was a little rattle in the papers.

♪ ♪ Well, Kinyoun thought the bodies were too far gone.

There wasn't definitive proof.

So the press kind of backed away, Kinyoun backed away, and everybody backed away.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: A positive diagnosis would be calamitous.

But the condition of the tissue samples and decomposed bodies made forensic confirmation impossible.

Without scientific proof, Kinyoun could not assert that plague had arrived.

Yet his years of rigorous training had taught him to remain alert.

♪ ♪ CHASE: Joseph Kinyoun was a star.

He was beautifully educated.

He had studied with the best scientists in the world to learn the state-of-the-art methods of diagnosing infectious diseases.

Then, at the age of 27, while he was at the Hygienic Laboratory in New York, he diagnosed the first case of cholera with the new bacteriologic tests in the Western Hemisphere.

He was truly the elite of American scientists.

NARRATOR: But Kinyoun's meteoric rise was interrupted by personal tragedy.

♪ ♪ TRISH REEVES: Joe and Elizabeth Kinyoun's daughter died of diphtheria at the age of three.

It's a terrible disease to die from, and it must be devastating for a parent.

♪ ♪ RANDALL: Diphtheria at the time was one of the most devastating childhood diseases.

So, Kinyoun goes to Germany to work with Robert Koch, who had discovered these cures for diphtheria.

And he can't believe his own eyes, seeing these kids recover as if by magic.

And he can't help but believe that he's seeing his own daughter's face on all of these children.

And that really gives him this idea that medicine can conquer anything.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Kinyoun was fueled by not just a new sense of purpose but of possibility.

♪ ♪ DAVID MORENS: Joseph James Kinyoun, he was a very unique guy from the day he set foot in the Marine Hospital Service.

He was fascinated by technology.

He taught himself photography and radiology, which was a new technique around the turn of the century.

He was an inventor.

And he invented an enormous number of machines and devices to steam sterilize, for example, or chemically sterilize.

Any new technique, he was just in love with and he wanted to master it.

He was an early adopter of ideas.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The 39-year old scientist had already proven himself a leader in the fledgling fields of microbiology and infectious diseases.

Once in D.C., Kinyoun developed the Hygienic Laboratory into a national state-of-the-art research center, which supported the MHS by identifying diseases and controlling epidemic outbreaks.

CHASE: Dr. Joseph Kinyoun loved the National Hygienic Lab.

He and his young family loved the finer East Coast living and the cream of scientific society in Washington D.C.

However, Walter Wyman, the surgeon general of the Marine Hospital Service, his eye was on the West Coast, where he feared plague would be entering and he transferred the young Joseph Kinyoun to San Francisco to run the Angel Island quarantine station.

(wind whipping) And, of course, Kinyoun was not pleased about being dispatched to what he thought was this frontier outpost.

NARRATOR: The MHS quarantine station on Angel Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay was a jumble of filthy and neglected buildings.

(birds chirping) Kinyoun now had to contend with a workplace that was completely unsuitable to the urgent task at hand-- protecting the nation from a deadly epidemic.

MORENS: The Marine Hospital Service was a uniform branch of the United States government.

And Kinyoun himself, he's a very military guy.

He always followed orders, and he did what he was told, and didn't complain about it.

He was clearly the best man for the job.

He probably knew that.

So, as everything else, he threw himself into it 100%.

♪ ♪ (birds squawking) NARRATOR: From the moment Kinyoun assumed his post in California, he had been on high alert for plague.

San Francisco was not only the busiest port on the West Coast, but connected by rail to the rest of the country.

It was terrifyingly well-placed to spread disease far and wide.

♪ ♪ To miss even a single diagnosis could be cataclysmic.

♪ ♪ SHAH: Joseph Kinyoun is really intent on checking every ship from Asia.

Because after bubonic plague emerges in Honolulu, and is discovered in the Chinese quarter, it becomes kind of a confirmation bias.

It was only going to affect Chinese people.

That one could contain it in some way.

And that set up a terrible dynamic.

It only percolated more fear, more confusion, more misunderstanding.

And all eyes were targeted on a Chinese source.

(traditional Chinese music playing) (firecrackers popping) (music continues) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: As the 20th century dawned, everyone celebrated.

♪ ♪ And no place had more optimistic swagger than San Francisco.

It was home to one out of every four people who lived west of the Rockies.

♪ ♪ A third of the nation's money west of the Mississippi flowed through her banks.

The city was a trading hub, the portal to the east, and the diamond in the crown of a state already rich with natural resources.

It truly was the city of the future.

CHASE: As a Gold Rush boom town, San Francisco had new money.

It had three opera houses, railroad and mining tycoons living in palaces on Nob Hill, and a new cable car system.

(cable car bells clanging) San Francisco in 1900 aspired to be the Paris of the Pacific coast.

(people chattering) NARRATOR: Nearly six percent of the city's population lived in a 12-block district.

HARRY CHUCK: Chinatown is home and it always will be.

My mother was born in the year 1900 in San Francisco's Chinatown.

And she lived in Chinatown throughout her entire life.

Because they didn't have any choices.

They were not permitted to move outside of the neighborhood.

Things were red lined, there was discrimination, and people were very stereotyped.

MAE NGAI: Chinatowns primarily exist because Chinese weren't allowed to live in white neighborhoods or any other neighborhood.

♪ ♪ They are what sociologists call ethnic enclaves, where people like to live with people who speak their language, or eat similar foods, or practice the same religion.

But they're also confining.

So, Chinatowns are a combination of ethnic solidarity and discrimination and exclusion.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: As the Year of the Rat dawned on January 31, 1900, shop owners in Chinatown began noticing a disturbing sight: rat carcasses littered the district's alleys and courtyards.

And for 41-year-old Wong Chut King, something was definitely wrong.

A worker in a nearby lumber yard, Wong lived in the Globe Hotel on DuPont Avenue, the main artery of Chinatown.

♪ ♪ RANDALL: He shared one bed with two other men.

They'd take turns sleeping.

It was really a meager existence of survival.

He, like many people who came from China, expected their time in San Francisco to be short-lived.

They come, they make a lot of money, then they go back home a wealthy man.

That didn't play out for almost all of them.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: For several weeks, Wong Chut King struggled with mounting fever, exhaustion, and painfully swollen lymph nodes, or "buboes."

Because city hospitals were closed to the Chinese, he sought traditional Chinese remedies, but nothing seemed to help.

Eventually, he was too sick to move.

RANDALL: His roommates, they see that he's dying.

They take him to a local, you know, what was called a Hall of Tranquility.

♪ ♪ GUENTER RISSE: The Chinese have a holistic view.

They believe that when they die, their spirit needs to be tended to.

And the remains had to be brought back because of their view that the ancestors played a great role in the afterlife.

NGAI: One of the sources of mistrust between the community and Western doctors was a very different view of life and death.

The body should not be cut, autopsies were anathema, one's soul had to return to one's home village.

So the Chinese were very careful.

CHASE: So, it was a quiet affair.

And Wong Chut King died alone, on March 6, 1900.

♪ ♪ (bell rings, horse hooves clomping) NARRATOR: State law required a physician to issue a death certificate so a health inspector was summoned to examine the body.

(horse whinnying) He notices a bubo in, in Wong Chut King's groin and he jumps back because he does know what this is.

He knows it's a sign of bubonic plague.

So, he figures that, "I'm going to take a sample of this tissue "from Wong Chut King's body.

"I'm going to run it over to Kinyoun at Angel Island.

"And I'm going to let him make the decision of whether this is plague or not."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Kinyoun knew all about buboes, where the word "bubonic" comes from.

The swollen lymph nodes were an infamous sign of the plague.

Yet he also knew that they weren't enough for a diagnosis and he had to be 100% certain.

♪ ♪ MORENS: To prove a plague death scientifically, you couldn't just do it by examining the live patient or the cadaver.

You had to isolate the organism from tissue.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In 1900, microbiology was still a fledgling field.

And the idea that germs could cause disease was not fully accepted, even by many doctors.

Kinyoun's superior, Surgeon General Walter Wyman, had himself published a paper on the plague that was full of speculations and misinformation: that the disease was spread by dust, tainted food, and contaminated objects.

Wyman also endorsed racial theories of the time that the disease targeted Asians while sparing whites.

RANDALL: Surgeon General Wyman, himself, said it was only a disease of rice eaters.

If you ate a "muscular diet of meat," you were somehow immune to it.

NARRATOR: Such ignorance was widespread due in part to the fact that scientific confirmation could take years.

Nevertheless, European scientists had recently identified the bubonic plague bacteria using a test called Gram's stain.

MAY CHU: Bubonic plague is transmitted by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis.

And Gram stains are used under the microscope to enhance the difference in colors.

So, you can see the bacteria in what we call a smear on a slide.

♪ ♪ And Yersinia pestis stains pink.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: As the first American to have studied the bacilli, Kinyoun was unquestionably the most qualified scientist in the country to test for plague.

Hours after Wong's death, he undertook the exacting forensic work, using the sample taken from the body.

(glass clinking) CHASE: Isolate the germ in biopsy, test it with the Gram stain.

Put it under a microscope... ♪ ♪ And look for the distinctive pink rod-shaped bacilli with rounded tips.

And that was the classic signature of plague.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Yet the presence of the telltale marker alone wasn't enough to confirm a diagnosis.

Kinyoun would have to grow the culture in his lab, which would take time, and there was none to spare.

For he couldn't help but wonder: how many others might be infected?

♪ ♪ Across San Francisco Bay, the city board of health was too spooked to wait.

To them, it was clearly a "Chinese problem," confined to Chinatown.

So they decided to control matters by quarantining the entire district.

One day after Wong Chut King's death, the Chinese community awoke to find ropes cordoning off their 12-block district.

Overnight, 20,000 people-- nearly all of the city's Asians-- found themselves virtual prisoners.

McCLAIN: What was unusual was that it didn't apply to this one particular house where the man was found, but applied to the whole Chinese quarter, sealing off a whole area of a city.

SHAH: There was this kind of idea that the Chinese carry a particular virulent form of some kind of disease, whether it was smallpox, or syphilis, or bubonic plague.

And that the disease is endemic to their bodies, that it would be possible to infect innocent middle-class white people.

McCLAIN: There was definitely this view that Asians were more susceptible to the disease as opposed to whites.

And this was a widely shared view at the time.

♪ ♪ RANDALL: The residents of Chinatown were really stuck.

They weren't allowed to be citizens.

They weren't allowed to own property.

They weren't allowed many fundamental rights.

NARRATOR: In 1900, anti-Chinese sentiment wasn't isolated-- it was codified by federal law.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited all Chinese from citizenship, essentially relegating them to the margins of society.

♪ ♪ POWELL: The Chinese were already not seen as human before the Chinese Exclusion Act, which is why the act passed.

♪ ♪ The only time in our history that we specifically named an ethnicity to say they can't come to the United States; they don't belong, they're too different than us.

