1919: Declaration of Independence

In April 1919, a Korean Congress, composed of delegates from the United States, Korea, and other parts of the world, gathered in Philadelphia, the “Cradle of Liberty.” They wanted Americans to know that on March 1st, Korean protestors in Seoul had declared their independence from Japan. That demonstration involved more than one million protestors shouting “Mansei!” (Long live Korea!) and sparked the March First Movement that spread throughout their country. Japan responded with a violent crackdown. Through news dispatches and private telegrams, delegates learned that tens of thousands of Korean revolutionists were arrested, and that thousands, including women and children, were killed or wounded. The Korean Congress in Philadelphia appealed to the American people for their support and sympathy: “We know you love justice; you also fought for liberty and democracy, and you stand for Christianity and humanity.”¹

In June 1919, the Honorable Manuel Quezon, president of the Philippine Senate and chairman of the Philippine Commission, extended “good will, respect, and gratitude” from the Filipino people before a congressional hearing on Philippine independence. Then he stated forcefully and clearly: “The Filipino people feel that the time has come when steps should be taken immediately by the Government of the United States for the recognition of the sovereignty of the Filipino people over their own country.”² By 1919, the United States had colonized the Philippines for two decades. Although Filipinos had declared the independence of the Philippines on June 12, 1898, after years of fighting against Spanish rule, the United States did not recognize the new republic. American colonizers replaced Spanish ones.

In April 1919, General Reginald Dyer led a group of British soldiers to Jallianwala Bagh, a public garden, in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, in India. Several thousand civilians had gathered to celebrate the Sikh New Year. General Dyer ordered his troops to fire without warning. Women and children were among the 379 dead and more than a thousand injured.³ Mohan Singh was present and saved himself by lying flat on the ground. The massacre deepened Singh’s resentment toward British rule and motivated him to pursue his college education in the United States in the 1920s.⁴ Indian students began coming to the United States in the late nineteenth century to further their education. Among a group holding wide-ranging political views, one contingent stood out for its fervent nationalism and organizing efforts to end British rule.

Imperialism and anti-imperialism shaped the early twentieth-century experiences of Korean, Filipino, and Asian Indians in the United States. However, like so much of Asian American history, these histories are not well known. It is not solely because more research and writing about them are necessary. It is also because these histories are erased and forgotten in multiple ways. Relevant historic places have been redeveloped for commercial use and subsequently bear no trace of what was once there. Plaques and monuments that pay tribute to US victories in war gloss over suffering and attempts at self-determination. The commemorations of related historical milestones are overshadowed by contemporary violence.

This chapter juxtaposes the presence and absence of these histories, and highlights community-driven ways of preserving them.

DREAMS OF INDEPENDENCE

The news of Japan’s colonization of Korea in 1910 devastated Koreans who were living and working in Hawai’i and the US mainland. One man recalled that they had left their home country to make money in America, “the land of prosperity,” but they had hoped to return. Now there was no going back:

The news of the fall of our country tore our hearts apart! Just thinking about it now gives me warm tears in my eyes. How we cried in our plantation fields and mining stations. And how we could not help running around like we had lost our minds.⁵

Before 1910, Japan had encroached on Korean sovereignty through a series of unequal treaties. The 1876 Treaty of Kanghwa gave Japan special trading privileges in Korea that were not reciprocated for Koreans in Japan. Japan forced Korea to sign a treaty that gave Japan the right to use Korea for military purposes in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) despite Korea’s declaration of neutrality.⁶ After Japan’s victory in the war, it established a protectorate over Korea in 1905.

Koreans in Hawai’i and the US mainland responded to the growing threat on Korea’s autonomy by organizing. In Hawai’i, Koreans created the Kongniphoe (Mutual Aid Society) and the Changanhoe (Self-Strengthening Society) in 1905, and the Noso Tongmaenghoe (Young and Old Alliance) in 1907. On the US mainland, they formed the Gongnip Hyeophoe (Cooperative Association) in Riverside, California, in 1905, and the Kongjehoe (Mutual Salvation Society) in New York, the Tongmaeng Sinhunghoe (Newly Rising Alliance) in Seattle, and Taedong Pokukhoe (All-Together Protecting the Nation Society) in San Francisco in 1907.⁷ Scholar Lili Kim has found that no fewer than twenty-four political organizations existed by 1907.

The early twentieth-century presence of Koreans in Hawai’i emerged from the interplay of sugar plantations’ recruitment of their labor, their own dreams of socioeconomic mobility, and their practice of Christianity as well as Japanese subjugation. Although a small group of approximately fifty Koreans had entered the United States as diplomats, merchants, and students between 1880 and 1902, larger migrations began in 1903. Approximately 7,400 Koreans migrated to Hawai’i between 1903 and 1905.⁸ They endured ten-hour days of backbreaking labor on sugar plantations, earning less than a dollar a day.

An estimated one thousand Koreans from Hawai’i moved to the US mainland between 1905 and 1907. Migration offered work opportunities in small shops, construction, and mining as well as agricultural work. Between 1906 to 1924, six hundred political refugees and a thousand “picture brides,” who had arranged marriages with earlier Korean migrants through photos and correspondence, entered the United States.⁹ Although relatively small in number, Koreans on the mainland encountered the anti-Asian violence experienced by other Asian groups, including Japanese.

