Impossible Subjects by Ngai Mae

Author:Ngai, Mae
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six___________________________________

The Cold War Chinese Immigration Crisis and the Confession Cases

The subpoenas in question can only be used for the obvious purpose of oppressing and intimidating the entire Chinese American community in San Francisco and, whether intentional or otherwise, they are having the effect of stigmatizing the social and family status of a respected community with criminal coloration.

—Chinese Six Companies, 19561

THE CHINESE have the dubious distinction of being the only group to be excluded from immigration into the United States explicitly by name. The Chinese exclusion laws, which barred all Chinese laborers from entry and prohibited Chinese from acquiring naturalized citizenship, generated the nation’s first illegal aliens as well as the first alien citizens. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that Chinese born in the United States were citizens, the premises of exclusion—the alleged racial unassimilability of Chinese—powerfully influenced Americans’ perceptions of Chinese Americans as permanent foreigners. Excluded from the polity and for the most part confined to Chinatown ghettoes and an ethnic economy, Chinese Americans remained marginalized from the mainstream of society well into the twentieth century.2

Chinese Americans’ political and social standing in the United States rose and fell on multiple occasions from the 1930s to the 1960s, along with shifting American foreign policy and war interests. During the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s, American sympathies lay with China. The United States was not a party to the conflict, but the Roosevelt administration sent arms to China and American missionaries’ firsthand accounts of the war inspired widespread sympathy for the Chinese people. For example, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, a humanist narrative of the Chinese peasantry, was the one of the biggest best-sellers of the 1930s, according to one source second only to Gone with the Wind.3 China had long been the “sick man of Asia,” but Americans now read a noble pathos in its suffering, and Chinese Americans benefited from the association.

The Sino-Japanese War prompted widespread mobilization among Chinese Americans to support China. Chinatown communities hosted mass demonstrations, raised funds, and organized campaigns to stop the shipment of American scrap metal to Japan. Gender did the work of Chinese nationalism to particular effect, especially with the American public. The beautiful, Wellesley-educated Soong May Ling (Madame Chiang Kai-Shek) won the hearts of Americans in her tour of the United States. After Pearl Harbor and the American entrance into the Pacific war, China became a formal ally of the United States. Over twelve thousand Chinese American men and women served in the U.S. armed forces, and many construed their contribution to the war in terms of patriotism and national loyalty to both the United States and China.4

In 1943 Congress repealed the Chinese exclusion laws as a wartime measure to counter Japanese propaganda that held up Chinese exclusion as evidence of American’s anti-Asiatic race policies.5 But Congress’s continued antipathy towards Chinese migration was evident in the annual Chinese quota of 105. This quota was unlike all other immigration quotas in that it was not for China but for all Chinese in the world, regardless of their country of birth or residence.

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