1875: Homage

Xiaojie Tan’s daughter Jami described her mom as “petite and fierce!”¹ Daoyou Feng had hoped to return to her hometown in Guangdong and open a business.² Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez frequently sang along to gospel music while she worked.³ Paul Andre Michels was a good-hearted, regular guy.⁴ Soon Chung Park’s favorite things included towering sunflowers, ceramic owls, and champagne.⁵ Hyun Jung Grant was a former elementary school teacher who loved to dance.⁶ Suncha Kim was proud to become a US citizen, and her naturalization ceremony was one of the happiest days of her life.⁷ Yong Ae Yue denounced racism and called out Asian friends who expressed racism toward Black people.⁸

I write this chapter in their memory. On March 16, 2021, they were killed at three different spas in North Georgia. Six of them were Asian American women.

The board of directors of the Association for Asian American Studies, a professional research and teaching hub founded in 1979, expressed our collective grief and rage: “These murders follow a long history of racist, misogynist violence against Asian women, a history with which we are both professionally and personally familiar.”⁹

Their statement resonated with me on a professional and personal level. Professionally, I had done research on the Chicago mass murder of eight female nurses—Gloria Davy, Suzanne Farris, Merlita Gargullo, Mary Ann Jordan, Patricia Matusek, Valentina Pasion, Nina Schmale, and Pamela Wilkening—by Richard Speck in 1966. Two of his victims—Gargullo and Pasion—were Filipino nurses. The lone survivor, Corazon Amurao, was also a Filipino nurse and the prosecution’s star witness. However, most Americans remember the name of the perpetrator, not the women who died nor the brave woman who testified against him.¹⁰

Personally, while growing up in New York City, I had learned from a young age to hold my keys in my fist during certain situations, such as walking alone or taking the subway at night, in case I needed to use them as a weapon. I cannot recall how I learned to do this, only that it had become second nature, an unspoken rule of our society’s normalization of sexual violence.

After the Atlanta murders, Asian American studies scholars, including me, spoke to many journalists. It wasn’t an easy thing to do in a time of mourning and anguish. However, having researched and written about sensationalized mass murders, I’ve learned that featuring the voices and analyses of Asian American women matters, and I hoped it would make a difference.

One of the questions I was asked repeatedly by journalists was what I thought about the perpetrator’s claim that race had nothing to do with the mass shooting. The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Captain Jay Baker had communicated to the press, “He claims it was not racially motivated. He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places. And it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”¹¹

When asked this question, I often wondered:

Why should perpetrators of violence dictate the conversation?

Yet, I thought to myself that if his claims were part of the public discourse, then so too should the insights of Asian American women. I responded: “Killing Asian American women to eliminate a man’s temptation speaks to the history of the objectification of Asian and Asian American women as variations of the Asian temptress, the dragon ladies and the lotus blossoms, whose value is only in relation to men’s fantasies and desires.”¹²

REPRESENTATIONS OF US

The history of the objectification of Asian American women is almost 150 years old. One key origin point is an 1875 immigration law known as the Page Act, which prohibited the transport of unfree laborers and women brought for “immoral purposes” to the United States. It created a system of enforcement that conflated Asian women’s migration with prostitution. This system obligated the US consul-general or consul residing at ports of embarkation in “China, Japan, or any Oriental country” to “ascertain whether such immigrant has entered into a contract or agreement for a term of service . . . for lewd and immoral purposes.”¹³ Scholar Kerry Abrams points out that this system treated Asian women differently from European women, as “American consuls in foreign ports had an obligation to screen Chinese and Japanese women before they even left their home countries, and refuse to grant them an immigration certificate if they suspected them of prostitution, a hurdle not imposed on immigrants from other ports, such as those in Europe.”¹⁴

Historian Mae Ngai explains, “The way the law was written, you had to certify that you weren’t a prostitute.”¹⁵ She asks us to consider:

How do you prove a negative?

Although the Page Act applied to “any Oriental country,” it was enforced primarily against Chinese women. As early as the 1850s, the California legislature had attempted to exclude Chinese immigrants by levying heavy fines on steamship companies for transporting unmarried Chinese women, who were assumed to be “lewd and debauched.”¹⁶ The enmity directed at Chinese women was heightened by the prevailing nineteenth-century discourses that linked Chinese female bodies with disease. In 1870, Senator Cornelius Cole made clear that continued Chinese female immigration posed a physical as well as moral danger: “When I look upon a certain class of Chinese who come to this land—I mean the females—who are the most undesirable of population, who spread disease and moral death among our white population, I ask myself the question, whether or not there is a limit to this class of immigrants?”¹⁷

Who represents you?

