On Wednesday and Thursday Charles and I screened a DVD I just received from PBS (over two months after I ordered it!) of Asian Americans, a five-hour miniseries that was largely a follow-up to two previous series they’d done on African-Americans and Latino-Americans. The first part was “Breaking Ground,” about the early immigrants, mostly from China, who started coming to the U.S. in the 1850’s to join the California gold rush. Most of them arrived too late to strike gold — though I remember looking at books about the gold rush that featured photos of giant piles of mine waste with rather racist captions explaining that these had been left behind by Chinese who went through piles white miners had abandoned for whatever few flecks of gold were left behind. But many of them got jobs building the first transcontinental railroad, the legendary joint venture of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads (though the U.S. government put up most of the money and then, as we’ve done so many times both before and since, gave ownership of it to private corporations, so Americans paid for it twice over, first as taxpayers and then as consumers paying extortionate rates to use the infrastructure their tax money had paid for) that met at Promontory Summit, Utah. (When I heard this story in high school it was still called “Promontory Point.”) According to this show, the tracks that were built west from New York were laid mostly by Irish immigrants (well before the Irish in America were largely accepted as “white” instead of being victimized by racial discrimination themselves!), while the ones built east were laid mostly by Chinese — who were carefully excluded from the group photos of the two locomotives and crews when they finally met.
The Chinese immigrants built Chinatowns in the various cities in which they settled and ended up specializing in laundries — this became the stereotypical Chinese occupation the way banking and finance became the stereotypical Jewish occupations — and the show included one fascinating image, showing a malevolent master Chinese pulling strings to create all manner of corruption in the world, that looked far more like a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda than the kinds of negative images usually put out about Blacks and Latinos in late 19th century racist propaganda. While prejudice against Blacks and Latinos was motivated by a belief in their biological inferiority, prejudice against Asians, like prejudice against Jews, seems at least in part to be based on fear of their superiority. One reason American universities long maintained quotas limiting how many Jews and Asians could be admitted as students was fear that if those quotas didn’t exist, Jews and Asians would rise to the summit of the meritocracy and deprive whites of their “natural” position at the top. Also, while the social prejudice against Blacks and Latinos included the idea that they were “lazy” and had to be driven hard to get them to work at all, the prejudice against Asians was that they were too hard-working, too patient, too willing to plan ahead and build carefully for the day when they would take over completely.
One
fascinating figure who wasn’t mentioned in this program but should have been
was Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant who in the 1870’s founded the
Workingmen’s Party in San Francisco. What makes Kearney especially interesting
today is the schizoid character of his speeches: when he was talking about the
power of the giant corporations and their growing stranglehold on the political
system he sounded like Bernie Sanders — and when he talked about Chinese
immigrants and denounced them for taking jobs away from whites, he sounded like
Donald Trump talking about Mexicans. The “Breaking Ground” segment of Asian
Americans notes that the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882 — which banned all
Chinese immigrants to the U.S. for 20 years (and was later extended and still
later codified into the heavily exclusionary immigration laws of 1924, which
Trump aide Steven Miller has cited as a model for how future immigration
legislation should be written) — was the first legal restriction on immigration to the U.S. and set
up the entire distinction between “legal” (documented) and “illegal”
(undocumented) immigrants that has been at the heart of U.S. immigration policy
ever since. One dodge a lot of Chinese used to get into the U.S. in spite of
the Chinese Exclusion Act and the other laws that followed it was buying
so-called “Paper Fathers,” forged birth certificates that falsely identified
their parents as American-born people of Chinese descent who were therefore
U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Chinese-Americans who were able
to present documents (authentic or forged) establishing legal status
literally had to carry these papers on
their persons at all time. When immigrants from other parts of Asia —
particularly India, the Philippines, and later Southeast Asians — started
coming to the U.S. later in the 19th century they thoroughly screwed
up America’s racial system because they seemed unclassifiable: one man profiled
in “Breaking Ground” was an (East) Indian who moved to New Orleans and, because
of his dark skin, was classified as Black: he married an African-American woman
and their descendants appeared on the program.