♪ ♪ CHASE: The building of the transcontinental railroad required tons of hard labor, which Chinese workers had taken on.

Once that final golden spike was driven, the welcome mat was withdrawn.

And the once-essential Chinese workers were regarded as a surplus that would cut into demand for white labor.

So, the white labor movement was very hostile.

(crowd shouting) NGAI: Almost 20 years have gone by since the Exclusion Act.

And this has been a very tumultuous number of decades where the government tries to take this right away, impose that discriminatory law, to try to drive people away.

NARRATOR: The Chinese community saw the cordon for what it was: the latest unjust action taken against them based on flimsy evidence and a convenient excuse.

CHASE: The populace was violently opposed to being sealed inside Chinatown.

Many people worked outside the district.

They had jobs to get to.

And interestingly, the white community, while not so sympathetic to the viewpoint of the people in Chinatown, wanted their cooks and gardeners and domestic back on the job.

And so all sides were at war.

And by March 10, the ropes came down.

McCLAIN: So, the first quarantine of Chinatown, it didn't last very long-- only three days.

RANDALL: Because the quarantine came down so quickly, many people in San Francisco thought it was just all a sham.

It almost eroded public trust immediately.

NARRATOR: In the face of such apparent incompetence, the city's response was one of relief-- and amused contempt.

CHASE: One of the papers celebrated the end of the first quarantine by writing a silly poem, ""Sweet Fong is at his post once more And cooking reigns supreme."

Because the people had gotten their domestic servants back.

It was that kind of racial supremacy emanating from every corner of the city.

♪ ♪ (birds chirping) NARRATOR: Alone in his lab on Angel Island, Kinyoun had managed to successfully grow the microorganism within 48 hours.

But the next step-- injecting it into a healthy animal to see what would happen-- would take days.

Once again, Kinyoun took extra precautions, choosing to inoculate not one but four lab animals: two guinea pigs, a rat, and a monkey.

(animals chittering, glass clinking) HOUTS JR.: Three of the animals died pretty quickly.

The last one, the monkey, was the one he was hoping on.

If it didn't die, then maybe it's not the plague.

Well, it died.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: On March 13, seven days after Wong Chut King passed away, Kinyoun was finally able to confirm the cause of death.

♪ ♪ Wong became the first diagnosed case of bubonic plague in the United States.

But Kinyoun feared he would not be the last.

♪ ♪ (machine clicking) RANDALL: Kinyoun immediately sends a coded telegram to D.C. "Bumpkin confirmed."

And that was the code word that plague is here.

MORENS: Kinyoun's boss Walter Wyman had every reason to believe that if it got out of San Francisco, it would go over the whole country and countless deaths would occur.

♪ ♪ So, the people in Washington were just alarmed, and their point of view is, "We don't care what you do.

"If you have to burn the place down, "just make sure that you contain this epidemic.

It's a national emergency."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: As federal officials frantically tried to coordinate a response, word of Kinyoun's diagnosis spread quickly among San Francisco's leaders.

Yet powerful merchants and politicians like Mayor James Phelan refused to accept his findings.

(seagulls squawking) RISSE: Shipping exchanges around the world was very, very important source of income.

So, if there was plague in San Francisco, it would be blocked, it would no longer be open.

So industries were at stake.

McCLAIN: Mayor Phelan was very concerned that if word got around that San Francisco had cases of plague that the city's commerce would be dealt a really serious blow.

NARRATOR: City leaders were used to autonomy, and didn't like being told what to do, especially by authorities at the federal level.

♪ ♪ (birds chirping) SHAH: With the Marine Hospital Service, the federal government, they were now centrally becoming involved in public health across the United States.

And they felt they had supreme authority.

But the city government, the merchant elite was saying to them, "We have jurisdiction in San Francisco."

And then there were state officials and the governor who thought, "Well, we have authority over all of California."

And it becomes a question immediately of who has authority.

If there is an outbreak, is this a federal responsibility?

Or is this the city, or is it the state?

NARRATOR: Most San Franciscans didn't care.

They couldn't be bothered with the death of a faceless stranger in Chinatown, especially given widespread beliefs that whites were immune.

As for city leaders, while they refused to accept Kinyoun's diagnosis, they did agree that what they called the "Chinese problem" needed to be contained.

MORENS: They didn't really understand how the bubonic plague was transmitted to people.

But they knew if it occurred in a city it would be in one area.

And so, the public health approach was to find the focus and go in there and do whatever you could to get rid of the disease.

NARRATOR: The moment Mayor Phelan declared "Asiatic infections are a constant menace to San Francisco's public health," 75 health inspectors and dozens of policemen, armed with sledgehammers and axes, descended on an unsuspecting Chinatown.

They smashed down doors, ransacked homes, stole brazenly, and beat anyone who stood up to them.

CHASE: They were subjected to plague measures, which included torching of belongings, they would bring in smudge pots of sulfur, and fumigate a building.

If you were a merchant selling fine silks or ceramics, it would spoil your goods.

So, these measures, which were crude and discriminatory and not very effective, frightened the populace.

People were not eager to report a case of sickness in their home.

♪ ♪ BRUCE QUAN JR.: In 1900, at the time of the bubonic plague, my great-grandfather had a business called the Pacific Fruit Packing Company.

And my family lived above the cannery on Stockton Street in Chinatown.

They went to church where Ng Poon Chew was the assistant pastor.

And that's how when he started a newspaper, my great-grandfather helped him fund the "Chung Sai Yat Po."

And in Chinatown, they would post some of the newspapers on the walls.

So the Chinese knew exactly what was going on.

♪ ♪ SHAH: Ng Poon Chew and his newspaper documented what the deeply felt fears and concerns were of Chinese laborers, how they distrusted Western medical authority, how they feared what was going to happen to them from a Chinese perspective.

MAN (reading): "Alas, why should Chinatown's good name depend on "the life and death of a monkey?

"We don't know whether they are rooting for Chinatown or the monkey."

"Chung Sai Yat Po Daily."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Nine days after Wong Chut King's death, Kinyoun confirmed three more cases-- all within Chinatown.

♪ ♪ Kinyoun had feared such an outbreak all along, knowing that even a handful of cases could explode exponentially into a national epidemic within weeks.

The urgency of the situation caught the eye of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

On March 18, his paper, "The New York Journal," published a special national edition trumpeting the sensational story from California.

Pressured by commercial stakeholders, San Francisco's leaders quickly responded, enlisting the editors of leading newspapers to dismiss what they now called "rumors."

RANDALL: City Hall and all of San Francisco's elite, they had the same idea in mind, "We're not going to report any news of the plague."

You have the "Chronicle" saying, "We're gonna write an editorial "saying that Kinyoun or anybody else from "Marine Hospital Service is just trying to pick San Francisco's pocket."

CHASE: Dr. Joseph Kinyoun was a proud man.

He regarded the tools of science, the enlightenment of his technology, as a gift.

And he expected, quite rightly, some deference and respect for what he brought to the city.

And he got none of it.

Because from the moment that Joseph Kinyoun diagnosed plague in the glands of Wong Chut King, science was on trial.

♪ ♪ And Bubonic plague was called "Kinyoun's fake."

♪ ♪ (bird squawking) NARRATOR: As the media storm swirled around him, a frantic Kinyoun tried to retrace the last days of each victim's life in a desperate attempt to determine who or where the next might be.

RANDALL: What made Kinyoun so terrified when he started identifying the disease, was he found one victim and he could not find any connections to the next victim.

♪ ♪ It's almost like you're looking at the ocean, and you can't see it, but you know something is down there.

And he had no idea what it was.

CHASE: It was a mystery.

There was a kind of creeping pace.

There would be a case or two, and then it would pause.

Kinyoun tried to puzzle it out.

MORENS: He was looking for other cases of plague.

He also knew that because of the way Chinatown was being treated by local officials, they might hide cases.

♪ ♪ MAN (reading): "Suspicions everywhere and every shadow becomes an enemy."

"Chung Sai Yat Po Daily."

CHASE: A plague death would require autopsy to confirm the case.

It was an offense in the culture.

So no one was eager to call in the scientists.

RANDALL: And it becomes a cat and mouse game.

And people keep on questioning him.

If the plague is as scary as you're saying it is, there should be bodies everywhere.

We should also see living victims who are struggling with this.

♪ ♪ McCLAIN: People thought, "Well, if the plague existed, "it should be spreading like wildfire.

Why aren't hundreds of people infected with it?"

And it obviously made things difficult for Kinyoun, because in the face of pretty clear evidence, people denied that the plague existed at all.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: When three more people died in mid-May, Kinyoun telegrammed Wyman urging a bold and unprecedented plan.

He proposed vaccinating every Chinatown resident with the recently developed Haffkine vaccine.

In 1900, vaccination was still a frightening concept to most.

But in Chinatown, the proposal was further complicated by the dark racial dynamics of the time.

♪ ♪ MORENS: There'd been a long history of white people, European-descended people, treating the Chinese in San Francisco badly.

So, the rational expectation was, you know, if the white power structure wants this done, there's gotta be something wrong with it.

NGAI: The Chinese relationship with city health authorities, there was nothing positive about it.

There was a history of malignant neglect.

Chinese were routinely refused treatment at city hospitals.

It was only that year that a Chinese clinic was allowed to open in Chinatown called the Tung Wah Dispensary.

So Chinese had absolutely no trust in city health authorities.

Also, they weren't vaccinating white people.

So it seemed to be targeted at them.

NARRATOR: The Haffkine was largely untested.

Existing data showed only a 50% protection rate.

Furthermore, the drug's purported side effects were so notorious that a headline-hungry reporter from a Hearst newspaper volunteered to be injected himself.

♪ ♪ MAN (reading): "Within two hours, the serum had spread "through my system and its effects began to be felt.

"Shooting pains extended through the chest, down the arm, "and even into my neck and head.

"My left arm felt numb.

The pain in my shoulder, chest, neck, and arm was quite severe."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Out of thousands of Chinese living in San Francisco, only 53 were willing to be vaccinated.

Growing desperate, Kinyoun telegrammed Wyman.

JOSEPH KINYOUN (dramatized): Regard situation very serious.

Will require almost superhuman efforts to control now.

So much time has been lost.

MORENS: And that's when Marine Hospital Service had to make its first authoritative stand against plague.

(machine clicking) RANDALL: Surgeon General Wyman telegraphs Kinyoun immediately, saying, "You are our man in San Francisco.

"It all depends on you.

You know, you have to protect us all."

NARRATOR: Now charged with overseeing the entire West Coast, Kinyoun quickly hired additional officers, whom he dispatched across California and Oregon to beef up inspection and patrols.

He also made vaccination mandatory, and took exclusive aim at not just the Chinese, but Japanese with an unheard-of travel ban.

