ASAM paper

Xinyu Shang

ASAM 100AA

Week 6 Reading Journal

The articles deeply analyzed the American perception on the Chinese immigrants

and the type of difficulties that the Chinese Americans residing in the United States faced

in the early and mid-20 century. This is exhibited from a number of articles which deeply

analyzed the experience of different Chinese prospective who resided in America either

for work or educational purposes. The articles use the experience of Sing Shen, an

immigrant who initially lived in California and Ho, a student from China who had

different cultural experiences in America.

Apart from the obvious reasons on the racial discrimination by Americans, the

Native Americans cited a number of reasons for their resentment towards the Chinese

immigrants. The relationship between the United States and the Chinese government is

also analyzed and how the two parties stood to gain from the relationship. However, the

articles indicates the continued growth in the number of the Asian communities in

America which eventually made the two cultures interrelate thus reducing the oppressive

laws as well as aggressiveness against people from China as compared to the Japanese

citizens by mainly analyzing the impact of the impacts of the Americans’ increasing

interest in Asia.

America is depicted as being hypocritical when it came to the support it claimed

to provide the Chinese whereby Sing Shen used the votes casted to determine the

eligibility of him, as a Chinese immigrant to buy property in San Francisco whereby they

terribly failed. Some of the reasons cited by the Americans include the possibility of the

prices of property failing as a result of the immigrants’ purchase of the property,

unassimilable nature of the Chinese and African American races, and inferiority to the

white race.

However, Chinese immigrants stood to benefit more that the American natives

since there were better schools in America which is evidenced by the immigration of

Chinese Students to study MIT for example Ho. However, as it became prevalent with

the course of the Asian- American inhabitants wars, the relationship between China and

America was mainly driven by the communism vs capitalist wars that were intense

between 1943 and 2000. The leniency that was observed in America regarding the

immigration rights and freedom of the Chinese showed that America wanted to leverage

on advantages that the immigrants had by being allowed to enter America so as to create

allies that had economic potential in Asia so as to gain some competitive advantage in a

region that had highly been influenced by the Soviets Communism rules.

Another aspect that showed that Americans were superior in the relationship with

the Chinese was the fact that they managed to effectively enforce their culture on the

Chinese people. This is exhibited in Ho’s narrative where he describes the fact that he

had to go through a number of culturally related behaviors of the Americans for example

how to deal with the American culture meaning that he has to learn a thing or two about

the American Culture such as the language which he was forced to learn to use since he

was going to be studying in America whereby English is the official language.

The main approach that was used was the control of the government through its

treasury in terms of the Chinas economy where the war predetermined the value of the

currency in that country. This was exhibited when the American soldiers started to

aggressively push for their removal from the country. The perceived insecurity eventually

led to the economic downfall of the country where prices for property which included

land and houses started to depreciate significantly. Ho’s brother clearly explains this

when asking for his money from his brother who was studying in the US.