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174 Response and Resistance

In 1926, the journal Survey Graphic featured the autobiography of Kazuo Kawai, a young Japanese American who had immigrated to the United States at the age of six. Although not native-born, he was presented as an exemplar of the second-generation experience. Kawai said that life as an Am^icanized person ofjapanese ancestry had been difficult and confusing. During his high school years, he identified with American culture and did not connect with 5 classmates whom he viewed as overly ’Japanesy" In college, however, where he was no -longer surrounded by other Japanese Americans, he grew increasingly self-conscious about &his racial "otherness.” "[For] the first time," said Kawai:

I felt myself becoming identified with Japan, and began to realize that I was Japanese ...What would I be able to do in Japan?... I couldn't speak the language except for a silly baby-talk ... I didn't know any of the customs or traditions of Japan/'1 He continued, “Where did I belong?... in language, in thought, in ideals, in custom, in everything, I was American. But America wouldn't have me... Once I was American, but America made a foreigner out of me—Not a Japanese, but a foreigner—a foreigner to any country for I am just as much a foreigner to Japan as to America.2

Such sentiments were common among young Asian Americans―both U.S. and foreign ,born~during the early twentieth century For the most part, they considered themselves American, but in the course of their lives, came to realize that their ethnic backgrounds and /. "OrientaT faces impeded their full belonging in American society

This chapter examines the Eves of Asian Americans against the backdrop of modernity U jn the early twentieth century with a focus on issues such as education, work, politics, racism, / popular culture, and generational relations. It pays particular attention to young Asian Americans, mainly second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) and Chinese Americans, whose experiences have been the most widely documented, although the lives of U.S.-born and /or young Filipinos, Koreans, South Asians, and Asian Americans of mixed parentage will also be considered. The chapter will discuss the pressures and challenges that young 'Asian Americans faced, whether from their own families and ethnic communities or the

# Modernity and the Second Generation Modernity and the Second Generation 177

larger society and how their responses ranged from accommodation to rebellion. While their lives can be understood as part of a larger second generation experience bearing similarities to European and other immigrant communities in America, Asian Americans' lives were also shaped by race, and specifically the perception that they regardless of nativity and citizenship, were "Orientals," and hence fundamentally foreign. Finally the chapter considers Asian America against the backdrop of the “Roaring Twenties“ and the Great Depression, demonstrating how Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and Asian Indians in the United States were affected by and participated in the major developments of these eras.

Among Chinese Americans, children were present since the mid-1800s, but the second generation, as a sizeable and discrete cohort, did not really emerge until the 1920s, as its growth was most dramatic after the turn of the century3 The small number of American- born Chinese before the 1900s was a consequence of exclusion, highly skewed gender ratios, and the sojourner orientation of most male immigrants. The birth of a child in Chinese America during the late 1800s and early 1900s, then, was a rare and joyous occasion, and

Figure 7.1 Chinese American baseball team from Hawaii, 1914. This photograph shows a Chinese American baseball team from Hawaii that came to the United States to play against university teams. Sports and recreation were an important part of life among many young Asian Americans growing up during the early 1900s, providing an outlet for socializing and engaging with matnstream American culture. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-B2-3075-13.)

often the mark of a family's elite status.4 Things would change gradually; between 1870 and 1900, the American-born went from one to 11 percent of the U.S. Chinese population, and by 1930, that number shot up to 41 percent. Ten years later, they represented a majority at 52 percent.5

In Japanese America, the Nisei were an increasingly visible element of the population after 1910. As discussed previously most Issei men had come to Hawaii and North America between 1890 and 1908, and the entry of Japanese picture brides facilitated nuclear family formation and the rise of a second generation. Between 1900 and 1910, the number ofNisei in the continental United States rose from 269 to 4,502.6 Significant as this was, this paled in comparison to the growth of subsequent decades. From 1920 to 1930, Nisei went from nearly 30,000 to 60,000, and on the eve of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 they numbered nearly 80,000, outnumbering Issei two to one. Because most of their births occurred between 1910 and 1940, the Nisei一and to a degree other second-generation Asian Americans—developed a strong cohort identity based on a shared historical life cycle that included eras such as the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II.

The second-generation presence among Koreans and Filipinos was more pronounced in Hawaii than on the mainland, as a larger number of women went to the islands than the continent during the early years of these groups." migrations. The arrival of picture brides to Hawaii was pivotal in driving the growth of the female population among Koreans; from 1910 to 1920, they went from 13 to 30 percent of the islands' Korean population. In turn, this led to the rise of the second generation. Over these same years, Filipinos in Hawaii likewise saw dramatic growth in the second-generation population; by 1920, the Hawaiian-born represented 29 percent of the islands* Filipino population.7

On the whole, Asian immigrants leaned toward endogamy but a significant portion of the second generation was of mixed parentage. Mixed-race children of various backgrounds were especially visible and numerous in Hawaii by the early 1900s, but they also appeared on .the continent. For example, prior to 1946, 80 percent of the approximately four hundred Asian Indian families in California included Indian husbands and Mexican wives. The families were concentrated in the Imperial but were also found in smaller numbers throughout

the state as well as in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Canada. As a result of these intermarriages, which can be traced to the 1910s, most second-generation Asian Indians, until the late 1960s, were racially mixed. In the biethnic households in which they grew up, cultural traditions were melded: tortillas were substituted for roti and chapattis andjalapenos for Punjabi chili peppers, and children had names such as Oscar Bupara and Anna Luisa Bupara.8

The emergence of a second generation dramatically altered the dynamics of daily life in Asian American communities. The rising number of U.S. births meant that parents and community leaders would have to grapple with the matter of education and other issues concerning how to raise children in a new land. Around 1908, Issei leaders began addressing the second-generation problem, or <fdai Nisei mondai." In an editorial published that year, a writer for the Shin Sekai opined that the issue of dual nationality would grow pressing as

children got older, particularly around matters like military service. Parents, thus, needed to decide if their families, futures were in Japan or America.9 This also demanded a thoughtful and deliberate approach to Nisei education, and in 1909 the Japanese Association of America in San Francisco convened a group called the Thursday Club to discuss the issue. One of the assumptions the group worked from was that Nisei, because of their nativity and American acculturation, would have a different national identity from their parents, and, should, thus, be exposed to curricula that reflected and developed their Japanese and American sides.

While recognizing that their children would grow up in a much different environment than they had, many Asian parents nonetheless sought to ensure that their children knew the language and culture of their homeland. While some hoped to stem the Americanization of their children, others sought to bridge potential cultural gaps between them. In Chinese American communities, for instance, parents, usually from the merchant class and with the assistance of family associations, sent their children to tutors, language schools, and even to China.10 As early as 1880, San Francisco Chinese Americans had established at least twelve language schools, open on weekends and weekday afternoons, that offered courses in Chinese classics, music, history geography and math.11

Japanese and Koreans likewise formed language schools, which children usually attended in the afternoon. These were less prevalent among Filipinos and Asian Indians. As the

Japanese Association explained, the purpose of Japanese schools was to strengthen Nisei connections to the homeland and supplement U.S. education without impeding the goal of preparing the second generation to be permanent residents of the United States.12 Preschool children learned English as preparation for American school, and those enrolled in American schools would receive supplemental instruction in Japanese ethics, history, geography and language. The Issei did not always agree on the curricula, debating, for instance, whether moral education based on the Imperial Rescript on Education should be stressed or if this was too parochial. Sensitive to anti Japanese proponents' charges that these schools resisted childrens Americanization, the Pacific Coast Japanese Deliberative Council and Northwest American Japanese Association emphasized their supplementary purpose and even said that Nisei, if they so wished, should be able to renounce their Japanese citizenship.13

Parents with the resources and connections to do so sent their LLS.-born children to Asia to study Many Issei embraced this after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, as the law confirmed American antiJapanese racism and impressed upon them the urgency to prepare their children to be cultural mediators in order to improve race relations. Educator Abiko Kyutaro advocated the idea that the Nisei should be '"bridges of understanding” between the United States and Japan, but to play this role efiectively they had to spend time in Japan. After a group of four girls from Seattle returned from a trip there in 1924, they traveled to the Pacific Northwest and California to share their experience with other Japanese Americans, inspiring Abiko to underwrite Nisei tours ofjapan through his newspaper Nichibei Shimbun and with the cooperation ofjapan financier Shibusawa Eiichi. In 1925, the paper said about these tours:

After the young Nisei boys and girls see and understand Japan, they will become conscious of their own ethnicity and gain confidence in themselves. Individually they

Modernity and the Second Generation 179 will be blessed with self assurance; they will become essential links in fostering Japanese-American amity each in their own personal way; and they will naturally realize what they must do as Americans for America ..."

Coordinating his first group in 1925, Abiko selected applicants based on their leadership potential, and eventually assembled eleven males and females for a three-month trip.15 Miya Sannomiya, who went with the second group in 1926, said the tour “changed my life." The trip also had its intended effect of molding her into a f<bridge of understanding/' as she went on to become the English secretary of the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai (International Society for Cultural Relations), a Japanese education society that disseminated information about Japan in western languages.16 Other newspapers and organizations followed suit with similar Nisei education tours.