In June 1913, eleven Koreans from Riverside arrived in the small rural town of Hemet, California. Two ranchers had hired them to pick apricots in their orchard after they were unable to find enough workers locally. When the Koreans arrived in Hemet by train, an angry mob of over a hundred white men surrounded them, threatened them with physical violence, and ordered them to leave the town. They assumed the laborers were Japanese. When the ranchers later explained that the workers were Korean, it did not make a difference to the mob, who claimed that Hemet was “a white man’s valley.”¹⁰

The 1913 incident in Hemet was part of a well-established pattern of the racial lumping together of “Asiatics,” but Koreans organized to resist this homogenization. They rejected a Japanese vice consul’s and the Japanese Association of Southern California’s attempts to intervene on their behalf and insisted on relying on their own Korean-led organizations and spokespeople to communicate with the US government. This nuance supports scholar Richard Kim’s argument that, while their economic independence was important, “Korea’s loss of national sovereignty to Japan between 1905 and 1910 would become the single most important issue for Korean immigrants.”¹¹

The numerous political organizations that emerged in the wake of Korea becoming a protectorate reflected the overseas Korean community’s fragmentation as well as nationalism. Their efforts to unify resulted in the formation of an umbrella organization called Hanin Hapsonghoe (United Korean Society), headquartered in Honolulu, and the establishment of the Korean National Association in San Francisco to provide social services as well as advocate for Korean independence. Nationalist leaders espoused distinct styles of leadership, and rivalries among them ensued. Pak Yong-man was a proponent of military training and established a small military training camp in Nebraska and a military school in Hawai’i. Syngman Rhee, who received a doctorate from Princeton University in 1910, emphasized education and diplomacy. Rhee became president of the Korean Provisional Government in exile from 1919 to 1939. Ahn Chang Ho’s philosophy stressed the cultivation of inner strength, communal consciousness, and ethical leadership. He served as president of the Korean National Association and founded the HeungSaDan (Young Korean Academy) in San Francisco in 1913 to develop Korean leaders.

Women dedicated themselves to the nationalist cause. Scholar Lili Kim’s research spotlights the leadership of Maria Hwang in the Korean Women’s Relief Society, which was founded in Hawai’i in 1919. Hwang immigrated to Hawai’i with her children, leaving her husband, who had a concubine, behind in Korea. She allegedly told her husband: “I can no longer live under these circumstances with you. I am taking our children to America and will shame you in the future. These children shall become educated and I shall become a wonderful person. You can remain as you are.”¹² Society members fundraised for the nationalist cause by selling homemade Korean food and copies of the 1919 Declaration of Korean Independence. They sent money to families who had members who had been killed or injured in the March First Movement. They also contributed funds to the Korean Provisional Government in exile, the Korean Commission in Washington, DC, and the Korean Independence Army in China. Similar organizations formed on the US mainland. The Korean Women’s Patriotic Society of California boycotted Japanese products and sold homemade soy sauce and bean paste.¹³

Lee Hee Kyung arrived in Honolulu as a picture bride in 1912, recognizing her husband through the photo she held in her hand. When she stepped into her new home, she realized that the new life she had imagined, including her dream of attending college, was not to be. However, she found community with other Korean immigrant women helping the poor and the sick through the Youngnam Puin Hoe, an extension of the Methodist Society. Before leaving Korea, Lee had encountered Methodist missionaries in her hometown of Taegu and was inspired by their ancestors’ stories of fleeing from religious and political oppression in their home countries and coming to the United States. In the 1910s, Youngnam Puin Hoe members, like so many other Koreans in Hawai’i, became more involved in the Korean nationalist cause. They raised enough funds so that Lee could return to Korea and participate in the March 1 demonstration in Seoul. In a memoir about her parents, author Margaret K. Pai writes:

How quickly and brutally the Japanese suppressed the revolutionists! During the parade in Seoul a young woman’s hand, proudly waving the Korean flag, was cut off by a Japanese sword. But before the flag touched the ground, she caught it with her other hand. More than 2,500 Koreans were thrown in prison in Seoul alone that day. Among the women activists incarcerated was my mother, Lee Hee Kyung.¹⁴

Religion, most notably Christianity, was a distinctive feature of the Korean independence movement in the United States as well as Korea. Christianity became a major religion in Korea in the nineteenth century as a result of American missionary efforts there as well as Koreans’ embrace of the religion and the educational mobility it offered to women and lower classes.¹⁵ Mission schools were sites where people could exchange ideas and views. This social and political element would continue in the United States. Scholars Edward T. Chang and Woo Sung Han observe: “Korean immigrant churches not only provided spiritual salvation, but more importantly a place to discuss and strategize the independence of Korea.”¹⁶

When the Korean Congress drafted “An Appeal to America” in Philadelphia in April 1919, they framed their appeal on behalf of their religious brethren who desired freedom:

