JOURNALS

Margins and Mainstreams

Asians in American

History and Culture

GARY Y. OKIHIRO

University ofWashington Press

SEATTLE & LONDON

1 When and Where I Enter

A s o L 1 T A R Y figure defies a tank, insofar as a solitary figure can defy a tank. A “goddess of liberty” in the image of the Statue of Liberty arises from the midst of a vast throng gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The November I, 1991, issue of Asiaweek carries the caption “Welcoming Asians” under a picture of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor awash in the light of fireworks. 1 Contained within those images-vivid and memora- ble-is what Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal called the American creed. Democracy, equality, and liberty form the core of that creed, and the “mighty woman with a torch” has come to symbolize those ideals to, in the words of the poet Emma Lazarus, the tired, the poor, the huddled masses “yearning to breathe free.”

On another island, on the other coast, stands not a statue but a wooden barrack. Solitary figures hunch over to carve poems on the walls. 2

The sea-scape resembles lichen twisting and turning for a thousand li.

There is no shore to land and it is difficult to walk.

r I have taken the title of this chapter from a narrative history of African American women by Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, !984).

2. Poems published in Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), pp. 34, 52·

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WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

With a gentle breeze I arrived at the city thinking all would be so.

At ease, how was one to know he was to live in a wooden building?

In the quiet of night, I heard, faintly, the whistling of wind.

The forms and shadows saddened me; upon seeing the landscape, I composed a poem.

The floating clouds, the fog, darken the sky. The moon shines faintly as the insects chirp. Grief and bitterness entwined are heaven sent. The sad person sits alone, leaning by a window.

Angel Island, not Ellis Island, was the main port of entry for Chinese migrants “yearning to breathe free” from 1910 to 1940.3

There, separated by cold currents from the golden shore, the mi- grants were carefully screened by U.S. Immigration officials and held for days, weeks, and months to determine their fitness for America. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act had prohibited entry to Chinese workers, indicative of a race- and class-based politics, because according to the act, “in the opinion of the Government of the United States, the coming of Chinese laborers to this cou~­ try endangers the good order of certain localities within the ter- ritory thereof.” ”

In New York City, a year after passage of the Chinese Exclusion

3 A third island, Sullivan’s Island, was the point of entry for many African slaves during the eighteenth century. “Sullivan’s Island,” wrote historian Peter H. Wood, “the sandy spit on the northeast edge of Charlestown harbor where incoming slaves were briefly quarantined, might well be viewed as the Ellis Island of black Americans” (Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Car- olina from r67o through the Stano Rebellion [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, I975], p. xiv).

4 The text of the r882 Chinese Exclusion Act is quoted in Cheng-Tsu Wu, ed., “Chink!” A Documentary History of Anti-Chinese Prejudice in America (New York: World Publishing, 1972), pp. 70-75.

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Act, Emma Lazarus wrote the poem that now graces the base of the Statue of Liberty. But the statue had not been envisioned as a symbol of welcome to the world’s “wretched refuse” by its maker, French sculptor Frederic Auguste Batholdi, and at its unveiling in r886, President Grover Cleveland proclaimed that the statue’s light would radiate outward into “the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression until Liberty enlightens the world.”5 In other words, the statue commemorated republican stability, and ac- cording to the October 29, r886, New York World, it stood for- ever as a warning against lawlessness and anarchy and as a pledge of friendship with nations that “dare strike for freedom.” That meaning was changed by European immigrants, who saw the statue as welcoming them, and by Americanizers, who, during the 1920s and 193os, after the 1924 Immigration Act restricting mass immigration, sought a symbol to instill within the children of im- migrants patriotism and a love for country. 6

The tale of those two islands, separated by the vast interior and lapped by different waters, comprises a metaphor of America and the Asian American experience. America was not always a nation of immigrants, nor was America unfailingly a land of democracy, equality, and liberty. The romantic sentiment of the American identity, “this new man,” expressed by French immigrant J. Hec- tor St. John de Crevecoeur was probably not the dominant view, nor did it apply to all of America’s people. Writing in 1782, Creve- coeur exclaimed: “What then is the American, this new man? … I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an En- glishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of dif- ferent nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and

5 John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), pp. 71-72, 74, 75·

6 Ibid., pp. 75, 77, 79·

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being re- ceived in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” 7

Instead, the prevailing view was a narrower construction that distinguished “settler,” or original colonist, from “immigrant,” and that required a single origin and common culture. Americans, John Jay wrote in the Federalist papers, were “one united people-a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”8 That eighteenth-century discrimination between set- tler and immigrant proved inadequate for the building of a new republic during the nineteenth century. The quest for a unifying national identity, conceived along the lines of Crevecoeur’s notion whereby “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men,” an idea later called the “melting pot,” paralleled the build- ing of networks of roads, railroads, and communications links that unified and bound the nation.9

Although Asians helped to construct those iron links that con- nected East to West, they, along with other peoples of color, were excluded from the industrial, masculine, destroying melting pot. Ellis Island was not their port of entry; its statue was not their goddess of liberty. Instead, the square-jawed, androgynous visage of the “Mother of Exiles” turned outward to instruct, to warn, and to repel those who would endanger the good order of Amer- ica’s shores, both at home and abroad. The indigenous inhabi- tants of Africa, Asia, and the Americas were not members of the community but were more akin to the wilderness, which required penetration and domestication. Three years after the Constitu- tion was ratified, the first Congress met and restricted admission

7 J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Fox, Duffield & Co., 1904), pp. 54-55.

8 Higham, Send These to Me, p. 3· 9 Ibid., p. 199.

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into the American community to “free white persons” through the Naturalization Act of 1790. Although the act was modified to in- clude “persons of African nativity or descent” in 1870 and Chinese nationals in 1943, the racial criterion for citizenship was eliminated completely only in 19 52, 162 years after the original delineation of the Republic’s members, or, according to the Nat- uralization Act, the “worthy part of mankind.”

