Judy Yung - Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco

Illustrations

Terminology and Transliterations

Although Oriental was the common term used to describe East Asians in America (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans) until recent times, I choose to use Asian American for political reasons and not to hyphenate Chinese American even when used as an adjective. During the late 1960s, Chinese and Japanese American activists called attention to Ori ental as a derogatory name that connotes exoticism and inferiority. The term Asian American became the preferred name in recognition of the group's common history of oppression, geographical origins, panethnic identity, and political destiny. The hyphen was eliminated because it inferred that Chinese Americans have split identities, that somehow they are not fully American like everyone else. For the same reasons and to be consistent, I do not use the hyphen when referring to any ethnic American group.

In regard to racial and ethnic terms, I use what is generally preferred by the groups themselves. Black and African American are used interchangeably; so are Native American and American Indian. Depending on the time period under discussion, I use either Latino, Hispanic, Mexican, or Chicano; minority women or women of color. In a racial context, I generally use white instead of European American. Otherwise, I try to be ethnic specific in identifying the group by using Italian Ameri can, German American, Jewish American, etc. I capitalize Black but not white in recognition of the distinctive history, cultural identity, and political legacy that the former but not the latter term encompasses. The term America should be understood as an abbreviated form of United States of America. To be Americanized is to become acculturated but not necessarily assimilated into American life. To avoid the trap of associating the dominant white group with everything that is American, Western is preferred over American when the reference is to cultural practices; thus, Western dress, not American dress.

Introduction

As a second-generation Chinese American woman from San Francisco Chinatown, I grew up in the 1950s with very little understanding of my own historical background. My parents, who were immigrants from Doumen District in Guangdong Province, refused to answer any of my questions about our family history, so afraid were they of having their illegal immigration status exposed. Although the elementary school I attended was almost all Chinese, we were taught a very Eurocentric male version of American history. There was no mention of African Americans, American Indians, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, or women for that matter. Every day after "American" school I attended St. Mary's Chinese Language School, where I was taught the Chinese classics, history, patriotic heroes such as Sun Yat-sen and Yue Fei, and made to feel proud of my cultural heritage. The only famous women who were mentioned were beauties like Yang Guifei, who was blamed for the downfall of the empire. Looking back at my upbringing and education, I now see why I knew so little about my own history as a Chinese American woman.

Upon graduation from college I entered the female-dominated profession of librarianship and was assigned to the Chinatown Branch Library, where I went as a child to read. I would have been content to stay there until I retired except that I became politically aware of the omission of Chinese American and women's history in the public record. After park ranger Alexander Weiss discovered Chinese poetry carved into the barrack walls of the abandoned Angel Island Immigration Station in 1970, I was drawn into my first research project, translating these poems and interviewing Chinese immigrants about what happened to them at Angel Island. Historian Him Mark Lai, poet Genny Lim, and I ended up self-publishing Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940, since no publisher at the time believed the subject important enough to be marketable. Inspired by the civil rights and women's liberation movements, I turned my attention to recovering Chinese American women's history after Island was published. With a grant from the U.S. Department of Education (Women's Educational Equity Act), Genny Lim, Vincente Tang, and I embarked on the Chinese Women of America Research Project, which resulted in a traveling exhibit and my next book, Chinese Women of America: A Pictorial His tory. Given the absence of written accounts by Chinese American women themselves and the availability of only stereotypical works by missionaries and journalists, we looked for women's stories in primary sources such as immigration documents, Chinese-language newspapers, and the records of women's organizations. We also conducted oral history interviews with 274 women of diverse backgrounds in different parts of the United States.