The Columbia Guide to Asian American History
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The Columbia Guide to Asian American History

Gary Okihiro

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The Columbia Guide to Asian American History

Gary Okihiro

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About This Book

Offering a rich and insightful road map of Asian American history as it has evolved over more than 200 years, this book marks the first systematic attempt to take stock of this field of study. It examines, comments, and questions the changing assumptions and contexts underlying the experiences and contributions of an incredibly diverse population of Americans. Arriving and settling in this nation as early as the 1790s, with American-born generations stretching back more than a century, Asian Americans have become an integral part of the American experience; this cleverly organized book marks the trajectory of that journey, offering researchers invaluable information and interpretation.

? Part 1 offers a synoptic narrative history, a chronology, and a set of periodizations that reflect different ways of constructing the Asian American past.

? Part 2 presents lucid discussions of historical debates—such as interpreting the anti-Chinese movement of the late 1800s and the underlying causes of Japanese American internment during World War II—and such emerging themes as transnationalism and women and gender issues.

? Part 3 contains a historiographical essay and a wide-ranging compilation of book, film, and electronic resources for further study of core themes and groups, including Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hmong, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, and others.

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Year
2005
ISBN
9780231505956
PART 1
Narrative Overview
Chapter 1
NARRATIVE HISTORY
This narrative history provides an amplification of the chronology supplied in this book. Like all histories and chronologies, it is interpretive, based on assumptions and biases. In my chronology and hence narrative history I clearly stress, for example, the interactions of Europeans and Asians, the deeds of men, the articulations of capital and labor, and the events typical of political and legal history. These in my view provide the mere skeleton for the more substantial, fleshy matters of history—the thoughts and actions of a more diverse group of people, raced, gendered, classed, and sexualized, who shape and are molded by social institutions and processes. But heterogeneity has been sacrificed in this account for the more conventional ideas of history. For fuller treatments of the Asian American past, I refer readers to the standard texts: Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), and Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991).
As early as the fifth century B.C.E., Europeans formed opinions about Asians. Of course, the notions of “European” and “Asian” were alien constructs at the time and can be attributed to Europeans only in retrospect. The ancient Greeks distanced themselves from peoples to their north—“barbarians”—and referred to peoples to their east as Asians. This distinction between European and Asian was at variance with nineteenth-century U.S. representations of Europeans as northern Europeans and Asians as East and possibly Southeast Asians. Still, the ideas of Asia and Asians appear consistent and longstanding within the European imagination. Insofar as those representations constitute a single genealogy, the notions of Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, bear relevance to Asian American history.
Hippocrates held an environmental determinist view of human conformation and behavior, and noted the extreme difference between Europeans and Asians. Asia, he speculated, with its mild and uniform climate supported lush vegetation and plentiful harvests. Those conditions engendered a lazy, monotonous, and pleasure-seeking people who were content to be ruled by despots, unlike Europe with its harsh, varied climate and its strong, courageous, and high-spirited people. Uniformity, he argued, yields slackness and cowardice, while heterogeneity fosters endurance and bravery in both body and soul.1 His representations might in retrospect be seen as racializations of Europeans set in opposition to Asians and as genderings of Europeans with manly virtues against Asians with womanly infirmities.
Alexander, king of Macedon and Greece, in 334 B.C.E. led his army eastward to Persia and then on to India in 327 B.C.E.. Both an expedition of conquest and scientific discovery, Alexander’s thrust toward India affirmed European superiority over Asia and promoted an assimilation of cultures through intermarriage with Asian women of the noble class and absorption of Asians into his military, schools, and colonial bureaucracy. Arrian, a Roman historian and assimilated Asian, memorialized Alexander’s Asian conquests about four hundred years after his death. He contrasted the conqueror’s ingenuity and irrepressible spirit with the cowardice of the barbarians who fled before him. He recorded a speech by Alexander to his troops reminding them that Greeks were a free people and ever conquerors, like men, while Asians, a nation of slaves and always defeated, were like women. According to Arrian, Alexander proclaimed that the Greeks were “inured to warlike toils” while the Asians were “enervated by long ease and effeminacy,” and he called them “the wanton, the luxurious, and effeminate Asiatics.”2