On March 1st of this year some three million men, mostly of the educated class composed of Christians, Heaven Worshipers, Confucians, Buddhists, students of mission schools, under the leadership of the pastors of native Christian churches, declared their independence from Japan and formed a provisional government on the border of Manchuria.¹⁷

They linked American values with their own moral cause: “Our aim is freedom from militaristic autocracy; our object is democracy for Asia; our hope is universal Christianity.”¹⁸

The US Congress responded cautiously to the Korean declaration of independence. In October 1919, Senate and House resolutions expressed sympathy with the Korean people’s aspirations. However, as scholar Richard Kim observes, they were primarily symbolic gestures that “fell far short of official recognition of the newly formed Korean government.”¹⁹ What many Koreans, Americans, and even Japanese did not know was that in the secret 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement, the United States had agreed not to interfere with Japan’s interests in Korea in exchange for Japan’s recognition of US control of the Philippines.²⁰

After the US victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War, the United States and Spain negotiated the Treaty of Paris, in which Spain ceded the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States for twenty million dollars. Although the United States entered the Spanish-American War in support of Cuban independence from Spanish rule, the war took place in the Philippines as well as Cuba. It presented the United States an opportunity to build an overseas empire in the Pacific. Economic and military objectives—such as access to overseas markets, especially the China market, to sell American manufactured goods, and the strategic use of overseas colonies as refueling stations for the US Navy as well as sources for raw materials—intertwined with moral and racial justifications. The popular nineteenth-century ideology of Manifest Destiny, which emphasized the divine right of white Americans to expand westward, justified the violence of the Mexican-American War (1846–48), the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), and the overthrow of the Hawai’ian monarchy (1893).

On December 21, 1898, President William McKinley issued the “Proclamation of Benevolent Assimilation,” emphasizing that the United States came to the Philippines as friends and not as conquerors. In an 1899 speech, McKinley claimed that “there was nothing to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”²¹ British poet Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden” infamously encouraged Americans to colonize the Philippines and “your new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.”²² Like other Western nations, the United States became a world power by joining the race for empire.

US colonization of the Philippines belied Filipino dreams of independence from over three centuries of Spanish rule. Their dreams were born out of Spanish corruption and the abuses of the Spanish friars who ruled the colony. A nationalist consciousness also emerged from Filipino reformist demands for fair representation in the Cortes Españolas (Spanish Courts), and the literature written by Filipino educated elites, such as Jose Rizal, who imagined the archipelago as one nation. The Philippine Revolution against Spain began in 1896.

Initially confident of US support of the Filipino cause, nationalist leader Emilio Aguinaldo declared the independence of the Philippines on June 12, 1898, in Kawit, in the province of Cavite. In September 1898, a constitutional convention met in Malolos, the capital of the new republic. The Philippine Republic was officially inaugurated on January 23, 1899, with Emilio Aguinaldo as its new president. However, the United States did not recognize the new republic.

In February 1899, when Private William Grayson shot at a group of Filipino soldiers in Manila, it ignited the Philippine-American War. The war was brutal. Clashes between Americans and Filipinos on the island of Samar in the central region of the Philippines led to a Filipino guerrilla attack that killed forty-eight American soldiers. Brigadier General Jacob Smith ordered American soldiers to take no prisoners and to kill and burn, stating: “The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.”²³ US interrogation tactics included the “water cure,” which is now known as waterboarding. The policy of concentrating civilians in camps led to malnutrition, overcrowding, and tainted water supplies. An estimated 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants died, and several hundred thousand Filipino civilians died from famine and disease as well as violence.²⁴ A cruel irony is that the United States justified its possession of the Philippines through claims of bringing public health to the archipelago. Yet, the war resulted in a cholera epidemic that claimed 150,000 to 200,000 lives. The official years of the Philippine-American War are 1899–1902, but armed conflict continued between American forces and the Moro people in the southern Philippines in the early 1900s until the Battle of Bud Bagsak in 1913.²⁵

In the United States, the subject of colonizing the Philippines was highly controversial. The Anti-Imperialist League formed in 1898 to oppose US annexation of the Philippines for moral, racial, legal, and economic reasons. Prominent anti-imperialists included writer Mark Twain, scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, activist Jane Addams, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, Senator George Frisbie Hoar, and writer and Presbyterian minister Henry Van Dyke. In 1905, Twain penned “The War Prayer” to protest US military intervention in the Philippines. The antiwar text (which some have called a short story or prose poem) criticizes the blind patriotism and religious fervor that accompanies war. It features a minister who leads the people in a passionate prayer to protect their noble young soldiers in battle, but then an aged stranger interrupts him and begins articulating the part that is prayed for “silently” and “unthinkingly.”²⁶ That part consists of pleas for the violent deaths of their opponents, the destruction of their homes, the grief of their widows and children, and other devastating, often unacknowledged, impacts of war. However, Americans were unable to read “The War Prayer” until well after the Philippine-American War had ended. Harper’s Bazaar rejected it for publication, and “The War Prayer” was not published until 1923, thirteen years after Twain’s death.