In 1886, African American educator Anna Julia Cooper told a group of African American ministers: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter … then and there the whole Ne- gro race enters with me.’ ” 1° Cooper’s confident declaration held profound meaning. African American men bore the stigma of race, but African American women bore the stigmata of race and gender. Her liberation, her access to the full promise of America, embraced the admission of the entire race. The matter of “when and where,” accordingly, is an engendered, enabling moment. The matter of “when and where,” in addition, is a generative, trans- formative moment. The matter of “when and where,” finally, is an extravagant, expansive moment. That entry into the American community, however enfeebled by barriers to full membership, parallels the earlier entry into historical consciousness, and the “when and where” . of both moments are engendered/enabling, generative/transformative, extra,vagant/expansive.

Asians entered into the European American historical con- sciousness long before the mid-nineteenth-century Chinese mi- gration to “Gold Mountain” and, I believe, even before Yankee traders and American diplomats and missionaries traveled to China in the Elte eighteenth century. The “when and where” of the Asian American experience can be found within the European imagination and construction of Asians and Asia and within their expansion eastward and westward to Asia for conquest and trade.

Writing in the fifth or fourth century B.C.E., Hippocrates, Greek physician and “father of medicine,” offered a “scientific”

10 Giddings, When and Where I Enter, pp. 81-82.

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

view of Asia and its people. 11 Asia, Hippocrates held, differed “in every respect” and “very widely” from Europe. He attributed those contrasts to the environment, which shaped the peoples’ bodily conformations and their characters. Asia’s mild, uniform climate supported lush vegetation and plentiful harvests, but un- der those conditions “courage, endurance, industry and high spirit could not arise” and “pleasure must be supreme.” Asians re- flected the seasons in their natures, exhibiting a “monotonous sameness” and “stagnation,” and their form of government, led by kings who ruled as “despots,” enfeebled Asians even more. Among Asians, Hippocrates reported, were “Longheads” and “Phasians.” The latter had yellowish complexions “as though they suffered from jaundice.” Because of the differing environ- ments in which they lived, Hippocrates concluded that Europeans had a wider variety of physical types and were more courageous and energetic than Asians, “for uniformity engenders slackness, while variation fosters endurance in both body and soul; rest and slackness are food for cowardice, endurance arid exertion for bravery.”12

Aristotle mirrored Hippocrates’ views of Asia during thefourth century B.C. E. In his Politics, Aristotle observed that northern Eu’- ropeans were “full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill,” whereas Asians were “intelligent and inventive,” but lacked spirit and were therefore “always in a state of subjection and slavery.” The Greeks, in contrast, lived between those two groups and thus were both “high-spirited and also intelligent.” Further, argued Aristotle, barbarians were by nature “more servile in character” than Greeks, and he reported that some Asians practiced canni-

II For Hippocrates, Asia meant Asia Minor, or the area between the Med- iterranean and Black seas. Depending upon who was writing and when, Asia meant variously Asia Minor (or Anatolia), the Levant, Southwest Asia, Cen- tral Asia, or India. Generally, during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. E. the Greeks called the Persians “Asians.”

12 Hippocrates, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1923), 1:105-33·

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balism. 13 The fourth-century B.C.E. conflict between Persia and Greece, between barbarism and civilization, between inferior and superior, tested the “great chain of being” idea propounded by Plato and Aristotle. Alexander the Great’s thrust into India, to “the ends of the world,” was a one-sided affair, according to the Roman historian Arrian, a chronicler of the expedition. Using contemporary accounts but writing some four hundred years af- ter Alexander’s death in 3 23 B.C.E., Arrian contrasted Alex- ander’s ingenuity and dauntless spirit-“he could not endure to think of putting an end to the war so long as he could find ene- mies”-with the cowardice of the barbarian hordes, who fled pell- mell at the sight of the conqueror. 14 In a speech to his officers, as recorded by Arrian, Alexander reminded them that they were “ever conquerors” and their enemies were “always beaten,” that the Greeks were “a free people” and the Asians, “a nation of slaves.” He praised the strength and valor of the Greeks, who were “inured to warlike toils,” and he declared that their enemies had been “enervated by long ease and effeminacy” and called them “the wanton, the luxurious, and effeminate Asiatics.”15

Such accounts of Asia, based upon the belief in a generative re- lationship between the environment and race and culture, enabled an exotic, alienating construction of Asians, whether witnessed or

13 The Politics of Aristotle, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), pp. 96, 218, 248. “Barbarians,” it should be noted, could refer to Europeans, such as Thracians and lllyrians, as well as to Asians.

14 Arrian’s History of the Expedition of Alexander the Great, and Con- quest of Persia, trans. John Rooke (London: W. McDowall, 1813), pp. II2, II?, 123, 146.

15 Ibid., p. 42. Arrian was an Asian from Nicomedia in northern Turkey and wrote in Greek, despite serving as a Roman governor. See also Alex- ander’s contrast of intelligent Greeks with Persian and Indian hordes in the influential work of late Greek literature The Greek Alexander Romance, trans. Richard Stoneman (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 105, 128, i81; and a similar representation of Persians by Romans during the third century c. E. in Michael H. Dodgeon and Samuel N.C. Lieu, comps. and eds., The Ro- man Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars (AD 226-363): A Documentary History (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 19, 26.

