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Gordon Lee copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Based on a presentation made by Civil Liberty and Faith Visiting Scholar Dr. Gordon Lee at the PANA Institute on March 7, 2008, in preparation for the PANA Pilgrimage to the Sacramento River Delta.
I. Who are we, and what is our relationship to the past?
Loss of memory is a symptom of colonization and its negation of our experiences.
“I was Tunisian, therefore colonized. I discovered few aspects of my life and my personality that were untouched by this fact. The colonial reality was all encompassing. One was affected even if one was not aware of it. Defensive attitudes arose out of this reality and became in-grained as a part of our personality. However, colonialism was not merely satisfied with altering our brain. It turned to the past of our people and distorted, disfigured, and destroyed it.” (Memmi, 1965.)
“The maps I have learned are dangerously incomplete, the histories I have studied absurdly one-sided. In my schooling I have been taught that imperialism is natural, that the technologies required to further such development express evolution’s highest offering, that people living sustainably are laughably anachronistic. Via corporate science and advertising, I have been told that the human organism is nothing more than a shave of DNA, my yearning for community can be answered by a laptop computer, eating a burger at the airport is culture, corporate domination is free trade and democracy.” (Glendinning, 1999.)
“For the subjugated and colonized, the presentation of such a story as one of admirable accomplishments is an added injury, a second trauma, much like the first. For each generation thereafter the conquest is repeated, the wounds are buried deeper, hidden in-between the lines of contemporary narratives and in the complex silences of the unspoken and the forgotten.
"My entire education has been shaped by projections of conquest. The task now is to expand beyond the identity and experience of the Empire world. It is to learn the stories so long squelched and denied: of native peoples, the vanquished, losers in war, survivors of conquest, the other side of the story. The task is to realize the culture and communities that have been erased. The task is to remember. My people. Our history. The good and the horrendous, nothing left out, colonizer and colonized indelibly intermingled, indelibly embraced.” (Glendinning, 1999.)
II. How did we get here?
Migration and diaspora have been products of industrialization and colonization.
In the second half of the 19th century Western European and American economies transformed global realities, initiating the first wave of the modern diaspora. The industrial revolution with its new technologies of production drastically altered the world, elevating some nations into global empires, and, at the same time, plunging others into subservient colonial territories.
In 1839, England’s emerging Empire attacked China in the first of the Opium Wars. In 1853, Commodore Perry steamed in Tokyo Bay with his infamous Black ships. In 1898, in the aftermath of the Spanish American War, the U.S. acquired the Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba and Puerto Rico. During this era colonies were created and maintained through military force; local and national economies were destroyed and altered to fit the needs of the industrializing nations. In this context rural economies in these countries collapsed, thousands, hundreds of thousands of peasants and farmers were displaced, thrown off their lands.
During the same period, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, demand for labor, particularly agricultural labor, increased due to industrialization and expansion of the economy in the U.S. The end of legal slavery in 1864 intensified the need for labor. In the 1880s in California, a shift from wheat to fruit production along with new agricultural technologies caused a major transformation in the regional economy. It increased the total area of cultivated land as well as the labor needed to work it. The completion of the transcontinental railroad incorporated California into the national economy, providing it with access to Midwest and East Coast markets. The refrigerated railroad car, introduced in 1888, allowed fresh fruit to be sent over long distances. Accelerated urbanization throughout the United States, arising out of the growth and explosion of manufacturing and industrial production, increased the demand for fresh produce. For the first time in U.S. history, one state, California, became the principal supplier of fresh fruit and produce for cities throughout the entire country.
In this context, displacement of farmers globally and demands for labor in the Americas, our predecessors crossed previously impassable national boundaries, joining what was becoming a growing colonial diaspora and some were drawn to San Francisco, Stockton, Sacramento and the San Joaquin Valley in central California (as well as to many other places in the Americas).
III. What happened when we got here?
Anti-Asian narratives and practices were not based on ignorance, but were a way of justifying treating Asians as sub-human and second-class, and maintaining power over other working class Americans.
The Chinese reclaimed land in the Sacramento Delta, ran canneries, started truck farms, developed asparagus, potatoes, onions, celery, strawberries, salmon, abalone, crab, and seaweed harvesting. We built temples in Weaverville, Fiddletown, and other parts of California. We constructed miles of solid rock walls for the fencing of cattle and huge underground tunnels for wineries in the north. We laid miles and miles of railroad track where no one dared.