By 375 C.E., Polynesians had settled the islands of Hawai’i. Some believe that Polynesians originated in Asia and became island peoples when they settled on the islands of Indonesia, where they built canoes and learned seafaring technologies that carried them gradually eastward to Micronesia or New Guinea and eventually to the islands of Polynesia. Population growth, warfare, expulsions and flight, and the spirit of adventure might have prompted these migrations. Whatever the cause, the migrants knew the requirements of ocean travel—sturdy vessels, navigational skills, a supply of food and water, and plants and animals for propagation once they found land. The first Polynesians to settle Hawai’i were from eastern Polynesia, likely the Marquesas Islands.
The feat was immense and was undertaken in stages. Making landfall certainly required prodigious knowledge of the sea and sky for direction, and also experience transporting domesticated plants and livestock for breeding. Shoots, tubers, vine cuttings, and slips had to be carefully wrapped to preserve them against voyages of uncertain duration. Chickens, dogs, and pigs had to be selected and fed. And the travelers’ provisions had to be carefully chosen with consideration for their weight, bulk, durability, and nutritional and social value. The first settlers probably took only the bare essentials, and might have been surprised to find that Hawai’i had no wild taro, sweet potato, or coconuts, all of which were common to most of the islands of Polynesia. Some of these settlers returned to Polynesia to direct subsequent waves of land-seekers, who would bring additional plant and animal life to Hawai’i.
What familiar plant life the migrants did find in Hawai’i was brought there by ocean currents and birds. The migrants settled along the shore where the fishing was good and planted their crops along streams. They later cleared, terraced, and irrigated fields of wet-taro in the rich valleys. By 1100, Hawaiian culture and language was distinctive from that of other Polynesian peoples. With some variation between individual islands, it embraced the entire island chain. Subsistence farming and fishing made possible the social system of extended families that maintained stewardship over the land and its natural resources. Over the next three hundred years, new waves of migrations from Tahiti introduced to the islands priests and high chiefs, resulting in intermarriage, warfare, and new, elaborate systems of economy, religion, and government. Between 1400 and 1600, the Hawaiian population grew; food production increased with irrigation, terracing, and aquaculture; and the surpluses sustained the stratification of society into the classes of chief, priest, and commoner.
About the time of the migration of high chiefs and priests from Tahiti to Hawai’i, the Mongols, led by their military and leader Chinghis Khan (1155–1227), pressed China and conquered Korea, central Asia, west Asia, and eastern Europe. Their cavalry tactics and weapons maximized their striking force, and with their horses and light baggage they were able to cover long distances quickly. The Mongols devastated the nations they conquered, but they also unified vast areas and brought together diverse groups of people. It was during the Mongol Empire that Marco Polo, a Venetian, traveled in relative safety across Europe and Asia to China, where he served as a minor Mongol official from 1275 to 1292. His account of his travels followed a script familiar to Europeans such that John Masefield, in his introduction to the 1908 edition of The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian, could write: “[H]is picture of the East is the picture which we all make in our minds when we repeat to ourselves those two strange words, ‘the East,’ and give ourselves up to the image which that symbol evokes.”3 Part of that image involved Polo’s generous accounts of prostitutes, sex, and angelic and delicate women who lived in luxury and abandon.4
Marco Polo’s travels were inspired in large measure by notions of Asia’s wealth, and his was simply one of many excursions Europeans made to Asia, especially after the thirteenth century. Portugal and Spain led the way in the fifteenth century, seeking maritime avenues to Asia by which they might avoid the long, perilous, and expensive overland trade routes. Portuguese sailors traveled down Africa’s west coast and rounded its southern tip at the Cape of Good Hope, and Vasco da Gama made it to India in 1498. Six years earlier, Christopher Columbus, sailing from Spain, reached the islands off America’s shore and, believing he had landed in the East Indies, named the islanders accordingly. Spain pursued an American empire for gold, and its explorers and conquistadors mapped and conquered land that they later settled. In 1513, Vasco de Balboa was the first European to gaze upon the Pacific Ocean; Hernando Cortes began Mexico’s conquest in 1518; and Ferdinand Magellan led an expedition that sailed around South America, crossed the Pacific, and claimed the Philippines for Spain in 1521.
