Chinese Americans: Chinese or Americans?
Chinese American Chronology: Three Events (Source: Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans:
An Interpretive History
1882 Chinese Exclusion Law suspends immigration of laborers for ten years. Chinese
community leaders form Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA or
Chinese Six Companies) in San Francisco.
1884 Joseph and Mary Tape sue San Francisco school board to enroll their daughter
Mamie in a public school.
1885 San Francisco builds new segregated “Oriental School”’ anti-Chinese violence at
Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory.
1886 Residents of Tacoma, Seattle, and many places in the American West forcibly
expel the Chinese. Chinese laundrymen win the case in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, which
declares that a law with unequal impact on different groups is discriminatory.
1949 Five thousand highly educated Chinese in the United States are granted refugee
status after a Communist government comes to power in China.
1979 Resumption of diplomatic relations between the People’s Republic of China and
the United States allows members of long-separated Chinese American families to be
reunited.
1982 Vincent Chin, a Chinese American draftsman, is clubbed to death with a baseball
bat by two Euro-American men
Chinese Americans: Chinese or Americans?
On Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter: she ‘was only twenty-four years old
when she wrote her autobiography. Many of the chapters in Fifth Chinese Daughter
were revisions of essays she had writtenh while she was a college student. It should not
be surprising, then, that the two most striking features of the book are its documentation
of her often enraged struggle to attain individual definition apart from her family and her
acceptance of attitudes popularly ascribed to the Chinese American minority during her
era’ (Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their
Social Context 66).
‘[…] Wong’s assertion of here Chinese identity was restricted to identification with
whatever was acceptable about it to white society, and the Chinese identity that Wong
defined involved whatever was most exotic, interesting, and non-threatening to the white
society that was her reference point. This explains why Wong’s self-definition has so
much to do with Chinese food, for example, and why whatever rage she did feel against
what she calls ‘injustice’ or ‘prejudice’ is directed against her own Chinese family and
community’ (Kim 66).
‘Unlike Pardee Lowe, Wong does not roundly reject her Chinese identity. Instead, she
accepts the role of interpreter of the “life and hear of the Chinese people in order to
“contribute in bringing better understanding of the Chinese people, so that in the Western
world they would be recognized for their achievements”’ (Kim 69).
‘For many Asian Americans, the era of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in
the United States was an era or increased awareness of racial and cultural identity built on
their need to clarify and establish their uniquely American identity’ ; ‘Young writers
attempted to “claim America” for Asian Americans by demonstrating Asian roots in
American society and culture. In some cases, this meant rejecting the ethnic community
as subject matter, since some writers felt that it limited them and only perpetuated the
relegation of Asian Americans to marginal states. They turned their interest away from
community portraiture and towards questions of individual Asian American identity
within the context of the larger society” (Elaine Kim, “Chinatown Cowboys and Warrior
Women: Searching for a New Self-Image,” Asian American Literature: An Introduction
to the Writings and Their Social Context 173).
Symbol of masculine Asian American identity: Kwan Kung, Chinese god of art and war
(Kim 17).
‘Because American racial policies regarding Asians have involved active attempts to
exclude them as a minority from participation in American life, Chinese Americans have
been taught, Chin says, “that we don’t exist, that we have no style, no language, no
literature, and no history besides the white version of our history.” The only cultural
identity allowed the Chinese American has been a foreign Chinese one” (Kim 175).
‘Chin points out that whites from Europe are not linked with Americans of European
descent, but Chinese are linked with Chinese Americans because skin color binds them
together in a white supremacist society’ (Kim 176).
Chin calls himself a “Chinatown Cowboy” because: “The Asian culture we are
supposedly preserving is uniquely without masculinity; we are characterized as lacking
daring, originality, aggressiveness, assertiveness, vitality, and a living art and culture.”
Chin wants Chinese Americans to be associate with the men who built the railroads
across the United States’ (Kim 177).
Chin against the model minority stereotype and the Chinese American status as
“honorary whites” (179).