In 1928, an Indian immigrant named Vaishno Das Bagai rented a room in San Jose, turned on the gas, and ended his life. He was thirty-seven. He had come to San Francisco thirteen years earlier with his wife and two children, “dreaming and hoping to make this land my own.” A dapper man, he learned English, wore three-piece suits, became a naturalized citizen, and opened a general store and import business on Fillmore Street, in San Francisco. But when Bagai tried to move his family into a home in Berkeley, the neighbors locked up the house, and the Bagais had to turn their luggage trucks back. Then, in 1923, Bagai found himself snared by anti-Asian laws: the Supreme Court ruled that South Asians, because they were not white, could not become naturalized citizens of the United States. Bagai was stripped of his status. Under the California Alien Land Law, of 1913—a piece of racist legislation designed to deter Asians from encroaching on white businesses and farms—losing that status also meant losing his property and his business. The next blow came when he tried to visit India. The United States government advised him to apply for a British passport.
According to Erika Lee’s “The Making of Asian America,” published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Immigration and Nationality Act, signed into law on October 3, 1965, this swarm of circumstances undid Bagai. In the room in San Jose, he left a suicide note addressed, in an act of protest, to the San Francisco Examiner. The paper published it under the headline “Here’s Letter to the World from Suicide.” “What have I made of myself and my children?” Bagai wrote. "We cannot exercise our rights. Humility and insults, who is responsible for all this? Me and the American government. Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and bridges burnt behind."
Bagai could have been speaking for the mass of Asian-Americans—Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Hmong, and Filipinos—who escaped colonialism or economic hardship at home only to encounter a country rancid with racism. Racism, as Lee shows, was the unifying factor in the Asian-American experience, bringing together twenty-three distinct immigrant groups, from very different parts of the world. It determined the jobs that Asians were able to acquire, the sizes of their families, and their self-esteem in America. If Asian America exists, it is because of systemic racism.
A few weeks ago, Donald Trump climbed a stage and crassly mimicked a Japanese (or was it a Chinese?) accent, in supposed admiration of the old stereotype that the Japanese are soulless, rapacious businessmen. This was just after Jeb Bush defended his use of the term “anchor babies” by saying that it was “more related to Asian people” than to Latinos. In September, the F.B.I. finally dropped all charges against Dr. Xi Xiaoxing, a Chinese-American physicist at Temple University arrested, in May, for passing on sensitive superconductor technology to China. The F.B.I. had claimed it had blueprints of the technology, but when independent experts examined the blueprints, they found that they weren’t for the device in question. “I don’t expect them to understand everything I do,” Xi told the Times. “But the fact that they don’t consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn’t do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game.”
These are just a few recent stories, of course, but they stand in for many others. Asian-Americans are still regarded as “other” by many of their fellow-citizens. And yet one finds among some Asian-Americans a reluctance to call out racist acts, in part because of their supposed privilege in comparison with other minority groups. Meanwhile, much of the history of Asians in America, a history that now spans nearly half a millennium, has been forgotten.
The first Asians to come to North America, Lee writes, were Filipino sailors. They came aboard Spanish ships in the late fifteen-hundreds, and were subjected to such a torrent of vermin and filth on these vessels that half died en route; when they got to colonial Mexico, many refused to cross the Pacific again. They settled in Acapulco and married local women. Asian America began in desperation.
Many of the immigrants in the seventeen-hundreds and eighteen-hundreds came from lands sucked dry by colonialism, such as the Guangdong province, in China, reeling from drought and famine after the Opium Wars. Lured by contractors and agents, Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Japanese men travelled across the globe to toil on sugar and tobacco plantations in the British West Indies, Hawaii, and the Deep South as indentured laborers or “coolies,” working ten hours a day, six days a week, for five or more years before gaining freedom. (Some Asian women were hired as indentured servants, too, mostly in an attempt to pacify the men.) When the men gained their freedom, though, they often chose not to return to their homes—either, Lee writes, out of shame (their earnings didn’t match their boasts to people back home) or because they had married locals during their lonely sojourns and couldn't take them back. Lee cites a few of their melancholic letters to family members, but one wishes she had gone deeper into the psychology of exile: many immigrants subsist on a diet of denial, believing, sometimes until their deaths, that they will go back.
From the initial ports of entry, Asians, particularly the Chinese and Filipinos, radiated outward, so that, in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, there was a Filipino fishing village in Louisiana and a Chinatown in Havana, as well as active Chinese communities along much of the West Coast. Lee describes life and labor in these communities well, explaining, for instance, why Chinese immigrants got into the laundry business during the Gold Rush. (At the time, it was cheaper for someone living in San Francisco to have clothes washed in Honolulu than to get them laundered in the city. Chinese immigrants seized the opportunity that provided.) Lee is particularly acute on the racism these immigrants endured. Chinese were called, at various times, “rats,” “beasts,” and “swine.” The president of the American Federation of Labor said that the presence of the Chinese in America was a matter of “Meat vs. Rice—American Manhood vs Asiatic Coolieism.” Kaiser Wilhelm woke from a nightmare in 1895 and commissioned a hideous painting showing the archangel Michael beset by heathen hordes from the East—the famed “yellow peril.” When more Chinese started coming after the Gold Rush, employed on large projects like the Pacific Railroad, anti-Chinese sentiment became shrill. In 1882, on the basis that Chinese workers undercut wages, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning low-skilled and family immigration, and making the Chinese, in Lee’s words, “the first illegal immigrants.” (As Jiayang Fan noted in a recent piece for this magazine, “The act, which wasn’t repealed until 1943, remains the only federal law ever to exclude a group of people by nationality.”) Special agents known as “Chinese catchers” appeared on the border with Mexico, and the Secretary of Labor despaired that “not even a Chinese wall” along the border would stop Chinese immigration. In 1871, in the largest mass lynching in American history, seventeen Chinese men were murdered by a mob of five hundred, in Los Angeles.