Those initiatives by Portugal and Spain laid the foundations for a global network of trade and exchanges that involved European ships and goods, European colonies, and indigenous laborers and products. Europeans, introducing diseases that decimated native peoples who had no immunities to them, suffered vitamin deficiencies and tropical diseases that felled many of them. The nation-state endowed commercial firms like the Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, with trade monopolies and the power to wage war, make treaties, coin money, and establish colonies in Africa and Asia. Similarly, the British East India Company, created two years before its Dutch rival, held a monopoly over Britain’s trade with Asia. The British government granted the company, which was on the brink of bankruptcy in 1773, an exemption from taxes on tea exports and a monopoly on tea exports to the American colonies, thereby undercutting American merchants who already were required to pay taxes on their imports. The act led to widespread resentment, cries against taxation without representation, a tea boycott, and the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which became a theater of the American Revolution.
Portuguese success in the Indian Ocean trade was built in large measure on Asian and African slaves who manned the ships that carried Asia’s products to Europe. By the early sixteenth century, enslaved laborers from Bengal, Sri Lanka and southern India, the Indonesian archipelago, the Philippines, and Japan made up the majority of the crews on board Portuguese ships in the Indian Ocean, mainly because so many white sailors had succumbed to disease. By the end of the century the Dutch had eclipsed the overextended Portuguese commercial empire in southeast Asia. The British surpassed the Portuguese in the rest of Asia shortly thereafter. In 1658, the Dutch introduced Asian slaves, along with African slaves, into their refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope. By 1834, when slavery was abolished, there were approximately 34,000 slaves there.
In 1565 Spain began its galleon trade, which took Mexican and Peruvian silver from Acapulco amd Callao to Manila. From there, Asia’s products reached the Americas and eventually Europe. In this way, America’s silver reached China, where it was traded for the silk, porcelain, and lacquer that enriched Spanish society in its American colonies and in Spain. America’s crops, notably maize and potatoes, entered Asia via Manila, and helped to sustain increases in China’s population. The galleon trade also conveyed Filipino and Chinese sailors from Manila to Acapulco, where some of them remained and traveled to Spain’s other colonies in the Americas. Filipino “Manila men” reached Louisiana and established fishing and shrimping villages in the bayous near New Orleans possibly as early as 1765. These were probably the first permanent settlement of Asians in North America.
Asia was still on European minds when in 1776 British Captain James Cook, after two research expeditions to the South Pacific, was directed to find the fabled Northwest Passage, which would open a straighter highway from Europe to Asia’s products. Cook’s departure from Plymouth, England, was just nine days after the American Declaration of Independence. When he accidentally made landfall on January 19, 1778, on the island of Kaua’i after stops in Polynesia, the process of consolidation begun by the migrations from Tahiti in 1100 was reaching a culmination. Around the mid-fifteenth century, warfare increasingly determined political authority. Warriors replaced hereditary chiefs, and the social divide between chiefs and commoners, whose labor the chiefs taxed, widened. These changes in Hawaiian society would accelerate with the advent of Europeans who placed the islands on their maps and used them as a provisioning station between the Americas and Asia.
On board one of Cook’s ships was John Ledyard, an American. Although the voyagers failed to discover the Northwest Passage, they did discover in America’s Pacific Northwest furs and skins that Chinese merchants valued. This find led to a trade network among the fur-bearing regions of the Pacific Northwest, Canada, and Alaska, the sandalwood-producing regions of the Hawaiian islands, and the regions of China producing silk, porcelain, and other products. In Robert Morris, a leading businessman and financier, Ledyard found a receptive ear for his schemes for trade between America and China. Even before the end of the Revolutionary War, Morris and others planned the creation of a company, similar to the British East India Company, to lead American trade with Asia. The Empress of China was one of the ships designated for the voyage. But instead of taking the risky Ledyard route to the Pacific Northwest and its furs, the investors loaded the ship’s cargo bay with American ginseng and pointed it across the Atlantic and the Cape of Good Hope in 1784, about five months after the treaty that recognized America’s independence. The young nation’s entry into Europe’s reach for Asia, the New York News Dispatch predicted, “will promote the welfare of the United States in general, by inspiring their citizens with emulation to equal, if not excell their mercantile rivals.”5
In the same year of the Empress of China’s departure from New York’s harbor, an American trade ship arrived in Calcutta, and the first American ships entered the Pacific Northwest fur trade in 1787, the year the U.S. Constitution was adopted. That same year, a Hawaiian woman, Winee, was perhaps the first to leave the islands on a European ship when a British ship captain hired her as his wife’s personal servant for the voyage to China. During the journey, Winee fell with fever, as would later many of her fellow islanders. She died and was buried at sea. Hawaiians and Asians traveled the globe mainly as laborers on European and American ships. In the year of George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, ten ships from Salem, Massachusetts, sailed the waters of the Indian Ocean, and during the 1790s Asian Indians arrived in Salem and worked on the India wharves for some of the biggest shippers and as domestic servants. They might have married African American women and become members of Salem’s African American community. Asian Indian indentured servants, including James Dunn, John Ballay, Joseph Green, George Jimor, Thomas Robinson, and others, served whites in Pennsylvania, and, if freed, probably married into African American communities. Chinese men, conveyed like Asian Indians on American ships, appear in New York City’s records as early as the 1820s.