Before becoming a senator in 1867, Cornelius Cole had served as a representative from California from 1863 to 1865. The author of the Page Act, Horace F. Page, had also served as a representative from California for five consecutive two-year terms from 1873 to 1883. He dedicated his political career to drafting and advocating for anti-Chinese legislation. Prior to the passage of the Page Act, he had sponsored four anti-Chinese bills and three House resolutions that failed to pass. A key obstacle in his legislative path was the Burlingame-Seward Treaty of 1868 between the United States and China. It promised the Chinese the right to free immigration and travel within the United States.¹⁸ Page’s emphasis on excluding immoral women and unfree laborers, supposedly for the purpose of protecting the Western states’ moral integrity, enabled him to circumvent the treaty with his eponymous law.¹⁹

The Page Act had a significant impact in two overlapping ways. First, as the first federal statute restricting immigration, it set a precedent to exclude groups based on their race, national origin, gender, and class. Between 1875 and 1965, the restriction and exclusion of Asian immigrants were prominent features of immigration policy. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States for ten years. It was renewed in 1892 for another ten years. In 1902, it was expanded to cover Hawai’i and the Philippines. In 1904, it was extended indefinitely.²⁰ The 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement between the United States and Japan restricted the immigration of Japanese laborers. The 1917 creation of the Asiatic Barred Zone denied entry from most Asian countries. The passage of the nation’s first comprehensive restriction law, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, virtually abolished Asian immigration by excluding “aliens” who, because of race or nationality, were ineligible for citizenship. The major exception to the 1924 Immigration Act was Philippine immigration, because Filipinos, as a result of US annexation of the Philippines, had the status of US nationals. However, the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934 changed their status to alien and restricted their immigration to fifty persons per year.²¹

Second, by excluding persons based on filthy and immoral behavior, the Page Act also established a practice of barring persons who did not conform to social norms regarding health, ability, sex, and sexuality. The Immigration Act of 1917 excluded homosexuals as “persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority,” a rationale stemming from pseudoscientific ideas that diagnosed homosexuality as a form of mental illness. During the McCarthy Era, the removal of gays and lesbians from federal employment and the military contributed to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which barred homosexuals or immigrants suspected of being homosexuals from entering the United States. In 1965, immigration laws denied entry based on “sexual deviation.” It wasn’t until the Immigration Act of 1990 that homosexuality was removed as grounds of exclusion from the US. Still, major barriers remain in the twenty-first century.²²

Despite the significance of Chinese women in US immigration history, they have been overlooked and marginalized as historical subjects. As Abrams observes, “There are many histories of the Chinese in America, but most of them treat male laborers as the standard and women as exceptional.”²³ Thus, their objectification in immigration law and its enforcement is not as well known as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. But it should be.

Popular entertainment contributed to the dissemination of these ideas. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Hollywood popularized the objectification of Asian and Asian American women to the masses, depicting them as exotic, sensual, submissive, and mysterious. On-screen, Asian and Asian American women were represented as one-dimensional types, at times scantily dressed, at other times docile and demure, and, more often than not, madly and deeply in love with the film’s white male protagonist.²⁴ Among the most popular types were the dragon lady, the lotus blossom, the geisha girl, and the prostitute, which all became well known in films such as the Thief of Bagdad (1924), Daughter of the Dragon (1931), Sayonara (1957), South Pacific (1958), The World of Suzie Wong (1960), and Full Metal Jacket (1987).

Although these types were relegated to secondary roles or bit parts, they permeated popular culture beyond these specific films as other movies and television shows reproduced the same fantasies about Asian and Asian American women. For example, a segment of the ABC 20/20 special on the Atlanta murders showed how the few spoken lines of a Vietnamese prostitute in Full Metal Jacket—”Me love you long time”—were repeated again in comedic movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) and the long-running television show South Park.²⁵

