Journals

Citizens of Asian America

CINDY I - FEN CHENG

Democracy and Race

during the Cold War

? !fJ- '33-tj-6--1 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

CHAPTER 3 Asian American Firsts and the Progress toward Racial Integration

Jennie Lee earned the distinction of being the first Chinese and one of the first women to be a certified army- navy welder at the Douglas Aircraft Company.' During World War II, Lee's accomplishment was featured in newspapers throughout the greater Los Angeles area, as it captured the values and aspirations that the nation sought to promote. As a female welder, Lee personified the popular war- time propaganda about Rosie the Riveter, who fulfilled her patriotic duty by daring to work in a trade that was previously restricted to men. As Lee was also noted for being a Chinese Rosie, her participation as a racial- ized minority further affirmed how the nation was in need of and truly welcomed all able-bodied workers to contribute to the war effort. Lee's distinction as the first Chinese Rosie illustrated how World War II had opened up the nation's workplaces to women and to people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Unlike the Aryan supremacist ways of Nazi Ger- many, which led to the mass extermination of Jews throughout Europe, Lee's certification as an army-navy welder showed the United States to be progressing toward the full realization of its democratic principles.

As the mainstream media celebrated Lee's accomplishment in relation to the nation's war effort, the recognition it gave Lee helped to generate an ideal image of racialized minorities, especially those who were to be inte- grated into dominant society. News accounts drew on Lee's personal in- terests (besides being the first Chinese Rosie, she was an avid fan of both

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Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Brooklyn Dodgers) in order to advance the needs of the state. The media coverage suggested that Lee's espousal of the Chinese Nationalist government, a political ally of the United States during World War II, and h er familiarity with U.S. popular culture showed her loyalty and belonging to the United States, proof of the nation's abil- ity to secure broad-based support for the war effort. Thus Lee, as the first Chinese Rosie, was established as a model for the terms that made racial

integration not just possible but also desirable. The postwar period saw a proliferation of celebrations of the first of a

particular racial or ethnic group to achieve a level of social and profes- sional distinction. The widespread attention that popular media paid to these pioneers marked the early Cold War years as a defining era that cul- tivated the culture of the first. Among the notable trailblazers was baseball legend Jackie Robinson; the signing of the Los Angeles-bred infielder to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 distinguished Robinson as the first black ath- lete to achieve major league baseball status in modern times. The list also included Judge Albert Armendariz Sr., founder of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, who in 1947 became the first in his im- mediate family to pursue graduate study and the only Mexican American to be enrolled in the University of Southern California Law School. Like stories on the first that appeared prior to the postwar period, mainstream news features of the early Cold War years drew on the achievements of racialized minorities to shed light on the values and aspirations of the nation. These stories not only emphasized the importance of cultural as- similation for bringing about racial integration, they also showed that portrayals of raciali zed minorities as both willing and able to prove their desirability to dominant society helped to make desegregation a necessary goal. The sheer number of stories that adopted this approach imbued a sense of normalcy and expectedness to these viewpoints.

In Robinson's case, his success as the first black player in modern ma- jor league baseball entailed that he refrain from public drinking, smoking, and partying. It also required that Robinson be the one to always turn the other cheek when players dug their spiked cleats into his leg and when players as well as fans shouted racial slurs at him. As the Tim e maga- zine cover story on Robinson contended, these constraints were crucial because they not only garnered Robinson the respect of his peers, they also enabled his talent as a ballplayer to be the main thing that the public

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focused on and the main thing that would ultimately win them over. Ac- cordingly, even though the Time feature believed that Robinson's athletic abilities were enough to make him rookie of the year, it nevertheless con- sidered it an offense to celebrate his talents apart from his ability to carry out the terms that gained him mainstream acceptance!

Time's coverage of Robinson exemplified one of the most appealing as- pects of stories on the first: they depicted racial injustice as foremost a personal and not a societal problem for racialized minorities to overcome. This was also apparent in the way the oral history of Judge Albert Arm- endariz Sr. accounted for Armendariz's successes. This feature related how Armendariz, as the only Mexican American at USC Law School, had stuck out like a "sore thumb" and how administrators, professors, and fellow stu- dents made him feel he did not belong. It further noted how Armendariz came to terms with this alienation by reminding himself that he had en- rolled in law school to earn a degree, not to make friends. 3 The oral history credited Armendariz's future accomplishments to the way he worked out his feelings of social isolation, thus advocating a specific solution to the problem of racism: racialized minorities could move forward in society by changing their attitudes and not demanding a change in the attitudes of those around them.

