:: Tossed Salad and Scramble Eggs ::

:: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 ::

After sometime of lazing around doing nothing constructive, I finally got down to some work on my project. I'll explain more in detail about the project sometime later before I leave for San Fransisco in September. But now, I just need a space to write down some things for me to piece together later on.

I have been searching for some websites and places to visit when me and Jan get back here in September. Just browsing the websites, looking for a point of reference to start the momentum going, just looking and searching for 'that point' in particular. Our objective at this point is rather weak but I'm sure we'll find a gold thread soon.

The countless photographs I found on some of the websites are interesting. Alot of them are pre-1906 pictures of Chinatown. I spent the afternoon looking through all of them and it is amazing that it took a giant earthquake to change the entire cultural structure of community. The pre-1906 photos were characterised by Chinese immigrants wearing traditional chinese costumes which seemed to have been directly imported from China. The only thing that gives them away are are the Western hats that the Chinese men wear - an odd combination when worn with chinese clothes(there is a name for those kind of hats, need to go find out).

As for the post 1906 photographs, the reconstruction of Chinatown not only changed the architecture of the buildings around the bay area, but it also changed the community. The cultural change is dramatic, Chinese costumes were no longer worn, all the pictures had people in Western clothes of that 1910-1920s. There was nothing which hint 'chinese' except for the skin colour of those who wore them. Reasons are many. Everything was lost in the fire and earthquake and for pragmatic reason, I would guess that there wasn't much of a choice left and importing would have been expensive especially with most of the businesses lost.

I remembered that Uncle Harry did mention that after the quake, all records were lost. This gave the Chinese the oppurtunity to bring in their mainland chinese relatives who previously could not enter because of the Immigration Act. For them, the urgency of assimilating into Asian American culture was important in order for them to continue staying in San Francisco. They had to memorize bits of English phrases in order to 'pass' the interview with the immigration office and I would think that the need to wear Western clothes would have been deadly important. Thus began the rapid watering down of Chinese tradition which had been proudly and stubbornly held onto in the post-1906 period.

I'm only taking these pictures at face value and I'm sure that there are alot more to discover in the coming days.

I'm now wondering about the Chinese community in San Fran now. They have come a long way. When I walk around Chinatown SF, I wonder how much of the Chinese myth is lost and how much of it is retained. Does it ever resemble a 'Little Shanghai' anymore? No one in mainland China would ever think so, in fact, none of them regard the Chinese Americans as Chinese. They chide the Chinese Americans, the same way you would chide my speaking of the Chinese language with the term orang cheena bukan cheena. To what extent do they feel American and to what extent can they ever really feel fully Chinese again?

I'll stop here for now and continue reading.

If anyone has any questions about the Chinese American Diaspora in California that they would like to raise, feel free to send me an email or tag on the board below. Your questions will facilitate my work and will play a big role in helping me find out more about the Chinese American Diaspora.

List of readings

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Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American
Shehong Chen

Introduction
This is a study of the transformation of Chinese identity in the United States between 1911 and 1927. My research interest in this subject matter began when I was a graduate student at the University of Utah. In the early 1990s, I interviewed four Chinese Americans in Salt Lake City for a graduate paper. Three of my interviewees were American-born Chinese, and one came to the United States with her parents when she was a baby. My interviewees showed pride in their Chinese heritage. They told me stories of how they practiced Chinese rituals and celebrated Chinese traditional festivals at home. They also described different encounters of racially oriented prejudice and discrimination and various efforts they had made in fighting for equal rights and opportunities as minority people in the United States.