Pro-imperialists employed multiple strategies to counter anti-colonial criticism. One was to promote benevolent assimilation policies through educational opportunities. In addition to establishing a system of Americanized education in the Philippines at the elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels, the US-established Philippine Commission created the pensionado program in 1903. The program sponsored promising Filipino students, many of them from elite families, to further their education in the United States. While most of the students, known as pensionados, were men, they included the feminist historian Encarnacion Alzona, the first Filipino woman to receive a doctoral degree, which she earned in history at Columbia University.²⁷ Upon their return, the pensionados assumed positions in the colonial government, education, and business, exemplifying the benefits of American tutelage.

Another strategy was to celebrate America’s new possessions through popular cultural forms, such as world’s fairs, that integrated education, commerce, and entertainment.²⁸ At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, over a thousand people—Tinguians, Bagobos, Bontoc Igorots, Suyoc Igorots, Negritos, Mangyans, Visayans, and Moros, among other groups—were displayed in a “living exhibition.”²⁹ The exposition celebrated US expansion westward and overseas. It rationalized US imperialism through its representation of Philippine indigenous peoples at the bottom of a racial hierarchy.

One of the fair’s most popular exhibits was the “Igorot Village” in the forty-seven-acre “Philippine Reservation.” In 2004, on the centennial of the St. Louis World’s Fair, Mia Abeya, whose Igorot grandfather was among those on display, reflected on the fair’s colonial narrative: “They brought them to the fair to show to the world that here are people who need our help. They need us to develop them. Look at how they dress themselves, look at how they dance, just look at how they live.”³⁰ In this narrative, one of the key examples of native savagery was the Igorot practice of dog eating. Abeya noted that they did so occasionally for ceremonial purposes. However, Igorots were fed the animals daily to give fairgoers the opportunity to witness this practice. “They made them butcher dogs, which is really abusing the culture of the Igorots,” Abeya said.³¹

The passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 abolished virtually all Asian immigration to the United States, with one exception: Filipinos. As a result of US annexation, they became “US nationals,” which meant they could immigrate to the United States but were ineligible to become US citizens. Filipino immigration significantly increased after 1924. Agricultural industries sought cheap labor, but Filipinos had dreams of their own. These dreams were not necessarily of their own choosing. What choice do you have when faced with famine, disease, and increasing land dispossession? Yet, stories about Abraham Lincoln and other prominent Americans with humble beginnings, which Filipinos had read in their American schoolbooks, infused their imaginations. They observed the socioeconomic mobility of the returning pensionados who had studied in the United States and realized that the trajectories of colonialism were multidirectional. The geography of their own hopes expanded toward the United States.

By the 1920s, when Mohan Singh decided to leave India and further his education in the United States, Indian students had been attending US colleges and universities for several decades. They studied engineering, medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing in institutions across the United States, from Columbia and Harvard in the Northeast to midwestern universities in Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. However, most of them attended institutions on the West Coast, such as the University of Washington, Oregon Agricultural College, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley.³²

Although the students held a wide range of political views, some became fervent advocates of Indian independence from British rule. Revolutionary intellectual and student leaders included Har Dayal and Taraknath Das. Har Dayal worked as a lecturer of Indian philosophy at Stanford University and lived in one of the Indian student hostels in Berkeley. During a meeting with Indian students, he called on them to engage in ending British rule: “Anybody can be a Collector, or an Engineer, or a Barrister, or a Doctor. What Indian [sic] needs today is warriors of freedom.”³³ Taraknath Das became involved in revolutionary activity while in college in Calcutta. He evaded police by fleeing to Japan, and subsequently studied in the United States and worked in Canada. Das completed BA and MA degrees at the University of Washington in Seattle. He helped found the Hindusthan Association of America to support Indian students, as well as its journal, the Hindusthanee Student, which documented their activities and gave advice regarding education and employment opportunities.³⁴

Students’ experiences of racial discrimination on the West Coast intensified their interest in Indian independence. Although some students came from middle-class families, their socioeconomic privilege did not protect them from racial discrimination. Restaurants refused to serve them. College student clubs denied them membership. Historian Joan Jensen notes that hotels and boardinghouses, including the YMCA, refused to take them in, and recounts the story of one student who spent a cold winter night in a Southern Pacific depot in Northern California after being turned away from a dozen hotels.³⁵

Between 1912 and 1913, a coalition of Bengali and Punjabi intellectuals and students and Punjabi agricultural workers formed the Ghadar Party. They overcame linguistic, religious, and regional differences as they aimed to overthrow the British Empire through armed revolution. Scholar Seema Sohi writes that their shared experiences—from being pushed out of India because of colonialism to enduring humiliation as degraded colonial subjects around the world to encountering anti-Asian racism and discrimination in Canada as well as the United States—created an “anti-colonial consciousness” that was “inseparable from attaining racial equality abroad.”³⁶

On November 1, 1913, the Ghadar Party launched its first newspaper, Ghadar, declaring that “today there begins in foreign lands, but in our country’s language, a war against the English Raj.”³⁷ They printed several thousand issues in Urdu and Gurmukhi in their headquarters, the Yugantar Ashram (Advent of a New Age Ashram), on Hill Street in San Francisco. Members memorized over a thousand subscribers’ names to avoid creating a paper trail that could be used by the British government against them. Indians who engaged in anti-colonial activity overseas were targets of British and North American political surveillance.³⁸