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

simply imagined. Literary critics Edward W. Said and Mary B. Campbell have characterized that European conception of Asia and Asians-“the Other”-as “almost a European invention,” according to Said, a place of “romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences,” and for Campbell, that conception was “the ground for dynamic struggles between the powers of language and the facts of life.”16 Accord- ingly, the Greek historian Ctesias, writing probably in the fifth century B.C.E., reveled in the accounts of “dog-faced creatures” and “creatures without heads” that supposedly inhabited Africa, and he peopled his Asia with those same monstrous beasts. Like- wise, the author of the early medieval account Wonders of the East described Asian women “who have boars’ tusks and hair down to their heels and oxen’s tails growing out of their loins. These women are thirteen feet tall, and their bodies have the whiteness of marble, and they have camels’ feet and donkeys’ teeth.” Alexander the Great, hero of Wonders of the East, ki.lls those giant, tusked, and tailed women “because of their obscen- ity” and thereby eliminates strangeness and makes the world sane and safe again. Asia in Wonders of the East, writes Campbell, “stands in opposition to the world we know and the laws that govern it,” and thus was beyond and outside the realm of order and sensibility.17

That otherworldliness, that flight from reality, pervades the earliest Christian European text to define Europe in opposition to Asia, the Peregrinatio ad terram sanctam by Egeria, probably written during the late fourth century C.E. Although her account of her journey to the Holy Land contained “moments of awe, rev- erence, wonder or gratitude,” it described an exotic Asia that served to highlight the positive, the real, the substantial Europe. De locis sanctis, written during the late seventh century c.E. by

16 Edward W. Said, Orienta/ism (New York: Random House, 1978), p. l:j and Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic Euro- peatt Travel Writing, 40o-I6oo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 3·

17 Campbell, Witness, pp. p, 63-65, 68-69, 84. See also Greek Alex- a.nder Romance, p. 124.

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Adamnan, abbot at Iona’s monastery, recounted a similar Asia from the travels of Bishop Arculf to the Holy Land. Asia, accord- ing to De locis sanctis, was a strange, even demonic place, where people exhibited grotesque inversions and perversions of human nature, and where a prerational, stagnant configuration existed, “a world stripped of spirit and past.”18

Asia, according to Campbell and Said, was Europe’s Other. 19

Asia was the location of Europe’s oldest, greatest, and richest col- onies, the source of its civilization and languages, its cultural con- testant, and the wellspring of one of its most persistent images of the Other. At the same time, cautions Said, the assumptions of Orientalism were not merely abstractions and figments of the Eu- ropean imagination but composed a system of thought that sup- ported a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over” Asia. Within Orientalism’s lexicon, Asians were inferior to and deformations of Europeans, and Orientalism’s purpose was to stir an inert people, raise them to their former greatness, shape them and give them an identity, and subdue and domesticate them. That colonization, wrote Said, was an engen- dered subordination, by which European men aroused, pene- trated, and possessed a passive, dark, and vacuous “Eastern bride,” imposing movement and giving definition to the “inscru- table Orient,” full of secrecy and sexual promise. 20 The femini- zation of Asia was well under way before the colonization of Asia by Europe in the sixteenth century, as evident in the accounts of Hippocrates, Herodotus,Z1 Aristotle, Arrian, Egeria, and Adamnan. .

I8 Campbell, Witness, pp. 7-8, 21, 26,44-45. 19 Ibid., p. 3; and Said, Orienta/ism, p. r. See also Christopher Miller,

Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1985), who contends that Africa was Europe’s Other.

20 Said, Orientalism, pp. r, 59, 62, 72, 74, 86, 207-8, 2II, 222. For a cautionary critique of Said, see Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and Brit- ish Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

21 The contest between Greece and Asia was a major theme in ancient Greek literature, as seen in the writings of Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Xen- ophon, and many others. The work of Herodotus, written in the fifth century

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

Arrian’s account of Alexander’s effortless victory over “effem- inate” Asian men, for example, parallels his discussion of Greek men’s easy conquest of erotic Asian women. Indian women, wrote the Roman historian, “who will suffer themselves to be deflow- ered for no other gift, will easily condescend, when an elephant is promised as the purchase,” thinking it “an honour to have their beauty valued at so high a rate.”22 The conqueror took for himself several Asian wives, he “bestowed the daughters of the most il- lustrious” Persians on his friends, and more than ro,ooo of his sol- diers married Asian women. Further, commented Arrian, despite being “in the very heat of youth,” Alexander curbed his sexual de- sires and thereby displayed the triumph of mind over body, ratio- nality over sensuality, Greek over Asian. “The daughter of Oxyartes was named Roxana, a virgin, but very marriageable, and, by the general consent of writers, the most beautiful of all the Asiatic women, Darius’s wife excepted,” wrote Arrian. “Alex- ander was struck with surprise at the sight of her beauty; never- theless, being fully resolved not to offer violence to a captive, he forbore to gratify his desires till he took her, afterwards, to wife … and herein showed himself no less a pattern of true conti- nency, than he had before done of heroic fortitude.” “As to thpse pleasures which regarded the body,” wrote Arrian in eulogizing Alexander, “he shewed himself indifferent; as to the desires of the mind, insatiable.”23

The Greek representation of Asia yielded not only soft men and erotic women but also hard, cruel men and virile, martial women. Fifth-century B.C.E. polarities of Greek/barbarian, male/female, and human/animal helped to define the citizens of the polis- Greek men-as the negation of their Other-barbarian, female, animal-who were linked by analogy such that barbarian was

B.C. E., is perhaps the best known example of this genre. I simply present a se- lection of the evidence.

22 Arrian’s History, p. 220. 23 Ibid., pp. 112-13, r8r, 205. Arrian was a Stoic philosopher, account-

ing for his stress on mind over body.

like female was like animatz• Athenian patriarchy held that men were the norm, were superior, and brought order, whereas women were abnormal, inferior, and brought chaos. Marriage domesticated women, civilizing their wild, untamed sexuality and disciplining them for admittance into the city. Amazons reversed the gender relations of the polis and stood in opposition to its an- drocentrism by being members of a society of women who refused to marry and become mothers to sons and who assumed the pre- eminent male characteristics of aggressiveness, leadership, and strength. Although the myth of Amazons originated before the Persian wars, the Greeks considered Asia to be the Amazons’ homeland, and they equated Persians with Amazons, in that both Persians and Amazons were barbarians and, according to !so- crates in 380 B.C.E., Amazons “hated the whole Greek race” and sought “to gain mastery over all.” Athenians, explained !socrates, defended themselves against Amazon expansion, defeated them, and destroyed them “just as if they had waged war against all mankind.”25 Besides posing a political threat, Asia served as an object lesson of how, when men ceased to act as men, order and normalcy vanished, resulting in the topsy-turvy world of the Amazons.26

The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century not only breached Alexander’s wall but also made palpable a hitherto- distant, alien people and culture. “Swarming like locusts over the face of the earth,” Friar William of Rub ruck wrote in 12 55, the

24 Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-history of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), pp. 4-5·

25 Quoted in W. Blake Tyrrell, Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmak- ing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 15-16. For an- other view of Amazons and their relation to Greek patriarchy, see duBois, Centaurs and Amazons, pp. 4-5, 34, 70.