After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the Nikkei began to fill the labor needs and demands of the growing economies in the western United States. We worked primarily in the agricultural, railroad, mining, lumber and fishing industries that extended from the Pacific Coast into adjacent western states and Alaska. By 1908, we had become the dominant labor force in agriculture. Issei farm workers were concentrated in labor-intensive crops, including sugar beets, grapes, fruits, berries, vegetables and hops. However, we were not hired for higher paying jobs in the cigar, shoe and garment industries.
For workers it was not uncommon for “twenty to thirty [to] sleep alongside each other in fieldsheds on the edge of fruit orchards. These sheds were called camps ... The camps are worse than dog and pig pens. They are totally unfit for human beings to sleep in. Rain and moisture seep down from the roofs. Winds blow nightly through all four walls. It’s like seeing beggars living beneath bridges. No one, not even dirt-poor peasants, wants to live in such unpleasant and filthy surroundings. These camps are the reason why so many robust workers become ill and die” (Ichioka, 1988, p.83).
The intensity and duration of the workday and the psychological impact of cultural alienation, racism and powerlessness sometimes resulted in death. Between 1898 and 1907, a hundred and eighty-two Nikkei laborers died in Fresno County, California, alone. Between 1900 and 1902, ninety-nine persons died in the Sacramento area. For many others psychological retreat became a way of life.
After the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, Japanese were permanently excluded from entry into the U.S. and Filipinos were brought in to replace them. We found ourselves in the same situation as the Chinese and Japanese before us.
Our role as coolie and semi-slave labor along with intensified oppression against “white” workers gave rise to the construction of the “Oriental.” Upper classes and growing industries wanted us as respectful servants and cheap labor. But the working classes vigorously opposed us because we were perceived as a threat to their standard of living, family unit, and way of life. Anti-Oriental campaigns became a major factor in California politics from the 1850s.
The narrative of Manifest Destiny proudly proclaimed the inherent right of Anglo-Saxons to inherit all of the riches of the U.S. as God-given and viewed all other “races,” including non-Anglo-Saxon Europeans, to be culturally, mentally and physically inferior. The Chinese and other “Orientals” were portrayed as sub-human, animal-like, inferior, physically grotesque, morally depraved and carriers of deadly diseases (Choy, 1994). Orientals or Yellows were ranked as undesirable along with Indians or Reds and Niggers or Blacks.
Yellow journalists and exclusionists warned that if the Asian invasion were not stopped, the result would be the destruction of the American family and the end of the American way of life. In 1885, in an illustration entitled “Consequences of Coolieism” an American family was portrayed with the father lying dead on the floor after committing suicide because he loses his job as a result of cheap immigrant labor, the mother in despair at the loss of her husband, and the daughter smoking opium from the evil influences of Chinese culture (Choy, 1994, p.125).
In the 1850s we were seen and identified as a part of its immoral excesses of the Gold Rush and representatives of industrial wage slavery. The Oriental representation came to embody all of the negative dislocations, effects and symptoms of industrial capitalism. The principally working class, formerly small producer, settlers in California experienced our presence as a psychological as well as economic crisis. Because of our presence their vision of California as a place for the restoration of a white republic was revealed instead as a center of capitalist production. From their perspective, in order for society to be renewed, restored, it must be cleansed. In order for this cleansing, we must be expelled.
In this context it is not that surprising that Denis Kearney, an Irish American politician, organized the Workingmen’s Party of California in 1877 with the slogan, “The Chinese Must Go!”
The Marin Journal wrote:
"That he [the Chinese] is a slave, reduced to the lowest terms of beggarly economy, and is no fit competitor for an American freeman.
"That he herds in scores, in small dens, where a white man and wife could hardly breathe and has none of the wants of a civilized white man.
"That he has neither wife nor child, nor expects to have any.
"That his sister is a prostitute from instinct, religion, education, and interest and degrading to all around her.
"That American men, women and children cannot be what free people should be, and compete with such degraded creatures in the labor market.
"That wherever they are numerous, as in San Francisco, by a secret machinery of their own, they defy the law, keep up the manners and customs of China, and utterly disregard all the laws of health, decency and morality.
"That they are driving the white population from the state, reducing laboring men to despair, laboring women to prostitution, and boys and girls to hoodlums and convicts.
"That the health, wealth, prosperity and happiness of our State demand their expulsion from our shores."
(Lee, 1999, p.62).
The Party accused the Chinese of stealing jobs from whites and advocated for the exclusion of Chinese. They held mass meetings, incited riots and perpetrated violence against the Chinese community.