McCLAIN: On May the 18th, the Board of Health of San Francisco passes a resolution to order the transport companies to refuse transportation to Chinese and Japanese without the certificate that said that the person had been inoculated with this Haffkine's vaccine.

And it's quite clear that they have endorsed the recommendations that have been passed onto them by Kinyoun.

So now the Chinese and Japanese are being told, "Do it, or you're confined to San Francisco.

You won't be able to leave."

It was being pushed on them coercively.

♪ ♪ MAN (reading): "The doctors are about to compel our Chinese people "to be inoculated.

"Tomorrow, all business houses large or small must be closed and wait until this unjust action is settled."

"Chung Sai Yat Po Daily."

NARRATOR: Its back to the wall, a defiant Chinatown turned to its own leaders: a consortium of district associations called the Chinese Six Companies.

NGAI: The leaders of the Six Companies were the biggest merchants in Chinatown, the most influential members of their associations.

Any dispute with the city government or the state government, Chinese would send their representatives to negotiate or to protest.

NARRATOR: The Chinese leaders met with Kinyoun at the consulate and implored him to call off his plans.

When he refused, the Chinese felt they had no option left but to take to the streets.

From the most powerful merchant to the lowliest worker, all of Chinatown took immediate action to protest Kinyoun's orders.

(crowd shouting) CHASE: There were riots.

A thousand Chinese protesters descended on Portsmouth Square in Chinatown where federal doctors had set up tents to vaccinate people.

(crowd shouting, whistle blaring) And they pulled cobblestones out of the streets and threw them in shop windows, pitching furniture into the street.

(shouting, whistles continue) They stood up to him, and they said, "We are not standing for these measures."

♪ ♪ MORENS: It was so terrible that a hundred police had to protect Kinyoun because the San Francisco mobs would have killed him.

♪ ♪ NGAI: The Chinese in San Francisco are beleaguered, but they also have fought every inch of the way with legal cases that are brought by the leadership of the community, the merchant leaders, sometimes together with the Chinese Consul.

(chuckling): They sued the government over everything.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Chinatown rose up as one to fight the travel ban.

Within days of the mandate, a class action suit was filed, naming Kinyoun and the San Francisco Board of Health.

CHASE: A businessman named Wong Wai sued, he went to court, and he charged that Dr. Kinyoun and everyone involved had violated the rights of the Chinese.

(gavel banging) McCLAIN: There was a petition for an injunction to stop the health authorities from preventing people from leaving the city.

It was racially discriminatory and that was forbidden by the 14th amendment, which says, "No state shall deprive any person of life, "liberty, or property without due process of law, "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law."

The Chinese were not eligible to become citizens, but they had secured for themselves recognition as constitutional persons.

And as such, they came under the protection of the 14th amendment.

SHAH: What you end up having for the court case is a question.

Is this a kind of unfair use of the law that targets one group racially unfairly?

CHASE: The judge agreed with the Chinese.

And he said, "I see no proof that you've offered "that this is a disease more likely to be contracted by or transmitted by Chinese people."

He said, "This travel ban had been illegally applied "with an evil eye and an uneven hand, "focused on racial theories of disease transmission-- completely unscientific."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In addition, the judge issued a restraining order against Kinyoun and advised him and the MHS in no uncertain terms to back off.

Stung by the emphatic ruling, Kinyoun wired his fears to Wyman.

KINYOUN (dramatized): Believe situation to United States very grave.

The decision practically nullifies all acts of federal government.

Most serious blow Service has received.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Unwavering in his convictions, Kinyoun ignored the judge and continued to enforce the known scientific measures of isolation and sanitation.

He pushed for camps on Angel Island, as well as remote Mission Rock, to detain people even suspected of having the plague.

CHASE: There were now threats to remove people forcibly from Chinatown.

♪ ♪ And at the head of it all was Dr. Kinyoun, so he was called the Wolf Doctor.

♪ ♪ He acquired this nickname for what was perceived as this snappy and officious manner-- aggressive, an assault on people, kind of adding insult to injury.

♪ ♪ MAN (reading): "The wolf doctor is baring his claws and teeth.

"Enforced relocation to an icy remote island renders us without wings to fly."

"Chung Sai Yat Po Daily."

NGAI: The city and the health authorities were never really interested in ameliorating the conditions in Chinatown.

What they wanted to do was isolate the Chinese community, protect white people, and that was their goal.

So there's very little space to gain people's trust because the whole thing is rotten.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: And now, other states were starting to put commercial pressure on California as well.

Everything erupted in an acrimonious three-day meeting-- with Kinyoun weighing in forcefully.

(people chattering in background) McCLAIN: The state of Texas was preventing people and products from San Francisco, from entering Texas.

So, the state board of health was putting tremendous pressure on the local board of health and says, "What you need to do is quarantine Chinatown."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: On May 28, Kinyoun privately exulted when the state health board secured what he had long thought was the best option-- a full lockdown of all of Chinatown, indefinitely.

Within hours, 159 policemen descended on the district, working in three around-the-clock shifts.

(whistling, people shouting) McCLAIN: They start putting barbed wire around the quarter, they start putting a wall up around Chinatown.

It becomes very clear to the Chinese that this is not like the first quarantine.

♪ ♪ The Chinese were very, very upset immediately, as soon as the quarantine was declared.

NARRATOR: Once again, nearly 20,000 people were locked down.

They had no idea when they would be allowed out or whether the authorities might even attempt to burn down the district like Honolulu only months before.

♪ ♪ With no streetcar service, or incoming shipments of food and other vital supplies, panic quickly spread.

♪ ♪ POWELL: It was very draconian for the Chinese.

You had this complicated interaction between the city, state, and the federal government.

But there was almost a consensus that, among all of them, that somehow the heart of the problem were the Chinese.

And if we could just control the Chinese, we could control this plague.

♪ ♪ SHAH: People had that sense of doubt.

Is this the way in which the health officials who never cared about our wellbeing want to eradicate us?

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Once more, the Chinese turned to the most powerful tool they had.

♪ ♪ McCLAIN: They file suit again.

And this leads to the second case, Jew Ho vs. Williamson.

And, again, Kinyoun was a named defendant.

CHASE: A grocer on Stockton Street, Jew Ho noticed that the quarantine lines were not drawn in a straight line around all businesses in the region, that they zigged and zagged to exclude white merchants.

And was specifically designed not to protect the health of an entire district, but to isolate the Chinese.

♪ ♪ BRUCE QUAN JR.: The quarantine line was along Stockton Street, so the cannery was in quarantine.

And the white workers, women and girls, employed by Lew Hing in the cannery, they were allowed to come and go, but not the Chinese.

McCLAIN: The judge says, it's very clear that the Caucasians on the perimeter are being treated differently.

And it has to do with whether this is a reasonable exercise of the police power.

And again, the court says no, it isn't because the Chinese are not being protected at all.

They're not being prevented from intermingling with each other; the individuals who had contact with these people who died of the plague have not been quarantined.

So, if the idea is to prevent the spread of a contagious disease, isn't this an unreasonable way to do it?

(gavel banging) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: A day after the ruling, Kinyoun imposed a sweeping travel ban on all Californians, regardless of race.

This meant no one could leave the state without a health certificate from him.

And, of course, that made him a menace to the entire city and the whole state of California.

Dr. Kinyoun was a top-down officer.

He led by issuing sound scientific diagnoses.

That plays very well in the lab, and not so well on the street.

(trolley clattering) NARRATOR: Three days later, on June 19, 1900, Kinyoun was dealt a stunning rebuke.

President William McKinley was forced to apologize to enraged state legislators for the actions of his federal officer and swiftly revoked the travel ban.

Desperate to do the right thing, Kinyoun had played his biggest card and lost.

(bell ringing) But the situation only worsened.

Until now, there had been 13 confirmed plague deaths, all Chinese.

From the beginning, racial pseudoscience had lulled many into the complacency of ignorance.

What's more, the disease came and went in mysterious and inexplicable waves.

Kinyoun feared that the plague was spreading in darkness.

This was confirmed in mid-August when the first known white victim, William Murphy, fell ill and died.

A worker who routinely made deliveries to Chinatown, he was succeeded that fall by another non-Chinese victim, a nurse at the children's hospital, who had never been to the district.

♪ ♪ Panicked that the disease had begun to spread beyond Chinatown, Kinyoun put all his men on high alert.

(ship horn blares, birds squawk) Late that September, a steamship called the Coptic arrived from Hawaii and docked at Angel Island.

An overzealous health official ordered that all passengers, rich and poor, male and female alike, be strip-searched en masse and examined for buboes in the armpits and groin.

First-class passengers were outraged, and vowed to never again sail into San Francisco as long as Kinyoun was in charge.

CHASE: And now, everyone is out for blood.

♪ ♪ RANDALL: The state senate in California, say that Kinyoun should be hung for what he's doing.

CHASE: He had been decried by the politicians, by the press.

The legislators want him to leave, lobbying the federal government for his transfer out of the city.

By now, Dr. Kinyoun had been smacked down in the courts.

He was defending his hypothesis, his diagnosis, his standing in the Marine Hospital Service.

So he's literally a man under fire, besieged.

♪ ♪ KINYOUN (dramatized): It appears to me that commercial interests of San Francisco are more dear to the inhabitants than the preservation of human life.

I am at war with everybody out here.

Joseph Kinyoun.

California's Governor Gage spun a fantastic conspiracy theory.

He said that Dr. Kinyoun and the federal doctors had actually created a fake plague by injecting corpses with plague bacteria that they had secretly imported.

That it was all made up.

And he planted the seed of doubt in people's mind.

This was too much for Dr. Kinyoun.

And in despair and anger, he wired his boss, Surgeon General Walter Wyman, and said, "Please defend me from this slander against myself and the Marine Hospital Service."

NARRATOR: But Wyman chose to remain silent.

Kinyoun was left defenseless, and utterly alone.

In despair, he wrote to a colleague.

(typewriter keys clacking) KINYOUN (dramatized): My exoneration rests upon Dr. Wyman openly avowing his responsibility for my official actions.

This he should, if he possesses the courage of a man.

All these years I have stood loyally by his side... keeping his political head from rolling into the basket.

HOUTS JR.: It took a lot of stamina and guts to stay the course, that what he believed in.

'Cause he knew it, where everybody else doubted him.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Barely nine months since his first forensic diagnosis, Kinyoun confirmed the 22nd known plague casualty.

Seeking vindication, he now demanded a thorough, outside investigation into the truth of the matter.

Meanwhile, word of San Francisco's troubles continued to spread across the country.

MORENS: It became obvious to everybody in the country that San Francisco had an epidemic and they weren't admitting to it.

♪ ♪ The federal government and the state government of California were at a standoff.

So, a deal was cut that there would be a neutral federal commission.

Three of the most prominent bacteriologists in the United States would go west to investigate and find out whether there really was a plague epidemic, and whether Kinyoun was doing the right things or the wrong things.