The show made too little mention
of one of the few Asian-Americans in the 19th century who actually won a civil-rights lawsuit: his name was Yick Wo, he
owned and operated a Chinese laundry in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and when the
San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a local ordinance designed to put him
and other Chinese laundry owners out of business, he sued. The ordinance didn’t
mention Chinese; it said that laundries had to be operated in stone or brick
buildings rather than wooden ones, and it was passed off as a fire-safety
measure. But everyone in the city, on both sides of the Chinese question, knew
what its real intent was: to close down all the Chinese laundries in town and
allow only white people who could afford space in brick or stone buildings to
run laundry businesses. Yick Wo took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court, and amazingly, he won: in 1886 the Court ruled that even a law fair on its
face could be held unconstitutional if its actual effect was to discriminate
based on race. (Alas, just 10 years later the Court ruled the opposite way in
the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which legitimized racial segregation against
African-Americans and was the law of the land until the Court reversed it in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 — and Richard Kluger’s Simple
Justice, the definitive book on Brown, argues that then-chief justice Earl Warren missed
an opportunity when he failed to cite Yick Wo v. Hopkins as a pre-Plessy
precedent for the Court to mandate racial equality.) The major Supreme Court
case “Breaking Ground” does
profile came in 1923 and involved Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh from Punjab, India
who served in the U.S. army in World War I and afterwards applied for
naturalization as a U.S. citizen. The Court delivered a weirdly split verdict
to the effect that he was “Aryan” and therefore Caucasian, but not really
“white” in the sense of the immigration laws — and after the verdict governments
throughout the U.S. began a wholesale campaign to de-naturalize foreign-born U.S. citizens of Asian descent, thereby
wiping out their livelihoods because according to the laws in most U.S. states
at the time, only U.S. citizens could own property.
The second episode of Asian Americans, “A Question of Loyalty,” dealt mostly with the
internment of all Americans of
Japanese descent — not only Issei
(direct immigrants from Japan) but Nisei (their U.S.-born children) and Sansei (the third generation of Japanese-Americans). I’ve
seen other films about the internment but this one was quite the most powerful:
it reflected on the problems Japanese-Americans faced from U.S. racism even before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 led
to the U.S. declaration of war against Japan and the internment, ostensibly as
a military-security measure out of fear that the Japanese would form a Fifth
Column in the U.S. and work against the war effort. Later, in the 1970’s,
documents emerged that showed that the internments were recommended by U.S.
officers for frankly racist reasons — though quite a few otherwise progressive
people, including President Franklin Roosevelt, California governor (and later
Supreme Court Chief Justice) Earl Warren and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black
(usually a strong defender of civil rights, but in this case the man who wrote
the Court’s opinion upholding the internment as constitutional), were either
fooled by the military’s contention that the internment was a necessary war
measure or felt they simply weren’t going to tell the military leaders how to
fight the war. The most
fascinating aspect of the story was the profile of the Uno family and how they
were torn apart by the war, the internment and the ambiguous status of
Japanese-Americans. In the 1930’s Buddy Uno, first son of an Issei couple, trained in the U.S. as a journalist but
found no American paper would hire him because of his race.
At the same time
the government of Japan was appealing to Japanese-Americans, including U.S.-born
Nisei, to move back to the homeland and put
the professional skills and training they had acquired in the U.S. to work for
Japan in their military expansion, including the invasion of Manchuria in 1931
(which some historians argue was the real beginning of World War II) and mainland China in 1937. Buddy Uno
became a war correspondent who (to use the modern term) “embedded” in one of
the Japanese military units fighting in China, and the longer he stayed in that
job the more convinced he became of the righteousness of the Japanese military
cause and the more strident he wrote in defense of the Japanese military,
including its war crimes against Chinese, Southeast Asians, Pacific Islanders
and, after 1941, Americans. Meanwhile, Buddy’s father was transferred from one
internment camp to a higher-security one because of his son’s activities, while
at least two of Buddy’s brothers enlisted in the U.S. Army and took the way out that was offered of
internees of military age: join the American military and fight in Europe
against Japan’s German and Italian allies, and you can get out of the camp.