IV. The effects on us?
Affidavit of Lum May, June 3rd, 1886. (Pfaelzer, 2007.)
"I was born in Canton, China, and am a subject of the Chinese Empire. I am 51 years old. Have been in America about eleven years and have been doing business in Tacoma for ten years. My business there was that of keeping dry goods, provisions, medicines and general merchandise store.
"I resided with my family in Tacoma on the corner of Railroad Street some little distance from Chinatown. At that time I would say there were eight or nine hundred Chinese persons in and about Tacoma who were forcibly expelled by the white people of Tacoma. Twenty days previously to the 3rd of November, 1885, a committee of white persons waited upon the Chinese at their residences and ordered them to leave the city.
"I asked General Sprague and other citizens for protection for myself and the Chinese people. The General said he would see and do what he could. About half past 9 o clock in the morning, a large crowd of citizens of Tacoma marched down to Chinatown and told all the Chinese that the whole Chinese population of Tacoma must leave town by half past one o clock in the afternoon of that day. There must have been in the neighborhood of 1000 people in the crowd of white people though I cannot tell how many. They went to all the Chinese houses and establishments and notified the Chinese to leave. Where the doors were locked they broke forcibly into the houses smashing in doors and breaking in windows. Some of the crowd was armed with pistols, some with clubs. They acted in a rude boisterous and threatening manner, dragging and kicking the Chinese out of their houses.
"My wife refused to go and some of the white persons dragged her out of the house. From the excitement, the fright and the losses we sustained through the riot she lost her reason, and has ever since been hopelessly insane. She threatens to kill people with a hatchet or any other weapon she can get hold of. The outrages I and my family suffered at the hands of the mob has utterly ruined me. I make no claim, however, for my wife’s insanity or the anguish I have suffered. My wife was perfectly sane before the riot.
"I saw my countrymen marched out of Tacoma. They presented a sad spectacle. Some had lost their trunks, some their blankets, some were crying for their things. Armed white men were behind the Chinese, on horseback sternly urging them on. It was raining and blowing hard. On the 5th of November all the Chinese houses situated on the wharf were burnt down by incendiaries."
This were not an isolated incident. From Eureka and Arcata to Seattle and Tacoma violent and well publicized purges sparked similar actions in small towns and cities up and down the West Coast. Riverside, Santa Cruz, Stockton, Napa, San Buenaventura, Tulare, Antioch, Wheatland, Bloomfield, Sonora, Sumner, Washington Territory, and East Portland, Oregon to name a few.
V. What did we do?
Despite the obvious unequal power relationship we were not merely passive objects or victims. We did not accept conditions as they found them. We vigorously defended ourselves and contested the limits imposed on us. We purchased arms, created organizations to protect our jobs, refused to abandon our homes, and despite overwhelming barriers, asserted our rights through the U.S. legal system. For example, the Chinese in Tacoma, assisted by the Chinese Consul in San Francisco, compelled the U.S. attorney to arrest the mayor of Tacoma, the chief of police, two councilmen, a probate court judge, and the president of the YMCA. They filed seventeen civil claims against the U.S. government for a total of $103,365. Despite all efforts against us we survived.
VI. How were we affected?
For those who lived in this period, there was intensive and continuous trauma, psychological and physical, individual and collective. For those who endured and resisted, it hardened them. For those who fell, there was little time to mourn. It was written:
* * * * *
The futile sweat
Our many years in America are wasted.
* * * * *
Our immigrant history in its last pages
In confinement we are in hibernation.
* * * * *
(Ichioka, 1988)
VII. Silencing and our Shadows
Our memories of agricultural labor have been silenced by the "better opportunity" and the "good immigrant" narratives.
The shadow of intra-ethnic conflict.
As a result, the racial violence and cultural trauma many of our predecessors endured as coolies and pollutants have been silenced. These experiences have been erased, deleted from our memories, and replaced (like find and replace) with narratives and recollections of “better opportunity” and the “good immigrant”. These stories go something like. “Suffering is good, normal, and temporary. It’s a way of proving yourself. If you work hard enough, eventually you’ll make it. It’s what everybody has to go through and ultimately has a happy ending. Things weren’t really that bad.”
In response, Ben Tong (1971) wrote: “Chinese America moves and expresses its being in terms of a psychology wrought from the crucible of a historical experience now barely discernible on the surface of the collective consciousness. This was the experience of total repression by a white racist society.” We were seen and treated not only not as “Americans,” but as yellow periled “aliens.” In today’s Asian American narratives the intensity and depth of these stories are rarely heard. Instead, we hear and continuously re-tell stories of “successful” potato kings.