(train horn blares, steam hisses) RANDALL: Kinyoun, was looking for that sense of validation.

He felt like he was 2,000 miles away from anybody he'd consider his peer who he trusted.

You know, "Finally, here are people who care about science, "who care about medicine.

"And now I'm going to be validated, "and we're going to save, you know, thousands, if not millions, of lives."

NARRATOR: When the three-man commission arrived in San Francisco in late January 1901, they felt the full urgency of their mission.

Sensing they had to penetrate Chinatown, they immediately hired a local translator and go-between, a former Six Companies secretary named Wong Chung.

RANDALL: He was the link between medical establishment, San Francisco establishment, the Chinese Six Companies, and Chinatown itself.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The move paid off.

With the help of Wong Chung, and with Kinyoun safely on Angel Island, the commission was quickly able to gain what had been missing for months: not just trust, but access.

♪ ♪ Within weeks, they confirmed six new cases.

When Governor Henry Gage learned of the commission's upcoming report, he panicked.

He hastily made a trip to Washington D.C., accompanied by a hand-picked army of the most powerful men in California: senators, newspaper editors, and business leaders.

♪ ♪ CHASE: When he arrived in Washington, he visited Surgeon General Walter Wyman, and he proposed a quid pro quo.

He said, "We will clean up the city of San Francisco "if you keep the existence of plague secret from the nation."

(engine puttering, trolley clanging) NARRATOR: Both sides had much to gain.

California needed the White House to put an end to the matter that was threatening to take down its economy and reputation.

And McKinley needed the vote-rich state to ensure his upcoming bid for re-election.

All of the men now agreed: one hand would wash the other.

(footsteps echoing) MORENS: And this unholy deal was undertaken in the office of the President of the United States-- President McKinley, in concert with senior Republican leaders, including those from California.

CHASE: And they struck a deal with the surgeon general to maintain what Dr. Walter Wyman, surgeon general, called a perfect seal of silence.

They would hush it up.

NARRATOR: On March 6, 1901, exactly one year since Wong Chut King's death, a local headline blared an unexpected and scandalous scoop.

CHASE: Reporters broke news of this infamous pact signed by the surgeon general and the governor of California.

♪ ♪ And word got out about this cover-up.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Wyman found himself in an uncomfortable position.

Yet he also knew that much of the vitriol aimed at the MHS had been greatly exacerbated by Kinyoun's actions.

His perceived lack of diplomacy was all anyone could talk about.

Kinyoun had to be thrown under the bus.

And so he was removed from his job without any real explanation for why.

NARRATOR: In May 1901, Kinyoun was ordered without thanks, fanfare, or even notice, to pack up his family and relocate to Detroit.

♪ ♪ He had spent two long years trying to protect the country, and seemingly all in vain.

REEVES: It was such a devastating blow because it basically ended his scientific career in many ways.

He did not get to go back to his beloved lab.

And I think that was devastating.

MORENS: And I think he believed he had spent his life doing really good things, and he was very proud of that.

And I think to be thrown under the bus was probably devastating to him.

Because it called into question the goodness of all those things he'd been doing for so long.

CHASE: Dr. Kinyoun did the hard work of nailing the scientific diagnosis.

He just couldn't make it stick in the minds of the populace.

And he was hurt, he was indignant.

And being somewhat hot-tempered, he didn't go quietly.

♪ ♪ He blasted the city, blasted Chinatown, blasted all the authorities.

NARRATOR: Kinyoun had come to San Francisco expecting to champion science and save the country.

Instead, he had been sent away in ignominy, while the danger still remained.

("Hail to the Chief" playing) NARRATOR: With Kinyoun gone, California turned to happier business.

As their part of the secret deal brokered months before, state politicians welcomed President McKinley to a lavish, all-expenses-paid junket.

(crowd cheering) Meanwhile, Wyman was on the hunt for a new quarantine officer.

But after Kinyoun's humiliating ouster, no one in the MHS community wanted what they saw as an impossible job.

("Hail to the Chief" ends) ♪ ♪ He finally settled on a candidate: Rupert Lee Blue, a 32-year old physician from the MHS.

Unlike Kinyoun, Blue wasn't a research scientist.

He lacked Kinyoun's medical pedigree and rigorous training.

In fact, he wasn't Wyman's first or even second choice.

CHASE: Rupert Lee Blue, or Pert as he was known by his nickname, was round-faced and shy.

He was diffident.

And he really loved boxing matches.

(crowd shouting) Not just as a spectator but also as an amateur participant.

♪ ♪ He was preceded by rumors that he was lazy, as one of his colleagues called him "inert."

"Inert Pert."

RANDALL: He was known as kind of affable guy, not necessarily the most accomplished.

Other people thought of him as, you know, somebody who is barely getting by, but it's hard to be that critical of somebody you like, you know, or somebody who's friendly.

(birds chirping) NARRATOR: The sixth of eight children, Blue was born three years after the end of the Civil War to a struggling but respected family in Marion, South Carolina.

(horse whinnying) RANDALL: Blue came from nothing, essentially, and grew up in the fields.

He'd walk with his siblings, bursting open watermelons with his fist and eating right there in the fields.

(child shouting in distance) He knew he was not the most favored son.

His older brother, Victor, was a war hero.

And the parents idolized Victor.

Rupert Blue kind of felt that "If Victor's purpose in life is to harm, perhaps my purpose in life is to heal."

So he went into medicine.

And went to one of the first public medical schools in the U.S. ♪ ♪ He wrote letters to his mom saying, "I don't think I can hack it.

I can barely survive."

And he barely graduated medical school.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Blue joined the Commissioned Corps of the Marine Hospital Service.

The MHS represented adventure with a purpose, the chance to see a world bigger than that of his small-town boyhood, and to confront diseases he had only read about in school.

As a quarantine officer, he tracked yellow fever in Galveston, monitored infectious diseases in Milwaukee, and investigated possible plague cases in Rome.

CHASE: He had to work hard.

Having lost his father to illness, he had to send money to his widowed mother and to his teenage sisters at home.

RANDALL: So he was working in the Marine Hospital Service, and also taking all these other side jobs as editor of a medical bulletin or a newsletter just to try to bring in more money.

(trolley clanging, people chattering) NARRATOR: The new posting in San Francisco, commercial hub for the nation and Asia, was a huge step up from monitoring shipping fleets on Lake Michigan.

It was a high-profile chance for Blue to prove himself, although it came with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Chinatown feared and distrusted the MHS and its agents.

City leaders were openly vying for their own interests.

State officials still refused to acknowledge that the disease even existed.

♪ ♪ By June 1901, there had been a total of 34 official plague deaths, so Blue knew he had no time to lose.

(child chattering) CHASE: The first thing he did, he moved into the city and he set up a lab right on Merchant Street, which is Chinatown, and he was comfortable there.

(horse hooves clomping) RANDALL: He would literally just walk into shops and start talking to people and trying to make those kinds of friendships and forge those social bonds.

And Kinyoun, when he went into Chinatown, he had to have a protection of armed officers.

Blue, he would walk down the streets by himself.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Blue also kept on Wong Chung, the interpreter who had assisted the federal commission.

And since he knew that Chinatown's dead seemed to mysteriously vanish, he talked Surgeon General Wyman into an unusual expense.

RANDALL: He arranged for a horse and buggy to have his own, essentially, morgue service, so he could find bodies and he could inspect them as quickly as he could.

Blue also paid the Chinese translators the same as he did as his white members of the staff, which was radical at the time.

He found himself relying more and more on his translator, Wong Chung.

Not just as a translator and interpreter, but also as a sort of cultural liaison.

So, Wong Chung helped Dr. Blue understand the community's resistance to Western medical interventions.

♪ ♪ (people chattering) NARRATOR: With Wong as his trusted go-between, Blue revised the harsh protocol of his predecessor.

He disinfected only targeted houses, not whole streets.

He quarantined immediate family alone, and limited lockdown to the shortest time possible.

RANDALL: He was somebody who was willing to listen, which was a real skill.

He knew he wasn't the smartest.

He knew he didn't necessarily have insights that other people did, but he was willing to, to try everything.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: But what Blue discovered was unnerving.

In the month of July, three Japanese prostitutes working on the edge of Chinatown died.

Blue reeled at the thought that the women had had contact with literally dozens of nameless customers.

How many were there?

Where did they go?

Blue was terrified that the disease was poised to explode exponentially, as he admitted to Wyman.

RUPERT BLUE (dramatized): It would not be an easy matter to trace the source of this infection.

The Chinese seem to know a suspicious case and depart, like the fleas.

Rupert Blue.

RANDALL: On the big map right behind his desk, he starts putting red marks everywhere there's a known plague victim.

And that becomes this obsession to try to prevent more red marks from showing up on his map, but also to try to find some kind of connection between these victims.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: For the rest of the summer, Blue patiently continued to explore Chinatown, always on the lookout for more cases.

♪ ♪ On September 11, 1901, following a tip from Wong Chung, Blue and his men had a rare opportunity.

In the basement of a grocery store, they found a 28-year-old man with signs of the plague, and took him to the Tung Wah Dispensary for observation.

CHASE: Well, friends of the patient were about to get him out of Chinatown to avoid the red tape, the inspections, the interventions.

But Wong Chung's tip enabled the federal doctors to prevent this evasion.

NARRATOR: It was the first time Blue had had the opportunity to examine a living patient.

Until now, the Chinese had never trusted the MHS enough to cooperate.

Blue was able to isolate the man and question him about his contacts to hopefully learn how the disease was being spread.

Thanks to Wong Chung's quiet diligence, Chinatown was starting to open up.

Cases that had formerly been hidden or misdiagnosed were coming to light, leading to a wave of ten more confirmed diagnoses.

BLUE (dramatized): I am working like a Trojan.

and I trust that my labors will be rewarded.

We are still working quietly, avoiding friction with the state or the Chinese.

Rupert Blue.

RANDALL: He soon finds more and more victims.

He sees living victims.

He sees more victims quickly before they can be hidden away.

So he starts realizing the scope of the problem.

CHASE: So, Wong Chung played a pivotal role, and for this he took many risks.

♪ ♪ The state doctors who denied the plague existence may have tipped Chinatown gangsters that Wong Chung was a collaborator, a traitor to his community.

Not that long after, someone tried to kill him.

♪ ♪ And he had to run for his life, essentially.

(loud clattering) CHASE: It took the intervention of Washington, and only then was Wong Chung secure to go about his medical rounds with the doctors.

(bell tolling) NARRATOR: For 18 months, Blue, like Kinyoun before him, had been confounded by the low number of fatalities, but neither man had had the full picture.

♪ ♪ Blue began to realize that white doctors throughout San Francisco, bowing to political pressure, were deliberately misdiagnosing cases in order to minimize actual numbers.

BLUE (dramatized): Scant courtesy, singular apathy, and, in the end, interference, have characterized the state health board at a time of grave public peril.

