Discriminating Sex

White Leisure and the Making of the American "Oriental"

Amy Sueyoshi

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780252050268
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Sociologie

Freewheeling sexuality and gender experimentation defined the social and moral landscape of 1890s San Francisco. Middle class whites crafting titillating narratives on topics such as high divorce rates, mannish women, and extramarital sex centered Chinese and Japanese immigrants in particular.

Amy Sueyoshi draws on everything from newspapers to felony case files to oral histories in order to examine how whites' pursuit of gender and sexual fulfillment gave rise to racial caricatures. As she reveals, white reporters, writers, artists, and others conflated Chinese and Japanese, previously seen as two races, into one. There emerged the Oriental—a single pan-Asian American stereotype weighted with sexual and gender meaning. Sueyoshi bridges feminist, queer, and ethnic studies to show how the white quest to forge new frontiers in gender and sexual freedom reinforced—and spawned—racial inequality through the ever evolving Oriental.

Informed and fascinating, Discriminating Sex reconsiders the origins and expression of racial stereotyping in an American city.

CHAPTER 1

A Peculiar Obsession

The Chinese and Japanese Problem in the “International City”

In August 1918, officials dragged out a body in overalls with a matching blue sweater and jacket from the San Francisco Bay near Pier 28. The medical examiner decisively logged him in as “John Doe Japanese” in a ledger of unknown dead despite the fact the body had deteriorated beyond recognition.1 Without a definitive guide on how to ascertain the ethnicity of unidentifiable bodies, the examiner likely drew on his own personal assumptions to mark this particular John Doe as Japanese. The size of the body could have suggested that he was Asian and not white. His lack of a queue and his American clothes may have signaled that he was Japanese rather than Chinese, since whites had long perceived Chinese immigrants as “unassimilable” in their seeming refusal to adopt American hairstyles and dress. Yet by 1918 Chinese San Franciscans had increasingly abandoned their queues and wore American outfits, rendering themselves more similar in likeness to Japanese rather than how San Franciscans typically assumed Chinese to appear. This particular John Doe Japanese had so severely decomposed that only his hair remained. Amid these realities, for examiners to assign ethnicity with any consistent accuracy would have been a miracle. Still, dozens of only the apparently Asian men were named with ethnic designations as “John Doe Japanese” or “John Doe Chinaman.” Record keeping at the medical examiner’s office powerfully reflected not only San Francisco’s specific obsession with Asians but also how the city viewed Chinese and Japanese men as clearly distinct from each other. As Japanese gained sociopolitical visibility at the turn of the century, whites would initially perceive Chinese and Japanese as two separate racial groups with vastly different meaning, in stark contrast to how America would later come to see all “Orientals” as “the same.”2 San Francisco’s particular attention toward Chinese and Japanese as racially noteworthy, as well as different from one another, would set the stage on which middle-class whites would expand their own gender and sexual norms in a city that prided itself as “international.”

After close to thirty years of vilifying the Chinese, by the 1880s Americans and particularly San Franciscans had extremely clear ideas about the “Mongoloid.” When Chinese first arrived as laborers after the 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California, they proved indispensable in their willingness to take on backbreaking, life-threatening unskilled labor at low wages that no white laborer would agree to do. Chinese labor built railroads that connected remote towns and populous city centers across the nation. Chinese also cultivated agricultural lands deemed unworkable by white farmers. Sinophobes, however, almost immediately transformed the Chinese man’s seemingly unique ability to overcome extreme obstacles as “unhuman,” and therefore barbaric and uncivilized.3 He became a “heathen” and also a sexual threat to white women. Characterizations of Chinese women as “slave girls” rendered them degraded as well, for their participation in prostitution. Without aggressive expulsion, many feared that Chinese immoralities would poison the entire nation.4 Anti-Chinese sentiment culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first and only federal immigration act that excluded a group of people explicitly on the basis of race or ethnicity. The Chinese American population dropped precipitously soon after, and by the 1890s America’s most virulent form of anti-Chinese sentiment had come to an end.