The objectification of Asian American women on-screen, in turn, limited their professional opportunities as actors in Hollywood. Born on January 3, 1905, in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood. After she was cast as an extra for The Red Lantern in 1919, she went on to appear in over sixty movies. Wong auditioned for lead roles, but she was consistently cast as a supporting character. In 1924, she created her own production company, Anna May Wong Productions, but it was short-lived. Anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriages influenced the creation of a 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, which forbade the depiction of miscegenation. As a result, Wong was unable to land leading roles alongside white actors in romantic movies. Wong left Hollywood frustrated by these discriminatory barriers that circumscribed her career. Like other American artists of color in the early twentieth century, she moved to Europe, where she starred in many plays and films including her first talking film in 1930 called The Flame of Love. ²⁶

In a 1933 interview, Wong reflected: “I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain—murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that.”²⁷ She questioned why Chinese people and their culture could not be portrayed with dignity: We have our own virtues. . . . Why do they never show these on the screen?²⁸

Although Paramount Studios contacted Wong and promised her leading roles, upon her return, she was still asked to play one-dimensional Asian roles created by white Hollywood directors. At times, Wong refused stereotypical roles and inauthentic direction, such as when one director asked her to use Japanese mannerisms to play a Chinese character. At other times, she agreed to play stereotypical roles in order to work with successful directors of the period, such as Josef von Sternberg. She appeared in the 1932 von Sternberg film Shanghai Express, playing a Chinese prostitute alongside her friend Marlene Dietrich.²⁹

Who is playing whom?

Compounding this problem of objectification and marginalization on-screen was the centuries-old practice of “yellowface,” in which white actors play Asian or Asian American characters. The phenomenon involved white actors taping their eyelids in order to make their eyes appear slanted and wearing buck teeth and heavy makeup. The results were often so exaggerated that their appearances were incredulous and buffoonish. Yet, some of the most prominent American actors performed in yellowface on-screen. These include Katharine Hepburn, who played a Chinese woman, Jade Tan, in the 1944 film Dragon Seed; Marlon Brando, portraying Sakini, an Okinawan interpreter, in the 1956 film Teahouse of the August Moon; and Mickey Rooney, as Mr. Yunioshi, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).

According to scholar Josephine Lee, white actors in theater as well as in film portrayed Asian characters as “villainous despots, exotic curiosities, or comic fools.”³⁰ Yellowface precluded Asian American actors from employment, further hampering the recognition of their talent on stage as well as on-screen. A related practice is “whitewashing,” the erasure of Asian or Asian American characters altogether in favor of white casting. In the twenty-first century, examples of yellowface casting and whitewashing include the films 21 (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), Aloha (2015), Doctor Strange (2016), and Ghost in the Shell (2017). In other words, for much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Asian Americans couldn’t even portray themselves.

How do you make the invisible visible?

One way to make the humanity of Asian American women visible is to foreground their perspectives and experiences. In their 2018 study, scholars Shruti Mukkamala and Karen Suyemoto interviewed Asian American women about their experiences of discrimination through online open-ended surveys as well as in-person group interviews.³¹ Out of the 107 participants in the study, only four said they had never experienced discrimination. Mukkamala and Suyemoto identified six types of discrimination that illustrate how race and gender intersect in their lives. These types include being exoticized, objectified, and infantilized, for example, as “geisha girls” with a distinctive sexuality; seen as incapable of being or becoming leaders; perceived to be agreeable and unable to speak up or stand up for themselves; expected to look cute and small; rendered invisible; and assumed to be a service worker, such as a maid or nail salon worker.

The results of Mukkamala and Suyemoto’s study complement other research findings that Asian American women face both subtle and blatant discrimination from bosses and coworkers as well as their own partners, family members, and friends. Mukkamala and Suyemoto hope that their research is used to increase public awareness, empower Asian American women, and prevent discrimination against this group. At stake are Asian American women’s lives and well-being.

REPRESENTING OURSELVES

We must confront the histories of objectification of Asian American women and the adverse impacts on their lives in order to address these problems. But it is painful to only see yourself through the eyes of others. It might beg the question: Why can’t we represent ourselves? However, Asian American women do and have represented themselves, their families, and their communities in a multitude of ways. Given Congressman Horace Page’s role in the long history of anti-Asian hostility, and the persistence of the perception that Asian American women are incapable of leadership, the achievements of Asian American female members in Congress warrant a closer look.