Eradication of the disease would be entirely out of the question, and the danger of an indefinite stay is enhanced.

Rupert Blue.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: By the fall of 1902, the number of officially diagnosed cases had tripled.

♪ ♪ At the annual meeting of state and local health boards in New Haven, Connecticut, San Francisco was all everyone talked about.

California officials continued to deny that the plague existed, in direct contradiction to the MHS and national papers.

CHASE: Other state boards of health started issuing censure votes and statements of condemnation against the state of California, against Governor Gage, against the denial of plague.

And some radicals even demanded that the Navy transfer centers be moved north to Seattle.

(cannon fire) Well, this was serious.

San Francisco did not want to risk such a loss of power.

At this point, the denial of plague became costly.

California had run out of options.

It was time to face it, and clean it out, and stamp it out.

(distant shouting) NARRATOR: The responsibility of controlling the plague rested squarely on Blue's shoulders.

CHASE: Blue's boxing taught him how to bob and weave, size up his opponents, anticipating their next move, put an edge on his strategic approach.

NARRATOR: Now, he stared at his map for the hundredth time.

Every single block in Chinatown had had a confirmed case.

♪ ♪ But in the previous September, a white washerwoman with no connection to the district had died of plague, and she lived a block away.

NARRATOR: It dawned on Blue he'd been ignoring something that had been right in front of him the entire time.

The mystery of why the plague had decimated Europe and Asia for centuries was finally beginning to unravel.

(indistinct chatter) CHUCK: For us kids, one of the great pastimes was just fishing off the piers, which ran almost right up against Chinatown.

And ships that were moored to the docks, they had these huge ropes.

You would see rats.

Rats just coming from the ships and coming down those ropes.

And some of them would just fall in the water.

Others were able to find their way onto the docks.

They scurried, they were fast, and they were quick.

(rat squeaking) ♪ ♪ RANDALL: Rats are biological marvels in many ways because they can survive almost anything.

And they can breed incredibly quickly.

(music playing on newsreel) NEWSREEL NARRATOR: And a single pair of rats, left to reproduce unhampered, would become 1,500 in a year.

(rats squeaking) NARRATOR: In his lab, Blue and his men had discovered plague germs in dead rats that they had dissected.

He was now struck by the possibility that rats themselves might somehow spread the disease as they roamed the city, though he still had no idea how.

RANDALL: And he realizes the only way we're going to save San Francisco is if we kill as many rats as possible.

So, they focus on rat eradication.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Thanks to Wong Chung's prior outreach, the Chinese Six Companies now agreed that all Chinatown businesses would work with health authorities.

MAN (reading): "People should not be frightened.

"These physicians are very kind and gentle.

Their main emphasis is to go after the rats."

"Chung Sai Yat Po Daily."

CHASE: The state was assigned to hire inspectors.

The city would lay traps and poisoned bait for rats.

And they tried to get all the citizens involved in rat collection.

So they offered 10 cents a rat, even 50 cents for a breeding female.

So, you can imagine this is quite a sum.

And people got involved in bringing in rats.

(rat squeaking) RANDALL: Blue starts to look for where are rats living.

Let's create as few nesting spots for a rat as possible.

Wooden sidewalks provide so many places for rats to nest.

So he rips those out and let's have concrete sidewalks.

♪ ♪ At the same time, let's tear down these remnants of the past, buildings that were still up from the gold rush era.

And let's have more modern buildings in their place.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: By the spring of 1905, Chinatown was almost completely renovated.

Blue's team was dismantled, its job done, and he was sent to his new posting in Virginia.

With no new cases being reported in over a year, as far as everyone was concerned, the plague was finally under control.

♪ ♪ Out of the official tally of 119 confirmed cases, 104 victims were Asian, and 15 were non-Asian.

RANDALL: I think it's fair to say that the true death toll is probably ten times as much, if not more.

CHASE: It was more than likely the accurate number of plague cases were under-reported because they were entirely racially focused on Asian people.

(horse whinnying) ♪ ♪ (rumbling, crashing) Just after 5:00 a.m., April 18, 1906...

The city was wracked by a massive earthquake.

It would have been 7.9 on the Richter scale, an extremely dangerous earthquake, particularly in a city of unreinforced brick and mortar buildings that simply crumbled.

(horse whinnies) Buildings were pancaked, floors collapsed.

The city was ablaze, water mains were broken.

So, the water reservoirs were not available to fight fires.

In a desperate attempt to stop the advancing flames, the city resorted to setting strategic charges to keep the fire from jumping.

(loud booms) That helped a little bit, but some ne'er-do-wells started dynamiting Chinatown indiscriminately, destroying buildings even further.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: More than 80% of San Francisco was destroyed, including virtually all of Chinatown.

CHASE: There were 3,000 people killed outright.

Nearly a quarter million injured, hundreds of thousands homeless.

RANDALL: And you had refugees who suddenly have to live in places like Golden Gate Park or other makeshift camps.

CHASE: People were living out of tents.

People were living in a village of earthquake cottages built by the Red Cross.

(thunder rumbling) NARRATOR: The Army and Red Cross handed out crackers and canned milk.

But when word spread that no such aid would be given to the Chinese, the community once again turned to its own devices.

♪ ♪ Four years earlier, merchant Lew Hing had moved away from San Francisco.

QUAN JR.: Lew Hing decided to open a cannery in Oakland, away from San Francisco.

Having been tired of being harassed by the white media, having had to compete against the white canneries that had formed a cartel to try and drive all the independent canneries out of business, and particularly targeted Lew Hing because he had become such a force in the cannery business.

♪ ♪ When the earthquake hit on April 18, the Chinese in San Francisco, they were refused by the white relief agencies and had no place to go.

And so many of the Chinese came to a very small Chinese settlement in Oakland where my great-grandfather, who had some vacant areas around his cannery, he then hired people to cook, and was able to feed thousands of the Chinese who came over.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: San Francisco was staggering to regain its footing amidst the devastation.

(horse whinnying) And the fallout continued to escalate.

RANDALL: You had instant problems with sanitation.

If you didn't die from the earthquake, or die from the fire, you might die from diphtheria or smallpox or all these other diseases that could rear their head very quickly.

CHASE: With the sewer pipes ruptured, rats, including plague-infected ones, were released into the city to feast on the uncollected refuse, and breed in the ruins.

(rat squeaking) So once again, there was a resurgence of rats and rat-born plague.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Thirteen months after the earthquake, San Francisco had its first plague death in three years.

By summer, there were six more.

Wyman immediately wired Blue, and ordered him to return to San Francisco.

CHASE: On this otherwise unassuming residential street in a Victorian house, Dr. Blue set up his new headquarters, and from there, he ran his command center.

(car horn blares) RANDALL: The problem they find very quickly is that plague is no longer a Chinatown problem, it's a San Francisco problem.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In stark contrast to the early days, there was now only one Chinese casualty: the president of the Chinese Six Companies.

RANDALL: And that's when Blue starts hearing from white physicians who say, "Perhaps I have seen plague cases before, "and I just thought it was pneumonia.

"Or actually, maybe I knew it was plague and I didn't want to admit it."

And this kind of solidifies for Blue this was a disease of the environment.

SHAH: Now bubonic plague began to emerge in all sorts of different communities across the Bay Area.

And people began to realize that anyone could get bubonic plague.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Blue set up a special workplace dedicated to the grisly task at hand.

CHASE: In back of the federal headquarters was an annex to the building that became known as the Rattery.

♪ ♪ And the Rattery was essentially a coroner's lab, a forensic lab, just for rats.

♪ ♪ RANDALL: That's where all the rat carcasses were brought.

And it's just rat after rat that's dissected and opened up and examined for signs of the plague.

And they would chart, you know, what percentage of rats are infected.

(flies buzzing) NARRATOR: By the fall, there were 30 new plague deaths.

Blue and his men stepped up their campaign, killing more than 13,000 rats a week.

(bell ringing) Throughout, he kept trying out new ways to determine how the disease was spreading through the city.

♪ ♪ CHASE: They even took it a step further and tried to analyze migratory patterns.

They wanted to find out where the rats originated and where they traveled.

So, they devised a program that came to be nicknamed the rainbow rats, and they got a group of healthy, active rats and dyed them red, green, or blue, depending upon what district they were from, and turned them loose.

Then they would try to catch them at the other end and find out how they were spreading.

And, of course, when the raucous local press found out, they just had a field day.

♪ ♪ RANDALL: The newspapers mock them for this immediately.

It almost sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss.

And Blue shrinks very quickly from this public mockery.

He's not used to that.

But he continues to try.

NARRATOR: Then a local case caught Blue's eye.

CHASE: There was a physician who had perceived a bad smell in his house.

The doctor decided he would chop out a hole in the wall and get to the source of this unpleasant odor.

And there he found two dead rats.

And immediately, two members of the family got the plague.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: As Blue pondered the details of this case, he recalled reading a recent report from the British Plague Commission that confirmed the results of a study completed ten years earlier.

CHASE: Pasteur Institute scientist Paul Louis Simond did this experiment.

He put two rats in cages side by side, separated by a grate.

They couldn't touch one another.

One rat was healthy, one rat was sick with the plague.

And Simond made the breakthrough observation that when the plague rat died, the fleas jumped to the side of the healthy rat for their next blood meal.

MAY C. CHU: Bubonic plague is transmitted by Yersinia pestis.

The flea itself is really the host of Yersinia pestis.

And when it seeks a blood meal on its natural host, it regurgitates its bacteria and transmits plague.

And it's only when its own host dies, the flea seeks another warm body, a rat, or if a human comes by, they'll jump on.

It senses that there's something warm here.

"I don't care what it is."

And then they'll bite.

They'll try to feed, because it's hungry.

So, the cause of the transmission between rats and human was the flea.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Blue was thunderstruck by the realization that fleas played the primary role in transmitting the disease.

Rats, he now understood, were only agents of the epidemic because of the insects in their fur.

And pieces fell into place: the peaks of the outbreak lined up with the flea's active season.

The baffling on-again, off-again pattern became crystal clear.

SHAH: So, the bubonic plague bacilla was best conveyed by fleas on rats biting humans.

That transmission was the most important thing.

So, the eradication of rats would be pretty significant.

(bells ring) NARRATOR: As the city continued to rebuild, Blue knew that public support for rat extermination was solid.

Still, without full buy-in from the entire community, the stream of rats would continue unchecked.

It was time for extreme measures.

Rupert Blue the strategist understood he needed both a carrot and a stick.

So fleet week was approaching.

But Blue told the city, if the city isn't a healthful place, I will tell the admiral that it's not safe to land his ships.

This was terrible news.

It would be like canceling Christmas, to have the Great White Fleet barred from entering San Francisco, and worse yet diverted to Seattle, the rival city, would have been terrible.

So, all the city had to take part.

♪ ♪ In 1908, the first truly grassroots, fully public, multi-sector health campaign was born.