With the rise of Japanese immigrants, studies on race presume that contempt for Chinese transposed itself onto the Japanese as the new “Oriental.” Anti-Chinese sentiment, too, had originally been a transference of anti-Black sentiment in the wake of emancipation.5 The conflation of Chinese and Japanese remains axiomatic in Asian American history, a self-evident given that requires no investigation in the face of the ominous reality that Asians have always appeared individually indistinguishable to white America. Certainly, a long American legacy of transposed racisms easily explains away the need to interrogate the presumption. White supremacists with little creativity had simply overlaid old hatreds onto new people. Yet, on the eve of the twentieth century, whites did not necessarily assume Japanese to be the same as Chinese. In fact, few Americans had a clear sense of Japanese people and culture.

Unfamiliar Japan

In 1894 Lafcadio Hearn, after living in Japan for four years, published Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan in hopes of educating the West about the “mysteries” of “strange Japan.” According to Hearn, nothing of significance had been published on Japan since 1871, and even those studies imparted only data from official records or “sketchy impressions of passing travelers.” Hearn recounted that in terms of Japanese inner life—its religion, thought, and “the hidden springs by which they move”—“the world knows but little.” Japan, which had heretofore been rendered practically “invisible,” would now be unveiled in these “glimpses” in his chapters on Buddhism and summer festivals.6 As the “preeminent interpreter” of Japan to the West, Hearn in his romantic depictions of Japanese folkways lauded Japanese religion and culture as superior to those in America. The subsequent works he published—one book a year until his death in 1904—significantly shaped how the American public would come to imagine Japan.7 The New York Times declared that Japan would not be understood by “western barbarians” had it not been for Hearn. The “Anglo-Saxon” should be grateful to Hearn for “his unfolding” to the American audience the Japanese civilization, “hoary in wisdom and ripe in charm.”8 Some believed his popular publications would likely end notions of the “degraded heathen” in considerations of the broader “Oriental.”9 Notably, in Hearn’s earliest writing totaling close to seven hundred pages, what would later become highly charged icons of Japanese culture—namely, the samurai and the geisha—were marginal, if not nearly absent.10

In successive years, Japan’s visibility would rise bit by bit in American popular consciousness due to a number of factors, including reports of Japanese military gains and mounting anti-Japanese sentiment from American xenophobes directed against immigrants. The publication of two extremely influential books, however, may have most significantly expanded visibility if not accurate knowledge on Japan. Though not immediately popular, Inazo Nitobe’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan in 1899 and Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in 1946 both sold millions of copies internationally in the decades following their release.11 In the late nineteenth century, however, America still remained generally unfamiliar with Japan except for Hearn’s recently published “glimpses.” The turn of the century proved to be a crucial period in the formation of how Americans viewed Asians as a racial grouping as they sorted through their sentiments for both Chinese and Japanese people and culture for the first time.

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan and Bushido piqued interest in the “Mikado” just as Japonisme, an aesthetic movement among middle-class whites who embraced Japan as having cultural value, also captured Americans. This attraction to Japan, described by art historians as an affair between “lovers,” fueled the incorporation of Japanese culture into the United States as middle-class whites hoped to thwart malaise brought on by what they saw as their own over civilization. Japanese-themed afternoon teas, “kimonas,” and art became all the rage.12 Through an Orientalist lens, Japan became a site of exotic traditionalism to enhance American leisure. A century earlier, Americans such as George Washington and Phineas T. Barnum had embraced Chinese things and ideas to “suit their own agendas” in a previous form of Orientalism, specifically Chinese, called Chinoiserie.13 Increasing interest around Japan in the aesthetic and consumptive context of Japonisme sparked an entirely different set of discourse from the despised Chinese of the mid-nineteenth century.