While Dayal authored many of the initial articles, Kartar Singh Sarabha ran the printing operation. Sarabha arrived in San Francisco in 1912 intent on freeing India from British rule. After a relatively short detention of three days, he passed the inspection at the Angel Island Immigration Station, thanks to his English-language proficiency, some financial resources, and plans to study electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. However, when whites called him a “damn Hindu,” it shocked and humiliated him. Like many other Indian students during that time, Sarabha found that these experiences deepened his commitment to Indian independence, which he expressed through impassioned lectures and poetry. Sarabha helped build the Ghadar Party’s coalition by traveling among Indian migrant laborers and farmers in rural areas to fundraise for the nationalist cause.³⁹

Farmers Jawala Singh and Wasakha Singh were among those who donated generously to the Ghadar Party. In 1912, they founded the Stockton Gurdwara, the first Sikh temple in the United States. The Stockton Gurdwara became a hub for the spiritual, social, and political life of South Asian migrants. South Asians from across the West Coast visited the gurdwara to see one another a few times a year for special holidays and festivals. It also served as a center for the Ghadar Party’s activities. Jawala Singh served as the first Granthi, or ceremonial reader, of the Guru Granth Sahib, or Holy Book. Also known as the “Potato King,” because of his success in farming this crop, Jawala Singh used his financial resources to sponsor scholarships for students in India to attend the University of California, providing them with room and board in a house he purchased in Berkeley. In 1913, he became a vice president of the Ghadar Party and recruited Punjabi farmworkers in California to return to India to fight against the British government.

Between 1914 and 1918, the Ghadar Party mobilized nearly eight thousand Indians from North America and other parts of the world to return to India in order to join the struggle for independence. While they had some success with recruiting Indians in the diaspora to their cause, they were unable to build a broader coalition with their compatriots in India. Furthermore, British intelligence thwarted their revolutionary plans, arresting hundreds of independence fighters even before they arrived in India.⁴⁰ Kartar Singh Sarabha made it back to the Punjab to participate in an armed uprising on February 21, 1915. But government authorities arrested him and sentenced him to death. Before his hanging on November 16, 1915, he wrote one last poem, titled “On the Way to the Gallows.” In it, he reaffirmed his devotion to India even if it meant sacrificing his own life. For even in death, he proclaimed, “I will attain / A life of eternity.”⁴¹

British repression of Ghadarites subdued the party’s activities. However, one of its legacies, the Stockton Gurdwara, continued to flourish as a social and political hub for South Asian Americans of different faiths, political views, and generations. While it was the first Sikh house of worship established in the United States, it also served Muslims, Hindus, and the Catholic wives of South Asian immigrant pioneers. Before Dalip Singh Saund became the first Asian, Sikh, and Indian American elected to serve in the US Congress in 1956, he served as a secretary of the Stockton Gurdwara.

The gurdwara also created a sense of community among the second generation. As scholar Karen Leonard writes, “To most members of the second generation, however, the Stockton temple was where one met ‘other Hindu kids.’ Asked about it, one woman responded, ‘The Stockton temple, that’s where we met the Khan kids every year, coming over from Phoenix to pick peaches.’“⁴² Since many members of the second generation were Punjabi Mexican, the gurdwara was also a touchstone of memories of their Punjabi fathers—for example, how they sent money regularly to support the temple even when their families were in need. When a descendant recalled an event held there in connection with her father’s passing, she described it as a reunion.⁴³ It was a reunion on multiple levels, the coming together of family members, of rarely seen friends, and of a historic community.

ERASING, FORGETTING, OVERSHADOWING

Asian American histories of imperialism and anti-imperialism are erased and forgotten in multiple ways. One way relates to the difference that historical perspective makes, specifically the power that comes from who gets to tell the story. If you read that the surrender of Japan in World War II led to the “liberation of Korea” in 1945; that the United States “granted Philippine independence” in 1946; and that the British passage of the 1947 Indian Independence Act “granted Indian independence” and “partitioned British India” into the dominions of India and Pakistan, consider this question: Who are the major actors in these stories? Imperial nations can continue to occupy center stage even in the histories of decolonization. These narratives can be found in memorials and plaques such as the one installed in the Minnesota State Capitol Rotunda in 1948, which commemorated the service of soldiers who “battled to free the oppressed peoples of the Philippine Islands, who suffered under the despotic rule of Spain.”⁴⁴

The erasing and forgetting of these histories are also a consequence of the inaccessibility of historical evidence. Who gets to write history, and which primary source materials are collected, preserved, and made accessible, are often intertwined. Hence, activists and scholars Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio introduce their book on the Philippine-American War, aptly titled The Forbidden Book, with the following:

To the victor goes the privilege of writing history, the glorification of its conquests, and the silencing of the conquered. The history of the Philippine-American War is amassed in volumes of newspaper accounts, military reports, government documents, autobiographies, biographies, and letters by American soldiers. All, however, are part of The Forbidden Book buried in antique collections, libraries, archives, vaults, and private drawers.⁴⁵

Historic places help remind us of the past. However, sometimes they are redeveloped, leaving no trace of what transpired there. Such was the case with Pachappa Camp in Riverside, California. The site of an early Koreatown founded by Ahn Chang Ho in 1904, Pachappa Camp (also known as Dosan’s Republic) was home to a Korean immigrant community of families, women, and children. Many of them worked in the local citrus groves and participated in various independence-related activities that took place in Riverside, such as the 1911 Korean National Association of North America convention.