When I asked them about their thoughts of and connections with China, they became hesitant and worried. One of them said that China could have done better without communism; another asked me whether it was safe to make financial investments in China; still another remembered his experience as an American soldier in the Korean War and how "we were pushed back by them [the Chinese] to the 38th parallel"; and the fourth interviewee expressed disapproval of the Chinese government's action in the 1989 student democracy movement. However, they all expressed their desire to see a strong China and hoped they could do something to help strengthen their ancestral land.1

The findings from the interviews were not surprising; they actually reinforced an observation I had been making. I visited Chinatowns, made a few friends among Chinese Americans, and was entertained at Chinese American homes. Having grown up in the People's Republic of China, I sensed that the Chinatown atmosphere and Chinese American homes embodied elements of traditional Chinese culture as well as modern American culture. For instance, Chinatown stores and restaurants publicly displayed offerings to gods and goddesses; Chinese Americans drove hundreds of miles to clean their ancestral graves around the Qing Ming Festival, the traditional Chinese festival to remember the dead; and Chinese American parents would not open letters addressed to their children, for doing so was a violation of their children's right to privacy. Whereas the first two examples reflected Chinese traditional customs, the third was decidedly a reflection of American individualism.

While making such observations, I was wrapping up my Ph.D. coursework with an emphasis on the history of China-U.S. relations. Since the first major wave of Chinese immigration into the United States in the 1850s, China and the United States had encountered two very different fates in the evolutionary history of nation-states. Having just conquered the west coast of the North American continent, the United States began in the 1850s to rise as a world power. For China, the 1840s marked the beginning of humiliation and decline as a nation and a civilization. While the rise of the United States was accompanied by expansionism, industrialization, capitalist democracy, and Christianity, the decline of China was caused partly by Western expansionism and partly by internal struggles over how to cope with challenges posed by the aggressive outside forces in the modern world.

The most intense search for a modern China and modern Chinese identity happened in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The year 1911 witnessed an end to the century-old dynastic system in China and a declaration of the establishment of a modern republic. Such a fundamental change proved not to be an easy matter for China. Western and modern ideas such as capitalism failed to find national capital and an industrial base, thus opening China's market and resources further to outside exploitation. The idea of democracy conflicted with the Confucian hierarchy of social order. Greed for power led to attempts at monarchical restoration and warlords' competition for regional control, pushing China to the verge of disintegration as a unified nation. Intensified search for a way out of China's national crisis led to a cultural movement condemning Confucianism and Chinese tradition, to the embracing of Marxist ideas and formation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and to the height of nationalism against imperialism. It was in early 1923 that the Guomindang (GMD, or the Nationalist Party), which led the 1911 revolution, decided to ally with the Soviet Union and cooperate with the CCP in the national effort for a unified, independent, and modern China.

Knowledge of history and my own observations that being Chinese in the United States carried different meanings from being Chinese in the People's Republic of China combined to form my research questions. How did Chinese in the United States envision a modern China while China as a nation underwent such fundamental changes in the first few decades of the twentieth century? What did they think of the debates and politics in China? Did their experience in the United States affect their vision of a modern China? Did their exposure to American ideology and Christian values shape their sense of Chineseness as the old framework for Chinese identity faced challenges?

The more I think about the dichotomy of Chinese and American history in the modern world, the more aware I am of the interesting position occupied by Chinese in the United States. American Chinese in the early twentieth century were involved in the crosscurrents of conflicting and competing global forces. (Throughout this book I use the term Chinese Americans for people of Chinese ancestry who are American citizens; American Chinese and Chinese in the United States are used interchangeably to refer to any Chinese living in the United States.) As subjects of the dynastic China, they were carriers of traditional Chinese values; as immigrants suffering from discrimination and exclusion in the United States, they were victims of white racism and the weakened Chinese nation. How they survived exclusion and discrimination and how they envisioned and maintained Chineseness and adapted to American society became a much more interesting question for me than diplomatic relations between China and the United States. I decided to make my doctoral dissertation a study of the transformation of Chinese identity in the United States in the early twentieth century.

A review of existing literature on Chinese American studies encouraged my pursuit. Until very recently, Chinese American studies left the first few decades of the twentieth century almost unexamined. According to Sucheng Chan, one of the leading experts on Chinese American studies, the entire period between 1882 and 1943, the "age of exclusion," was "a deplorable lacuna in Chinese American historiography."2 Students of the period before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 found materials with which to study the Chinese experience in the United States, many of them in English, including documentation of observations about the Chinese as a different race and debates over and violence against the Chinese presence in the United States. After the passage of the Exclusion Act, Chinese population decreased drastically, and Chinese existence in the United States became much more precarious; as a result, there was little English-language documentation of the Chinese American experience.