Members of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, a community of adventurous and culturally inquisitive writers and artists, may have considered themselves the most knowledgeable American experts on Japan in the late 1890s in their pursuit of internationalism and adventure. Moreover, bohemians specifically embraced Japanese rather than Chinese culture. The group erected a daibutsu, or giant Buddha, for one of their retreats in Muir Woods. Essayist Joaquin Miller also liked Japanese boys “best” among the many young men he invited to live with him in his home, called “The Hights,” in the Oakland hills. Women writers such as Blanche Partington, Léonie Gilmour, and Ethel Armes all found themselves drawn to rising poet Yone Noguchi for his specifically Japanese artistry. What a number of women perceived as Noguchi’s “mystical” disposition might otherwise be characterized as moodiness in the absence of Orientalism. Western writer Charles Warren Stoddard, known by literary historians as San Francisco’s first gay author, specifically drew upon Japan as a land of high art and exquisite poetry in his attraction to young Japanese men. Notably, neither Miller, Partington, Gilmour, Armes, nor Stoddard would evoke China in a similar fashion nor even mention China and Japan in the same sentence as a possible equivalency in their discussions of beauty and art.14 Perhaps the most famous aesthete bohemian, Oscar Wilde, more explicitly advised San Franciscans against bringing specifically Chinese art into their homes during a lecture titled “Art Decoration” at Platt Hall on the corner of Bush and Montgomery Streets. He noted, “You have no need of it any more than you have need of Chinese labor.”15

Chinese and Japanese, too, were keenly aware of how whites perceived them as different from each other. Chinese refused to completely transform their clothing to American style, even as they knew that whites denigrated them for their seeming inability to “assimilate.” Many opposed becoming too American in appearance and manner and looked down on fellow Chinese who tried to pass as Japanese by donning western clothes. Chinese men warned of Americanized Chinese women as too flagrantly sexual in their style, even as they largely accepted Chinese prostitutes without moral judgment.16 Writer and Chinese Canadian Sui Sin Far, who became an advocate for the Chinese American community during her time in San Francisco, created a dastardly villain Lum Choy in her popular short story “A Chinese Ishmael” in the Overland Monthly in 1899. He was a westernized Chinese man who deliberately sought to pass as Japanese.17 Choy’s characterization illustrated how Chinese viewed Japanese as distinctly degraded in their ingratiating attempts for white acceptance through American dress. Japanese officials conversely pressed their citizens to wear American clothes and westernize so as not be seen negatively as intractable, nationalistic Chinese.18 In Sui Sin Far’s social circle, a number of mixed-race individuals of white and Chinese heritage passed themselves off as Japanese, Mexican, or Spanish to avoid the particular stigma of being Chinese.19 The stark difference in how Americans viewed Chinese versus Japanese appeared abundantly clear in the late nineteenth century not just to Far but to all the mixed-race Asians who sought to hide their Chinese heritage.

Anti-Asian San Francisco

While Americans increasingly placed cultural value in Japan, Japanese and Chinese alike faced innumerable acts of similar discrimination and violence. As increasing numbers of Japanese entered the United States, immigrants from Japan reported being stoned, called “Jap,” spat upon and harassed by gangs of young white men and teenaged boys each time they ventured out into public. Japanese student-laborers who had traveled across the Pacific Ocean hoping for an American education found themselves trapped in a cycle of drudgery as they provided domestic service to white families in exchange for free room and board. Too tired to attend school after they finished their domestic duties, Japanese men attempted to escape the often unreasonable demands of a white matriarch by taking up other menial jobs with even less security, such as dishwashing in a restaurant. For those able to pool resources and start a business, vandals regularly smashed out their window storefronts. In 1900 a statewide movement against the Japanese grew out of San Francisco as officials began to clamor for legislation banning Japanese immigrants that mirrored the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Five years later one of the city’s leading daily newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, launched an anti-Japanese editorial campaign. In 1906 the San Francisco School Board then directed all school principals to segregate Japanese and Korean children into the “Oriental School” where Chinese had already been relegated since 1859.20

In the half-century be...