Jonathan H. X. Lee - Chinese Americans: The History and Culture of a People

CHINESE

AMERICANS

EDITORIAL BOARD

Allan W. Austin, PhD

Misericordia University

Yan He, PhD

Ohio University

Franklin Ng, PhD

California State University, Fresno

Christen T. Sasaki, PhD

San Francisco State University

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, PhD

University of Connecticut

Paul Spickard, PhD

University of California, Santa Barbara

Copyright 2016 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chinese Americans : the history and culture of a people / Jonathan H. X. Lee, editor.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61069-549-7 (print : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61069-550-3 (e-book)

1.Chinese AmericansHistory. 2.Chinese AmericansSocial conditions. 3.Chinese AmericansBiography. I.Lee, Jonathan H. X., editor.

E184.C5C4793 2016

973.04951dc23 2015035598

ISBN: 978-1-61069-549-7

EISBN: 978-1-61069-550-3

2019181716 12345

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.

Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

I wish to dedicate this volume to my sisters:

Lora Lee, Josephine Mu, and Sang Ngo;

to the memories of my big brother, Jason Lee;

and to my son, Owen Edward Jinfa Quady-Lee.

Virtually every aspect of American culture has been influenced by Chinese immigrants and their descendants. Chinese Americans: The History and Culture of a People tells the story of the Chinese American experiencefrom immigration to exclusion, through complicated and contradictory iterations of assimilation, acculturation, and expressions of hybrid identities, to success and achievement in American life and society and the continued work toward equity and social justice, not just for Chinese Americans but for Asian Americans and other immigrant populations that compose the American mosaic.

Chinese Americans: The History and Culture of a People provides historical analysis and highlights the enormous contributions of Chinese Americans to the professions, politics, and popular culture of America, from the 19th century through the present day.

While the number of Chinese Americans has grown very rapidly in the last decade, this group has long thrived in the United States in spite of racism, discrimination, and segregationist policies. This comprehensive volume takes a global view of the Chinese experience in the Americas. While the focus is on Chinese Americans in the United States, Chinese Americans: The History and Culture of a People also explores the experiences of Chinese immigrants in Canada, Cuba, Mexico, and South America. This volume considers why the Chinese chose to leave their home country, where they resettled, and how the distinctive Chinese American identityor, rather, identitiesformed.

Chinese Americans: The History and Culture of a People is organized into four sections: Part I: Context of Chinese American Emigration: Coming to America; Part II: Political Activity and Economic Life: Business Endeavors and Involvement in American Politics; Part III: Cultural and Religious Life: People, Institutions, and Organizations; and Part IV: Literature, the Arts, Popular Culture, and Sports: People, Movements, and Expressions of Identity. Each section contains alphabetically arranged essays that capture a snapshot of everyday life for this immigrant group as they negotiated the mainstream demands for assimilation and acculturation to produce and express variations of hybrid subjectivity that reflect varying ratios of being Chinese and being American (including Hong Kongese and Taiwanese) that is temporally situated. The tussle with being and becoming both Chinese and American is a central theme in the artistic, literary, political, social, economic, civic and educational expressions of being Chinese American or Chinese in America. This volume includes a chronology of events from the 18th century to the present that highlights the impact of the Chinese Americans across many generations. The primary documents section contains useful primary sources that illustrates the themes of the articles in the volume, and will be useful to students from a variety of academic disciplines. There is a useful bibliography on the subjects covered in the volume as well as a general subject index.

Chinese Americans: The History and Culture of a People can easily be a multi-volume project. Therefore, determining what to include and what to exclude in this one volume project was daunting as Chinese American contributions to American history, politics, civic life, economy, art, literature, film, pop-culture, and so on is deep, extensive, and endearing. I thus focused on unexplored and unexamined topics and personalities in Chinese American studies, such as Chinese Americans and LGBTQQI, and Chinese American and Hip-hop, and lesser known contemporary notable Chinese Americans, for example Huang, Eddie (1982), whose memoir Fresh Off the Boat (2013) was adapted into an ABC comedy sitcom of the same name, the first since Margaret Chos All-American Girl (1994); Low, Evan (1983), the first openly gay Chinese American politician in California; and Yee, James J. (ca. 1968), a Chinese American Muslim who served in the U.S. military and was investigated by the FBI as a Chinese spy.

I wish to express sincere gratitude to Senior Editor, Michael Millman at ABC-Clio/Greenwood/Praeger who supported this volume and my ability to see it to fruition. I also wish to thank Sidney C. Li, my research assistant; my students and colleagues in the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University; and funding from the College of Ethnic Studies that provided resources and time to dedicate to this volume.

I hope Chinese Americans: The History and Culture of a People will be a resource for students who wish to learn about themselves and about the contributions of Chinese Americans, not just at home but around the world.

Jonathan H. X. Lee

Berkeley, California