The use of the first as a model of assimilationist ideologies conveyed the message that individual resolve on the part of racialized minorities was key to bringing about institutional change during the postwar period. But the dictates of assimilation in this era also brought to the fore some- thing even more fundamental than the desire of racialized minorities to improve their social standing in dominant society. As the Cold War turned hot in Asia with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, stories on the firsts increasingly depicted the drive of racialized minorities to, live and work in areas previously restricted to them as indications of their unwav- ering belief in the superiority of U.S . democracy, rather than just their per- sonal desire to improve their lot in life. Thus the achievements of racial- ized minorities worked to attest to the credibility of U.S. democracy during a time when the Cold War had escalated into open conflict. Given how the legitimacy of U.S. democracy had a much bigger impact on world affairs during the Cold War than it had in World War II, stories on the first were vital to showing an international community that the United States was superior to communist countries.

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This chapter will focus on three individuals whose professional dis- tinctions made headlines during the early Cold War years. Whereas the popular press routinely carried stories on the successes of various racial- ized groups in the United States, this chapter examines only the stories on Asian Americans. It does this in order to underscore the way U.S. Cold War efforts in Asia had turned the social status of Asians in the United States into a measure of the credibility of U.S. democracy. The three figures of in- terest are Sammy Lee, who, in addition to being a major in the U.S. army and a medical doctor (an ear, nose, and throat specialist), became the first Asian American to win an Olympic gold medal, a feat that he achieved in platform diving in 1948 and in 1952; Jade Snow Wong, who became the first Asian American to pen a nationally acclaimed book, her 1950 autobiogra- phy, Fifth Chinese Daughter; and Delbert Wong, who became the first Chi- nese American judge following his 1959 appointment to the Los Angeles municipal court by California governor Edmund G. Brown.

The attention to Asian Americans further stems from a scholarly inter- est in tracing the stereotype of Asian Americans as the model minority to the early Cold War years. Scholars of Asian American studies have gener- ally concentrated on the late 1960s as the time when the image of Asian Americans as the model minority first appeared in the popular press, but this study examines the discourse on the first to show that Asian Ameri- cans began to assume the role of model minorities during the early Cold War years: It argues that portrayals of Asian Americans as the model mi- nority worked not just to verify the state's adherence to assimilationist ide- ologies, but also to bolster U.S. efforts to rally non-Western countries away from the influence of communism. The U.S. State Department sent distin- guished Asian Americans to East, Southeast, and South Asia to bear wit- ness that U.S. democracy strove to treat all people and countries equally. But the state's reliance on the success stories of racialized minorities to establish the legitimacy of U.S. democracy was not a one-sided affair. Rather, a transnational exchange took place between the United States and communist China, as China was also releasing English-language ac- counts on the social advancement of Chinese women and of China's mi- noritized populations in order to showcase the capacity of communism to bring about gender as well as racial equality. Moreover, despite the U.S. government's attempts to propagate stories that demonstrated the superi- ority of the American political system, it could not fully secure the consent

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of the nation to this endeavor, as counternarratives emerged to expose the limits of U.S . democracy. This chapter examines the concept of tokenism and how it worked to unsettle the ability of the first to signify the nation's

steady progress toward racial equality.

Constructing a Role for the First

The postwar era is generally regarded as a time when the nation relaxed its racial barriers and in so doing, carried forward some of the changes that took place in World War II. Various historians recount how the war against Nazi Germany together with the nation's postwar aspiration to be the leader of the "free world" made racist practices increasingly difficult to justify at home. The passage of the 1944 G.l. Bill of Rights was also signifi- cant for providing a sizable number of black, Asian American, and Mexi- can American veterans the means to obtain a college education, while the lifting of racial restrictions in the job market granted racialized minorities access to professional jobs.5 As labor unions moved to do away with ra- cial barriers to union membership, the admission of people of color into the rank and file further boosted the employment of racialized minorities in trade jobs.6 With these changes in mind, the historian Brenda Gayle Plummer described the rise of a Cold War liberalism that catered to an ac- culturationist mindset and made radicalism suspect. Black popular maga- zines, Plummer argued, exemplified this way of thinking as they bought into the promise of postwar opportunities and routinely ran features that promoted the ideal of the white middle-class suburban lifestyle. The pro- liferation of stories on the victories of blacks over the color line effectively turned the early Cold War years into the age of "Negro firsts:' 7

Notably, stories on the firsts did not merely detail how easing racial bar- riers helped boost the social status of racialized minorities and their sub- sequent adherence to the status quo. As the United States engaged in an ideological battle with communist countries over which form of govern- ment, communism or U.S. democracy, was superior, this rivalry prompted the federal government to not only support desegregation measures but also to use the rising status of racialized minorities to attest to the ben- efits of the American way of life. As the cultural critic Christina Klein has

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argued, when the Cold War escalated into armed conflict with the out-

break of the Korean War, the shift fueled the American public's fascination with Asia, apparent in the upsurge of news articles, novels, and films on

Asians and Asian Americans.8 The rise of the culture of the first thus saw

Asian Americans figure centrally in the creation of an ethos around the

credibility and superiority of U.S. democracy. Besides being the subject of

news features, Asian Americans became the storytellers whose testimo-

nies helped to authenticate the superiority of the American way of life.