26 On the ambiguities of Greek attributions of male and female and the rhetoric of discourse and reality of practice, see John J. Winkler, The Con- straints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1990).

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

Mongols “have brought terrible devastation to the eastern parts [of Europe], laying waste with fire and carnage … it seemed that God did not wish them to come out; nevertheless it is written in sacred history that they shall come out toward the end of the world, and shall make a great slaughter of men.”27 The Mongols, of whom the Tatars were the most prominent group, appeared as avenging angels from hell, “Tartarus,” and hence the corruption of their name to “Tartars.”28 Although in awe of the Mongols’ mil- itary prowess and strength, Friar William saw little to admire in their filth and barbarism: “the poor provide for themselves · by trading sheep and skins; and the slaves fill their bellies with dirty water and are content with this. They also catch mice, of which many kinds abound there; mice with long tails they do not eat but give to their birds; they eat doormice and all kinds of mice with short tails.”29

The late-thirteenth-century account of Asia by the Venetian Marco Polo contains both feminine and masculine attributions, chaste women and diabolical men, and grotesque and wondrous objects and people, including unicorns, Amazons, dog-headed creatures, mountain streams flowing with diamonds, and deserts full of ghouls. His narrative is a distillation of the brew that had preceded him. john Masefield, in his introduction to the :t9o8 !:!cli- tion of Polo’s Travels, wrote that “his picture of the East is the pic- ture 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.”30 A prominent part of that im- age was the exotic and the erotic, highlighted in Polo’s ample ac- counts of prostitutes, sex, and women, leading Henry Hart t~ speculate: “One may surmise that the numerous references to

27 Campbell, Witness, pp. 88-89. 28 David Morgan, The Mongols (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 56-

57· 29 Campbell, Witness, p. u4. 30 The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian (London: J. M. Dent, 1908), p.

XI.

women-the intimate descriptions of their persons, their various aptitudes in sex relations and many other details not usually re- lated even by hardy travelers of that or a later day … were largely, if not entirely, called forth by the frank curiosity and con- tinual questionings of the stay-at-home Westerners for whom his tale was told and written.” Polo wrote of the Chinese that “their ladies and wives are also most delicate and angelique things, and raised gently, and with great delicacy, and they clothe themselves with so many ornaments and of silk and of jewels, that the value of them cannot be estimated.’m

In Europe, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was the most in- fluential book about Asia from r 3 56, when it was first published, to the eighteenth century. “Mandeville” was a pseudonym for perhaps a number of authors, who claimed to have traveled from England to the Holy Land, Egypt, Arabia, and even to the court of the Great Khan in Cathay. Like Polo, Mandeville describedthe marvels and monsters of the East, from the bounties of gold, sil- ver, precious stones, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger to the horrors of one-eyed and headless beasts, giants, pygmies, and cannibals. In a single passage, Mandeville poses an apparently curious juxta- position of sexuality and war, but upon reflection, the feminine (sexuality) and masculine (war) so constructed are really two sides of the same coin: the dominance of men over women and ter- ritory, achieved through heterosexual sex and war, and, by exten- sion, under imperialism, European men’s superiority over Asian women and men and their control of reproduction and the state. On the island of “Calonak” near Java, wrote Mandeville, the king “hath as many wives as he will. For he maketh search all the coun- try to get him the fairest maidens that may be found, and maketh them to be brought before him. And he taketh one one night, and another another night, and so forth continually suing; so that he hath a thousand wives or more. And he lieth never but one night

31 Henry H. Hart, Marco Polo: Venetian Adventurer (Norman: Univer- sity of Oklahoma Press, 1967), pp. II?, 135.

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

with one of them, and another night with another; but if that one happen to be more lusty to his pleasance than another. And there- fore the king getteth full many children, some-time an hundred, some-time a two-hundred, and some-time more.” Without a paragraph break, Mandeville continued: “And he hath also into a 14,ooo elephants or more that he maketh for to be brought up amongst his villains by all his towns. For in case that he had any war against any other king about him, then [he] maketh certain men of arms for to go up into the castles of tree made for the War, that craftily be set upon the elephants’ backs, for to fight against their enemies.”32

Christopher Columbus was a great admirer of “Mandeville” and, along with English explorers Martin Frobisher and Walter Raleigh and Flemish cartographer Gerhardus Mercator, read and believed Mandeville’s account of Asia and his idea of a circum- navigable and universally inhabited world.33 The fabulous East, the earthly paradise “discovered” and described by Columbus, was to him and his contemporaries Asia-the “Indies”-and its peoples were Asians-the “Indians.” They were just as surely Asian as the lands and peoples in Polo’s and Mandeville’s travel- ogues. As Columbus noted in the preface to his ship’s daily log, the expedition’s purpose was to go “to the regions of India, to see the Princes there and the peoples and the lands, and to learn of their disposition, and of everything, and the measures which could be taken for their conversion to our Holy Faith.”34 Columbus com- pared the new lands to the virtuous Garden before the Fall, where people were like children, innocent and unselfconscious in their nakedness, and where the feminized land invited conquest. His log entry for October I2, 1492, reported: “At dawn we saw naked

32 The Travels of Sir john Mandeville (London: Macmillan, 1900), pp. 127-28.

33 Campbell, Witness, pp. 10, 161; and The Log of Christopher Colum- bus, trans. Robert H. Fuson (Camden, Maine: International Marine Publish- ing, 1987), p. 25.

