PREFACE
Iwrite this book with a sense of personal urgency. Given the long-standing presence of Asian Americans in the United States, how is it that we find ourselves in the years, 2020 and 2021, in the midst of so much hate directed against us?
Throughout 2020, and most notably beginning in March when COVID-19 became a pandemic, anti-Asian, coronavirus-related racism was on the rise. It took shape in various forms of verbal and physical harassment, from bullying Asian American youth and spitting on Asian Americans to blaming us for the disease. This anti-Asian hostility also led to grave violence, such as the knife attack on a Burmese American family in Midland, Texas. The perpetrator blamed the family for spreading the coronavirus.1
As I write this in 2021, anti-Asian violence is all around us from New York City to Atlanta to Glendale, Arizona, to the San Francisco Bay Area. We bear witness to some of this violence in video clips shared on social media of Asian American elders just going about their day, taking a walk for some daily exercise or running an errand at a grocery, and suddenly being assaulted, knocked to the ground, punched in the face, dragged from a car in a purse-snatching gone awry. On March 29, Vilma Kari, a sixty-five-year-old Filipino woman who had emigrated from the Philippines decades ago, was brutally attacked in broad daylight in front of a luxury building in Manhattan.2
Some of these assaults have been fatal. After being pushed with a level of force that knocked him to the ground, eighty-four-year-old Thai immigrant Vicha Ratanapakdee never regained consciousness and passed away two days later.3 Seventy-four-year-old Filipino immigrant, Juanito Falcon, died after he had been punched in the face and hit his head against the pavement.4
This anti-Asian violence is about misogyny as well as racism. Asian American women make up a disproportionate share of these attacks.5 We grieved over the March 16, 2021, shooting and killing of eight people in Atlanta. Six of the eight dead were Asian American women. The shooter denied racial motivation, emphasizing his sex addiction. However, many Asian American women understood the tragedy differently, having experienced the ways that race and gender intersect to create the stereotypes that fetishize and objectify them.6
It’s not solely the brute violence that plays out in my mind. In Juanito Falcon, I see my Lolo, my Filipino grandfather. In Vilma Kari, I see my Filipino mother walking on her way to church. I learn that this violence is also playing out in the minds of my own children. And that, in the victims of these attacks, they see me.
My son, who is away at college, calls my husband and me. “Are you okay?” he asks. He’s seen the videos and news stories of this violence. He fears what I fear. For most of 2020 and in the first few months of 2021, it is as though it has been open season to harass and harm Asian Americans. As though we are less than human, our lives expendable.
This fear threatens in ways both internal as well as external. It creates tension in your head, it hurts your heart. Your thoughts race. Will I or one of my family members be next? What will I do if it happens to me? Why is this happening?
MISUNDERSTANDING AND DEHUMANIZATION
As an Asian American historian who has researched, written, and taught Asian American history for over two decades, I know that so much of what I am observing and we are experiencing in these times is not new. Anti-Asian violence in the United States has a history that spans over 150 years. So too does the objectification of Asian women, as does the association of Asian bodies with disease. That Asian American history may still seem like an unknown quantity—well, that has a history too.
Asian American historical scholarship and teaching have made incredible strides over the past three decades, most notably in US university and college departments and programs, book publishing, and academic professional organizations. Yet, despite this progress, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates our culture.
This lack of understanding has led to a misunderstanding of Asian Americans and our histories. Instead, generalizations about who we are pass for common knowledge. Asian Americans are whiz kids, innately good at math and memorization. As adults, Asian Americans are model minorities who do not complain. Asian American men are effeminate or asexual while Asian American women are exotic and alluring. All Asian Americans are successful.
Some might ask, what could be wrong with this? After all, aren’t there stereotypes of every group of people and culture? And isn’t much of this the most positive branding a group could hope for?
What’s problematic about this misunderstanding is that it contributes to the dehumanization of Asian Americans. These one-dimensional depictions, even the seemingly positive ones, can turn sinister in an instant, comprising two sides of the same coin that can easily be flipped. Thus, Asian Americans may be considered model minorities at one moment, but then quickly transform into something menacing. An Asian American woman is a lotus blossom, but also a dragon lady. Both are attractive, but the dragon lady is a villainess.