Nisei who were sent to Japan for extended periods (usually to live with grandparents or other relatives) as part of their education were known as the kibei. While education and being properly 'Japanized" were major factors behind the kibei phenomenon, it also freed up parents' time to work tnore. It is difficult to know just how many there were in the pre-war years, but about 9 percent of the internment camp population during World War II identified themselves as kibei. By the time they returned to the United States, they were usually teenagers or young adults, and the extended time they had spent in Japan made them less Americanized than their Nisei counterparts. As a result, Nisei who had never left the United States tended to view them as much different from themselves and did not socialize with them extensively The relative lack of acculturation among kibei, furthermore, proved to be a long-term disadvantage to this group, as they were generally less socioeconomically successful than the Nisei.17

Concerns about language retention notwithstanding, most evidence indicates that Asian parents did not actively resist the Americanization of their children, and in daily life they continued some customs while adopting new ones, so children grew up entrenched in multiple cultural traditions. In Chinese families, for instance, many parents carried over the practice of ceremonially bathing a newborn and confining the mother and child to the home for one month afterbirth.18 Some also maintained superstitions aimed at protecting children from soul-stealing devils and other malevolent forces. Boys might be dressed in girls' clothes to confuse demons, and images of tigers were secured to keep harmful spirits at bay19 Class and religious background often factored into how and to what extent families adopted American and western customs. Chinese Protestant families, for instance, were more likely to baptize their children in churches to celebrate a birth rather than follow Chinese folk practices, dthough many families attended church on Sundays while continuing to worship Chinese gods at home. Such examples of retention and borrowing meant that members of the second generation usually grew up with knowledge of multiple cultural practices. For example, U.S.-born Chinese children learned about and participated in American culture, but they were also familiar with Chinese herbs and remedies, special dishes for ancestral holidays, ghost stories, and other traditions.

178 Modernity and the Second Generation

Middle class and elite Asian American families tended to pursue Americanization more intentionally and enthusiastically than their less affluent counterparts did, as facility in English and American culture was often a requisite for their roles as businessmen, social elites, or brokers. In turn, this shaped how they raised their children. Chinese American

Pardee Lowe, fbr example, was named after George Pardee, a former governor of California, and his parents named their other sons after Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Riley Marshall. He also had a sister named Alice Roosevelt.20 Seid Gain Back Jr. and Moy Bow Hing, the sons of two of Portland's wealthiest Chinese merchants, were also raised in a Western style. After attending the Baptist Chinese Mission School, both went to the mostly white and private Bishop Scott Grammar School. Their fathers believed the environment of these institutions would best facilitate the sons' assimilation and future success.21

After 1911, Chinese American middle class families' embrace of Westernization and modernity also increasingly stemmed from the influence of the Chinese Revolution. It shaped, for example, some parents' decision to adopt more liberal approaches to raising daughters. Florence Chinn Kwan's parents were nationalistic and modern in their outlook and lifestyle; her father, fbr instance, had cut his queue and her mother unbound her feet. Kwan played tennis, wore Western clothes and, along with her sisters, was allowed to serve as princesses in a parade celebrating the Chinese republic. Her parents also encouraged her to go to college, which was still unusual for Chinese daughters, and she attended Mills College before going on to earn a Masters in Sociology from the University of Chicago.

At the same time, tension between members of the first and second generations was common, often playing out as cultural conflicts and parent-child disagreements. To many in the older generation, young Asians did not show proper respect for their elders, and they blamed this on the influence of American culture. In 1924, George Lem, who had emigrated from China to California in 1875, observed:

[the] children here have no respect fbr the old people. It is not so in China, there they respect the old people. But here, if you are old, they think you ought to die. When the boy is twenty-one, he says, ‘I am twenty-one, I will do as I please/ And when the girl is eighteen, she says, rI am eighteen and I can do as I please/ ... There is too much liberty I believe in liberty but I think in some ways there is too much among the young people.22

These dynamics also appeared in other Asian communities. In 1930, the Korean immigrant Young Kang, who lived in Honolulu, said that young people were not interested in their heritage or studying Korean and were too wrapped up in American culture.23 He was especially concerned about the moral wellbeing of young Koreans who left the church. For their part, the second generation did not always understand why the first generation so strenuously emphasized the importance of respect and knowing one s heritage, and often bemoaned parents' and elders' sternness and high expectations. One young Korean American said in 1927, “So far I have read very little about my parents，native land. I have never felt a sense of pride in knowing about my parents' native land but I have pity and sympathy fbr them：* Bernice Kim, another second generation Korean American, thought generational conflicts were rooted in misunderstanding. Young Koreans, she said, wanted freedom, but parents mistook this for disrespect.

When children and parents clashed over gender roles, the situation could be especially complicated. For some traditional parents, male-female equality was a novel concept, but modernized daughters came to expect this and resented what they perceived as sexist parental pressures. Recalling how her father favored her brother over her and her sisters, Chinese American Esther Wong stated:

When I was 13 my brother was born and then [my fether] lost interest in us girls, did not care to bother teaching girls, and seemed to forget what we were like. When we were small he used to work at a machine next to ours, and when we were all busy he would tell us stories as we worked; but later he became very stern and cold and did not try to understand us at all.25

Another Chinese American, Alice Sue Fun, who grew up in San Francisco in the early 1900s, focused her angst on her mother. She recalled how each day after school—she attended the Oriental Public School and, then the True Sunshine Chinese School—she did chores at home and took care of her siblings. Lamenting these burdens and lack of freedom, Fun remembered:

Mother watched us like a hawk. We couldn't move without telling her. When we were growing up, we never allowed to go out unless accompanied by an older brother, sister, or anybody else ... If you wanted to go shopping, you might as well forget it because, one thing, you didn't have the money Secondly you knew your mother wouldn't let you go, so what's the use of asking, right?26

Her yearning for freedom from parental authority led her to get a job at Canton Bazaar and then marry her Chinese teacher, with whom she moved to New York. She eventually divorced her husband, and traveled the world as a maid and companion to the actress Lola Fisher.27 Fun looked back with satisfaction on the independent life she forged, but regretted that similar freedoms eluded her mother in her lifetime. "My mother lived a very sheltered life/* she said. "Even up to her old age, she never trusted herself to go out alone. She was afraid that she'll get lost... I would go out anytime I want and anywhere I want. Even in foreign countries, I wasn't afraid to go out alone . . . I like to be independent. I don't like to always be accompanied by people. I guess I had enough of that when I was a young girl/'28

In families that embraced some aspects of modernity parents' gendered expectations and hypocrisies confused daughters and led to clashes. Jade Snow Wong, the fifth of seven daughters in a prominent San Francisco Chinatown family recalled how her parents were very progressive in their support for educating daughters, but were also traditional and strict, for instance, in their expectation of obedience and use of physical punishment. Her father, the owner of a garment fectory was a Christian and Chinese nationalist and had impressed upon her the importance of girls' education for the sake of strong families and a strong China. Wong, however, clashed frequently with her parents over her ambitions and desire to be a part of mainstream American culture. Her father would not let her go to college because he felt it was more important for her brother to go. She eventually struck out on her own and worked as a live-in housekeeper, using her contacts and money earned to go to Mills College.29

Although patriarchal conventions from the homeland and in American society meant that sons were frequently prioritized over daughters, the former nonetheless often chafed at the pressures and responsibilities that came with being boys. Examples of favoritism included limiting property inheritance to male children, and prioritizing college education for sons if resources were scarce. For instance, in Punjabi families in California in which fathers owned agricultural land, the norm was that only sons inherited property However, with these privileges came greater expectations, which could foster resentment. Sons were expected to follow their fathers into agriculture and work in the fields from their teenage years alongside other Punjabi men. Remembering how his father pushed him into agriculture and in other areas of his life, Pritham Sandhu came to believe that pressure and dogged persistence were traits of all Punjabi patriarchs, something he lamented: "They were out to win, they didn't care how they played the game; they wanted to be the best. When I was growing up, I thought this was an isolated thing with my father, but later on, I saw it was a Sikh thing, a Punjabi thing. They never quit, and they wouldn't let us either/'30 Such pressure could lead to sons rebelling against their parents. Chinese American Edwin Wong, who helped at his family's laundry and worked as a domestic, resented his fathers order that he spend many hours working and send the money he earned to family members in China. Unwilling to continue living under this authority he ran away from home to live in Berkeley and continue his high school education.31

The generational divide in Asian American families also led to explosive conflicts over dating and marriage, especially between daughters and parents.32 In 1917, when she was just fifteen-years-old, Chinese American Elsie Chan of Oakland resisted her parents* attempt to place her in an arranged marriage, a still-common practice among Chinese in the early twentieth century In her distress, she tried to commit suicide and, before doing so, wrote a note to her true love, William, which said, “Sorry to say that I could get no chance to see you before I died, as my mother forces me to marry but I didn't obey her about it. I really intended to marry you, and I will follow you any time if I can. I am just worrying about my mother forcing me to marry and that makes me die.”% Daughters also turned to other less drastic solutions, such as seeking the intervention of a third party A Chinese American named Bessie Jeong vowed, after seeing her older sister enter an arranged marriage, to avoid the same fate. Fearing that her father was going to take her to China to marry her o氐 she sought the protection of Donaldina Cameron of the San Francisco Presbyterian Mission Home and later married the man ofher choice, Dr. Ying Wing Chan, the Chinese consul in San Francisco.34 In Pui^jabi—Mexican families, when fathers tried to set their daughters up with Punjabis or Punjabi-Mexicans, the daughters sometimes turned to their mothers for help. "Dad wanted me to marry a well-established man eighteen (or twenty-eight?) years older than I," recalled one daughter. "He tried three times to get me married, but mother said,，No way!' It bothered him a lot that I made my own decision?'35