34 Log of Christopher Columbus, p. 51·

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people, and I went ashore in the ship’s boat, armed …. I unfurled the royal banner. … After a prayer of thanksgiving I ordered the captains of the Pinta and Nina … to bear faith and witness that I was taking possession of this island for the King and Queen.”35

Much of the land was bountiful and laden with fruit, and on his third voyage, Columbus described the mouth of the Orinoco River as shaped “like a woman’s nipple,” from whence issued the waters of paradise into the sea.36

Some islanders, reported Columbus, were friendly, domestic, tractable, and even cowardly, but others were warlike, monstrous, and evil, even cannibalistic (a word derived from the name “Carib” Indians). “I also understand that, a long distance from here,” wrote Columbus on November 4, 1492, “there are men with one eye and others with dogs’ snouts who eat men. On tak- ing a man they behead him and drink his blood and cut off his gen- itals.’m The timid Indians were eager to submit to Europeans, being “utterly convinced that I and all my people came from Heaven,” according to Columbus, whereas the fearless ones re- quired discipline. Both kinds of Indians, “feminine” and “mas- culine,” were fair game for capture, or, in Columbus’s euphemism, “I would like to take some of them with me.”38 That, in fact, was what the admiral did, as easily as plucking leaves from the lush, tropical vegetation, to serve as guides, servants, and specimens. Columbus’s text and others like it helped to justify a “Christian imperialism” and were the means by which the invad- ers “communicated-and helped control-a suddenly larger world.”39

35 Ibid., pp. 75~76. 36 Campbell, Witness, pp. 171, 247. Walter Raleigh also believed the Ori-

noco led to paradise (ibid., pp. 246-47). 3 7 Log of Christopher Columbus, p. 102. 38 Ibid., pp. 145, 173; and “Letter of Columbus,” in The Four Voyages of

Columbus, ed. and trans. Cecil Jane (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), p. 10.

39 Campbell, Witness, p. 166.

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

That world grew even larger in about rsro, when a few Euro- peans questioned Columbus’s “India” and proposed the existence of a new continent that stood between Europe and Asia, although cartographers continued to append American discoveries to the Asian coast until the late sixteenth century. Accompanying and justifying their expanded physical world was an ideology, articu~ lated in texts, of a growing racial and cultural distance between Europeans and the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The first cracks had appeared, in the perceptions of Asians by Euro- peans, in the fifth-century B.C. E. works of Hippocrates, who had posited “very wide” differences “in every respect” between Eu- ropeans and Asians. The fissures continued to widen thereafter to the degree that Asia, Africa, and the Americas became antipodes of Europe, the habitations of monstrous beasts and perversions of nature itself. That world, it seemed, needed to be appropriated, worked over, and tamed.

The process of colonization and the relationship between col- onizer and colonized were incisively described by Albert Memmi, the twentieth-century Tunisian philosopher and author. “The co~ lonialist stresses those things which keep him separate, rather than emphasizing that which might contribute to the foundation of a joint community.” That focus on difference is not of itself rac- ist, but it takes on a particular meaning and function within a rac- ist context. According to Memmi: “In those differences, the colonized is always degraded and the colonialist finds justification for rejecting his subject. … The colonialist removes the factor [the colonized] from history, time, and therefore possible evolu- tion. What is actually a sociological point becomes labeled as being biological or, preferably, metaphysical. It is attached to the colonized’s basic nature.”40 Whether because of race or culture, of biology or behavior, of physical appearance or social construct, Asians appeared immutable, engendered, and inferior. These dif-

40 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 71.

ferences not only served to set Asians apart from the “joint com- munity” but also helped to define the European identity as a negation of its Other.

Reflecting on works published on the five-hundredth anniver- sary of Columbus’s “discovery,” anthropologist Wilcomb E. Washburn, noted interpreter of American Indian culture and di- rector of the Office of American Studies at the Smithsonian Insti- tution, reminded his readers that the initiative for discovery came from the West and not the East, and thus “Asia was more sharply etched on the European niind than on the Asian mind …. Both America and Asia were relatively stagnant,” he explained, “being more wedded to their traditions than was the West, which found the novelty of other climes and other cultures stimulating. While the Western mind did not always move in directions that we would now applaud, it moved-indeed, darted here and there- as the Asian mind too often did not.”41

Following Columbus’s “great enterprise” and his “taking pos- session” of “Asia,” the penetration of Asia proper began with the Portuguese, who seized parts of India and Southeast Asia during the early sixteenth century, established a colony at Macao in 1557, and controlled much of the trade with China and Japan. Despite Portugal’s presumed, sole possession of the hemisphere east of the 1493 papal line of demarcation, Spain, the Nether- lands, France, and Britain also participated in the trade with and colonization of Asia. The conquest and colonization of the Amer- icas was, of course, a product of that global expansion of Euro- peans, and the “when and where” of the Asian American experience must be similarly situated. I do not claim, however, that Orientalism’s restructuring and domination of Asia simply migrated with Europeans to America, nor am I arguing a neces- sary relationship between European and European American per- ceptions of Asians. My contention is that there is a remarkable

41 Wilcomb E. Washburn, “Columbus: On and off the Reservation,” Na- tional Review, October 5, 1992, pp. 57-58.

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

familiarity to Orientalism’s face on both shores of the Atlantic and that its resemblance extends to European constructions of American Indians and Africans.42