I painfully observed this fine line between docility and danger during the research for my first book, Empire of Care, about Filipino nurses in the US. In the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands of Filipino nurses immigrated to the United States to alleviate critical nursing shortages.7 Many Americans considered these women to be soft-spoken and friendly. Yet, in the 1977 case of United States v. Narciso and Perez, two Filipino immigrant nurses were wrongfully convicted of conspiracy and poisoning patients at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Although they were eventually exonerated in 1978, Filipina Narciso and Leonora Perez characterized their experience as an American “nightmare.”8 In his book The Mysterious Deaths at Ann Arbor, author Robert Wilcox wrote about the case against them, highlighting the supposed inscrutability of Filipino immigrants: “Such was the enigma of the little Filipino: responsible, considerate, shy. But was it a veil hiding evil beneath?”9
Thus, this duality of being superhuman (e.g., the whiz kid, model minority) and of being subhuman (e.g., spreaders of the “China virus,” “dirty Japs,” and “slant-eyed bitches,” as one witness referred to Narciso and Perez) has a history. Its endgame is to objectify Asian Americans as non-Americans and even non-human. Tragically, in times of crises, such as disease outbreaks and economic downturns, dehumanization lends itself to racial, classed, gendered, and sexualized scapegoating and the surge of anti-Asian violence that we bore witness to in 2020 and 2021.
This misunderstanding is in large part a legacy of the American past. Historically, Asian identity was set in opposition to the American one in an expanding cascade of so many national, state, and local laws. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigration laws, such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1917 Immigration Act, which created the Asiatic Barred Zone, literally attempted to keep Asians out of the United States. US Supreme Court cases, such as Takao Ozawa v. United States in 1922 and the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923, rendered Japanese and Indian immigrants ineligible for US citizenship because they were non-white. Alien land laws in California then barred persons ineligible for US citizenship from owning land. Anti-miscegenation laws in Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and other states prohibited interracial marriage between Asians and whites.
American popular culture played a formative role in portraying Asians as subhuman and superhuman threats. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world’s fairs and political cartoons disseminated ideas of Asians as uncivilized children in need of American tutelage, threatening hordes, and harbingers of disease and immorality. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, producers profited from featuring Asians as mystical evildoers intent on taking over the Western world.
This positioning of Asians in opposition to American identity and experience is perhaps most powerfully expressed through the erasure of their long-standing presence in the United States and their contributions to its various industries. When Asians in the United States contributed to the building of the nation through railroad construction, agricultural development, military service, and labor organizing, many of these contributions were erased or forgotten. One egregious, early historical example is the omission of Chinese railroad workers in the iconic photograph of the ceremony that marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, even though they built half of it. Another is the historical record overlooking the leadership of Filipino American Larry Itliong in the United Farm Workers, and the sacrifices of many other Filipino American organizers in US labor history.
The legacies of legal exclusion, cultural stereotyping, and historical erasure haunt us in the twenty-first century. They help explain why no matter how hard Asian Americans work to assimilate and to demonstrate our patriotism, we find ourselves outside the American experience looking in. We are forever foreigners regardless of whether we are fourth-generation Chinese American and Korean American, like my children on their father’s side, or whether we are third-generation Filipino American, like my children on my side.
Thus, despite over three decades of Asian American historical book writing, documentary filmmaking, and professional association conferencing, Asian American studies scholars including me encounter the following reactions to Asian American history: “Really? I didn’t know that,” and “I only learned a little about that in the one ethnic studies course I took in college.”
Yet, at the same time, the tenacity of this outsider status coexists alongside significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics. In 2020, Vice President Kamala Harris became the first Asian and Black American woman to be elected in this major leadership role. Rob Bonta became California’s first Filipino American state legislator when he was elected to the California State Assembly’s 18th District in 2012. In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom chose Bonta to be California’s attorney general, making Bonta the first Asian American man in this position.
Asian American breakthroughs are also taking place in American arts and culture. In 2021, Steve Yeun became the first Asian American to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Actor category for the movie Minari, about a Korean immigrant family seeking to settle in rural Arkansas. Writer and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Sympathizer in 2016, and then, in 2020, became the first Asian American to join the Pulitzer Prize Board in the board’s 103-year history. Actress, comedian, writer, producer, and director Mindy Kaling became well known for her role as Kelly Kapoor in the long-running NBC sitcom The Office (2005–13), a television show that Kaling also contributed to as a writer, an executive producer, and a director. In 2020, Kaling created the Netflix series Never Have I Ever, which features the life of an Indian American teen and has been hailed as a groundbreaking series that challenges Asian American stereotypes.
Thus, Asian Americans find ourselves at a crossroads. As we celebrate these breakthroughs, we remain targets of hate. How did we get here?
VIOLENCE, ERASURE, AND RESISTANCE
In this book, I reckon with this question by emphasizing three interconnected themes in Asian American histories of the United States: violence, erasure, and resistance. One of my major motivations for writing this book is to explain how we got here by documenting the 150-plus-year history of anti-Asian violence, and its intersection with misogyny and other forms of hatred. To document this history is to confront a time line of terror inflicted against Asian Americans in its various physical forms including lynching, arson, shooting, stabbing, vandalism, threats, scapegoating, spitting, shoving, and beating. This history is not solely about acts of wrongdoing, however. It is just as much about the impacts of this violence on Asian Americans’ life chances, their strategies for survival, and their overall mental health and well-being.