Residents also established a Korean mission and a hakyo, or Korean school. While the children also attended American schools, they encountered verbal and physical harassment there as other children sang, “Ching Chong Chinaman, sitting on a wall, along came a white man, and chopped his head off,” and then touched their necks to mime chopping their heads off or tackled them.⁴⁶ They learned to hide their kimchee and rice lunch boxes from non-Korean classmates to avoid further embarrassment. By contrast, Pachappa Camp’s hakyo provided a space to learn about their Korean heritage with pride. Ahn Chang Ho often instructed the children: “Be ready, prepare yourself for the coming independence fight for our country!”⁴⁷

The Great Freeze of 1913 devastated Riverside’s citrus industry and led to an exodus of many Korean residents to Central and Northern California cities. According to city directories from the mid-1920s, sites formerly occupied by Koreans were now vacant or inhabited by people of Japanese and Mexican descent. By the 1940s, the Korean immigrant pioneers had all but disappeared. Then, in the 1950s, crews bulldozed the area for commercial redevelopment. Oil and gas companies moved in, and their cinderblock buildings and parking lots dotted the landscape. Scholar Edward T. Chang observes:

Due to development and the physical erasure of Pachappa Camp’s built environment, Riverside lost sight of its historic Korean community. For years after the camp’s demolition, an insurance map of Riverside, city directories, and a rare newspaper article remained the only written sources about Riverside’s Koreatown in the English language, limiting the larger public’s knowledge about the significance of the site.⁴⁸

Sometimes historic places remain, but their commemorations are overshadowed by other events. In 2012, the year of the Stockton Gurdwara’s centennial, writer Bhira Baukhaus reflected on the significance of the gurdwara’s history in relation to devastating hate violence that took place in Wisconsin that same year. A gunman with ties to a white supremacist movement shot and killed six Sikh worshippers in a temple in Oak Creek. What did he see as he stepped through the door and started firing? Baukhaus writes that “presumably he saw the temple as a frightening symbol of otherness.”⁴⁹ When she first encountered images of the shooting on television, she saw the faces of her own brothers and sisters, her aunties and uncles.

Unlike the Stockton Gurdwara, the construction of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin was completed more recently, in 2007. However, like the Stockton Gurdwara, the temple serves as a social and cultural hub, housing in its brick building a library, a school for adults and children, and a childcare area. The site also provides Punjabi language instruction, a mentorship program, and accommodations for visiting ragu jathas (priests) from around the world. The Sikh Temple also collaborates with the group Rangla Punjab to organize folk dance and popular music events, featuring gidha, bhangra, and other cultural activities.⁵⁰

Backhaus has a black-and-white photograph of the Stockton Gurdwara that was taken decades after its founding. The photo includes her mother, sister, brothers, cousins, and aunts as well as herself. Her family attended services there for ordinary and major celebrations, like those commemorating births of the gurus who established Sikhism beginning in the fifteenth century. She described the Sikh pioneers who crossed a vast ocean and had the vision to build the gurdwara as “brave.”⁵¹ At this concurrence of a centennial celebration of South Asian American resilience and a contemporary act of American racist violence, Baukhaus commented on how far Sikh communities in California had come in terms of younger generations pursuing their American ambitions while preserving their South Asian heritage. Yet, that progress is tempered by the question she herself continues to get from people: Why can’t they assimilate more? While Baukhaus does not have a simple answer to that question, she proffers what is at stake when our histories are erased:

But I do know this: to wipe away what has come before, who we have been over the centuries, also means to forget who our own mothers and fathers were. It means that how they conducted their lives—the families they raised, the homes they built—didn’t matter. It denies us that basic human impulse, to remember their stories, the unique timbre of their voices. It would be as if they had never existed at all.⁵²

DOCUMENTING, REMEMBERING, ILLUMINATING

Community leaders, researchers, and descendants have used multiple strategies to document, remember, and illuminate these forgotten histories. In 2017, on the fifth-year anniversary of the mass shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, Sikh community leader Mandeep Kaur wrote that “for most Americans across our country, this act of terror has been largely forgotten. On the other hand, Sikh Americans will never forget where we were when we learned the news, and will always remember the lives irrevocably altered by this tragedy.”⁵³

Grief persists, but so too does renewal. Weeks after losing his mother, Harpreet Singh Saini became the first Sikh American to testify in front of the US Senate. His advocacy helped convince the Justice Department to begin tracking hate crimes against Sikhs and other religious minorities who were previously unrepresented in federal hate crime data.