As suggested in the suicide letter by Elsie Chan, second-generation Asian Americans tended to prefer companionate marriages and relationships. In Japanese American families, parents often forbade dating, but many Nisei, especially those in cities 囲。had opportunities to meet potential partners at various community events, embraced the idea of marriage based on choice and emotional connections. They found support for these wishes from Nisei writer Mary Oyama, who wrote an advice column in the Nichibei Shimbun and Shin Sekai Asahi, under the pseudonym "Dierdre" for the latter. Although she addressed men and women, Oyama's advice to young women was radical for its time, as she encouraged them to chart their own course, and opined that it was fine for a woman in her twenties to be unmarried. "Here in America where living standards are so high it takes a longer time for a young Nisei man to arrive at an age and station where he can adequately support a wife.s，36 Oyama urged Nisei women to know themselves, especially in terms of how Americanized they were, and to select husbands who were good matches for them, rather than giving in to the wishes of others. While such advice was scandalous to some parents and community elders, Oyama's writing fell short of advocating gender equality or challenging the wisdom that women should eventually marry. Further, Nisei couples generally maintained the tradition of seeking parental consent to marry and parents continued to employ go-betweens to investigate a prospective partner's background.37

Another source of tension, particularly in endogamous families and communities, was interracial and interethnic relationships. Interracial dating, while not a widespread phenomenon among Asian Americans in the early 1900s, grew out of day-to-day encounters in integrated school and neighborhoods. Although among Nisei, for instance, out-marriage rates were low in the prewar years― ust over 2 percent for women and 3 percent for men— Japanese American newspapers regularly printed stories warning of the shame and tragedy that interracial and interethnic relationships would bring upon a family38 None were warned against more than those with Filipinos. Because Filipinos often encountered Nisei as laborers on Japanese-owned farms, a class bias as well as ethnocentrism colored these tales. Issei warned that Filipino blood would dilute Japanese racial superiority and portrayed Filipinos as lascivious toward young Japanese women.39 The story of Alice Kaneko of Newcastle, California, which the Shin Sekai pubEshed in January 1934, illustrated Issei fears about Filipino-Japanese relationships. Kaneko, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a Japanese farmer, had planned to marry Shizuo Haramoto, which greatly upset a Filipino agricultural employee, whose relationship with Kaneko was unclear, although he had once proposed to her. The day before Kaneko's wedding, the lovestruck Filipino appeared at the family's home and declared that if he could not have her, then nobody could. He shot Kaneko (who was hospitalized but did survive) and then turned the gun on himself committing suicide.40

180 Modernity and the Second Generation Modernity and the Second Generation #

# Modernity and the Second Generation Modernity and the Second Generation 183

Community leaders responded more mildly to relationships between Japanese and whites, although they still depicted them as risky and potentially tragic affairs. Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century such relationships were not only socially taboo, but marriages between whites and Asians were against the law One of these involved twenty-four-year-old Nisei farmer Sam Kurihara and his white girlfriend Jennie Jean Salsan, both of the Dinuba, California area. In January 1938, SalsanJs father, who had opposed the couple's relationship, shot Kurihara one evening as he approached the Salsan home to meet Jennie. Although Kurihara recovered from his wounds, a distraught Jennie Salsan killed herself by consuming poison.41 Not only did such relationships put Asian Americans at risk of being attacked by disapproving whites, but the mixed couples also faced ostracism from both Asian and white communities. In one case, Chinese American Tye Leung ran away to the San Francisco Presbyterian Mission Home to avoid an arranged marriage. While working as an assistant to matrons at Angel Island, she fell in love with a white immigration inspector named Charles Schulze, and the two got married in Washington State, where there were no miscegenation laws. Due to the disapproval of their communities, both resigned from their civil service jobs and lived close to Chinatown, where their children were taunted by such insults as ,fforeign devil child/M2

The dynamics of parent-child relations were different in mixed families because mothers and fathers were unlikely to put up a united cultural front and often disagreed with each other on child-rearing methods and objectives. In Punjabi-Mexican families, for example, the Mexican wives often insisted on raising children to speak Spanish and practice Catholicism. Because husbands spent less time at home and Indians were usually greatly outnumbered by Mexicans in the surrounding community children would grow up with distant relationships with their fathers and knew little about their Indian heritage.43 As highlighted earlier, it was common, for instance, for daughters to enlist the support of their mothers or Hispanic godmothers if they disagreed with their fathers rules or decisions. One daughter remembered a fight between her parents over her fathers objection to a prospective groom based on his caste background. Her mother exclaimed, "What is this caste thing, we re all Americans here!"44 Such patterns of turning to mothers and other relatives for support against fathers sometimes reinforced childrens negative perceptions of their fethers as hot-tempered men incapable of giving affection. As one Punj abi-Mexican recalled about his fether, “He was hard, he didn't talk a lot to me... he was a strict authoritarian and didn't show his feelings/,45

Such tension and conflicts notwithstanding, parents and children, first and second generations, were not always at odds with each other, and, moreover, the dynamics of intergenerational relations in Asian American families were not much different from those of other immigrant and non-immigrant households and communities. As noted above, parents did not regard the Americanization of their children as something to resist and did what they could to assist their childrens assimilation. Many Issei, for instance, helped form Boy Scout troops, youth organizations, and athletic leagues, and supported white teachers who worked with their children. The larger point here is that for the second generation, relationships with parents and elders were an important part of the terrain on which their experiences and identities were forged. Children were raised by them, looked up to them, and relied on them for support but also chafed and rebelled against them and ultimately had to figure out on their own how to negotiate their unique position.

Misunderstandings with parents stemmed in part from very different life experiences separating the immigrant and American-born generations. On the one hand, the latter group was bound by traditional expectations, but as assimilated Americans with citizenship and greater contact with people outside their ethnic communities, they were also less constrained by them. To be sure, there was no singular "second generation experience/' as it could vary considerably from one ethnic group to another, family to family class position, and place. For instance, in the early twentieth century the social lives of Chinese Americans in dense, urban Chinatowns tended to be more ethnically circumscribed than in communities without large Chinese populations. Generally speaking, though, members of the second generation grew up instilled in the "American Dream," something that seemed more within reach than it had been for their parents. However, the realization that they like their parents, were not immune to racial discrimination and would thus face limitations could be a bitter pill to swallow

Outside the home, through their engagement with various institutions and people, young Asian Americans' lives were immersed in American culture. Public schools were espedally important in this regard. Here, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, teachers instilled in pupils values of individuality equality and freedom. Also influential, especially in cities, were municipal agencies and organizations such as the YMCA and YWCA, which also reached out to the younger generation and exposed them to American ideas, recreation activities, and daily habits. In San Francisco Chinatown, for example, the city's playground commission and YMCA built facilities in the neighborhood―in 1911 and 1927, respectively一to promote wholesome play and the Americanization of its youngest residents.46 The YWCA, moreover, taught girls and women that they should participate in civic affairs and take on public roles, ideas that clashed with what many were taught at home. From peers whom they encountered in school and after school, they learned about fashion, dating, sports, and entertainment.

As important as public schools could be as sites of socialization for Asian Americans, access to them was elusive through much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century many attended segregated institutions. The history of Asian Americans and pubEc education, thus, illustrates their struggle for belonging via entry into mainstream institutions, a pervasive theme in the second-generation experience. In California until the 1880s, the public education of Chinese children was tenuous, as there were no explicit provisions for their schooling. As a result, most of those who did attend school went to private and missionary institutions.47 Access to public education, albeit usually in segregated settings, opened up after the California Supreme Court decision in Tapev. Hurley (1885). In 1884, the Spring Wiley Primary School in San Francisco had refused to admit eight-year-old Mamie Tape, the daughter of middle-class couple Mary and Joseph Tape, because she was Chinese. The Tapes sued the San Francisco School District, and the case eventually reached the state supreme court. Their lawyer William Gibson argued that in the absence of legislation prohibiting Chinese from going to school with whites, they had a right to public education, and to deny them entry into public schools violated both California law and Fourteenth Amendment protections.48 In a decision that secured young Mamie's place as a “civil rights pioneer/' the court ruled in Tape's favor/,49

Rather than lay the groundwork for integrated schools and equal access for Asians in San Francisco, however, the Tape v. Hurley decision led to the opening of the city's racially segregated Chinese Primary School, later called the Oriental School.50 Although its curriculum~emphasizing language, geography history and reverence of American heroes— was similar to other schools' in the district, the Oriental School always had to make do with fewer resources. It had become so overcrowded by the mid-1920s that all-white schools elsewhere in the district had to admit a handful of Asian students. Nonetheless, until 1947, the public education experience of Chinese up to the high school level was largely a segregated one.51 After graduating from the Oriental School, those wishing to continue their education had to apply to local public high schools, but most would be rejected. In 1908, just eleven Chinese Americans attended high school in San Francisco.52

# Modernity and the Second Generation Modernity and the Second Generation 185

Japanese Americans in the city had greater success in resisting school segregation than the Chinese, largely because ofjapans diplomatic standing. As discussed in previous chapters, in 1907, in response to pressure from the Japanese government and President Theodore Roosevelt, the Board of Supervisors exempted Japanese students from having to attend the

Oriental School. Japanese American leaders placed a high priority on adequate public education fbr the children in their community and in California Nisei made up about 3 percent of the state's student population and attended school at higher rates than the overall population. A large percentage—some 35 percent of Nisei students―were in Los Angeles County alone.53