It is painful for me to confront and write about these events. I wonder: Will emphasizing this topic only serve to further the trauma that violence produces? Perhaps. Yet, the alternative of denying its contemporary existence and its history is unacceptable. If we do not confront anti-Asian violence, it will continue. As James Baldwin instructs us: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”10 Thus, what is at stake in foregrounding the history of anti-Asian violence in the United States is not solely the accuracy of US history, but also the well-being of an American future.
The second major theme of this book is the erasure of Asian American experiences. In the subsequent chapters, I highlight its various forms including photographic and other documentary forms of erasure, forgotten and secret wars, and commercial redevelopment that removes traces of peoples’ and their communities’ presence. Examples of forgotten wars include the little-known Philippine-American War that began in 1899, and America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s. Histories can also be overshadowed by violence, as in the case of the 2012 mass shooting at a gurdwara (Sikh temple) in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. It coincided with and diverted attention away from what should have been a celebratory centennial commemoration of the oldest gurdwara in the US, founded in Stockton, California, in 1912.
Resistance, the third theme of this book, is the creative force that Asian Americans have wielded over time to survive violence, improve their livelihoods, and contest the erasure of their histories. It, too, takes shape in many forms such as creating mutual aid societies, building alliances to establish labor unions, demanding ethnic studies in schools, and shepherding new legislation. Resistance is also inextricably linked to the Asian American imagination and its creative, and not solely reactive, acts of will. Asian American creativity is expressed in both individual and communal ways, and history illuminates how they can intersect and overlap. Unknowingly, an individual’s creative force of resistance sparks imaginative thinking and resilience beyond themselves and across generations. For example, Chinese detainees at the Angel Island Immigration Station sought to express their isolation and anger by carving poems on the barrack walls beginning in the 1910s. This creative spark lives on in the more recent performances of Within These Walls by the Lenora Lee Dance Company. In 2017, the performance took place inside and around the Angel Island Immigration Station, its choreography creating time and space for healing and compassion in the year commemorating the 135th anniversary of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.11
HETEROGENEITY AND CHRONOLOGY
Finally, the book’s title, Asian American Histories of the United States, makes a statement about two major issues in Asian American history: heterogeneity and chronology. Asian Americans are not a monolith. They are a heterogeneous group with multiple histories. While the concept of Asian American remains salient—as in the current surge in anti-Asian violence that impacts Asian Americans across ethnic and socioeconomic lines—many Asian Americans feel marginalized or even invisible within the category because of the sheer diversity that it belies. Hence, on social media, scholars have used #BrownAsiansExist to call for more substantive inclusion of Filipino and South Asian Americans, for example. They point out that the elision of the many different groups that comprise Asian Americans is deeply problematic.
The challenge of synthesizing the histories of the largest Asian American groups—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Filipino—before the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was already daunting. Then the 1965 Act, with its more equitable immigration policies, exponentially increased the numbers of emigrants from even more Asian countries. For the past six decades, Asian migrations to the United States have ushered in distinctive demographic groups, such as highly educated immigrants and refugee populations. These more recent histories of migration and settlement have complicated Asian America’s composition as well as its meaning.
In the early twenty-first century, diversity and growth continue to be the hallmarks of Asian America. A record 23 million Asian Americans trace their roots to more than twenty countries in East and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.12 US-born descendants of Asian immigrants and multiracial Americans who identify as Asian American and at least one other racial category further contribute to this vast heterogeneity.
Another salient contributing factor to this incredible diversity has been the grouping of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders together in umbrella categories such as AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander), APIA (Asian and Pacific Islander American), and APA (Asian Pacific American) in specific community organizations, educational programs, and US-government-sponsored celebrations. According to the national organization Empowering Pacific Islander Communities, “Native Hawai’ians and Pacific Islanders” refers to persons whose origins are the original peoples of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. The grouping of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders has a history that is over four decades long. It is used, for example, in the celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May, which began as a US-government-sponsored celebration of Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week in 1979; the Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum, established in 1986, in order to improve the health of Asian Americans, Native Hawai’ians, and Pacific Islanders; New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute, which has featured public programs about issues facing Asian/Pacific/American communities since 1996; and the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center, founded in 2020 to document and combat recent surges of anti-Asian violence in the United States.