Historians of Chinese American studies thus suffered from this lack of source materials for the period between 1882 and 1943. Earlier studies of this period, done mostly by social scientists, whose conclusions do not depend as heavily on first-hand documents as historians do, generally described this period as the "silent years," in which American Chinese scraped together a living by running restaurants, grocery stores, and laundries.3 For example, Paul Siu's sociological study concluded that the Chinese laundryman remained a sojourner, an immigrant who did not intend to take root in the host society, for more than a hundred years, from the 1850s to the 1950s.4 Journalists, with very little knowledge of Chinatown life in general, documented sensational stories of Chinese "tong wars" during this period, popularizing and reinforcing the violent and mysterious image of Chinese American experience presented by social scientists.5 According to these studies, the isolated Chinatown life prevented any contact between Chinese and mainstream American society and encouraged Chinese in the United States to maintain intact their traditional identity.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, in mainland China and Taiwan, studies of overseas Chinese, including Chinese in the United States, praised them as "the mother of the Chinese revolution."6 Before 1949, the Nationalist government in China used this image to solicit support, especially financial support, from Chinese in the United States. Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China, both the government in Beijing and that in Taibei have continued to compete for political loyalty and financial support from Chinese in the United States. To serve the political agendas of their respective governments, scholars on both sides of the Taiwan Straits have claimed that Chinese in the United States maintained political allegiance to China and supported Chinese revolutions. According to Ling-chi Wang, a scholar of Chinese American studies and a political activist, such politically oriented studies resulted in "extraterritorial domination" over Chinese in the United States, whereas Wang Gungwu, a specialist in southeast Asian Chinese studies, maintained that the general statement about overseas Chinese as the mother of Chinese revolution misrepresented the role overseas Chinese played in Chinese revolutions.7

With the growing awareness of the existence of Chinese-language source materials and with more Chinese American historians competent in the Chinese language, several studies of the Chinese American experience in the exclusion period appeared. Using Chinese- and English-language source materials, these studies reconstructed various aspects of American Chinese community life and politics and told a more complete story of the Chinese American experience. Yet none of them aimed at a comprehensive understanding of the transformation of Chinese identity in the United States.8

Other scholars have been attempting to understand the transformation of Chinese identity in the United States. K. Scott Wong used the concept of transculturation, a process in which "marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant ... culture," to study the American Chinese identity transformation. He concluded that Chinese cultural elites, who had contacts with the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, combined the two worldviews—of traditional China and of the modern United States—to forge a "new and distinctively Chinese American cultural sensibility."9

It is in this line of analysis that I attempt to understand Chinese identity transformation in the United States in the context of reforms and revolutions in China between 1911 and 1927. The year 1911 witnessed the climax of the debate between the reformist Baohuanghui (the Society to Protect the Emperor) and the revolutionary Tongmenghui (the Revolutionary Alliance) among Chinese in the United States. The period between 1924 and 1927 witnessed concerted efforts to build permanent Chinese American communities, either by politically and legally fighting for rights to establish families and preserve Chinese cultural practices or by physically constructing community facilities such as the Chinese Hospital.

The study takes a transpacific approach in that it regards reformist and revolutionary programs that aimed to modernize China as the background and impetus for the American Chinese identity transformation. Furthermore, it investigates public debates and community events concerning a modern China among American Chinese to assess the impact of life in the United States and exposure to American culture and ideology on the formation of a Chinese American identity. The study thus moves constantly across the Pacific between events in China and events within American Chinese communities.