Historian Stuart Creighton Miller, in his 1969 book, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, I78s-r88z, argued that although it was sensible to assume that American attitudes toward Asians were rooted in the European heritage, he could find no direct connection between those views. Neither the writings nor the libraries of America’s leading figures during the colonial period showed an interest in or even curiosity about Asians. Miller characterized that lacuna as indicative of an “innocent, unstructured perception of China in the American mind” and, as proof, pointed to George Washington, who was surprised to learn in 178 5 that the Chinese were nonwhites. Fur- ther, Miller noted that the English failed to share the Continent’s enthusiasm for Chinese government and law and for Confucian philosophy made popular by Jesuit missionaries and by the icon- oclasts of the Age of Reason. In fact, in Britain, Sinophobes such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, and Adam S111ith launched a vitriolic attack against the Chinese. The Amer- ican image of Asians, Miller concluded, took shape only after di- rect American trade with China began with the departure of the Empress of China from New York Harbor in 1784.43

Miller underestimates the malleability and mobility of racial at- titudes and notions of the Other, characteristics that have been amply demonstrated by scholars. Europeans, as noted by histo- rian Dwight W. Hoover, “did not approach new lands and new people devoid of preconceptions. Instead, they brought with them a whole set of ideas concerning both the natural and historical worlds.”44 Some of those preconceptions included the idea of a bi-

42 See chapter 5 for an elaboration of this theme. 43 Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American

Image of the Chinese, I785-z882 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 11-14.

44 Dwight W. Hoover, The Red and the Black (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1976), p. 4·

21

ological chain of being that evolved from ape to wild man to man and the biblical notion of postdiluvian degeneration and diversity originating with the Tower of Babel.45 Despite their manifest va- riety, ideas of race distinguished Europeans from their shadow- non-Europeans-and claimed superiority for the civilized, Chris- tian portion of humankind.

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, first performed in r6n, was likely set in Bermuda but might just as well have been an al- legory of race relations during the age of European overseas ex- pansion and colonization, or perhaps even an account of the sugar plantation system that was installed along the European Mediter- ranean coast and on islands like Cyprus and Crete and that was driven mainly by Asian and African slave labor by the late four- teenth century.46 Prospera, “a prince of power” and lover of books, is set adrift with his daughter, Miranda, and lands on an enchanted island which he takes from Cali ban, whom he enslaves and banishes to the island’s wasteland. Caliban (anagram of the word “cannibal”) is everything Prospera is not; he is dark and physically deformed; he is “poisonous,” “lying,” “filth,” “capable of all ill,” and begotten of “the devil himself.” He is both African and Indian, his mother was from Algiers and he is descended from Brazilians, Patagonians, and Bermudans but is also part fish, part beast. Caliban’s mother, Prospero said, was a “damn’d witch,” a “hag,” who had given birth to Caliban like an animal-“she did litter here” her son, who was “not honour’d with a human shape.” Despite being excluded from their company and despite Miranda’s abhorrence of him, Caliban is indispensable to Pros- pera and Miranda, because he “does make our fire, fetch in our wood; and serves in offices that profit us.” Prospero pities Cali-

4 5 I merely allude to the vast literature on the history of racism and racist thought and cite as particularly helpful Arthur 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936); and George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978).

46 Hoover, Red and Black, pp. 1-2; and David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 52-57.

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

ban, tutors him, and takes “pains to make [him] speak”; Prospero gives meaning to Cali ban’s “gabble.” Instruction, however, proves insufficient. The wild man is driven by savage lust and tries to kill Prospero and rape the virginal Miranda, but he is repulsed by Prospero’s magic.47

Cali ban, the “savage man of Inde,” was African and Indian, but he was also Asian insofar as Indians came from Asia, as was con- tended . by Samuel Purchas, scholar and chaplain to the arch- bishop of Canterbury, in his widely read book Purchas · his Pilgrimage, published in r6r3, and seconded by the astronomer Edward Brerewood in his r6q book, Enquiries touching the di- versity of languages, and religions through the chiefe parts of the world, and by Walter Raleigh in his r6q History of the World. The fact that Indians were once Asians accounted for their bar- barism, according to these English writers.48 Thus, although a separate race, Indians were still Asians, both groups having de” scended from the biblical Shem; and Asians, Indians, and Africans all belonged to the darker races of men, the Cali bans of the earth, who were ruled by beastly passions, sought to impregnate white women (to people “this isle with Calibans”), and, although given a language and trained in useful labor, still turned against their benefactors and had to be subdued.49 Perhaps influenced by those European views, Thomas Jefferson hypothesized the kinship of Asians and America’s Indians: “the resemblance between the In- dians of America and the eastern inhabitants of Asia would in-

47 The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (New York: Walter]. Black, 1937), pp. 2-6; Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. n- !2; and Leslie A. Fielder, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein & Day, 1968), pp. 42-49. See 0. Mannoni, Prospera and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland (London: Methuen, 1956), for a more complex reading of the play, esp. pp. 105-6.

48 Hoover, Red and Black, pp. 35-37. 49 See Winthrop Jordan, White over Black (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1968), for British and American racial attitudes to- ward Indians and Africans from r 55 o to r 8 !2.

23

duce us to conjecture that the former are descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former.” 50

Although they arrived in the New World carrying the baggage of the Old World, Americans developed their own projections and invented their own mythologies, peering from their “clearing” into the “wilderness.” George Washington may have been reflect- ing the light of European ideology bent by the prism of American experience when he declared that “being upon good terms with the Indians” was based upon economy and expediency, and in- stead of driving them “by force of arms out of their Country; which … is like driving the wild Beasts of ye forest … the grad- ual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”51 And Jefferson might have defended Indians as “a de- graded yet basically noble brand of white man,” but he was also defending the American environment and its quadrupeds, those “other animals of America,” against French naturalist Georges Buffon’s claim of American inferiority. Having failed to assimilate and civilize the savage and childish Indians, Jefferson argued for their extermination, made “necessary to secure ourselves against the future effects of their savage and ruthless warfare.”52 Jefferson, having reached that conclusion about Indians, linked America’s determination to clear the forests with a New World version of British expansion and colonization and predicted that the “con- firmed brutalization, if not extermination of this race in our America is … to form an additional chapter in the English his- tory of [oppression of] the same colored man in Asia, and of the brethren of their own color in Ireland.”53

50 Frederick M. Binder, The Color Problem in Early National America as Viewed by john Adams, Jefferson and Jackson (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), p. 83.