Born on the island of Maui, Patsy Takemoto Mink became the first woman of color to serve in Congress when she was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1965. Mink was hailed as a groundbreaking congressmember on the issue of gender equality. Her most well-known legislative work is on the passage of Title IX, which required “all schools that receive federal funding to provide equal opportunities and benefits regardless of gender.”³² Title IX’s aims were broad, but its impact on expanding opportunities for women and girls in sports was profound. In 1972, there were just over three hundred thousand women and girls playing college and high school sports in the United States. Forty years after Title IX’s passage, the number of girls participating in high school sports nationwide had risen to more than 3 million, and more than 190,000 women were competing in intercollegiate sports—a sixfold increase since 1972.³³

In 1972, Mink also became the first Asian American to run for US president. A vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, she ran on an antiwar platform. Although her candidacy was unsuccessful, her daughter, Gwendolyn Mink, reflected, “My mother taught me that an election is not an end in itself, but rather an opening to do the hard work of securing justice, peace and the well being of all.”³⁴

After her long career in Congress, Mink, an environmental advocate, received an appointment from President Jimmy Carter as assistant secretary of state for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs in 1972. Mink recognized the connections between nuclear, conventional, and chemical military testing and their adverse ecological impacts across the Pacific in the Aleutian, Marshall, and Hawai’ian archipelagoes. Scholar Judy Tzu-Chun Wu highlights that, during Mink’s years as a representative, she repeatedly demanded that the Navy and Department of Defense stop using Kaho’olawe Island as a bombing practice site.³⁵

In 1990, Mink was reelected to Congress and served six terms in the House of Representatives. She helped form the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, which was established in 1994. Mink passed away on September 28, 2002, after being hospitalized for pneumonia. Her name was still on the November ballot. She won the election by a landslide and was replaced by Ed Case. The Title IX law was renamed the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in her honor.³⁶

Similarly, current Asian American congresswomen are making history not solely by breaking barriers and becoming “firsts” in various ways, but also by working to address inequities in Asian American and women’s histories, among other areas. When Judy Chu was elected to the US House of Representatives in July 2009 to represent the 27th Congressional District of Southern California, she became the first Chinese American woman elected to Congress. One of her proudest accomplishments includes introducing and passing a 2012 congressional resolution of regret for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.³⁷ In 2013, Senator Mazie Hirono from Hawai’i became the first Asian American woman in the US Senate, and the first Japanese immigrant member of Congress.³⁸ A member of the Senate Armed Services and Veterans Affairs Committees, she counts authoring legislation to honor Filipino World War II veterans with the Congressional Gold Medal among her proudest accomplishments.³⁹

The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Grace Meng became the first Asian American member of Congress from New York, representing its 6th Congressional District, in 2013. One of the pieces of legislation that she has sponsored and passed into law involves striking the use of “Oriental” from federal law. Prior to the passage of the law in 2016, the Department of Energy Act had, for decades, described a “minority” as someone who is “a Negro, Puerto Rican, American Indian, Eskimo, Oriental, or Aleut or is a Spanish speaking individual of Spanish descent.” The law changed and finally updated the language to “Asian American, Native Hawai’ian, a Pacific Islander, African American, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Native American, or an Alaska Native.”⁴⁰

In March 2020, Meng also introduced a resolution that denounced the rise in anti-Asian sentiment since the COVID-19 outbreak. The House of Representatives passed the resolution on September 17, 2020. “Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Asian Americans have been forced to endure demeaning and disgusting acts of bigotry and hate, consisting of everything from verbal assaults to physical attacks,” said Meng. “The House needed to take a strong and public stand against this appalling intolerance, discrimination, and violence that has taken place all across the country during this public health crisis, and today it did just that.”⁴¹

After serving as a representative from Illinois, Tammy Duckworth was elected to the Senate in 2016. Senator Duckworth has written about the racism she experienced during political campaigns as well as the challenges she faced as a mixed race child. Growing up in Thailand, she struggled to fit in as the daughter of a white American man. In the United States, she was treated like a perpetual foreigner: “I’ve had people—Americans—come up to me and ask me where I’m really from, even while I’m wearing a uniform.”⁴² An Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient who lost her legs in an attack on the helicopter that she was co-piloting, Duckworth was among the first handful of army women to fly combat missions during the war.

In 2018, Duckworth became the first US senator to give birth while serving in office and secured a historic change in Senate rules that allows senators to bring their infant children onto the Senate floor. She expressed her gratitude to her colleagues on both sides of the aisle “for helping bring the Senate into the 21st Century by recognizing that sometimes new parents also have responsibilities at work.”⁴³

In 2020, Marilyn Strickland became one of the first three Korean American women elected to Congress as well as the first Black representative elected from Washington State. During her swearing-in ceremony in Washington, DC in January 2021, Strickland donned a hanbok, a traditional Korean dress, in vibrant colors of red and blue. Strickland was born in South Korea. Her father, Willie Strickland, met her mother, Inmin Kim, while stationed in Korea.