While I refer to these categories when referring to specific organizations and events that use them, this book focuses on Asian American histories. This focus is not meant to exclude Pacific Islander American histories. On the contrary, it acknowledges Pacific Islander American community leaders and scholars’ call to identify and learn about Pacific Islander studies on their own terms, which foreground their experiences of indigeneity, sovereignty, and language revitalization in the contexts of US militarism and occupation, and connect them with Pacific Islander communities in other parts of the world. As Tavae Samuelu, the executive director of Empowering Pacific Islander Communities, observes, “AAPI is incredibly ambitious. It contends to cover and speak for some of the largest regions in the world. . . . In some ways, marginalization and erasure feel inevitable.”13
Samuelu’s observation is also relevant for the term “Asian American,” which encompasses so many different communities. Asian Americans recorded the fastest population growth rate among all racial and ethnic groups in the United States between 2000 and 2019.14 This growth compels us to reimagine and reconsider our assumptions about US geography. In 2019, the following states had the largest Asian American populations: California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, Florida, Virginia, Hawai’i, Massachusetts.15 However, some of the most dramatic growth of the Asian American population took place in North Dakota and South Dakota, states that one might think would least likely have an Asian American presence.
Asian American diversity in the United States is compounded by the growing socioeconomic divide within as well as across specific Asian American ethnic groups. In a report about the incomes of whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians from 1970 to 2016, the Pew Research Center found that Asians had displaced Blacks as the group with the most income inequality.16 Regional and linguistic identities from their homelands, generational differences between immigrant and US-born generations, local variations based on where one lives in the United States, and significant class divides—to identify only some of the major differences among Asian Americans—have resulted in a multitude of Asian American histories.
This book’s title acknowledges the immensity of the challenge for one history to encompass this diversity and growth. I do not claim to incorporate every Asian American’s experience nor do I think I would be able to do so in one book. Rather, one of my major motivations for writing this book is to narrate and to integrate less well-known stories about Asian Americans that spotlight specific ethnic group and thematic experiences, such as Indian, Korean, Filipino, and Cambodian Americans, as well as mixed race and adopted Asian Americans, among others. While these groups are sometimes mentioned in history books that aim to synthesize Asian American experiences, they are typically less featured despite their long histories, large and growing numbers, and increasing visibility in American culture and society.
The book’s title, and its introduction, about the multiple origins of Asian American history, also suggest something else. There are many ways of making Asian American history. And, as with US history—which has featured the providential story of the arrival of the Puritans who established a city on the hill in New England, but now grapples with the tremendous diversity of historical actors and perspectives, and its contradictory and painful legacies of genocide, slavery, and imperialism—there is no singular origin story in Asian American history. My hope is that this book’s emphasis on multiple Asian American histories will inspire and generate new ones.
After having taught Asian American history in universities and colleges for over twenty years, I’ve also listened to students express frustration with the way the subject has been conceptualized. A major concern relates to chronology, specifically the way that Asian American history moves forward linearly, beginning at one origin point in the past, such as the discovery of gold in California in 1848, and then ending approximately in the 1980s with the Asian American Movement for social justice or the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees. The last week or perhaps even the final day of the Asian American history course concludes with scant attention to more contemporary issues. A similar pattern emerges in Asian American history books.
By contrast, this book features multiple temporal origins of Asian American history, beginning in 2020, with subsequent chapters moving back in time to other earlier points of origin. Each of this book’s chapters moves backward and forward in time. In doing so, they illuminate connections among historical events hitherto unseen, such as the 1875 legislative act that catalyzed the objectification and fetishization of Asian American women in the Atlanta murders in March 2021; and the continuity of historic alliances between Black and Asian Americans, from Frederick Douglass’s 1869 speech advocating for Chinese immigration to Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X’s friendship in the 1960s.
Finally, I write differently in these years of great hatred, taking distinct writing approaches as a way to address the current moment. In this book, I write in the first and second person as well as the more traditional third person. I include an interlude, which is typically used in a play or other artistic work, and not in a history book. And I share personal experiences. This different writing style emanates from my previous writing across genres of creative nonfiction, essay, and scholarly monograph. But it primarily stems from my deep concern that the general public still has very little knowledge of Asian American history. I believe that this has to do with the way we write about history. Only through storytelling can the dates, names, events, and ideas make an impression that resonates with the reader.
I write because the stakes are high. The potential for further erasure of our Asian American histories by this pandemic is in our midst. We have experienced so many losses. Asian American loved ones are among the over nine hundred thousand COVID-19 deaths in the United States. With small business closures, the tastes, smells, sights, and sounds of some Asian restaurants are no longer with us. After a yearlong surge in anti-Asian violence, we have lost a sense of safety in the United States.
And so I write in the way I wish to live: without fear. I write with the desire to see our nation move forward with a sense of collective purpose that emphasizes compassion and care for all. From my research and teaching, I’ve learned that Asian American histories can illuminate the way forward.