Other Asians—Indians, Koreans, and Japanese—followed, and they, too, faced xenophobia. Koreans, who wished to fight for their freedom from Japan, were treated as Japanese subjects; Indians were considered British subjects. But these groups were not as large as the Chinese, and thus not as threatening. Still, stereotypes spread fast. Of thirty-nine immigrant groups, Indians were, according to the 1911 United States Immigration Commission, “the least desirable race of immigrants.” The editor of the Bellingham Reveille, in Washington, described Hindus as “repulsive in appearance and disgusting in their manners,” and, in 1907, the entire South Asian population was forced out of Bellingham in a single night with cries of “Drive out the Hindus.” (Bellingham, a lumber-mill town, had a long history of receiving—and then expelling—poor Asian laborers.) In another famous episode, when the Komagata Maru, a ship from Hong Kong, tried to dock in Vancouver, British Columbia, to challenge the racist 1908 Continuous Journey Regulation law—which held that Asians could only emigrate to Canada if they made a near-impossible non-stop voyage from the country of their citizenship—it was sent back to Calcutta. The people onboard were jailed by the British, and twenty-six were shot dead as they resisted arrest.
American policies toward Asians reached a nadir in 1924, with the implementation of a law that sought “to preserve the idea of American homogeneity” and denied admission to the country to most non-whites. Immigration from Asia was banned completely, with the establishment of an “Asiatic Barred Zone.” In the years immediately before and after, no plea by Asians to become citizens succeeded. When Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh-American who had fought with the United States Army in the First World War, argued before the Supreme Court that he was an Aryan and should, therefore, be allowed to keep his citizenship, his case was dismissed on the grounds that the “great body of our people instinctively … reject the thought of assimilation” of South Asians. Takao Ozawa, an assimilated Japanese man, sued for naturalization, in 1917, citing his Christian values, his American education, and his desire to “return the kindness which our Uncle Sam has extended to me.” He was denied, because he wasn’t Caucasian. This low point in immigration was followed by the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.
Then the fate of Asian-Americans began to turn. The Cold War remapped dynamics between nations. Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea, considered weak nations, were now allies. Their citizens couldn't be targeted by official policy in the same way. The civil-rights movement, meanwhile, took on open racism, including that faced by Asians. Still, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, dismantling racial quotas and allowing skills- and family-based immigration, he didn’t do so to help Asians; rather, Greeks and Poles and Italians had cried foul about the larger immigrant quotas for Northern Europeans, and those cries had been heard. Johnson, not known for his modesty, cautioned that it was “not a revolutionary bill” and would “not affect the lives of millions.”
He was wrong. In the years after, Asian-American life changed enormously, with the population swelling from less than one per cent of all Americans, in 1960, to nearly six per cent, or 19.5 million, today. Refugees from the Vietnam War, in the sixties and seventies, made Asian America, and America itself, even more diverse, and women, largely excluded in previous eras—less than one per cent of the Chinese entering the United States in 1900 were women, thanks to the Chinese Exclusion Act—poured in. Asians began to appear in the “model minority” jobs we associate them with today.
There are now, in a sense, two Asian Americas: one formed by five centuries of systemic racism, and another, more genteel version, constituted in the aftermath of the 1965 law. These two Asian Americas float over and under each other like tectonic plates, often clanging discordantly. So, while Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans are among the most prosperous groups in the country, Korean-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans have lower median personal earnings than the general population. Over-all Chinese-American prosperity obscures the higher-than-average poverty rate for Chinese-Americans. In 2000, Asian-Americans were more likely to have college degrees than other adults in America, but also five times as likely as whites to have fewer than four years of education. More damningly, the reputations of Asian-American groups, just as in the past, can turn on a dime, with national or international events triggering sudden reversals. After 9/11, for example, the I.N.S.’s National Security Entry-Exit Registration System required the fingerprinting and registering of immigrants from twenty-five nations, twenty-four of which were Arab and Muslim. (Portions of the program were discontinued in 2011.) Hate crimes spread to encompass groups such as Sikh-Americans, with a mass shooting at a temple in Wisconsin as recently as 2012. In February, when a middle-aged white man in North Carolina shot three Muslim college students dead over what the police claimed was “an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking,” the father of one of the victims pointed out, “I am sure my daughter felt hated, and she said, literally, ‘Daddy, I think it is because of the way we look and the way we dress.’ ”
In the eyes of some, Asians in America are, Lee writes, “perpetual foreigners at worst, or probationary Americans at best.” If Asians sometimes remain silent in the face of racism, and if some seem to work unusually hard in the face of this difficult history, it is not because they want to be part of a “model minority” but because they have often had no other choice.