Educating the populace on simple things like the right way to dispose of garbage.

You have to seal your household and security against rats.

They also educated greengrocers on the right way to store their wares to keep the city streets clean.

And they informed essential nature of sanitary precautions.

♪ ♪ RANDALL: They start putting notices in everybody's mailboxes.

Like, this is what you can do to save yourself and save the city.

CHASE: And little by little, hundreds and hundreds of citizens from all walks of life, churches, temples, lodges, women's clubs, business groups, everyone got on board and did their part.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: San Francisco got to work.

Long-neglected sanitary infrastructure was rebuilt.

A $4 million bond was issued to renovate the sewer system, and municipal garbage collection and disposal were put in place.

By now, even the local newspapers supported the sanitation drive by publishing the names and addresses of anyone who failed to comply.

In the end, Blue managed to have more than 20,000 houses inspected.

Untold numbers of rats were either trapped or found dead.

But of the ones tested, only 16 were found to be infected.

The outbreak was in retreat.

With backbreaking work, and focused messaging, Blue had finally rounded the corner on the disease.

(water lapping, birds squawking) ♪ ♪ The question that had so long tormented Kinyoun and Blue-- why hadn't the plague taken off exponentially?-- was at last answered.

♪ ♪ CHASE: It's so interesting that we had the germ that was just as lethal as during the Black Death.

The same germ that had ravaged populations in China, and India, what may have saved the city in the end from a much worse disaster was a tiny part of an organ inside of the little flea.

RANDALL: In places where you had this explosion of plague, there was a different species of rat flea.

Its anatomy was slightly different.

It would inject more of the plague bacilli into whatever victim it bit.

In San Francisco, the flea bite would inject a lower dose, harder for it to become a full-blown disease.

So, it was only this quirk of flea anatomy that really prevented millions of deaths in the U.S. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: February 1908 saw the last diagnosed case of bubonic plague.

For the first time in nearly eight years, San Francisco could afford to celebrate.

And on May 6, 1908, the Great White Fleet sailed into San Francisco Bay.

("Anchors Aweigh" playing, crowd cheering) CHASE: People stood atop every hill and promontory to get a look at these magnificent golden and white ships that were sent by Theodore Roosevelt.

People were waving flags and partying all week.

It celebrated not only the Great White Fleet and naval power, but also the rebirth of San Francisco as a healthful city.

And it was an effort in which everyone had taken part.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Chinatown was celebrating its own victory.

Its near-total destruction during the earthquake had lured white speculators eager to snap up the valuable land.

(carriages clattering) But they hadn't counted on the fierce opposition of Chinese merchants and associations, who fought them tooth and nail to control how they wanted the district to be used.

SHAH: We later learn, of course, they were quite successful in turning the fear of Chinatown as a labyrinth of disease and immorality into a kind of middle-class, consumer tourist paradise.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: On March 31, 1909, Rupert Blue was honored with a lavish ceremony at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill.

♪ ♪ CHASE: The dinner was rat-themed.

They had ice cream molds in the shape of rat traps.

They drank wine punch from beakers that were shaped like little trash cans.

It was kind of visual puns everywhere.

NARRATOR: It was a darkly humorous nod to the rats killed, two million in all, roughly five times the size of San Francisco's human population.

CHASE: And when he was called to the dais to accept his gift and the city's thanks, some of Blue's old shyness came flooding back and he said, "It's difficult to speak when one's heart is full."

After all his achievements, he got rather tongue-tied.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: It was likely Blue's reticence arose from not just humility, but a clear-eyed view of the debt he owed his predecessor.

True, he had been able to clean up San Francisco and rid the city of its rats.

But Kinyoun was the one who insisted that the problem even existed, and at enormous personal cost.

RANDALL: Blue was seen as a hero, and he continued on 'an upward trajectory.

You know, he became the fourth Surgeon General of the United States.

He was a very forward thinker.

He was somebody who advocated for better treatment of the mentally ill.

He advocated for a national health insurance at a time when that was never heard of whatsoever.

He saw where the world was going.

CHASE: Dr. Joseph Kinyoun's ouster from San Francisco represented a kind of failure of institutional resistance and rivalries.

But he is remembered for bringing state of the art methods of diagnosing infectious diseases to America.

He is remembered for helping found the National Hygienic Laboratory, the forerunner of our modern National Institutes of Health, for which he is posthumously recognized as the first director of NIH.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The two men brought an end to the epidemic using vastly different approaches.

Yet, it was the efforts of not just Kinyoun and Blue, but the marginalized community that still managed to stand up for its rights, that led to a paradigm shift in the way America viewed public health.

(fireworks explode, crowd cheers) SHAH: One of the things we learned in San Francisco is that intervention into a disease pandemic is a profoundly political act.

(plane engine roars) Science is one dimension to provide answers and to provide solutions, but it was still subject to human interpretation, human implementation.

McCLAIN: The question that came up in 1900 is what is the balance between public necessity, public health, and individual rights and liberties?

And it was balanced in a terrible way.

CHASE: Power-seeking politicians, and misguided commercial greed that takes precedence over public health, all of that delayed a solution in San Francisco.

In the end, we needed collaboration and cooperation by the federal, state, and local governments, participation by the citizenry, understanding and acceptance of science.

♪ ♪ POWELL: Science is implicated with the larger society.

In San Francisco, we actually pressed science to do work that it has no business doing.

You don't need science to tell us that we should treat people with dignity and love.

Science is a method of inquiry.

It knows a lot, but there's always unknowns.

SHAH: We had some worldviews that were coming into big conflict about how to think about science, about how to deal with a public health crisis, how to not ascribe a racial cause for the disease, and diverting accountability.

But also to think about, is it possible to protect myself from disease?

Is it possible to eradicate disease?

And those are open questions.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: "American Experience: Plague at the Golden Gate" is available on DVD.

To order, visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

"American Experience" is also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

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American Experience | Plague at the Golden Gate | Season 34 | Episode 4 | PBS

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Discover how bubonic plague in 1900 set off fear and anti-Asian sentiment in San Francisco

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/06/23/vincent-chin-death-40-years-asian-american-hate/7702773001/

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DETROIT - Helen Zia remembers how stunned she felt 40 years ago when she read the two men who beat Vincent Chin to death in Highland Park, an enclave of Detroit, were only given probation in his death.

"I was just livid," Zia, 70, an author and Asian American activist, recalled this week. "I couldn't believe my eyes. Is this how this story ends, that his killers get off with probation? And what did that mean for people who might be targeted? Like, go ahead, kill an Asian American and you won't go to jail."

Chin, a Chinese American man, was beaten with a baseball bat in 1982 by white autoworkers, one of whom complained about Asian Americans taking away their jobs. Chin died days later.

The outrage mobilized Zia and other Asian Americans in metro Detroit who went on to make the Chin case a national cause, igniting a movement that continues today amid growing concern about anti-Asian racism.

As anti-Asian hate incidents have risen in recent years, the story of Chin still resonates as metro Detroit on Thursday marked 40 years since his death. Back then, Japanese people were perceived as the enemy during an economic downturn, leading to attacks in Michigan and other places against not just Japanese Americans, but Asian Americans in general.

"It was a time of economic and social crisis for the city, and people of Asian descent were blamed for it and were scapegoated," Zia said.

The 40th commemoration of Chin's death comes amid a pandemic where Asians were wrongfully blamed for the proliferation of the COVID-19 virus, fueling hate incidents around the country. It also comes amid similar economic problems such as inflation, leading at times to ostracism of Asian Americans.

"If you look Asian, you're a target," said Sylvan Lake attorney James Shimoura, a grandson of Japanese immigrants who was one of the key activists 40 years ago working on the Chin case. "That was true in 1982. It's true today in 2022."
ANTI-ASIAN HATE CRIMES ON THE RISE: Here's what activists, lawmakers and police are doing to stop the violence
This month, there were four days of events remembering Chin and the struggles of Asian Americans, ending with an interfaith ceremony on Sunday at Chin's burial site at Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in Detroit.

Building coalitions for justice within the Asian community and beyond

As the Asian American population grows in southeast Michigan, communities are once again mobilizing to gain more political influence and preserve their rights.
'FETISHIZATION ISN'T APPRECIATION':The dangers of dating as an Asian American woman
One of the lessons learned four decades ago was coalition building, both within diverse Asian American communities sometimes divided by nationality and with other groups such as African Americans.

Black civil rights and labor leaders such as the late Rev. Horace Sheffield Jr., whose granddaughter is Detroit City Council President Mary Sheffield, gave "incredible support" to Asian Americans after Chin was killed, helping them publicize the case, Zia said. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and leaders with the NAACP and National Urban League also spoke out.

"We really are trying to lift that up, the multiracial, multicultural, interfaith movement that was created in Detroit," Zia said. "We've done it before. ... The drumbeat today is, we're so divided. ... We can show that we have come together and we accomplished a lot together."

As an idealistic child of the 1960s, Zia moved from Boston to Detroit in the 1970s to be part of the labor movement in a place known nationally known for its strong unions.
CHINATOWNS REACT: Chinatowns become more vibrant close-knit hub amid pandemic, anti-Asian violence
She became an autoworker, working as a large press operator at a Chrysler plant. But she later got laid off from Chrysler as the oil crisis of the 1970s led to rising unemployment in Michigan. A child of immigrants from China, Zia and others felt the rising anti-Asian prejudice.
ATTACKS ON ASIANS: Asian women continue to face 'terrifying' attacks in the US. What advocates say needs to change.
Back "then, every day on the TV, radio, news, the halls of Congress, the C suites of auto companies was: 'We're at war; Japan is the enemy,'" Zia said of the climate in the early 1980s.

In Detroit, cars made in Japan were sometimes shot at on the freeways, Zia recalled. Just a few months before Chin's death, in March 1982, then-U.S. Rep. John Dingell, a Democrat, referred to Japanese people using a racist slur, the New York Times reported. Dingell later apologized. The month before Chin's death, a Chrysler board member said on a local radio station the U.S. should drop another atomic bomb on Hiroshima to deal with Japanese competition, the Free Press reported.
ATLANTA SHOOTING: Atlanta spa shootings, one year later: Families share their 'pain,' denial,' and 'collective grief'
"There are really terrible parallels to what's going on today," Zia said.

A report released in March by Asian American advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate said there were 10,905 hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from March 19, 2020, through the end of last year. About 120 of those were in Michigan. The group started collecting data near the start of the pandemic when Asian Americans started to face bias incidents as some sought to link the virus to China.

More than 16% of the hate incidents involved physical assaults. Chinese Americans were the most common victims.