Sammy Lee was among the notable firsts. The recognition he enjoyed as the first Asian American to win an Olympic gold medal illustrates the po-

litical shifts that took place during the Cold War, as the government drew

on his accomplishments to rally the support of non-Western countries for the U.S. Cold War effort. Lee earned his distinction during the 1948 Olympic

games in London, when he won the gold medal in platform diving; at that time, mainstream news outlets that reported on Lee's win did little to draw

attention to his race, other than noting that Lee, who was born in Fresno,

California, was an American of Korean descent. 9 However, this changed in 1952, when Lee qualified for the Olympic games in Helsinki. Lee repeated

his win in platform diving and earned a second gold medal at the age of

thirty-two, but his skills as a diver were not the only thing that earned at- tention. As the United States was in the midst of fighting the Korean War,

Lee's racial designation as a Korean American became a newsworthy trait. The importance of Lee's racial heritage came to light following an inci-

dent that occurred during a preparatory meeting with swimmers and div-

ers at the 1952 Olympic games. As the New York Times reported, several Russian swimmers and divers approached Lee at the event and attempted

to strike up a conversation with him. Although Lee initially regarded the interaction as a friendly exchange between athletes who were curious about each other's diving techniques, he soon learned that there were po-

litical motivations behind the meeting. This realization came about after

one of the Russian swimmers pinned an ivory rendition of Pablo Picasso's peace dove on Lee's swimming jacket-a gesture that Lee regarded as rou-

tine and welcoming until a U.S. reporter drew his attention to the nature of the pin. Upon grasping what he was wearing, Lee was described to have

immediately ripped the dove off his jacket because, as the New York Times detailed, the "dumpy dove had become almost as much a Communist symbol as the hammer and sickle:'w

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The exchange between Lee and the Russian athletes displayed to an

American audience just what the Cold War was about, and specifically,

what was so menacing about communists. It showed how the Russian

athletes had purposely approached Lee, whom they tagged as an unsus-

pecting minority, and attempted to brainwash him into thinking that com-

munist countries were the true harbingers of peace and equality. The Rus- sian athletes, as the New York Times argued, even went as far as tricking

Lee into wearing a communist symbol. Lee affirmed this view as he was

quoted to have said, "I might have slipped on that peace dove thing, but

I already know what that guy wants to ask. It goes like this: Are you dis-

criminated against because you are an Oriental? They never get tired of trying I guess:'u With this remark, Lee revealed what was truly noteworthy

about the incident. His response showed how the United States had the

upper hand in this ideological battle with the Soviet Union, given how, un-

beknownst to the Russian athletes, Lee was not the impressionable minor-

ity that they thought he was. Rather, Lee was a major in the U.S. army and an American of Korean descent who was privy to the tactics of the Rus-

sians. His ripping of the communist dove from his jacket attested to the

ability of U.S. democracy to secure the loyalty of the nation's racialized mi- norities and to instill in them a clear sense of the world. Lee's subsequent

actions also displayed the appropriate attitude that racialized minorities

should assume when confronted with communist propaganda. As the New York Times noted, Lee refused to meet privately with a Russian newspaper-

man and opted instead to pay a social call to the South Korean team, even though he did not speak Korean .12 The story about Lee's exchange with the

Russian athletes illustrates the role of the first in providing proof that U.S. democracy offered equal opportunities to all and that racialized minorities

were worthy of being treated equally.

Following his win at the 1952 Olympic games, Lee was chosen by the U.S. Amateur Athletic Union to be the recipient of the prestigious James

E. Sullivan Memorial Trophy, an award given to amateur athletes display- ing exceptional sportsmanship and citizenship. Lee was recognized as "the oldest athlete, the first diver, and the first athlete of Oriental descent"

to win the trophy.13 The honor, however, also carried with it the political

entanglements of the Cold War, given how five months prior to the an- nouncement that Lee was the winner of the Sullivan, the United States

under the auspices of the United Nations Command together with North

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Korea and China signed the armistice to end the Korean War. Lee's win thus incited Pravda, the official Soviet paper, to question the timing of the award and to remark that Lee won only because he participated in "the capitalistic, bourgeoisie sport of war in Korea" by staging diving exhibi- tions in the Republic of Korea.'4 True to form, Lee, as the first, responded to this attack by declaring that "only in the United States can athletes of all colors, races, and religion get the chance to be world champions:·•s