51 Quoted in Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian- Hating and Empire-Building (New York: New American Library, 1980), p. 65.

52 Ibid., pp. 8o-8r, 98; and Jordan, White over Black, pp. 475-81. 53 Drinnon, Facing West, p. Sr.

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

When Yankee traders arrived in China during the late eighteenth century, they saw the Chinese through lenses that had already been ground with the grit of European views of Asia and Asians and the rub of historical and contemporary relations between European Americans and American Indians and Africans. The traders’ dia~ ries, journals, and letters were mostly free of racial prejudice, re- ports Miller, and the negative images of the Chinese that did appear concerned China’s government and the officials with whom the traders dealt, whom they saw as despotic, corrupt, barbarous, beg- ging, and cowardly. But traders’ accounts also revealed extreme ethnocentrism. According to a trader, the Chinese were “the most vile, the most cowardly and submissive of slaves,” and whites could bully even Chinese soldiers, whose “silly grunts and menaces mean nothing and are to be disregarded,” wrote another.54 A prominent theme was the bizarre and peculiar nature of the Chinese in their al- leged taste for dogs, cats, and rats, in their music, which was a “mass of detestible discord,” and in their theater, which was “ridic- ulous or disgracefully obscene.” The records, wrote Miller, “por- trayed him [the Chinese] as a ludicrous specimen of the human race and [were] not designed to evoke the admiration and respect for Chinese culture.” The focus on the exotic, on “strange and curious objects,” was complemented by a featuring of vice-gambling and prostitution- and practices showing the “moral debasement” of the people, including idolatry, polygamy, and infanticide. The Chinese, wrote a trader contemptuously, are ”grossly superstitious … most depraved and vicious: gambling is universal … ; they use pernicious drugs, … are gross gluttons,” and are “a people re- fined in cruelty, bloodthirsty, and inhuman.”55

The journey begun in New England and continuing around South America’s Cape Horn was just the start of America’s mas- culine thrust westward toward Asia’s open shores.56 Like those

54 Miller, Unwelcome Immigrant, pp. 21, 25-27, 34· 55 Ibid., pp. 27-32, 35· 56 The phrase “masculine thrust toward Asia” is from the title of chapter

II of Takaki’s Iron Cages, p. 253.

Yankee China trade vessels, the Conestoga wagons and prairie schooners pushed their way through “vacant, virgin” land to the Pacific and in the process built a continental empire that stretched “from sea to shining sea.” In r879, Robert Louis Stevenson rode the iron rails that bound the nation together, and his account, “Across the Plains: Leaves from the Notebook of an Emigrant be- tween New York and San Francisco,” might be read as the great American epic. America was “a sort of promised land” for Amer- icans, like Stevenson, who were immigrants from Europe and who found themselves among a diverse lot of fellow passengers, “a babel of bewildered men, women, and children.” As the train carried them westward, Stevenson described, like Crevecoeur, the beauties of the land, where “all times, races, and languages have brought their contribution.” That equality, that melting pot, how- ever, was broken at Chicago, at the frontier of civilization, where the travelers were placed on an “emigrant train” that consisted of segregated coaches: one for white men, another for white women and children, and yet another for Chinese. Stevenson reflected upon the hatreds that had prompted that racial, gender, and age segregation as the train “pushed through this unwatered wilder- ness and haunt of savage tribes.” America, he wrote, was the meeting ground, where “hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their gates in search of provender, had here come face to face,” and where Europeans had come with preconceived hatreds of the Chinese that had moved them from one field of con- flict to another. “They [Europeans] seemed never to have looked at them [Chinese], listened to them, or thought of them, but hated them a priori,” observed Stevenson. “The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of money.”57

Despite his contempt for those “stupid,” albeit modified, Old World prejudices, prejudices given further license once having left civilization for the “unwatered wilderness” of the frontier, Steven-

57 Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), pp. r, II, 26-27, 48, 6o, 62; and Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 219-21.

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

son was not entirely free of those same perceptions of the Chinese. His fellow Europeans, reported Stevenson, saw the Chinese as physically repulsive, such that the mere sight of them caused “a kind of choking in the throat.” “Now, as a matter of fact,” ad- mitted the observant Scotsman, “the young Chinese man is so like a large class of European women, that on raising my head and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I have for an instant been deceived by the resemblance”-although, he offered, “I do not say it is the most attractive class of our women.” And while looking upon the Chinese with “wonder and respect,” Stevenson saw them as creatures from “the other” world: “They [the Chinese] walk the earth with us, but it seems they must be of different clay.” “They hear the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course …. Heaven knows if we’ had one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our . eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows.”58

Stevenson’s view of the Chinese as “different clay” might have been conditioned by his European origins, but Herman Melville, surely no stranger to the American metaphysics of race relations, cannot be similarly dismissed. His retelling of a story by James Hall, “Indian hating.-Some of the sources of this animosity.–‘- Brief account of Col. Moredock,” not only offered a stinging cri- tique of inhumanity masked as morality, embodied in the “confidence-man” and Indian-hater John Moredock, but also foresaw, according to Richard Drinnon, that “when the meta- physics of Indian-hating hit salt water it more clearly became the metaphysics of empire-building.” Although believed to be a bar- barian, predicted Melville, “the backwoodsman would seem to America what Alexander was to Asia-captain in the vanguard of conquering civilization.” Melville, Drinnon points out, cor- rectly saw that the relentless westward advance of the Indian-

58 Stevenson, Across the Plains, pp. 62, 65-66.

27

hater would, after reaching the Pacific Ocean, continue on to Asia, and in Melville’s words, his hatreds would ride “upon the advance as the Polynesian upon the comb of the sur£.”59 And like Alexander, who had sought to conquer all of India, the “back- woodsman,” the “barbarian,” “could not endure to think of put- ting an end to the war so long as he could find enemies.”