The killings last year of eight people in Atlanta, six of them Asian women, shook many, leading to protests, including some in metro Detroit.
ASIAN VIOLENCE: Anti-Asian American violence is still raging. AAPI teachers are trying to stop it.
Vincent Chin's death: A fight, a baseball bat and a racial slur

On June 19, 1982, Chin and his friends were celebrating his upcoming marriage at a club in Highland Park, according to court testimony. Autoworkers Ronald Ebens, 43, and his stepson Michael Nitz, 22, got into an argument.
THIS IS AMERICA: Let's celebrate the full diversity of our community this AAPI Heritage Month
Witnesses said a racial slur against Japanese people was hurled at Chin, as well as comments about Japanese people stealing their jobs. The attackers denied making racial remarks and accused Chin of starting the fight.

A scuffle broke out and Chin left the club. Later, Ebens and Nitz searched for Chin, finding him outside a McDonald's. As Nitz held him, Ebens pounded him several times with a baseball bat. His last words, according to a witness, were: "It's not fair."

Chin died a few days later, on June 23.
WILL PASSING LAWS HELP?:Congress urged to address hate crimes, but 'hate is a hell of a motivator'
Zia and others followed the case in local newspapers, but it was the probation sentence the following year that ignited the movement.

They had a difficult time getting heard by politicians, prosecutors and progressive activists. Zia said Asian Americans were rarely covered by the news media.

"We were so invisible," Zia said.

As the case drew national attention due to the work of local activists and Zia, who was a freelance journalist at the time, the Department of Justice intervened, bringing federal civil rights charges.

Ebens was found guilty in the federal trial, but his conviction was later overturned by an appeals court. A civil lawsuit was then filed and a settlement was reached, with Ebens ordered to pay $1.5 million. Today, that amount is estimated to be up to $10 million, which he still owes, Zia said. Ebens lives in Nevada and couldn't be reached for comment.

Asian Americans were disappointed in what they say was an indifferent attitude among prosecutors. And the judge who sentenced the men, Charles Kaufman, praised them during the sentencing, saying: "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail."

White suspects being perceived automatically as people of good character in contrast to minority defendants is an issue that still exists today in the criminal justice system, advocates say.

Advocates say the Chin case showed Asian Americans the need to get more involved in politics and government.

In Michigan, there are now about 405,000 residents of Asian descent, making up about 4% of the state's population according to 2020 census data.

The growth of the Asian population can be seen in places like western Wayne County, Oakland and Macomb counties, and Ann Arbor. But while there are now four state legislators of Asian descent representing parts of metro Detroit, they are often absent at the local level in government.

Asian American activism in a pre-internet era

Before the internet, it was challenging for activists to publicize cases, Shimoura recalls.

In their early days of the case, they would gather at a Chinese restaurant in Ferndale where Chin used to work. Today, there's a memorial on Woodward Avenue and 9 Mile Road in the median remembering Chin.

"A lot of it was spread word-of-mouth," Shimoura said. "We put out a lot of press releases. We traveled a lot giving speeches, doing rallies across the country."

Chin's mother, Lily Chin, didn't speak English well, but gave speeches and appeared on "The Phil Donahue Show."

One advantage is that back then, the news cycles tended to be longer, and so the case had a staying power in contrast to today, when stories fade more quickly, Shimoura said.

Asians a key part of Detroit's history

On Wednesday, activists gathered in Detroit in what used be the city's Chinatown to unveil a new mural and memorial remembering Chin, hoping it will remind future generations of the case and the history of Asian Americans in the city.
Contact Niraj Warikoo:nwarikoo@freepress.com or Twitter @nwarikoo
Many Asians in metro Detroit have been here for several generations, such as Shimoura.

Shimoura's grandfather, James, or Tadae in Japanese, emigrated from Japan in the early 20th century and became a chemist working at Ford Motor Co.

After Japanese Americans were released from internment camps during World War II, a number of them moved to Detroit. Now, the two biggest groups among Asian Americans in Michigan are Indian Americans and Chinese Americans.

Shimoura led an Asian American group during his college years at Michigan State University. After Chin was killed, he reached out to people he knew for support. Together, they made thousands of phone calls and wrote letters and telegrams to spread the story.

Shimoura said that 40 years ago, the Asian community was fractured, but it came together for Chin's case.

Zia said that unity is important to hold onto amid a rise in anti-Asian hate incidents nationwide.

"Vincent Chin matters today because what happened to him 40 years ago is very similar to what's going on today," she said. "It's very important to remember that back then people came together to stand up and say, no more, that hate does not belong in America."

"We're at a very urgent time," she added. "We have come together before and we are standing up together."

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40 years after Vincent Chin's death, Asian Americans continue fighting against hate in Detroit and beyond

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DETROIT - Helen Zia remembers how stunned she felt 40 years ago when she read the two men who beat Vincent Chin to death in Highland Park, an enclave of Detroit, were only given probation in his death. "I was just livid," Zia, 70, an author and Asian American activist, recalled this week.

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https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2022/05/28/1099919790/a-photographers-journey-to-reconnect-with-his-chinese-american-identity

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Growing up in Queens as a young Chinese American, An Rong Xu internalized a shamefulness when he realized the way that he and his culture were negatively perceived through American eyes. Hearing so many offensive stereotypes targeting his identity, Xu grew resentful of his Chinese heritage.

It wasn't until his senior year of high school that Xu began to find some acceptance of who he is and where his family came from. He worked in Chinatown at an after-school center that he used to attend, helping kids with their homework. Xu saw himself in these kids. He was once one of these children, not yet aware of the journey he would make to figure out who he was and how he would struggle to grasp that truth. But it was during this time that he reconnected with himself and his own identity in the hope of creating a future where our differences don't set us apart.

Xu spent the next four years in college understanding the Asian American community and how his own identity as a Chinese American fit into that framework. He gravitated toward photographing people who looked like him and places that felt familiar to him.

"I really dedicated myself to kind of capturing the Chinese American community in New York and kind of finding this idea of what it means to be Chinese American," Xu says. "I saw it as this idea that I am part of the larger story of the Chinese American people who are trying to find their place in America."

"... What makes us special is that we have the privilege to share our stories of the next generation and tell the stories of those before us."

Xu rarely saw himself reflected in mainstream media. He shares these photos as a reflection of himself and of others who face similar challenges trying to create a way where these communities can hold their own space rather than trying to fit into a shape or mold that has already been established.

He doesn't claim to speak for all Chinese Americans when he makes his work. He emphasizes that these images stem from his own perspective and experience but with that, he hopes to stretch the cultural narrative of what it means to exist as a Chinese person in the United States.

"With my work, I tried to find the duality and how we perceive our identity, and then how the world perceives us and how we are trying to make our place in this world, but we're still caught in the shadows of a society that [isn't] ready to see us," Xu says.

These images tell the story of not only those who were brave enough to build new lives in America but the story of the generations that came after; how they persisted with their dreams and fought for their culture to exist in a society that wasn't welcoming. Xu's images shine a light on how deeply multifaceted the Asian identity is and how that identity is intertwined with the fabric of American culture.

"We are the authority of our own stories," Xu says. "We are beyond any expectations of what people expect of us."

"I just need you to see [us] and understand that we are here and we exist in the same dimension - same reality. There's nothing more that you can do but recognize that and realize that we are here and the world is a better place because we are here."
An Rong Xu is a New York City and Taipei based photographer and director. Born in China and raised in New York City's Chinatown, Xu explores the world around him through his unique cultural perspective. Follow his work on instagram at and anrongxu.com.

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A photographer's journey to reconnect with his Chinese American identity

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Growing up in Queens as a young Chinese American, An Rong Xu internalized a shamefulness when he realized the way that he and his culture were negatively perceived through American eyes. Hearing so many offensive stereotypes targeting his identity, Xu grew resentful of his Chinese heritage.

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https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/the-story-behind-abercrombie-and-fitchs-anti-asian-t-shirts

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Image of Phil Yu: Netflix

Burning Questions

How Abercrombie’s Racist T-shirts Motivated a Generation of Asian Americans

Phil Yu of ‘Angry Asian Man’ called the designs “pop culture Orientalism,” and fought back against the brand.

By Regina Kim April 21, 2022

Twenty years ago, Abercrombie & Fitch was at the height of its popularity as a clothing (and fragrance) destination for teen shoppers; it was only a few years out from a name-check in the LFO earworm “Summer Girls.” It was in the midst of this that the brand released a now infamous line of graphic tees that quickly sparked widespread fury within the Asian American community. As the recently released documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch contends, A&F built its brand by marketing a culture of exclusivity that often came at the expense of marginalized communities. Part of that involved mocking people of Asian descent by selling T-shirts emblazoned with racist depictions and slogans like “Pizza Dojo — You Love Long Time — Eat In or Wok Out” and “Wong Brothers Laundry Service — Two Wongs Can Make It White,” which depicted two Asian men with cartoonish slanted eyes under conical hats. Phil Yu, who runs the Angry Asian Man blog, called the designs “pop culture Orientalism” in White Hot. “It’s all this stuff taken from people’s understanding of Asians if you just watched American TV and movies,” he says.

Despite the overt racism on display, the $25 T-shirts initially flew off the shelves, snapped up by consumers who found the slogans to be funny enough to wear. At the time, media outlets even made a point to report that some Asian Americans didn’t find the T-shirts to be offensive. In addition, there were reports that Asian American designers were in the room when the controversial T-shirts were given the green light. “Two of the main team people were Asian Americans, which is why it got approved in the first place,” says Savas Abadsidis, the former editor-in-chief of A&F Quarterly, in White Hot. In response, Yu points out the pressure against speaking out if you’re one of the few minorities within a company with a strong corporate culture of exclusion: “Is he gonna flip over the table and be like, ‘I think this is really offensive to my identity’? In that environment, in this corporate stuffy environment where everyone around you is white... I don’t know if that’s a safe place to do that.”

Whatever took place behind the scenes, the brand’s message to Asian American consumers seemed clear: “Can’t take a joke?”

“Remember, Abercrombie, at this time, was the thing,” recalls Evan Low, a California state assemblymember representing Silicon Valley and an undergraduate student at De Anza College during the incident. “It was the thing to be part of, so why would you not want to be part of that mainstream culture?” Low, along with a few like-minded classmates, came up with a plan to protest at the local Westfield Mall. “I remember we made these little slips [that said] ‘Protest racist Abercrombie,’” Low recalls. “We would go into the mall and put it in their clothes, just as [many] as we could find. Of course, we got kicked out.”

Across the country, scores of Asian American college students and advocacy organizations staged protests in front of Abercrombie stores, also writing letters and emails to both the brand and the malls where Abercrombie & Fitch had storefronts, demanding the product be removed. Utilizing the relatively new power of the internet, Asian American activists were able to mobilize quickly and effectively, galvanized under a common sense of outrage.

Yu wrote about Abercrombie & Fitch’s controversial shirts in his blog, Angry Asian Man.