To be sure, there was much diversity across Asian Americans' experiences in public schools. For instance, many rural, poor, or working-class Asian Americans could not attend school for long periods due to other demands on their time.54 To illustrate, the 1924 yearbook fbr Seattle's Garfield High School showed that students had formed a Filipino Club. The accompanying text indicated that the club had suffered due to its fluctuating membership, caused by the departure of Filipino students who worked during the year as migrant laborers.55 With regard to the racial and ethnic makeup of the schools Asian Americans attended, they generally went to segregated institutions or "integrated" schools in minority neighborhoods, but this varied too, especially when it came to a family's class status and geographic location. Although segregated schools (de jure and de facto) were symbols of inequality and struggled with inferior resources, strong minority concentrations insulated students from the isolation and taunts that they might otherwise be subjected to if they were the only or one of few Asians. At Bailey Gatzert Elementary School in Seattle, which had an enrollment that approached 99 percent Chinese and Japanese in the early 1920s, Shigeko Sese Uno, who attended the school around this time, remembered, “I think we were very fortunate . . . I remember just a few Chinese, no black person, no Filipino. We were all Japanese.'*

For those who spent a major portion of their lives in school, these were foundational years in which they learned much about race and being Asian in America. Large concentrations of co-ethnics and other Asians existed mainly in elementary and junior high schools, and furthermore, into the twentieth century attending integrated schools increasingly became the norm. If they had not already been acquainted with the notion that they were racial “others," Asian American students were unlikely to escape this by high school. For example, in San Francisco during the 1910s, school officials noted that the recent entry of Chinese students into several schools had sparked numerous fights with Italian classmates.57 The content of school curricula, furthermore, underscored to Asian students that they belonged to a subordinate group. They learned from textbooks that portrayed China as a weak, arrogant, and antiquated nation and argued that Chinese were excluded from immigration because "[they] fail to become Americanized, fail to adopt as their own the interests and customs of this country'，Finally; in addition to enduring teasing from fellow students and insensitivity from teachers, they were often placed on vocational tracks that reflected the dim prospects projected on them.

The limited job and career options of the second generation were also shaped by family ahd community needs. In. working-class as well as many middle-class families, parents generally expected children to contribute to the household and their own support, and many started doing so by their early teens. In rural Japanese American communities, where family members were a crucial source of labor on farms and at home, most Nisei had to cut short their schooling and forgo completing high school. Urban Nisei were also expected to work, but they were usually able to stay in school, working in their spare time as babysitters, store assistants, or employees in family businesses. Punjabi-Mexican sons in the Imperial Wiley who were expected to follow their fathers' vocational footsteps had more options than the previous generation, although they tended to be limited to jobs in the lower tiers of the economy For example, while Punjabi immigrants worked primarily as laborers, farmers, and ranchers, their U.S.-born sons were able to find work as truck drivers, gas heating installers, freight agents, money exchangers, tractor drivers, and mix men.59 They also entered these fields because by the time they joined the labor market in the 1930s and 1940s, the trend toward larger farms made landowning exceedingly difficult. Others left the Imperial Valley for opportunities in cities.

Women were doubly limited in the jobs available to them as well as their freedom to enter and exit the labor market. They usually found that the fields open to them had not changed a great deal from the first generations experience. For example the 1900 and 1910 censuses found that prostitutes and seamstresses were the most common occupations reported among U.S.-born Chinese women in San Francisco.60 Also like the first generation, second- generation Asian American women had to contend with the traditional taboo in many communities against women having roles outside the home. This diminished somewhat into the twentieth century but remained significant nonetheless. And among those who did work, especially women from merchant and middle class families, jobs rarely turned into longterm careers, due to the limitations of the jobs themselves and the expectation that marriage and motherhood would eventually consume their lives.61 On the other hand, working-class Asian American women often had to enter the labor force at a young age and stay in it longer than they would have preferred. When she was in sixth grade, Nisei "Mrs. Fujitani," the eldest of six children, had to drop out of school to work on her family's strawberry farm. When she was in her late teens, she got a job as a live-in housekeeper, staying in this position for fourteen years. While she had to forego plans to continue her education, her wages allowed her younger siblings to finish high school and get white-collar occupations. When she was in her mid-thirties, she entered an arranged marriage to a divorced Issei and finally left domestic service.62

The general picture of second-generation employment until the 1940s, then, is of concentration in ethnic economies or niches, a tendency to stay within the same fields as the first generation, and limited mobility or movement into the mainstream economy To illustrate through the example ofjapanese Americans in California, although few Nisei from farm families actually grew up wanting to be farmers, in 1940 about 40 percent of those in the workforce were employed in agriculture. Of the 60 percent in nonagricultural fields, clerical and sales positions predominated, with domestic and unskilledjobs also being highly represented.63 In San Francisco and Los Angeles, the vast majority of Nisei—some 90 percent or higher—worked in the ethnic economy; either in family businesses or for co-ethnic employers. Although by the 1920s Nisei and other U.S.-born Asian Americans were increasingly finding work outside traditional low-status immigrant niches, entering clerical and sales jobs as well as professional occupations such as teacher, doctors, nurses, dentists, bank managers, tellers, and beauty parlor owners, these positions were usually- confined to ethnic economies, usually located in urban enclaves or serving a mainly co-ethnic clientele.

# Modernity and the Second Generation Modernity and the Second Generation 187

Those who did obtain professional or white-collar j obs in the mainstream economy were the exception and often relied on family and other connections to get their positions.64 Seid Back, Jr., the son of a prominent Portland Chinese merchant, worked as an interpreter for

a U.S. district court and the Bureau of Immigration during the early 1900s. He was able to secure the position because of his fathers standing and connections with white Americans in Portland. When he applied to work as an interpreter in San Francisco for the Immigration Service, former Oregon governor of George Chamberlain wrote a letter of support on his behalf.65 Such advantages opened doors for a few, but they did not always protect them from ■' discrimination on the job. In the 1920s, Alice Fong Yu was hired by the San Francisco School District as a teacher, but was not allowed to work in the classroom and was assigned other tasks.66

Handfuls of professionals notwithstanding, in the early twentieth century most young and educated Asian Americans were unable to secure employment commensurate with their 七 backgrounds or ambitions, a deeply frustrating predicament for people who had grown up expecting more. In Japanese America, the underemployed included Nisei who had completed , commercial courses for office jobs or who held engineering and science degrees, only tobe . relegated to laundry and restaurant work.67 Some parents, like Chinese American Pardee Lowe's, tried to protect their children from the rejection they feared awaited them by dissuading them from certain pursuits. Lowe remembered how at the age of thirteen, he told his father of his desire to leave school and get a job as an office boy at an American law； firm, to which the elder Lowe told his son that he would never be hired because he was Chinese. Discouraged, he stayed in school.68 Ultimately however, the greatest barrier facing the second generation with regard to mainstream employment and fulfilling careers was racism and structural discrimination in hiring and education. As a personnel officer at Stanford University explained in the 1920s:

Many firms have general regulations against employing [Chinese]; others object to them on the ground that the other men employed by the firms do not care to woric with them. Just recently a Chinese graduate ofStanford University who was brought up on the Stanford campus with the children of professors, who speaks English perfectiy and who is thoroughly Americanized, was refused consideration by a prominent California corporation because they do not employ Orientals in their offices.69

Mickey Fong was rejected from Stanford's nursing school around this time because it did not accept Asians. She eventually enrolled at the San Francisco Hospital School of Nursing,, but there she was discouraged from taking the public health nurses exam because, as she was told, she would not be able to work with white patients.70 When she later attempted to take the civil service exam to become a nurse supervisor, she was similarly discouraged from taking it. As she recalled, “They didn't seem very friendly or encouraging. One of them said, 'How do you think that you could supervise American nurses!”"】

As noted above, Asian Americans, encounters with racial discrimination and limited job prospects caused disillusionment and frustration. As a second-generation Chinese American; woman lamented in the Chinese Times, sometime in the 1920s:

So far as the occupational opportunities are concerned, the American-born Chinese is a most unfortunate group of human beings ... The Americans will not accept us as citizens ... We cannot get occupational status in the American community, not

back to the Chinese community there are not many places which can employ us ... There is a barrier between us and the old Chinese who are hosts of the Chinese community We cannot get occupational status there either. The Americans discriminate against us, and we cannot get along in the Chinese community very well; what opportunities do we have in the country?72

Japanese Americans expressed similar disappointments. A Los Angeles Nisei said, “] am a fruit stand worker... It is not a very attractive or distinguished occupation... I would much .rather it were a doctor or lawyer but my aspiration of developing into such [was] frustrated long ago ... I am only what I am, a professional carrot washer/'73 The newspaper Sei Fujii warned readers of college-educated Nisei working as janitors and gardeners and concluded that higher education for Nisei was pointless. As Nisei Joseph Shinoda affirmed, "They go to college, learn a heterogeneous body of facts relating to anything from art to architecture and end their days in a fruit stand?574

Many second generation Asian Americans, thus, entered adulthood full of pessimism -about their occupational prospects and if they would ever belong in America. Bitter from being barred from social activities and estabEshments due to his race, L. Tbyama, a Nisei from Southern California, held very critical views of white Americans. They ffare the narrowest-minded people in the world," he said. "They think only about and for themselves and exclude all others/'75 Others, while less angry; were confused and bewildered about how to reconcile their Asian and American identities. When asked if growing up in the United States made him wish he were white, Chinese American Edward L.C. replied, "[It] is a very :hard question to answer yet my conscience seems to say to me——why is it necessary to say ■ anythingyou have nothing to regret being a Chinese and member of the Mandarin race. My conscience says so but my heart seems to say—I am American. If you were me, what would you say?'%

L The question of where the second generation belonged was a common preoccupation.