Like the most recent studies of the Chinese American experience during the exclusion period, this study relies on American Chinese community newspapers as primary source material. The value of newspapers as primary source material lies in the role these newspapers played in the life of Chinese in the United States in the early twentieth century. According to Leong Gor Yun,10 author of Chinatown Inside Out, published in the 1930s, the influence of Chinese-language newspapers on American Chinese was "incalculable." This is how Leong Gor Yun described the influence of the Chinese language press: "It speaks to the Chinese in a language he understands; it is his only medium for knowing what is happening in his world and the world at large. It gives him a perspective very much needed in a life as narrow as life in Chinatown. Whatever the Chinese do for themselves will therefore probably be taught them through the newspapers."11

The influence of Chinese-language newspapers reached beyond those who subscribed to them and those who were educated enough to read them. Chinatown businesses, especially grocery stores, tea houses, restaurants, and Chinatown organization offices usually subscribed to several Chinese-language papers and made them available to shoppers, visitors, or anybody who stopped by to read them. It was also common in American Chinatowns to see newspapers posted on bulletin boards of community centers and to see one person reading aloud from a newspaper with a crowd listening. One study described a general store in San Jose in the first few years of the twentieth century. At the store, Chinese workers "made arrangements for employment and picked up their mail." The store "subscribed to several Chinese newspapers, so that bak [meaning "uncle" in Cantonese and here referring to Chinese adult men in general] would stop to rest, read the Chinese papers, and chat."12

Chinese-language newspapers not only served as "the only medium" for American Chinese to obtain information and perspectives but also recorded debates and events taking place among them.13 Because there are few living witnesses to the 1911-27 period from whom we can take oral histories and because few people left diaries or memoirs behind, Chinese-language papers are invaluable source materials, enabling us to understand the dynamics of social, economic, ideological, and political changes among American Chinese. Judy Yung used American Chinese community newspapers as part of her first-hand materials and stated that scholars of Chinese American studies had yet to tap these valuable sources.14

This study investigates three Chinese-language newspapers. They are Chinese World, a daily newspaper founded by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, reformers from China, that represented the American Chinatown elite in the 1911-27 period; Young China, a daily paper founded by Sun Yat-sen that served in the United States as the voice of the Tongmenghui and the GMD; and Chung Sai Yat Po, another daily paper founded and managed by Wu Panzhao (Ng Poon Chew), a Chinese Christian minister who advocated reforming and modernizing Chinese cultural practices and adapting to the norms of American mainstream society.

These three papers were selected because they represented a full spectrum of opinions among American Chinese between 1911 and 1927. Although all voiced a desire for a strong and modern China, each envisioned a different way of achieving the goal. This study analyzes the transformation of Chinese identity in the United States through editorial debates, reports of developments in China, and news coverage of American Chinese community events. Because these three papers represented different opinions, they inform us of the process of constructing a Chinese American identity and defining the essential elements that finally made up that identity.

The study is divided into five chapters. Arranged roughly in chronological order, Chapter 1 covers the year 1911. Then, Chinese in the United States offered three different visions for a modern China. Debates over reform and revolution politicized American Chinese communities, challenged traditional Chinese values, and tested boundaries of American Chinese support for revolution. With the establishment of the Republic of China at the beginning of 1912, Chinese identity stood at a crucial crossroads.

Chapter 2 covers the period from 1912 to 1914, in which American Chinese demonstrated the strength of traditional Chinese values, such as opposition to rebellion and willingness to preserve Chinese cultural practices. Meanwhile, the establishment of the Republic of China and the aroused nationalist feelings emboldened American Chinese to stand up for their right to be regarded as an integral part of American society.

Chapter 3 deals with the eventful year of 1915, in which the new Chinese republic faced its first serious external threat from Japan and made its first international appearance at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. In response to Japan's Twenty-one Demands, which encroached on China's territorial integrity and political independence, American Chinese revealed the limit of their Chinese nationalism. Although their organization of a comprehensive anti-Japanese boycott symbolized high-sounding ideals, their failure to implement that boycott revealed the limitations life in the United States had put on most American Chinese. China's presence at the International Exposition stood as testimony that life away from China had made American Chinese idealize Chinese culture and that American Chinese had absorbed certain aspects of Western or American values. The disappointments in China's presence at the exposition and in the Chinese government's acceptance of the Twenty-one Demands served as an impetus for the development of a Chinese American identity, the essence of which was embodied in the formation of the China Mail Steamship Company.