It worked. Just a week after the shirts first became available, Abercrombie pulled them from its 300+ stores. Through spokesperson Hampton Carney, Abercombie told The Associated Press that the company was “very, very, very sorry,” but declined to issue a formal apology from the CEO. Instead, the company offered an excuse for its actions by pointing out that it makes fun of everyone. “We never single out any one group to poke fun at," Carney said at the time. “We poke fun at everybody, from women to flight attendants to baggage handlers, to football coaches, to Irish Americans to snow skiers. There’s really no group we haven’t teased.”

“We personally thought Asians would love this T-shirt,” Carney told The San Francisco Chronicle. “The shirts were designed to appeal to young Asian shoppers with a sense of humor.”

Over the last two decades, Abercrombie has undergone some major changes that have fashioned the much-maligned brand into a more inclusive company. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Abercrombie & Fitch had violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by refusing to hire Samantha Elauf, a Muslim woman who’d worn a headscarf to her job interview back in 2008, on the basis of her religion. The Supreme Court’s decision served to confirm that Abercrombie’s infamous “Look Policy” — a stringent set of guidelines that dictated practically every detail of an employee’s appearance — was a thing of the past. Just a few months prior, Abercrombie essentially did away with the policy, announcing, among other things, that it would allow employees to wear clothes from other brands and stop hiring people based on their looks. Under the current CEO Fran Horowitz, who took over the company in 2017, Abercrombie has completely rebranded itself as a trendy, wholesome retailer geared toward young professionals, with a focus on authenticity, diversity and inclusion.

Today, when companies place an ever-increasing emphasis on inclusive marketing and culturally sensitive representations of their customers, it may seem unthinkable for an American brand to pull the same kind of stunt that A&F did in 2002. However, Low argues that the same type of discrimination still persists, albeit in perhaps more coded forms.

“This is the part of the dark underbelly of American society, and every generation will have its different Abercrombie. Maybe it’s not just as direct as these offensive T-shirts, [how they depict] us in terms of imagery. But nonetheless, it still represents the same type of xenophobia that we are working so hard to fight. That’s why it is incumbent upon us to speak out swiftly and take action, to call it as we see it and acknowledge our own history.”

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The Story Behind Abercrombie & Fitch’s Anti-Asian T-shirts

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The documentary ‘White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch’ revisits the brand’s tumultuous past, including its 2002 release of racist graphic T-shirts, and reveals how Asian American activists like Phil Yu have continued an important conversation.

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https://www.kqed.org/news/11877801/san-jose-had-5-chinatowns-why-did-they-vanish

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When they arrived in California, the immigrants realized it was far from the dream of "Gold Mountain." Some attempted mining for gold, but many others found work building the transcontinental railroad. Companies would pay for room, board and transportation, but the contracts for these jobs were short-term. When they ended, many of those men were left to fend for themselves.

"They had to continue on," Lai said. "They had to find work in different ways."

Some went to San Francisco and opened laundromats and other businesses, while others built levees throughout the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and picked orchards in the Santa Clara Valley.

When Chinese immigrants first arrived, they expected to do hard labor, make their earnings and return home to their families. A lot of Chinese men came over, leaving women and children behind.

"The ratio was roughly 26-to-1 Chinese American men to women, at this point," Lai said. "They never achieved the wealth that they hoped they would achieve to be able to return back to their village and retire or help their families. So they stayed and they endured."

The First Chinatowns in San Jose

Racist policies kept Chinese immigrants from owning property and white people didn't want them in their neighborhoods. So, they built their own communities. In San Jose, it began with the First Market Street Chinatown, which was built in 1866, but burned down a few years later in 1870. The community rebuilt a few blocks away and became known as Vine Street Chinatown. It too burned down in 1872.

From the moment Chinese immigrants started coming to America, they faced racism and violence. White residents wanted to send a message that they weren't welcome and used arson to terrorize and destroy Chinese communities.

But Chinese immigrants kept rebuilding. Lai explains there wasn't another option. "It was just simply to continue to try to plant your roots and the only way you could do it was through these kinds of Chinatowns," he said.

And the community was growing fast. In 1872, the Second Market Street Chinatown was built in downtown San Jose, where the Fairmont Hotel is located today. More than 1,400 people lived there, a far bigger population than the previous Chinatowns. There were shops, three restaurants, a theater and a temple. The people who lived in this Chinatown worked in factories, which manufactured cigars, shoes, clothing and furniture.

The Second Market Street Chinatown

Connie Young Yu is a local South Bay historian whose ancestry traces back to this Chinatown. Her grandfather's uncle was already living in San Jose and would travel back to China and tell family about the wonders of America.

"[My grandfather's] uncle was telling him about this beautiful area where you can work hard and there were good wages in Gum San," Yu said. "America was called Gum San: Gold Mountain."

Yu's grandfather, Young Soong Quong, arrived in 1881 to the Second Market Street Chinatown when he was 11 years old. He stocked shelves and cleaned floors in his uncle's shop, where many laborers came to eat, play cards and send money back home.

Eventually, a white family hired him as a houseboy, a job which required him to leave Chinatown. It was there where he experienced racial violence for the first time.

"When he would go back to the Market Street Chinatown, he'd have to run really fast because white kids would be throwing rocks at him," Yu said. "This was a vivid memory he passed down to us kids."

The Anti-Chinese Movement in San Jose

Barbara Voss, a historical archeologist at Stanford, is not surprised Young faced racial violence in San Jose.

"The anti-Chinese movement had been building throughout the western United States for about 20 years at this point," Voss said.

In the late 1880s, an angry mob burned San Jose's First Methodist Episcopal Church down when they learned the church did missionary work for Chinese immigrants and held a Sunday school service for Chinese children.

California had already enacted legislation that targeted Chinese immigrants, including the Foreign Miner's License of 1848 which required miners who were not citizens to pay $20 a month for the right to mine in California. Congress passed the Page Act of 1875, which prohibited women, particularly Chinese women from immigrating to the country for "immoral purposes."

In 1882, Congress passed the nation's most restrictive immigration bill: The Chinese Exclusion Act. It prohibited all Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States and prevented those that were here from becoming citizens.

These anti-Chinese laws passed at the federal and state level set the stage for San Jose to host the first statewide Anti-Chinese Convention in 1886.

"There were motivational speakers who were arguing racist slogans; arguing that the Chinese must go; making arguments about why white people are superior to Chinese people; making arguments about what they perceived to be the negative impact of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans on the economy of San Jose," Voss said.

Voss finds it eerie how similar some of the arguments made back then are to the anti-immigration arguments of today. The rally was well attended and was held just a few blocks away from the Second Market Street Chinatown.

"The Anti-Chinese movement in San Jose was as much about local boosterism as it was about racism," Voss explained. "The leaders of this movement found that they could not promote San Jose as a place for business development and settlement if the Chinatown remained in downtown."

"Chinatown Must Go"

A year after the convention, the San Jose Mercury News featured front page testimony from city leaders including the fire and police chiefs, the street commissioner and the mayor with one message: Chinatown must go.

"It was of their opinion that the general condition of the locality in a sanitary point of view could not be worse and in an aesthetic or moral sense, it was revolting," the testimony read.

Mayor Charles Breyfogle and the City Council voted unanimously to get rid of the Second Market Street Chinatown. But before any official action was taken, the Chinatown was burned down. That made it the third Chinatown in San Jose to succumb to arson.

There were no recorded casualties, but homes and businesses were destroyed and the community was displaced again. There was another small Chinatown in San Jose called the Woolen Mills Chinatown around the same time. The property was owned by the San Jose Woolen Manufacturing Company and provided to workers as a living accommodation. But that Chinatown was too small to accommodate the much larger population of the Second Market Street Chinatown.

Before the fire, Chinese residents had already started moving out of San Jose. After the fire, even more left. "There are anecdotal accounts from descendants that people started considering whether or not to move back to China," Voss said. "Some folks moved to more rural areas where they were out of the public eye."

Connie Young Yu's grandfather was among the immigrants who left for San Francisco. He didn't return for a decade.

The Rise of Heinlenville

The community would rebuild with the help of another immigrant named John Heinlen. He moved with his wife and children from Ohio to farm in California. Yu said Heinlen's family faced anti-German discrimination in the Midwest and when he came to California, he saw Chinese immigrants facing discrimination and sympathized with them.

"He was a friend to the Chinese," she said. "He had hired Chinese before [and] leased land to the Chinese in his other holdings in Fresno."

A few months after the fire, news broke that Heinlen had leased some of his land to Chinese residents who lost their homes and land. He was going to build a new Chinatown.

"There was such an uproar among the citizens," Yu said. "They said 'Down with John Heinlen, he's a traitor to his people.'"

Despite death threats, Heinlen finished construction of the new Chinatown in 1887, just months after the fire that destroyed the last Chinatown. Angry locals called the new Chinatown "Heinlenville," and the name stuck.

"They couldn't drive out Chinatown," Yu said. "Chinatown was there to stay and John Heinlen, to protect the Chinese, he built an eight-foot-high fence."

The fence had a gate which was locked every night, while foot patrols provided security. Eventually, Young Soong Quong, Connie Young Yu's grandfather, became a partner at one of the shops in Heinlenville and was able to settle in San Jose.

"Heinlen gave him a chance for a new life in San Jose. He was a merchant and he was able to send for his wife in China," she said.

They had been separated for 14 years. Yu's grandmother arrived in California in 1910 and they had their first son, Ming Young. Two years later, Yu's father, John, was born.

Heinlenville became a thriving community with 2,000 residents. Newspaper accounts said the Ng Shing Gung Temple, a two story structure, was the center of the community. The upper floor housed an intricately carved and gilded altar with five deities. The lower floor was used as a town hall and as a Chinese school for the children who grew up in Heinlenville.

San Jose's Last Chinatown

Heinlenville was San Jose's longest established Chinatown, lasting for 44 years, until 1931.

Because the Chinese Exclusion Act was in place for many years, immigration from China slowly dwindled. And many men weren't as fortunate as Young Soong Quong, who could bring his wife to join him in America. Their families were still in China.

"The workers were getting kind of old and there were no new laborers coming in to work in the fields," Yu said. Soon, there weren't enough people left in Chinatown to keep it alive.

The Great Depression took a toll on the Heinlen estate, which owned the land the Chinatown stood on. In 1931, the estate went bankrupt and Heinlenville became city property. All the buildings were eventually demolished.

Connie Young Yu has been working with the city to build a park where the last Chinatown once stood, not far from San Jose's Japantown. The park will commemorate John Heinlen's contributions to the city and highlight the history of San Jose's Chinese community. It will be called Heinlenville Park.

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San Jose Had 5 Chinatowns. What Happened To Them? | KQED

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When they arrived in California, the immigrants realized it was far from the dream of "Gold Mountain." Some attempted mining for gold, but many others found work building the transcontinental railroad. Companies would pay for room, board and transportation, but the contracts for these jobs were short-term.

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Question added to CA election about Chinese Immigration

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Question added to CA election about Chinese Immigration

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