America’s Asian trade brought increasing numbers of ships into Hawaiian waters, where they initiated exchanges that proved wide-ranging and oftentimes fatal. On the island of Hawai’i, Kiwalao succeeded his father, Kalaniopu’u, in 1782. His ambitious cousin, Kamehameha, contested the succession and defeated and killed Kiwalao. Over the next nine years, Kamehameha battled other contenders to the chieftaincy and finally prevailed. Not content with his domain, Kamehameha gathered a fleet of canoes and a huge army and in 1795 invaded and took the adjacent islands of Maui, Moloka’i, Lana’i, and Kaho’olawe. From Moloka’i he launched the invasion and conquest of O’ahu. Kamehameha succeeded in uniting the entire island chain under his rule in 1810, when Kaua’i’s chief, Kaumuali’i agreed to pay him tribute.
Kamehameha’s rise to supreme power was accompanied and aided by the arrival of Europeans and the weapons of war they brought with them. Hawaiian chiefs, in their contest for power, eagerly traded their agricultural products for metal, guns, and cannons, and Kamehameha employed Europeans to build his ships and man his cannons. The arms race and the chiefs’ drive for land and power had profound consequences for the masses of people. Besides the loss of laborers and resources caused by warfare, enormous efforts had to be expended in building the implements of war and in producing the food required to feed the armies and to exchange for guns. Kamehameha’s planned invasion of Kaua’i, for instance, required the building of a fleet of 800 canoes to transport his army of several thousand men, a task that took five years to complete. The planned invasion entailed the conscription of about 1,000 men to build large taro ponds, each requiring months to years to construct, for food for the expedition. Warfare severely disrupted and dramatically changed the nature of the Hawaiian economy and polity.
With the advent of European traders, Hawaiians were introduced to, indeed swept into, the world economy. During the pre-capitalist period, Hawaiians for the most part produced their own food, shelter, and clothing and maintained a limited system of exchange. Under capitalism, those farmers became laborers employed by chiefs to produce for and become consumers of the global, market economy. In that exchange between Hawaiians and foreigners, the chiefs exercised a monopoly and thereby accumulated wealth and political power. By the late eighteenth century, the convergence of warfare and foreign trade had led to the rise of the chiefs and to the separation of chief from commoner. Like warfare, trade affected Hawaiian agriculture by diverting labor away from subsistence cultivation to the production of goods demanded by the market. The islands’ sandalwood, an aromatic tree sold for incense in the China trade as early as 1792, became nearly extinct because of overcutting. Then, because large numbers of laborers were engaged in that activity, the food crops were left untended and a famine resulted.
On board one of those sandalwood traders was Tze-Chun Wong, who settled on the island of Lana’i in 1802. There, with his sugar mill and boiling pans, Wong began the first commercial manufacture of sugar in Hawai’i. He left about a year later when his venture proved unprofitable. Wong was not the first Chinese in Hawai’i, named by the Chinese “Sandalwood Mountains,” but was preceded by others possibly as early as 1794. And by 1828 there were 30 to 40 Chinese living among the estimated 400 foreigners in Honolulu.
Following the lead of Winee, two young Hawaiians, Hopu and Opukahaia, joined the crew of an American vessel in 1807 and sailed for the Pacific Northwest, where the ship took on a cargo of seal skins. After returning to Hawai’i, the ship headed west for China, staying there for about six months before sailing for Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and landing in New York’s harbor two years later. Hopu served in the War of 1812, was captured and imprisoned by the British in the West Indies, and after the war returned to New England, in 1816. There he was reunited with Opukahaia, who had enrolled at Yale, and the two studied for the ministry in preparation for their return to Hawai’i. Opukahaia, however, died of typhus in 1818. Hopu reached his island home in 1819.
Contrary forces were at work in Kamehameha’s kingdom. Wars caused great destruction and loss of life but ushered in a period of peace and relative prosperity. Foreign trade disrupted pre-capitalist relations and accelerated the gulf between chiefs and commoners but provided some opportunities for escape from chiefly prerogatives and controls. Hawaiian men like Hopu and Opukahaia found employment in the new economy. By 1830 they constituted the majority of the crews on American fur-trading ships in the Pacific Northwest and were widely employed at trading posts throughout Oregon country. During the 18...

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