The effect of this shadow is the disconnection from our agricultural labor history and from our connection to the land. As in the films Life is Beautiful and Pan’s Labyrinth, these experiences have been deleted and reimagined as our communities were urgently defending themselves from racial exclusionism and cultural negation. For example, some of the Issei (first generation Nikkei) proclaimed the Japanese community as heroic American pioneers and overseas colonists. Their heroes became embodiments of Horatio Alger, not Thomas Paine. As a result we bestowed historical significance on the entrepreneurial class and erased experiences of exploitation and poverty. Post World War II model minority narratives have reinforced these notions and buried the memories even deeper.
During these earlier times ethnic nationalism was constructed in part as racial pride and ethnic solidarity in response and as a defense to institutionalized white supremacy. However, it sometimes rationalized and perpetuated doctrines of racial supremacy over other Asians and other people of color. While it is important to place this in the context of the international colonization and the larger racial hierarchy in the U.S., this does not explain or justify why these negative aspects of ethnic nationalism are often not recognized or discussed within our own communities today.
This can be seen in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. When a Nisei woman married a Filipino man, an article in a local Japanese newspaper wrote: “The Japanese race, possessing superior racial traits unparalleled in the world, are destined for ceaseless development and prosperity. On the other hand, those people, whose homeland contents itself with being a third class nation would see nothing but poverty and misery in their lives. If their lazy blood becomes part of the Japanese race through interracial marriage, it would eventually offset the racial superiority of the Japanese. Racial purity is a precondition for the welfare of the second generation.”
This form of ethnic nationalism defined the interests of the Nikkei community with that of its predominantly male farmers, merchants, and professionals. It denied and silenced the common interests and experiences of Nikkei, Filipino, Chinese, Mexican, Native and African Americans. Instead, it reproduced and internalized notions of white supremacy.
VIII. Recovering Memory and the Praxis of Post-Colonial Pilgrimage
Recovering memory is a practice of decolonization and the restoration of our deeper selves (souls). The soul of Asian America lies buried in the fields of the central valley of California as well as in the back alleys and basements of Chinatown, Manilatown, Nihonmachi, Little Saigon, et. al.
"To transform the traumatic we must re-enter it fully, and allow the full weight of grief to pass through our hearts. It is not possible to digest atrocity without tasting it first, without assessing on our tongues the full bitterness of it. Only through mourning everything we have lost can we discover that we have in fact survived; that our spirits are indestructible." (Morales, 1998.)
"The scapegoat is one of many images that suggest moving between remembering and forgetting. Along with artists, priests, shamans, clowns and witches, the scapegoat crosses the boundary of the collective and deals with material too fraught with danger and chaos for ordinary hands. Along with these others the scapegoat serves to redeem the old modalities, by having to confront and struggle with the material repressed by the culture." (Perera, 1986.)
"Just as the individual recovering from abuse must reconstruct the story of her undeserved suffering in a way that gives it new meaning, and herself a rebuilt and invulnerable sense of worth, the victims of collective abuse and their progeny need ways to reconstruct history in a way that restores a sense of our inherent value as human beings, not simply in our usefulness to the goals of the elites." (Morales, 1998.)
This is shadow work, and this is the praxis of post-colonial pilgrimages.
References:
Choy, P. Dong, L. & Hom, M. (Eds.). (1994). Coming man: 19th century American perceptions of the Chinese. Hong Kong, Peoples Republic of China: University of Washington Press.
Glendinning, C. (1999). Off the map (an expedition deep into imperialism, the global economy, and other earthly whereabouts). Boston: Shambhala.
Ichioka, Yuji. (1988). The Issei: The world of the first generation Japanese immigrants, 1885-1924. New York: the Free Press.
Lee, R. (1999). Orientals: Asian Americans in popular culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Memmi, A. (1965). The colonizer and the colonized. Boston: Beacon Press.
Morales, A. (1998). Medicine stories: history, culture, and the politics of integrity. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Perera, S. (1986). The scapegoat complex: toward a mythology of shadow and guilt. Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books.
Pfaelzer, J. (2007). Driven out: the forgotten war against Chinese Americans. New York: Random House.
Tong, B. (1971). The ghetto of the mind: notes on the historical psychology of Chinese America. Amerasia Journal 1(3), 1-31.
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