Buddy Uno ended his war as a prisoner of war in the Philippines and one of his
brothers, assigned to guard the camp and process its inmates after Japan
surrendered, heard his voice and had the shock of his life. “A Question of
Loyalty” takes its title from the questionnaire adult internees were required
to fill out, though it was actually two questions of loyalty: one asking if you abjured any residual loyalty
to the government of Japan and one if you would be willing to join the U.S.
military and fight against the Axis alliance that included Japan. Though there
were at least 23 questions on the form, those were the crucial two and the
internees were divided into “Yes-Yes” and “No-No” groups — with the “No-No”
group unsurprisingly singled out for harsher treatment.
The filmmakers (the
credits list three writers — Victoria Chalk, S. Leo Chiang, and Aldo Velasco —
but no director) leave the obvious parallels between the Roosevelt-era
internment of Japanese-Americans and the Trump-era incarceration of immigrants
and refugees from Central and South America unstated until the very end of the
program, in which they show a modern-day internment camp located, ironically
(or maybe not so ironically at all) just across from the Texas site of the
harshest of the World War II internment camps, and the demonstrations survivors
of the Japanese-American internment and their descendants staged at the
modern-day camp, saying bluntly that internment of people on racial grounds was
wrong then and it’s wrong now. The show also mentions that in the 1980’s the
U.S. Congress passed (and Ronald Reagan signed) a bill formally apologizing for
the internment and authorizing reparations payments, though it does not mention one Congressmember who took a particular
role in that struggle: Tom Railsback, Republican of Illinois, who’s a personal
hero of mine (and, let’s face it, there haven’t been many Republicans,
especially ones alive in my lifetime, whom I regard as heroes!) both because he
took a leading role in pushing the anti-internment legislation but because he
was on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 and was one of the most forceful
Republican voices on the committee calling for the impeachment of Richard Nixon
over the Watergate cover-up. However, though Congress officially apologized for
the internment, the U.S. Supreme Court precedent legitimizing it as
constitutional remains in force. There was a lot of fear during the George W.
Bush administration that he would cite the Japanese-American internment as
binding prejudice allowing him to round up and intern Arab-Americans — and of
course Trump has done exactly that with Latin American immigrants and could
quite likely order the internment of American political dissenters if he’s
re-elected and continues to send paramilitary goon squads to assault protesters
in American cities.
The third episode, “Good Americans,” returned to the more
collage-like style of presentation of the first (and the one that’s typical of
PBS documentaries in general). It deals with the 15-year period between 1945
and 1960, the creation of white suburbia and the ambiguous role of
Asian-Americans in the nation’s racial hierarchies. It was the birth of the
image of Asian-Americans as the “model minority” — the idea that because Asians
were (or at least were stereotyped as being) quiet, hard-working and socially
responsible, they were examples of how people of color in the U.S. should behave — but it also was a time of continued
harassment and discrimination against them. The discrimination kicked into high
gear when Mao Zedong’s Communist Party of China won the country’s long civil
war (that had overlapped with its being on the receiving end of Japanese
aggression during World War II) in 1949, and all of a sudden the U.S. “line” on
China and Japan changed almost overnight. Instead of the Chinese being heroic
resisters of Japanese aggression, now the Chinese were seen as Communist
zombies taking over the world and Japanese as heroic resisters against Chinese
Communist aggressions. The change aggravated the antagonisms between various
Asian communities in the U.S. that had already begun during World War II — when
Americans of Chinese or Korean ancestry had shirts or buttons made to identify
them as not Japanese (and —though this story isn’t told here — Fred Korematsu,
who challenged the World War II internment policy at the Supreme Court and
lost, originally tried to avoid the internment by posing as Chinese, which in a
city like San Francisco with so many real Chinese proved impossible, especially since he didn’t speak a word of
Chinese). One irony there was that Koreans, whose country had been taken over
and colonized by Japan 100 years before World War II, had as much or more reason
to hate the Japanese during the war as Americans did!