Kim had come of age in Korea under Japanese colonial rule, where she was forced to learn Japanese in grade school. After marrying an African American soldier, she came to “a country where she didn’t know anyone, didn’t speak the language.”⁴⁴ Strickland related that her mother endured prejudice, “being ‘otherized,’ because America has had this habit of treating people of color as the ‘other,’ especially when your language and your accent doesn’t match what they think is the American accent.”⁴⁵ Strickland observed her mother’s ability to focus and to maintain a sense of humor with a growing sense of admiration.

Strickland chose to wear the hanbok during the swearing-in ceremony to honor her mother and her history on the “largest stage” she had ever been on. A hanbok, she explained, “is something that you wear for a very special occasion.”⁴⁶ On January 3, 2021, Strickland tweeted: “As a woman of both Korean-American and African-American descent, it was deeply personal to wear my #Hanbok, which not only symbolizes my heritage & honors my mother, but also serves as a larger testament to the importance of diversity in our nation, state, and the People’s House.”⁴⁷

This image resonated with many viewers. Jacob Kim tweeted: “Did I just see Marilyn Strickland @RepStricklandWA, the first Korean-American, Black-American from Washington State elected to the U.S.

House of Representatives wearing hanbok, the traditional Korean dress? I’m ALL for it! Representation MATTERS! Visibility MATTERS!”⁴⁸ Miran  Kim responded: “I cannot express to you how much it means to me to see a Hanbok in Congress. Thank you.”⁴⁹ And Scott Wilson replied: “Blasian representation. On behalf of my kids, I love it.”⁵⁰ Strickland illustrated one effective way of countering the objectification of Asian American women: having Asian American women create their own images grounded in history, respect, and strength.

“WITH SOFTNESS AND POWER”

“With Softness and Power” is the title of the portrait by artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya that graced the cover of Time magazine’s March 29, 2021, issue. The portrait is of an Asian American woman with a serious, defiant look. Her head is up, her gaze is off to the side but piercing nonetheless. Peonies, chrysanthemums, and hawthorn berries surround her. In the issue’s story behind the cover, Phingbodhipakkiya explained that the image “reflects the immeasurable strength of Asian American women who are the connective tissue of our communities, yet too often overlooked, fetishized, dehumanized and underestimated. . . . My hope is to see the beauty of our people reflected in the colors of our communities in a dignified and respectful way.”⁵¹

She further explained that her choice of flowers in the image was purposeful, and that their meanings contest stereotypical notions of Asian American women as docile and submissive lotus blossoms. Rather, the peonies symbolize solidarity and friendship, the chrysanthemums stand for resilience. “It’s one of the few flowers that blooms when it’s cold—and the hawthorn berries represent longevity and protection.”⁵²

The news of the Atlanta spa murders hit home for Phingbodhipakkiya, who was born in Atlanta to Thai and Indonesian immigrants. Currently based in New York City, she studied neuroscience at Columbia and worked at an Alzheimer’s research lab before becoming a full-time artist, educator, and STEM advocate. During New York City’s COVID-19 lockdown, Phingbodhipakkiya experienced the stigma of anti-Asian racism. After she took a seat in a subway car, the man next to her said, “Ew, gross!” and ran to the other end of the car. She also worried about her parents’ safety. Someone had yelled at them to go back to where they came from while they were in a grocery store.

Phingbodhipakkiya has characterized both her artwork and research in neuroscience as the practice of “making the invisible visible—whether it’s microscopic worlds or the often unseen struggles of communities of color.”⁵³ Their struggles with being unseen and unsung inspire her to foreground belonging in her work. In November 2020, she created a public art series, “I Still Believe in Our City.” Composed of forty-five pieces, it was displayed in the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, a subway hub that serves a diverse group of New Yorkers. The series features vibrant portraits of Black, Asian, and Pacific Islander people alongside messages such as “I did not make you sick,” and “I am not your scapegoat.”⁵⁴

Phingbodhipakkiya emphasizes that “it’s so important to see ourselves.” She reminds us that “despite what we have been through as Asian Americans, we’re still here. We don’t scare easily. We’re fighting every day for our shared future.”⁵⁵

Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue. May we remember your fierceness, good-heartedness, and love for life with softness and power.