Prabhjot Singh was only twelve years old when he hid in the basement during the shooting and later discovered his slain father. Five years later, he graduated from high school and was about to begin college. Previously, Singh thought that if his father were still alive and had wanted to return to live in India, he would have considered joining him. Encouragement from relatives emboldened Prabhjot to remain in the United States, as did community support. A few days after the shooting, Singh returned with his mother and sisters to the temple and encountered hundreds of people standing vigil with candles. He believed that they were sending his family this message: “We know what happened, and it should not have happened.”⁵⁴

Like Prabhjot Singh, Pardeep Kaleka lost his father on August 5, 2012, in the Oak Creek mass shooting, and was moved when so many people of diverse backgrounds came together to speak “this universal language of empathy.”⁵⁵ The tragic loss gave him a new purpose in life: to keep people together and help them navigate different languages, customs, and cultures. In 2018, Kaleka and former white supremacist Arno Michaelis published their book The Gift of Our Wounds, a collaboration that explores the power of forgiveness. In 2019, Kaleka became the first non-white, non-Christian executive director of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee. He believes that his Sikh faith illuminates a way forward:

There is a saying in Sikhism, Charhdi Kala which means “we move in relentless optimism.” Regardless of hardships in life I’m optimistic about the future. Charhdi Kala and compassion go hand in hand. Some people think of compassion as offering forgiveness and all is forgiven, but I think of it as a process, in other words I attach a purpose to what’s happening in life and appreciate the good things when they come. On August 5th, there was a purpose to what happened. Someone came to our temple trying to divide us, saying that we didn’t belong and that we weren’t wanted in his country. With Charhdi Kala the purpose of our response is to reach out, to include the other and say this will not happen again.⁵⁶

In the mid-1990s, Minnesota’s Filipino American community began a campaign to correct the historical inaccuracies of the Spanish-American War plaque in the State Capitol. In 2002, the Philippine Study Group together with other Filipino American organizations convinced the Minnesota legislature to install new text acknowledging that the Spanish-American War “was fought to defeat Spain, not to free Filipinos,” and that, soon after Spain’s surrender to the United States in 1898, Filipinos fought unsuccessfully for their independence against the United States in the Philippine-American War.⁵⁷

The publication of Ignacio, de la Cruz, Emmanuel, and Toribio’s The Forbidden Book presents another way to resist the cultural amnesia regarding the Philippine-American War and the inaccessibility of related primary source materials: curate and publicize your own collection. The Forbidden Book features Ignacio’s compilation of over four hundred political cartoons related to the war along with Emmanuel’s collection of editorial cartoons. Many of these cartoons are difficult to look at because they portray peoples from the Philippines, Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Samoa, China, Egypt, India, South Africa, and Sudan in buffoonish, savage, and childlike ways. For example, the 1899 political cartoon “The White Man’s Burden (Apologies to Kipling)” depicts Uncle Sam and John Bull, the popular national personifications of the United States and England, carrying these peoples up a steep mountain of “barbarism,” “ignorance,” and “vice” in order to reach “civilization” at the apex.⁵⁸ However, confronting the these cartoons reveals an ugly truth: the Philippine-American War is not solely about the conflict between Filipinos and Americans but is also just as much about the dehumanizing impact of imperialist relations throughout the world.

Another 1899 political cartoon illuminates the connection between US continental expansion and Philippine annexation through a message sent by an “American Indian” to a “Filipino”: “Be good, or you will be dead!”⁵⁹ The coauthors of The Forbidden Book note that some of the same US military personnel who subjugated indigenous peoples in the United States—such as Lieutenant Colonel Adna Chaffee, a veteran fighter in the US Indian wars against the Apache, Comanche, and Cheyenne—played leading roles in the Philippine-American War.⁶⁰ Furthermore, US conquest of American indigenous peoples through land dispossession and assimilation policies provided ideological justification and legal and institutional models to colonize the Philippines.

The perspectives of Philippine peoples are integral to histories of imperialism. Antonio S. Buangan is a descendant of the Suyoc people from northern Benguet province. In 1904, twenty-five of his Suyoc ancestors lived for several months in the “Igorotte Village” at the St. Louis World’s Fair.⁶¹ Buangan writes that, even a century later, “it was a novel idea for many that the Igorot who went to St. Louis even had descendants at all.”⁶² He decided to conduct his own research on the Suyoc, who had been dehumanized as “objects” of display, with the goal of lifting “those adventurous men, women, and children of my Suyoc great-grandparents’ generation out of the anonymity and the obscurity into which they have fallen.”⁶³ Buangan conducted archival research at the Missouri Historical Society (MHS) Museum and Library. Encountering large and detailed photographs of Tugmina (his Aunt Pacita’s father’s wife) and Oblika (his wife’s father’s first cousin) was emotionally moving:

Seeing this large set of my relatives’ and ancestors’ photographs all spread out in that large room at the MHS was an unforgettable experience. For a moment, spirits of the Suyoc people all seemed to be speaking at once, impatiently scolding and asking me, “Where have you been all this time?” My first wish was to offer them some rice wine, for that was what my parents did at home when they summoned their ancestors or felt their presence. Had I known what I was going to find in St. Louis, I would have brought an appropriate libation.⁶⁴