In truth, America’s manifest destiny was “an additional chap- ter” in the Orientalist text of Europe’s “dominating, restructur- ing, and having authority over” Asia. In July r853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry pushed into Tokyo Bay carrying a letter from the U.S. president demanding the opening of trade relations. That “opening” of Japan was accomplished, like the “opening” of the American West, with the iron fist of industry and the might of mil- itary arms; Perry’s “black ships” under full steam power and with matchless guns were complements of the iron horses and Ken- tucky rifles of the backwoodsmen, who were simultaneously tam- ing the wilderness. Reflecting on the second period of America’s manifest destiny, after the annexation of the Philippines and Ha- waii in r898 and after Secretary of State John Hay’s pronounce- ment of an “Open Door” with China, Theodore Roosevelt declared: “Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion …. That the barbarians recede or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their retrogression or con- quest, is due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their ex- pansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.”60

The filling of those “red wastes,” those empty spaces, was, of course, the white man’s burden. John Hay, a son of the frontier of sorts, sought “to draw close the bonds” that united “the two Anglo-Saxon peoples” of Britain and America in a common des-

59 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Eliza- beth S. Foster (New York: Hendricks House, 1954), pp.lxv-lxx, 164, 334- 41; and Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 214-15.

6o Quoted in Drinnon, Facing West, p. 2 3 2.

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

tiny and mission: “All of us who think cannot but see that there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us to a sort of part- nership in the beneficent work of the world. Whether we will it or not, we are associated in that work by the very nature of things, and no man and no group of men can prevent it. We are bound by a tie which we did not forge and which we cannot break; we are the joint ministers of the same sacred mission of liberty and prog- ress, charged with duties which we cannot evade by the imposi- tion of irresistible hands.”61 China’s “Open Door” and America’s “splendid little war” with Spain, observed Hay, were of that be- neficent quality. “We have done the Chinks a great service,” wrote Hay of his policy, “which they don’t seem inclined to recognize,” and he admonished the next generation of backwoodsmen, “as the children of Israel encamping by the sea were bidden, to Go Forward.” Indeed, noted Hay, America had gone forward and had charted a “general plan of opening a field of enterprise in those distant regions where the Far West becomes the Far East.”62

In becoming a Pacific power, America had fulfilled a European people’s destiny and, like Columbus, had gone ashore, unfurled the royal banner, offered a prayer of thanksgiving, and taken pos- session of the land. America’s Far West had become the Far East, where Indian-fighters became “goo-goo” fighters in the Philip- pines and Indian savages became Filipino “niggers,” and where a war of extermination was pursued with no less determination than the chastising of the Iroquois urged by George Washington in 1779, when he instructed Major General John Sullivan: “but you will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlement is effected …. Our future secu- rity will be in their inability to injure us … and in the terror with which the severity of the chastizement they receive will inspire them.”63

Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to America;

61 Ibid., p. 267. 62 Ibid., pp. 277, 278. 63 Ibid., p . 331.

Americans went to Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to take the wealth of America; Americans went to take the wealth of Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to conquer and colonize America; Americans went to conquer and colonize Asia. And the matter of the “when and where” of Asian American history is located therein, in Europe’s eastward and westward thrusts, engendered, transformative, expansive. But an- other context of the “when and where” is the historical moment in America, where Prospero ruled over the hideous, the imperative Caliban. Asia not only provided markets for goods and outposts for military and naval bases but also supplied pools of cheap labor for the development of America’s “plantations” along its southern and western frontiers. In 1848, Aaron H. Palmer, a counselor to the U.S. Supreme Court, anticipated the nation’s destiny in the American Southwest and Asia when he predicted that San Fran- cisco would become “the great emporium of our commerce on the Pacific; and so soon as it is connected by a railroad with the At- lantic States, will become the most eligible point of departure for steamers to … China.” To build that rail link and to bring the fertile valleys of California under cultivation, Palmer favored the importation of Chinese workers, explaining that “no people in all the East are so well adapted for clearing wild lands and raising every species of agricultural product … as the Chinese.”64

It was within those American “plantations” that Asians joined Africans, Indians, and Latinos in labor, making Prospero’s fire, fetching his wood, and serving in offices that profited him. It was within those “plantations” that Europeans tutored Asians, Afri- cans, Indians, and Latinos and gave meaning to their gabble. And it was within those “plantations” that Asians, Africans, Indians, and Latinos rose up in rebellion against their bondage and struck for their freedom.

In r 8 8 5, a Chinese American described his reaction to being so- licited for funds for erecting the Statue of Liberty. He felt honored to be counted among “citizens in the cause of liberty,” he wrote,

64 Takaki, Iron Cages, p. 229.

WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER

“but the word liberty makes me think of the fact that this country is the land of liberty for men of all nations except the Chinese. I consider it an insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute to- ward the building in this land a pedestal for a statue of liberty. That statue represents liberty holding a torch which lights the pas- sage of those of all nations who come into this country. But are the Chinese allowed to come? As for the Chinese who are here, are they allowed to enjoy liberty as men of all other nationalities en- joy it?”65 For China’s prodemocracy students in 1989 and for Asians in America, the “goddess of liberty,” featured so promi- nently by the American news media, situated squarely within the mainstream, and lifting up her torch above the masses in Tian- anmen Square, was not their symbol of liberation. Instead, their true symbol, relegated to the background as the camera panned the crowd, situated inconspicuously along the margins, was the declaration emblazoned by the Chinese students on the banners they waved, the shirts they wore, and the fliers they distributed: the words were, “We Shall Overcome.”

65 Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 199-200.