The Asian American Movement: A Social History. - book reviews

Reason, Dec, 1993 by John J. Miller

The Asian American Movement, disorganized and quarrelsome from day one, spent much of its energy protesting the Vietnam War, which Wei interprets as a racist effort to keep Southeast Asia colonized by Western powers. The war particularly concerned Asian-American radicals, Wei says, since it promoted something he calls "Gookism"--white America's inability to distinguish between "the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians (among other Asians) encountered overseas and Asian Americans at home." Wei never considers whether his beloved movement's attempt to manufacture a pan-ethnic identity might have exacerbated the rest of America's alleged inability to see the diversity of Asian America.

Predictably, the movement floundered. It lacked "a nationally known leader" and even "a set of specific aims." Wei's chronicle, though it assumes a tone of high seriousness, actually reads like a parody of radical-left incompetence. Members of the movement participated in Maoist purges like sport, battled among themselves over poetry readings, and regularly hurled silly invectives against the United States, which Wei calls "one of the most oppressive systems of racial prejudice and class domination that has ever existed in any democratic country." Despite these problems, the movement limps along. Wei reports that younger soldiers have "emerged to participate in the multicultural education movement."

Wei's gloom and doom is exaggerated and simplistic, but a serious study of the Asian-American experience need not be all sweetness and light. In Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850--1990, Bill Ong Hing offers a valuable chronicle of the many barriers that Asian immigrants have faced. Once in high demand to harvest Hawaiian sugarcane fields and lay the transcontinental railroad, Asian immigrants continually suffered from varying degrees of nativism and working-class resentment during the 19th century. The Chinese were subjected to the first legal restrictions in 1870, which began what Hing calls the "cycles of rejection and acceptance" that occasionally accepted but mostly rejected Asian immigrants until 1965. Other anti-Chinese laws came in 1875, when Congress essentially banned Chinese women, and in 1882, when it forbade the entry of "idiots," "lunatics," and "Chinese laborers."

The Japanese fared somewhat better, but laws in 1907 and 1924 effectively cut off their immigration pipeline. Restrictions affected Filipinos in 1934. Asian Indians and others who had not migrated in very large numbers were limited in 1917. In a useful appendix, Hing buttresses his thorough analysis by excerpting every significant law and court ruling on Asian immigration between 1850 and 1923, including the important but obscure Gentleman's Agreement, negotiated between the United States and Japan by telegram in 1907 and 1908.

Hing carefully describes each of these laws and explains how they helped shape major Asian-American communities. The 1875 anti-Chinese law, for example, combined with anti-miscegenation laws already in place in California and Oregon to deprive Chinese male laborers of the chance to marry and have children. Fifteen years later, Chinese-American men outnumbered women by nearly 27 to 1. Denied the opportunity to form families, men came to rely heavily upon the social networks of Chinatown enclaves. These communities protected them from the vicious mob attacks that frequently erupted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anti-Asian hostility motivated the formation of tightly knit associations that made Chinatowns and their inhabitants seem secretive and off-putting to mainstream America.