188 Modernity and the Second Generation ivioaernny ana me oecunu kjcneiatiwii

• People grappled with it in essay and oratorical contests sponsored by community organizations as well as speeches and newspaper editorials. Nisei women mulled over how diey were supposed to negotiate conflicting standards for women s behavior in which American culture expected them to be spirited and boisterous while Japanese norms dictated tiiey be modest and demure.77 In New York in 1936, the Chinese American group the , Ging Hawk Club of New York sponsored an essay contest on the question, “Does my future lie in China or America?" It drew a variety of responses that illustrated the collective ambivalence of young Chinese Americans, as many wholeheartedly cast their lot in the United States, while others, disillusioned with American racism and felt obligations to help China, saw their futures in the ancestral homeland. Winner Robert Dunn, a student at Harvard University embodied both perspectives, expressing great pride in his Chinese ancestry and attachment to China while also having a strong loyalty to America.78

of Chinese ancestry In San Francisco in 1895, they formed the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, and shortly thereafter, Portland Chinese Americans established the American-Born

nizations emphasized U.S. loyalty; acculturation, and good citizenship and, until the 1920s,

Forging their Own Path

The elusiveness of mainstream belonging and the belief among many second generation and other young Asian Americans that their concerns and identities were distinct led them to forge their own social and organizational path, by both turning to one another and building bridges with others. In the process, they created vibrant subcultures that gave them alternatives to immigrant-led or all-white organizations, and that allowed them to nurture identities and skills that reflected their distinct positions. In describing Nisei in California,' David Ybo says their subculture was a "vital, alternative space between immigrant and native contexts."79

As early as the 1890s, as a small cohort of second generation Chinese Americans came of age and realized that they had unique concerns that immigrant associations did not always ... address, they formed organizations that catered to their particular interests as U.S. citizens <.

Chinese Association (ABC). Usually led by the children of elite immigrants, these orgawere very small or short-lived due to the limited size of the second-generation cohort. For example, the ABC in Portland, which engaged in activities such as patriotic demonstrations for its Chinese American members, was active for just twelve years.80

In the 1920s and 1930s, as the number of adult second-generation Asian Americans grew, their organizational activities proliferated. On college campuses, where student associations: often excluded them, they formed their own groups. After Chinese students at Stanford University were expelled from their dormitory by whites, they formed the Chinese Club House, which became one of few places on campus where they could live.81 Elsewhere, other Chinese student groups included the Chinese Students' Alliance and Sigma Omicron Pi Chinese Society the latter of which was founded in 1930 by Chinese women at San Francisco State Teachers' College. As Shirley Jennifer Lim has described, Asian American fraternities, sororities, and alumni organizations formed in the 1920s and 1930s helped foster a sense of belonging in otherwise alienating environments and gave members the opportunity to ； exercise their "cultural citizenship.4,82 In 1928, Japanese Americans at UCLA founded the Chi Alpha Delta sorority serving as a haven against racism, a place to help students apply for - scholarships, and a source of housing and social prestige.83

These organizations also developed and reflected Asian Americans，dual identities and their ties to Asia and America. The Chinese Students Association, for instance, which had about three thousand members, held a strong anti-imperialist stance and took a strong interest in Chinese politics.84 The Square and Circle Club of San Francisco, formed in 1924 as a service organization for second-generation Chinese American women, similarly intertwined China afeirs with ethnic poEtics and gave the U.S.-born a place to express their bicultural identity Reaching a membership of about eighty it appealed mainly to middle-class, educated, and professional women. As member Alice Fong explained the group's origins, "Usually the Chinese Chamber of Commerce or the Six Companies are in charge of these charitable and public aflfeirs... But we wanted to help too. American girls can do these things. Why shouldn't we?” 85 The organization emerged from meetings of the seven founding members at the Chinese Congregational Church, with a key impetus being their concern for flooding and

. M5—…

I 钿nine victims in Guangdong. It was named for the shape of Chinese coins and the Chinese motto, “In needs be square, in knowledge be all-around/' The group's fundraising drives, which incorporated jazz dances, variety shows, chest raffles, and fashion shows, bridged Chinese American and Chinese concerns, supporting Sun Yat-sen, war and famine victims after the 1911 Revolution, and Chinese orphanages, as well as Chinese American hospitals and youth programs in San Francisco.86 Members saw their U.S. patriotism and Chinese nationalism as compatible, and during World W^r II, they volunteered for the Red Cross and raised money for the war e&)rt through the YWCA.87 Despite this work, the club was denied admission to the local Federation of Womens Clubs in 1937.

Much of the early institution building among Asian Americans also promoted their autonomy as a generational cohort and aimed to combat racism. In 1922, at a time when ,the number of adult Nisei was still relatively small, a handful formed the Seattle Progressive '.Citizens League, and the following year, Nisei in California established the American Loyalty ;League. From there, Nisei organizing proliferated. The Young Buddhist Association (YBA) and Young People's Christian Conference (YPCC) gave Nisei the space to take charge of their religious lives on their terms.88 Additionally in EngEsh language newspapers or sections in I immigrant newspapers, Nisei writers expressed themselves on a range of issues. In terms of .political organizations, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), formed in 1930, was the most prominent, drawing the support ofjapanese Americans along the West Coast and growing to thirty-eight chapters in six years.89 Patrick Okura, a Los Angeles Nisei, found a sense of purpose working in theJACL. He described once being an angry young man due -to his inability to find employment commensurate with his master's degree in psychology As a member of the JACL, to which he was appointed executive director in 1936, Okura . worked to improve conditions in Little Tokyo and strengthened relationships with local politicians and nonJapanese businessmen. This experience helped him to become one of the first Japanese American civil servants in Los Angeles.90

Beyond having their own space free of the interference of the first generation, second- generation political organizations sought to initiate change, promote full citizenship, and assume leadership in the ethnic community Although the Square and Circle Club was mainly a service organization, it occasionally branched into politics by registering voters, protesting racist legislation, and supporting the war against Japan in China. Additionally the Chinese , pigest, founded in 1935 by Thomas Chinn and Chingwah Lee, positioned itself as a voice of :the second generation.91 In print for five years, it encouraged Chinese Americans to improve their communities and be politically engaged, and also promoted tourism as the economic base of Chinatown. It featured columns by and for second-generation women, such as articles by Clara Chan about fashion and sociological pieces by Ethel Lum. Through their annual .Nisei Week festival in Los Angeles, which began in 1934, Japanese Americans demonstrated their civic virtue and political allegiance as Americans. As John Maeno, a USC-educated lawyer and president of theJACL, explained, "Through the medium of this festival... the JACL hopes to present, acquaint, and contact you directly with the youngjapanese American dtizen, his life and environment.''? Such activities also aimed to strengthen the electoral power of the Nisei, and by the 1930s, in major West Coast cities, white office seekers started to court their vote by showing up to events such as Nisei Week.

190 Modernity and the Second Generation

Through their organizational activities, young Asian Americans sought to turn their inbetween status into a resource and then use it to improve their lives and communities. For

all the anguish that members of the second generation expressed about their liminality they also recognized their unique advantages. In many households, for example, immigrant parents depended on their U.S.-born children, who had stronger facility with the English language and American culture, to handle day-to-day transactions. As this generation grew older and more conscious of itself as a group, it sought to formalize this power through organizations like the Chinese American Citizens* Alliance (CACA) and theJACL. The CACA fought negative perceptions of Chinese in America and the JACL promoted the notion, originally touted by Issei educators like Abiko Kyutaro, that Nisei should be " bridges of understanding" by using their bicultural abilities to overcome misunderstanding and foster friendship in both domestic race relations and international affairs.

Other second generation Asian. Americans saw their futures in Asia. Chinese American Rose Hum Lee found a niche and sense of purpose in China. Having grown up in Butte, Montana, she had never before been surrounded by other Chinese people. She, furthermore, believed that the second generation had a mission there:

The men could eflect more rapid social and occupational mobility in China as teachers, professors, foreign firm representatives, minor consular officials, junior executives of foreign branch offices, engineers, doctors, dentists, salesmen, business men, manufacturers, chemists, physicists, etc. The girls could find work in foreign and Chinese firms, government offices, educational institutions, and churches. They lived in better residential areas, often peopled entirely by American-born Chinese and sojourners, and could maintain a lifestyle and a standard of living far above that of the local population.93

Lee would have stayed in China had World War II not broken out, but upon her return to America, she went on to become the first Chinese American to earn a Ph.D. in sociology (University of Chicago) and lead a sociology department (Roosevelt University). Florence Chinn Kwan moved to China after marrying a medical student from there, eventually finding work as an English teacher and board member of the YWCA.94 After studying journalism at the University of Chicago and marrying a Chinese graduate student, Flora Belle Jan also went to China with her husband and worked as a journalist for English language pubkcations. Her experience differed greatly from Lee's and others who found a renewed sense of purpose while living abroad. Jan s adjustment was difficult and being in China made her more conscious of and attached to her American identity She insisted on dressing her children in Western styles and made them speak English at home, and eventually returned to the United States in 1949.95

In carving out a distinct identity and mission, second-generation Asian Americans did not always critically rethink ideas about citizenship and inequality and sometimes reproduced the classism and sexism of the larger society Although the JACL purported to speak for all Nisei, it represented a distinctly male, Christian, and professional point of view Its leadership was drawn from the older wing of the Nisei cohort (born in the early 1910s) and the very elite echelon ofjapanese America, with many lawyers, doctors, dentists, and entrepreneurs serving as officers.96 JACL and other Nisei leaders often criticized fellow members of their cohort who did not live up to their ideals of proper decorum. For example, they dismissed Nisei gang members, or "rowdies," as the dirty laundry of the Los Angeles community97

Masao Satow who worked with the YMCA, lamented that his generation was "shallow" and lacked "culture" and refinement/' saying, rfWe are so one-sided... we naively wonder why Americans wont accept us as equals!"98 Joseph Shinoda, on the other hand, targeted his criticism at female Nisei. In particular, he said that women students at Berkeley were “deficient," as demonstrated by their poor academic performance. He pressed that Nisei women in college made a mockery of higher education, that they viewed college only as a marriage market, and blamed their parents for sending them."