Chapter 4 examines the four essential elements of the Chinese American identity. These four elements became crystallized in the period from 1916 to 1924, years in which American Chinese supported republicanism against monarchical restoration, tried to preserve the essence and principles of Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture while the New Culture Movement in China attacked both, willingly adopted Christianity in constructing a modern Chinese identity while China waged an anti-Christian movement, and strongly opposed the GMD's alliance with the Soviet Union and cooperation with the CCP.

Chapter 5 tours an American Chinatown and documents the building of a permanent Chinese American community between 1920 and 1927. American Chinese campaigns against the restrictions put on them by the 1924 Immigration Act, their efforts to defeat a bill aimed at controlling the practice of Chinese herbal medicine, and their enthusiasm for building community facilities demonstrated their determination to live as proud Chinese in the United States and develop a material base for the new Chinese American identity. A glimpse of some American Chinatown activities in this period reveals that Chinese in the United States had developed their own culture, which drew on both traditional China and modern America.

The findings of this project fill a gap in the study of the Chinese experience in the United States. Chinese were not as inassimilable as they are usually portrayed, nor were they unqualified supporters of Chinese revolutions. The way in which American Chinese envisioned a modern China in the 1911-27 period provides a framework for understanding the worries and confusions my interviewees revealed in their relationship with China. The transcultural identity formed in the process of searching for a modern sense of Chineseness in the same period explains the mixed cultural identity American Chinatowns and American Chinese families represented in the early 1990s.

As a comprehensive attempt to understand the transformation of Chinese identity in the United States, the findings shed light on the forces that shape ethnic identities. The study answers the call of pioneering Asian American scholars such as Roger Daniels and Him Mark Lai not to study the Chinese in the United States in terms of "what has happened to them"15 but "to fully probe and understand the processes governing the development of Chinese American communities."16 Finally, I hope this study reveals the variety of information community newspapers can provide to scholars in their attempt to reimagine life among Chinese in the United States in the first few decades of the twentieth century

:: Stuffy 6/28/2006 03:32:00 PM [+] ::
...

I’m now…not in the UK. Currently sitting in an uptown café with a basket of curly spicy fries which taste just like those you’d find in A&W. Exams have ended, although the days after seemed to have gone past in such a blur, I hardly had time to reflect.

I have a sick feeling that when I get back in September, I probably would have forgotten where I put what into which box. I was in such a rush to pack, I even forgot what exactly I put into my travel suitcase. Just what did I put in it? I'll find out later when I get back.

Anyway, I threw away my reef sandals and replaced it with a new cute pair of light green high heeled sandals. They are the best. I've never had a pair of heels which I can walk so comfortably in and not have throbbing heels and blisters. Yes, I'm going to score every street in the whole of Berkeley in 3 inched HEELS, and if I'm ambitious enough, I'll take the BART down to San Fransisco and take on the Hills (intended pun). I'm so proud of my new heels that I've been wearing my hawaii shorts just to show them off, even if it is at the expense of my elephant thighs. (Sorry, sadly, I do not have sexy legs like Mr Cher).

I just finished reading Samantha Chang's novella and five short stories, 'Hunger'. I did intend to pen down my thoughts on this blog, but I know I can't write anything substantial because the music in this cafe is just so unsettling.

:: Stuffy 6/24/2006 05:14:00 PM [+] ::
...

Dear Vik

I promised you a long long letter after my exams, but clumsy me accidently deleted some of my emails in my inbox. Gimme an email shout from Indianna yea?

Much Apologies!
Steph

:: Stuffy 6/20/2006 11:59:00 AM [+] ::
...

DIE LAH

I'm actually waiting till 2am for Hub to drive us out to Tesco to collect boxes to pack our stuff. Yes I've been alive since my papers ended and have been kept busy doing non-related academic stuff. And that also means, not doing any packing in my room. I'm in serious need of some discipline. I'm sooo malfunctioning. And yet, I want to savour the moment of being able to do all the things that I've been deprived of doing - its liberating.

I don't feel like sleeping tonight! I need something to do.

3 days to SF and PohPoh!

:: Stuffy 6/19/2006 05:03:00 PM [+] ::
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