“Good Americans” features
stories of various Asian children being harassed and bullied — including one
Filipino boy who tried to explain that he wasn’t Chinese and who was told by
the bullies, “It doesn’t matter. You’re not us.” One of the most fascinating stories in the program
deals with Hawai’i in the 1950’s and the emergence of an Asian — particularly
Japanese-descended — majority in the islands’ population, which got tied up
with the politics around Hawai’i’s admission to the U.S. as the 50th
state. Hawai’ian politics during the territorial period had been run by an apartheid-like white elite of Republicans, while the
Democratic Party in Hawai’i mostly consisted of Japanese and other Asian people
who were pushing the admission of Hawai’i as a state. The filmmakers
acknowledged that statehood was a double-edged — or maybe a triple-edged —
sword: the white elites were fine with territorial status while the Asians
wanted statehood (and the political offices that would come with it, including
representation in both houses of Congress), while the remaining native
Hawai’ians looked back on their days as their own country and asked why the
U.S. didn’t make them independent the way they’d done with the Philippines in
1946. The most interesting personality profiled in this show was U.S.
Congressmember Patsy Mink, who fought not only the white Hawai’ian
establishment but the Asian establishment in Hawai’i’s Democratic Party as well
— and in the week in which the contributions of African-American civil-rights
activist and Congressmember John Lewis (D-Georgia) were being hailed in the
wake of his recent death, it quickly became clear that Patsy Mink was the
Asian-American John Lewis — before John Lewis. She had to deal with racism, sexism and an entrenched
Democratic establishment that had already decided that Hiram Fong would be
Hawai’i’s first Asian-American U.S. Senator and Daniel Inouye (who’d lost an
arm serving in the U.S. during World War II and would later, in 1973, serve
with distinction as a member of the U.S. Senate committee investigating
Watergate) would be its first Congressmember — but Mink broke through and
finally won a House seat in 1964 and thereby got to vote for the landmark
immigration bill of 1965 that repealed the racist quota system that had been in
place since 1924 and allowed Asians to emigrate to the U.S. on the same basis
as anyone else.
There was one other interesting aspect of the first three
episodes of this series, and that is that each episode profiled an
Asian-American movie star and demonstrated how their career trajectories showed
the changing views of Asian-Americans. The star profiled in “Breaking Ground”
was Anna May Wong, a prodigiously talented actress and cabaret performer who
held her own against Marlene Dietrich in her best film, Shanghai
Express, but was almost always cast as the
villainous second lead, the femme fatale trying to steal the innocent young white man away from his equally
innocent white fiancée. The one profiled in “A Question of Loyalty” was Philip
Ahn, a Korean-American actor (that surprised me since I’d always assumed he was
Chinese) who “made his bones” in Hollywood during World War II by playing the
evil Japanese officer eager to torture the white POW’s as well as the people of
color in the countries the Japanese conquered during World War II. (Ironically,
Philip Ahn and Anna May Wong co-starred in a 1937 Paramount “B” called
Daughter of Shanghai, in which they both
played good guys — he an FBI
agent, she a decoy — teaming up to bust a ring of human traffickers.) The star
profiled in “Good Americans” was quite different: Bruce Lee, who was born in
San Francisco but alternated his film career between the U.S. and Hong Kong. In
American movies he was the usual Chinese sidekick, distinguished only by his
martial-arts skills — like his role as Kato in the 1960’s The Green
Hornet TV series — but he became an
international superstar in Run Run Shaw’s Hong Kong productions, particularly The
Chinese Connection and Enter the
Dragon, in which he played a martial-arts
hero busting the bad guys. There’s one particularly empowering clip from a
Bruce Lee movie in which he sees a sign reading, “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed”
(actually a quite common sign in Hong Kong during its days as a British
colony), and takes a flying leap during which he kicks the sign and breaks it
to smithereens. Now that’s a
metaphor for racial empowerment!