Orientalism and Modernity in the 1920s and 1930s

As discussed earlier, many Asian immigrants believed that anti-Asian prejudice would subside with the rise of the second generation. Discrimination, they thought, stemmed from cultural intolerance and a fear of foreigners, and the younger generation's nativity and Americanization would undercut xenophobes，arguments about Asians* inability to assimilate and, thus, lead to mainstream incorporation, lb many white American observers, second-generation Asian Americans were fascinating, as they illustrated the consequences of migration, human adaptability; and other modern phenomena, and their presence compelled them to rethink the roots of racial difference. The heightened attention that this generational cohort, as well as 'Americanized Asians," received in the 1920s and 1930s signaled a distinct phase in Asian racial formation in the United States in which people revised earlier assumptions about Asians. To be sure, their conclusions were still orientalist, but they were adapted to modern conditions and concerns.

Earlier complaints about and efforts to reach out to Asian American children were functions ofbroader national anxieties as well as anti-Asian prejudice. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wave of reformers invoked the need to provide children with structure, protection, and discipline in the face of a rapidly changing society Against this backdrop, in certain locations, Asians―parents and children―were singled out as a peculiar menace. Writers not only depicted Chinese mothers as callous and neglectful, but they also ridiculed and demonized their children. In 1896, for example, a reporter for the Wave wrote, "There is very litde in a Chinese child's lifb that a 'Christian kid" need envy unless it's having a queue to jump rope with."】。。Such descriptions added to the construction of Chinatowns as fascinating tourist destinations, but in casting the youngest residents as well as women as the most pathetic residents, they also prompted efforts by reformers to "rescue" and Americanize them,101 As early as the 1870s, Christian missionaries went to urban Chinatowns to conduct home visits to teach mothers about things like proper hygiene, and they later opened mission homes and schools for children.102 In California, the states role in Americanizing immigrant children through Progressive curricula was boosted in 1913 with the formation of the California State Commission of Immigration and Housing.

180 Modernity and the Second Generation Modernity and the Second Generation #

By the 1920s, the pEght of second generation Asian Americans had drawn the interest of researchers affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago and one of its eminent professors Robert Ezra Park. In studying the experiences ofU.S.-born Asians, they sought to answer larger questions about assimilation and race relations in modern America. Asians in America stood out because their experience seemed to deviate from that of European immigrants, in which mainstream incorporation was usually achieved within

# Modernity and the Second Generation Modernity and the Second Generation 177

on it, giving the general impression that it is a round of trap doors, secret passages, opium dens, and the like/'110

a generation. They identified this issue as the "Oriental Problem" and set out to understand why integration for Asians proceeded in a halting manner.103 Joining the sociologists were Protestant social reformers also interested in Asians in America, and they combined their efforts in the Survey cfRace Relations, a research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation based on the West Coast devoted to understanding the adjustment and assimilation problems of "Orientals“ in America. The researchers produced and disseminated new information about Asians in America, but because they largely took for granted prevailing assumptions about East-West difference, their work tended to fetishize their subjects and perpetuate the view that American and Asian cultures were incompatible. Acculturated Asian Americans were often portrayed as people stuck between two worlds, a 'lost generation" that belonged to neither the immigrant community nor mainstream society;104 Some concluded that this marginality doomed Asian Americans to a state of perpetual maladjustment, while others, like Robert Park, beEeved it freed them from stifling customs to be able to move among different cultures with relative ease.105

One of the unique aspects of this early twentieth century strain of orientalism was the involvement of dozens of Asian people, not just as objects and informants on the "Oriental Problem," but also as researchers. These included Kazuo Kawai, Flora Belle Jan, Caroline Chew, S. Frank Miyamoto, and Ching Chao Wu. Recruited through missionary networks and university classes, they were initially seen as "interpreters'3 by white American sociologists—Emory Bogardus, William Carlson Smith, and Roderick McKenzie and others~who hoped their language and cultural knowledge as well as insider positions could be tapped to gain access to Asian communities. The researchers especially valued those who were highly Americanized yet versed in ethnic customs, as they could most effectively "translate" the ways of Asians to an American audience. Flora Belle Jan, described by Robert Park as "the most emancipated girl I have ever met," was regarded as an ideal informant due to her "Clever, sophisticated, Americanized" character.106 Asian and Asian American sociology students at the University of Chicago and elsewhere proved particularly useful, with both their disciplinary training and ethnic capital. Sociologist Ernest Burgess summarized about Chinese students, rAs one of the cultural groups most deviant from the typical native American culture it provided sharp contrasts which clarified theoretical issues which otherwise might be vague. Also, the attendance of Chinese graduate students provided an opportunity for insightful research?'107

For the Asian American informants and researchers, participating in the study of the "Oriental Problem" allowed them to use their marginal status for personal and group advancement. Rose Hum Lee and S. Frank Miyamoto went on to become accomplished sociologists in their own right. For Miyamoto, a Nisei from Seattle, pursuing graduate studies in sociology was part of a deeply personal path. He grew up away from the Japanese American community because his father had moved the family out of Nihonmachi, and, thus, felt very self-conscious as a racial and ethnic minority "I felt a step removed from both and no strong subjective attachment to either/' he wrote, “in this way I was developing the attitude of detachment fundamental to the sociologist—I was becoming, in a sense, a 'marginal man.,，U08 As a sociologist, he could explore how to overcome race prejudice and better understand the tightly knit ethnic community to which he felt like an outsider. Similarly Kazuo Kawai hoped that sharing his life story would enable him to make productive contributions to American race relations. "If I can learn Oriental history and become able to teach Oriental history to Americans," he said, "I would be rendering a service as an interpreter of the East to the West."109 Others developed more critical attitudes about

American society and its treatment of Asians. Caroline Chew daughter of Ng Poon Chew, Used her platform to criticize writers and film producers who "have thrown a bizarre light

Ironically white researchers desired the participation of people like Miyamoto for researching the '"Oriental Problem" because they believed these Asian Americans had unique

most of the Chinese and Japanese American student researchers were U.S.-born and grew up away from the "ethnic ghettos'，they wrote about. Others were recently arrived Asian nationals who spoke little English and were also disconnected from ethnic communities, having come to the United States on scholarships and through missionary networks.111 Ching Chao Wu, for instance, regarded himself as more Chinese than Chinese American, and did

not identify with the immigrant community he studied, even though he thought his ancestry made him an apt informant. He did not conduct personal interviews, rather using already- compiled life histories in the Survey cfRace Relations. As such cases show; the Asian American researchers were often no better informants and translators of the <rOrientalM in America

accorded them credibility which may have helped them in their careers, but also boxed them in.

Frank Miyamoto had originally aspired to be a writer, but was discouraged at the lack of opportunities for Asian novelists in America. Indeed, Asian American participation and visibility in the American arts scene during the 1920s and 1930s was nascent, but nonetheless significant and bears comment. Asian America during the early twentieth century produced numerous creative minds that were influenced by the racialized boundaries of American society as well as the larger cultural dynamism that characterized this period. Notable figures included the Nisei artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi, Korean American novelist Ybunghill Kang, and Indian writer Dhan Gopal Muketji. Although their work was frequently informed by their lives as Asians or immigrants—and this was often key to their appeal— these artists, especially after they attained a measure of success, led unconventional, cosmopolitan lives and usually had little connection to co-ethnics. Mukeiji, for instance, lived among New York's literary elite and both he and Kang were married to white women. Noguchi was primarily raised by his white mother and spent his life in locations all over the world, never explicitly identifying as a Nisei artist until World War II. Noguchi's father, Ybne, was an established writer who had mixed with the bohemians of San Francisco and carried on a passionate correspondence with Charles Stoddard.112 As Asians, these artists sometimes struggled for the kind of recognition they wanted and to be seen as something other than mysterious "Orientals" or cultural translators. Isamu Noguchi, for instance, was once dismissed in 1935 by a critic as "wily " The same critic impugned his talents by saying, "once an Oriental, always an Oriental/'113