Buangan shared copies of these photographs with other descendants and, as a result of this communal exchange, learned the names of more Suyoc individuals who had gone to the fair: Buli-e and Bayongasan. Buli-e’s daughters and Bayongasan’s daughter-in-law were thrilled to see the images, remarking “Y a sanay si ama!” (Oh my, it is father!) The excitement of these findings spurred further research among descendants. Yolanda Lacpap Morita (granddaughter of Buli-e) of Tacoma, Washington, sent Buangan a 1904 newspaper article regarding the arrival of 235 Filipinos aboard the steamship USS Shawmut in Tacoma. They were on their way to the fair. Buangan then conducted research at the Tacoma Public Library and found the passenger manifest.

Buangan acknowledges that his research is just beginning, but there is one thing that he knows for sure: the Suyoc people were not a “primitive” group, even though their representation at the fair suggested otherwise. The Suyoc people were skilled in extracting and refining gold and copper. They frequently walked to the coast to trade. In the early 1900s, they met American soldiers who had come to their homeland’s mountains to prospect for gold. Some Americans married Suyoc women, who were also known for their skills in mining. These interactions exposed the Suyoc people to the possibility of seeing faraway places, such as St. Louis. In 1904, as they boarded a US steamship on their way to the world’s fair, they embarked on the adventure of crossing the expanse of the Pacific Ocean and of visiting lands that they had never traversed before. Among them were Tugmina, Oblika, Buli-e, and Bayongasan. Their individual names are important. “To be ‘named’ brings ancestors back to their community,” explains Buangan.⁶⁵

On March 23, 2017, the city of Riverside held a plaque ceremony to designate the location of Pachappa Camp as a “City Point of Cultural Interest.” Scholar Edward T. Chang worked with the city’s historic preservation officers, the mayor and city staff, and a coalition of community supporters—including Ahn Chang Ho’s youngest son, Ralph Ahn; the Save Our Chinatown Committee; and the Dosan Ahn Chang Ho Memorial Foundation—to obtain the designation, a process that took almost two years. Signage in English and Korean documents that independence activist Ahn Chang Ho founded the Korean American settlement of Pachappa Camp in 1905.⁶⁶

Ralph Ahn sustains the history and memories of this era through editing the newsletters and emceeing the annual gatherings of the Korean American Pioneer Descendants (KAPD) Society. At these gatherings, the descendants and newer generations honor family and community members who participated in the Korean independence struggle. I have had the privilege of attending several of these events because my husband’s paternal grandparents, Choi Neung-ik and Kim Chung Shook (also known as Frances Moon Kim), were independence activists and immigrant pioneers. The KAPD newsletter’s 2019 issue, commemorating the centennial of Korea’s declaration of independence, highlighted Kim’s participation in the March First Movement, and her work for the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai before she immigrated to the United States.⁶⁷ During his childhood, my husband, Greg Choy, knew very little about his grandmother, whom he affectionately called Nanny, and her incredible life history as an independence activist. It was not until many years later as Greg earned his doctorate in English, specializing in US multicultural literature and Asian American studies and researching Korean American newspapers with scholar S. E. Solberg, that he started to learn about this history from his father and other relatives.

Some activists were able to return to Korea. Ahn Chang Ho traveled to many parts of the world to organize support for Korean independence and helped establish the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai until the Japanese arrested him in 1932. After having been imprisoned and tortured, Ahn died in a Korean hospital in 1938. His wife, Helen Ahn, and their children (Philip, Philson, Susan, Soorah, and Ralph) were living in Los Angeles. Their home was a gathering place for the early Korean American community. Today the Ahn House is the site of the University of Southern California’s Korean Studies Institute.

Many Korean immigrant pioneers were unable to return to their homeland in their lifetime, and were buried in the United States. However, the Korean government officially recognized some of them as patriots and re-interred their remains in Korean national cemeteries. One of these patriots, Choi Neung-ik, is my husband Greg’s grandfather. Choi immigrated to the United States in 1916. He enrolled in the Willows Aviation School, a combat pilot-training unit for the Korean independence movement established in 1920 in Glenn County, California. Choi later served as a representative of the Korean National Revolutionary Corps.⁶⁸ He is now buried in Daejeon National Cemetery.

In 2010, thanks to the kindness of Phillip Choi—a former South Korean ambassador and Greg’s cousin, once removed—our family was able to visit Choi Neung-ik’s gravesite and see Greg’s father’s name, Howard Choy, which is carved into the gravestone. Howard’s name, situated amid a list of key events in Choi’s life, is the only part of the gravestone written in English; the rest is engraved in Hangul. As I observed “Uncle” Phillip and Greg reminiscing about Choi Neung-ik’s life history while our children Maya and Louis talked with their cousin Jay, I remember feeling awash in gratitude. We were finally able to learn more about our family’s history, their hopes and sacrifices that spanned multiple nations, cultures, and generations. We are still learning. The life histories of our ancestors have so much to teach us.