The scholarly research on Asians described above was part of a larger grappling with modernity, of which mass consumerism and leisure culture were also parts. A rich subculture embracing modernity, American identity and popular culture built on motion pictures, consumerism, and advertising flourished among second-generation and other young Asian Americans during the 1920s and 1930s. America in the 1920s was undergoing revolutionary social and cultural change, which included postwar prosperity rebellion, and consumerism. Additionally this was the era of the "new woman," who was individualistic, independent, and sought self-fulfillment. While race and class and other structural constraints limited who could participate in the new culture of modernity young Asian Americans drew from the landscape to carve out distinct identities and exercise their cultural citizenship.114

Many young Asian Americans embraced the "new woman." Among Chinese Americans, it was not just a construct of American culture, but also of the Chinese Revolution. Ideals of women's emancipation were embedded in the Chinese nationalist movement, which encouraged parents to educate daughters and allow them to work outside the home. Janie Chu said that the Chinese American woman:

gets her knowledge of social America from the 'movies/ from the street, from what she hears from the girls at service in homes. She wants to be American and she has always a struggle in her mind as to what is right and what is not right in respect to Occidental thinking. She teems with the life that urges on this new generation of Americans. She wants excitement and thrills. She wants to live.115

Chinese American actress Anna May Wong gained notice as a flapper who reveled in rebellion, flirtatiousness, and sexual frankness. While she embodied the sultry and provocative side of the "New Woman," as an actress she also exemplified female accomplishment and independence. Flora Belle Jan also typified the new Chinese American woman. Born in Fresno, California in 1906, and the third child in a family of seven, she was a regdar contributor to publications such as the Fresno Bee, San Francisco Examiner, and Chinese Students} Monthly, in which she shared her ideas on being a young Chinese in America. In 1925 she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she attended college and held a number of jobs, including a check girl at the Mandarin Cafe.116

Young Asian American women who embraced modern culture and flouted social convention often did so at the risk of alienating their families and communities. Because Flora Belle Jan advocated young women's freedom and often wrote critically about generational relations, she irked elders in the Chinese American community Additionally Asian American women professionals like physicians Margaret Chung, Bessie Jeong, and Rose Goong were trailblazers, but were also subjected to discouraging treatment because they were seen as such oddities.117 Bessie Jeong, the first Chinese American woman to graduate from Stanford University in 1927 before going on to earn a medical degree from the Womens Medical College of Pennsylvania, often withheld her first name in her professional listings in order to attract more patients.118 And Margaret Chung moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles to escape the discrimination she had experienced as a single woman.119

The rise of Asian American beauty contests captured some of the contradictions of women s status in the 1920s and 1930s, which were mirrored in the larger society On the one hand, the pageants were vehicles of modernity and a break from Asian traditions. The first San Francisco Chinatown beauty contest was held in 1915 and organized by the Chinese Six Companies. The winner was crowned at a lavish ball held at the Fairmont Hotel and presided over Chinatown celebrations during the Panama Pacific Exposition. At the coronation, which featured lion dancing and Western music, the queen and her court dressed in Chinese clothing while guests wore Western clothing.120 Los Angeles Japanese Americans crowned a Nisei Week Queen during their annual festival. Their contest, like the one in the San Francisco Chinatown, was aimed at fundraising, but also reflected the bicultural identity of Nisei. It offered a chance for young Japanese American women to perform their cultural citizenship in ways that affirmed their American identities and Japanese ethnic solidarity. In 1938, theJACL president said that the ideal candidate for Nisei Week Queen blended "the quiet charm of the Japanese wom[a]n with the more lively personality of the American girl/'121 The pageants, in both Chinese and Japanese communities, also were clearly predicated on a commodified and orientalized image of Asian women. For instance, during Nisei Week, in trying to attract tourists, Little Tokyo merchants hired hostesses to wear kimonos and hand out guidebooks with orientalized script.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Asian American businesses increasingly engaged the consumer culture and economy via tourism and spectacles like beauty pageants. In San Francisco, a "New Chinatown" emerged from the rubble of the 1906 earthquake after a merchant named Look Tin Eli rebuilt his store to reflect the Orientalized tastes of tourists and other entrepreneurs followed his lead. The most popular Chinese American establishment in San Francisco, patronized by white Americans and middle class Chinese Americans, was Forbidden City a cocktail bar on the outskirts of Chinatown that had its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Owner Charlie Low wanted the business to be an Orient- themed club that appealed to modern patrons, and central to his strategy was gender and the sexual objectification of women. Forbidden City Low said, would present the Chinese American woman as modern, because fCWe can't be backwards all the time; we ve got to show the world that we're on an equal basis. Why Chinese have limbs just as pretty as anyone else!"& m cabaret style routines, Chinese Americans performed tap, ballroom, and other kinds of dances. The dub drew 100,000 customers per year, including Hollywood actors and politicians.123

# Modernity and the Second Generation Modernity and the Second Generation 177

A range of occupations opened up for Asians in entertainment as Americans became interested in them as performers. Although community elders looked down on Forbidden City and similar establishments such as Chinese Village and Twin Dragon, also in San Francisco, and the young women employees were represented as exotic showpieces, these businesses provided them with well-paid employment unavailable elsewhere. As Bertha Hing, who worked at Forbidden City explained, "Chinatown mothers wouldn't let their daughters do anything like that. But what they didn't realize was that we all just loved to dance. And we didn't particularly care for drinking or smoking or anything like that. It was just another way of earning a living/'124 Chung and Rosie Moy were a husband and wife

team (Rose and Joe Moy) who performed at Ziegfield Follies and other venues across the country with Jack Benny Will Rogers, and the Marx Brothers.125 At their height, they earned $200 to $300 per week.

For young Asian Americans, especially in urban areas, following popular trends and fashion allowed them to express their identities and exercise citizenship in a society that denied their full belonging. Women mimicked what they read about fashion and dating-in magazines to embody middle class modern femininity and break from their parents' generation, and youths, most notably Filipinos and Nisei, took part in the automobile culture also to participate in the modern. As discussed in previous chapters, Filipino men were visible in the taxi dance hall scene, where they were noted for their flashy clothing and charm with women. Dance halls, gambling halls, boxing matches, and other recreation venues were part of a subculture in which Filipino Americans drew on popular culture to form identities and communities. "[These] leisure centers/, explains Linda Espana-Maram, "provided opportunities for poor immigrant men and working women to create identities that allowed them to be something other than what their ethnicity class, or national origin dictated."126

180 Modernity and the Second Generation Modernity and the Second Generation #

While engaging popular culture allowed Asian Americans to prove their modernity and claim cultural citizenship, in light of the anti-Asian sentiment and scientific racism of the era, it was also a way to disprove stereotypes. In this regard, Asian Americans who achieved visibility in the popular media were significant, but they also faced tensions between how they wished to be portrayed and public expectations. The career of actress Anna May Wong illustrates this bind. Wong was born in Los Angeles Chinatown in 1905 to U.S.-born parents and got her start in 1919 as an extra in The Red Lantern. On the one hand, she symbolized modern Asian femininity in America, a woman both proud of her heritage and loyal to America. She starred in several Chinese American themed films such as King of Chinatown (1939) in which she played surgeon Dr. Mary Ling, a character based on the Chinese American physician Margaret Chung.127 She enjoyed the heyday of her career in the 1920s and 1930s, and in 1938 People magazine called her "The World's Most Beautiful Chinese Girl/'128 Wong was typecast for much of her career, however; her most famous roles were as a Mongol slave in Thief of Baghdad (1924) and the character Lotus Flower who commits suicide in Toll ofthe Sea (1922). The themes of the films she appeared in were often predicated on East-West difierence and her characters were non-modern, colonized, and/or sinister.

After making The Daugkter of the Dragon (1931), her last role as a villain, critics praised Wong's performance, but she nonetheless criticized the film and continued to speak out against what she deemed inappropriate representations of Chinese people.129

Figure 7.2 Filipino American boxers in Los Angeles. The photo shows (left to right) Felix Santiago, 1931 Pacific Coast bantamweight and flyweight champion Speedy Dado, manager Jess Cortez, and future American middleweight champion, Ceferino Garcia, (Reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame.)

Anna May Wong and other modern performers were transcendent yet limited. Another famous actor from the early 1900s was Sessue Hayakawa, a Japan-born performer whose masculine image led to frequent comparisons to Rudolph Wlentino. Although such individuals broke boundaries, they could not cross borders at will. To travel, Wong had to file papers upon leaving the United States as proof of her citizenship so she could reenter. Moreover, their popularity owed greatly to the public's appetite for the exotic. "Modernity factored into orientalism," says Shirley Jennifer Lim, “and was heightened by the need to manage the yellow peril" and Asian menace/ which manifested itself in movies of the 1920s such as Old San Francisco and the Fu Manchu films?'130

The Great Depression and Eve of War

With the close of the 1920s, like other economically marginalized populations already at or near the bottom, Asian Americans had little ground to lose during the Great Depression, and in many ways were better equipped to weather the economic downturn than the general population. Women who worked outside the home, for instance, continued to find jobs in female-dominated areas of employment such as sewing, domestic service, sales, and clerical work. Also, because the communities in urban Chinatowns and Litde Tokyos had developed segregated ethnic economies and relied on internal resources and networks, they were insulated from the larger economy's downward spiral. Additionally those who did lose their jobs had assistance they could readily turn to. The CCBA was a crucial source of assistance for Chinese Americans. In San Francisco it expanded its services with free medical care at the Chinese Hospital as well as a shelter.131

On the mainland, Filipinos were active in labor organizing一mostly in the agricultural and salmon canning sectors—in part because their later entry into the workforce compared

to other Asians denied them the same paths to mobility132 They also lacked the support of co-ethnic contractors that helped, protected, and negotiated on behalf of Japanese and Chinese. The Filipino Labor Union (FLU), established in 1933 during a strike of seven hundred lettuce pickers in Salinas Wiley, is known as the first successful Filipino labor organization. The FLU's membership grew to two thousand by 1934 and that year its members joined the Vegetable Packers Association, an AFL aflfiliate, during a strike in Monterey133 Also in 1933, Northwest Filipino salmon cannery workers entered the AFL as the Cannery Workers and Farm Laborers Union (CWFLU), Local 18257, which challenged the power of contractors, called for shorter hours, and emphasized the need for Filipinos to attain more skills that would lead to greater mobility It.also enacted social welfare programs and engaged the wider Filipino community paying a Filipino-owned cafe in Seattle to serve meals to indigent members and providing financial support for Filipino American newspapers. In Washington during the 1930s, the CWFLU was also a political voice fbr Filipino Americans, appearing at NRA code hearings, protesting the state's alien land law and fighting the passage of miscegenation bills. Envisioning a multiethnic class-based coalition, CWFLU members also reached out with some success to Chinese and Japanese, and in 1938 it joined the CIO due to its more inclusive vision compared to the AFL.134

The activities of Filipinos and other Asian Americans in interethnic organizing highlight a little-known history of Asian American labor radicalism. Filipinos were instrumental in the formation of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) in 1930, which brought together white leftists and immigrant workers and urged for working class unity against contractors and ethnic middlemen. In 1935, the exploitative practices of San Francisco-based contractors led to the formation of the Alaska Cannery Workers Union (ACWU), an AFL local. Although it did not appeal broadly to Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, it did draw leftists from these communities, such as Karl Ybneda and Willie Fong. The ACWU, moreover, achieved notable success, gaining the recognition of canners in San Francisco and negotiating a wage scale that was higher than the industry minimum of $50 per month established by the National Recovery Act. Its membership peaked in the late 1930s and early 1940s at about four hundred, and in 1937 it became a CIO affiliate. 135

Although union activity could be an effective and empowering vehicle for laborers to change their work cultures and develop a class-based solidarity it was also accompanied by setbacks and frustration. For instance, despite its efforts to combat the ethnic-based contracting system in salmon canning, the CWFLU was never quite able to break the power of Chinese and Japanese contractors, nor did it gain the recognition of companies. At times class solidarity conflicted with interethnic cooperation. In 1930 in Seattle, the Filipino Laborers' Association was formed for agricultural workers in the Northwest but represented the interests of Filipinos against Japanese growers. Moreover, efforts to build interethnic class solidarity were disrupted by groups that favored nationalistic strategies. For instance, second- generation leader and Seattle resident Clarence Arai urged Nisei to support all Japanese organizations instead of unions such as the CWFLU, which tried to counter this by recruiting more progressive Nisei such as George Taki and Dyke Miyagawa. Some organizations were also beset by ideological disagreements among members, such as when Filipino leftists in the CWFLU broke away and created a rival organization called the Fishermen and Cannery Workers' Industrial Union (FCWIU).136

While utilizing services offered by ethnic associations bound Chinese Americans more tightly to the institutions, the Depression also offered opportunities to break away from ethnic networks and look to other avenues for relief and empowerment, such as the labor movement and the government. Workers in Chinese-owned garment fectories, where some employers exploited the predominantly female and immigrant labor force, mobilized for better conditions. At Joe Shoong's factories, worker abuse prompted the organization of strikes under the leadership of Chinese Ladies Garment Workers, an affiliate of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union formed in 1937. In 1931, Chinese Marxists in San Francisco formed the Huaren Shiyi Hui (Chinese Unemployed Alliance) to organize the working class and unemployed, and later joined the Communist Party-organized Unemployed Council of the U.S.A., which called for racial and class unity on unemployment and government relief The 1930s also marked a new era in labor relations. The Wagner Act of 1935 gave organized labor die right to collective bargaining, which strengthened the position of all workers across a number of industries. During this period, the CIO and the .Communist Party were instrumental in bringing minorities and women into the fold.

Chinese and blacks had been historically excluded from the labor movement, but they joined picket lines in the San Francisco strikes of 1934 and were welcomed into the International Longshoremen and X^rehousemens Union, Culinary and Miscellaneous Workers' Union, and Apartment and Hotel Union.137

For many Asians in America, obtaining government relief through New Deal programs like the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a major step. It reflected both the desperateness of the economic downturn and the New Deal's unprecedented openness to previously marginalized communities. By 1935, about 18 percent of the Chinese population in San Francisco—about 2,300 people—were on government assistance. The opportunities the programs offered, however, were limited; most racial minorities who obtained WPA jobs were placed in semiskilled and unskilled occupations, with a small number getting white-collar jobs such as social workers, recreation aides, teachers, and clerks.138 The federal programs, moreover, made starker the divide between first and second generations, as U.S. citizenship was usually a requirement.

Asian Americans also responded to the challenges of the Depression by finding new ways to boost their communities. San Francisco's Chinatown recovered before the rest of the country due to the organizing ofbusinessmen, recovery of the Chinese import trade, as well as heightened promotion of tourism, leading the Chinese Digest to declare in 1936 that the community had "passed its winter." By 1938, Chinatown tourism was bringing in $5 million per year. I% The Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939, furthermore, drew tourists and created new jobs, both at the fair and in Chinatown. The Nisei Week festival in Los Angeles, which started in 1934, likewise emerged from the hope that boosting Litde Ibkyo s appeal to outsiders would help the community weather hard times. The economic downturn, as well as the numerical rise of the Nisei, made immigrants realize that they needed to look to clientele they had traditionally ignored, namely whites and young Japanese Americans.140 It was immediately successful and spurred business and improved public relations.

# Modernity and the Second Generation Modernity and the Second Generation 177

Others left for Asia during the Depression, voluntarily and under pressure. Between 1930 and 1934, about 7,000 Chinese returned to China via San Francisco, while 2,300 entered.141

Filipinos, along with Mexicans, faced pressure from the federal government to go back to their homelands. In 1935, the Repatriation Act offered Filipinos free transportation to the Philippines on condition that they not return. Some 2,190, or about 7 percent of the Filipino population, took up the ofier.142

Until the 1930s, Asian Americans found ways to reconcile being Asian and American, creating fluid identities and multiple allegiances that complemented one another. Portland Chinese Americans Back and Hing, discussed earlier, grew up identifying as Americans while still proud, of being Chinese. Just after the Spanish-American War, they formed patriotic organizations for other Chinese American youths, including a pro-U.S. paramilitary organization called the Chinese Brigade.143 Likewise, Nisei across the country embraced a bicultural outlook in which they maintained identities as Japanese and Americans and regarded themselves as '"bridges of understanding." All of this would change abruptly and dramatically with the outbreak of World War II.

50 There were other Chinese schools prior to 1885. In 1859 the first Chinese Public School opened in San Francisco and the following year the legislature passed a law prohibiting blacks, Indians, and Mongolians from attending school with whites. This law was gradually liberalized in 1860s and children could attend school with whites if the district couldn't provide for their education in any other way. In 1870 a new segregation law provided for the creation of separate schools

190 Modernity and the Second Generation

From June to August 1943, the daily newspaper version of the popular Superman comic strij featured a storyline centering on Supermans heroics against an evil foe referred to as "Th( Leer, dreaded Jap saboteur/' It began with the hero's visit to a Japanese internment cam] where he subdued a group of disloyal internees ("enraged enemy Japs") who tried to escape with smuggled firearms. Afterward, as Clark Kent, he and Lois Lane wrote a series of article} for the Daily Planet calling on Americans to strengthen their resolve against Japanese. The articles drew the attention of "Chinese citizens of this city" and "Lum Wong, the mayor oi Chinatown," who invited Clark and Lois to ride in a float in a bond-selling parade through Chinatown. Sinister henchmen of Japanese ancestry (and ambiguous nationality) tried tc sabotage the parade by bombing Chinatown. Not only did Superman foil the 'Japs" once again, but he also went on to deliver needed war supplies to the Allied Powers. The last frame showed the hero speaking to readers with a message wildly out of sync with the storyline, but consistent with recent rhetoric about Japanese in America: "It should be remembered that most Japanese-Americans are loyal citizens. Many are in combat units of our armed forces, and others are working in war factories. According to government statements, not one act of sabotage was perpetrated in Hawaii or territorial U.S. by a Japanese-American.w 1

This comic strip was indicative ofhow much the fortunes of Asian Americans were shaped by wartime politics and exigencies. Chinese and Japanese were not lumped together, but separated, the former depicted as friends and good Americans and the latter as treacherous and demonic, through "stereotypic Orientalia, dialogue, and slurs." Aside from the striking juxtaposing ofjapanese villains and Supermans declaration ofjapanese Americans' loyalty; an interesting back story that played out around the strips publication shed light on the fluid, but contentious, state of wartime racial politics. Upon learning about the internment-focused storyline, officials at the Office of War Information became alarmed. Although they condoned antiJapanese propaganda earlier in the war, they had come to believe that fanning the flames of racial hatred would undermine U.S. morale.

Terms like “crucible" and "watershed" are often used to describe America during World War II, and these aptly capture the Asian American experience. The Superman comic discussed above evoked changing ideas about and popular depictions of Asian Americans.