The mainstream press in the United States further advanced the senti- ment that the selection of Lee for the Sullivan indicated how the United States. unlike the Soviet Union and China, was actually committed to treating all people and countries equally. Despite the widespread support for Lee's win, some legitimate questions were raised about the choice of Lee for the Sullivan. This was because Lee did not compete in a single national championship in 1953; he was stationed at the U.S. army's 121st Evacuation Hospital in Seoul, where he worked as an ear, nose, and throat specialist.'6 However, Lee's time in Seoul did present the opportunity to put his diving skills to use. Notably. the president of the Republic of Ko- rea, Syngman Rhee, not the U.S. government, initiated this opportunity. In an oral interview conducted by the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles in 1999, Lee recounted how he received notice during his stay in Seoul that President Rhee had an ear infection and was in need of a specialist. When he arrived, Lee identified himself as the son of Soon Kee Rhee, a lifelong friend of President Rhee who had died during a political meeting in Los Angeles defending Rhee's right to be the president of Korea after World War II ended and the Japanese were ousted from the Korean peninsula. Because of these ties, Rhee embraced Lee and arranged for a diving exhibition to be held in Seoul.'7 The event sought to make use of Lee's immense popularity in Korea to boost not just the morale of a people who witnessed the division of their country along the 38th parallel. but also their confidence in Rhee's leadership to one day reunify Korea.

Lee, for his part, drew on his distinction to support the political aims of both the United States and the Republic of Korea. In his acceptance speech for the Sullivan, Lee reaffirmed how this win spoke to the superior- ity of U.S. democracy. Radio stations and newsreels throughout the United States widely broadcasted Lee's witty remark that "only in the United States could a trophy founded in memory of an Irish-American like James E. Sullivan go to a Korean-American named Samuel O'Lee:· President Rhee

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of the Republic of Korea proclaimed the award a testament to "the people in Korea that Americans have their heart in the right place to honor one of us:· Lee's racial and national designations had thus permitted his accom- plishments to promote not just the U.S . Cold War effort but also the politi- cal ambitions of Rhee. More importantly. they allowed Lee to carry out his own transnational political affinities. As Lee detailed in his oral interview with the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, his commitment to promoting the benefits of the American way of life was tied to his desire to see a "free" Korea. He recounted how his father had taken him as a child

to an event in Los Angeles commemorating the 1919 March 1 uprising in Korea, when Korean students were killed for marching against Japanese colonial rule. The commemoration made such an impression on Lee that he went to his Japanese American neighbor's house, the Watanabis. with a butcher knife, seeking revenge. He also pointedly made clear that all of his achievements in middle and high school were done to best his Japanese American classmates. But despite his support for a sovereign Korea, Lee refused an invitation by President Rhee and opted not to compete in the 1952 games on behalf of the Republic of Korea. As Lee stated, "since I was an American first, I will take my chances and try to make the American team and do justice both to my ancestral background and to my Ameri- canism:··s Lee's choice to represent the United States thus showed how he identified foremost as an American and how this identification during the Cold War supported as well as aligned with his backing of the Republic of Korea as the representative regime of a sovereign Korea.

Following Lee's receipt of the Sullivan award, the U.S. State Department made Lee an official sports ambassador to Asia. Prior to taking on this of- ficial role, Lee had unofficially represented the United States in diving ex- hibitions in the Republic of Korea and in Japan. As the sports ambassador of the 1954 Far East goodwill mission, Lee traveled all over East, Southeast and South Asia to places such as India, Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Burma, and Vietnam. As Lee recalled, he was expected to lead a discussion on racial prejudice in U.S. society after each diving exhibition. This task importantly documented the rise of Asian Americans as the offi- cial storytellers of American democracy. who joined other notable African Americans commissioned by the State Department to bear witness to how American democracy worked to ensure freedom and equality to all people in all countries. The firsts thus emerged as a valuable government resource

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during the Cold War. Lee recounted how he developed a clever way to talk about race and U.S. democracy and would tell those who came to see him dive that Americans did not always practice what they preached, for if they did, he would not be standing before them as a two-time Olympian, doctor of medicine, major in the U.S. army, and winner of the James E. Sul- livan award.'9 According to Lee, this witty speech always worked to silence the cynics, given how it affirmed the existence of racial prejudice in the United States only to call attention to its waning influence.

Notably, Lee's role as the model minority also required that he continu- ally work to assure his fellow Americans that the nation was progressing toward the full realization of its democratic ideals and was not fundamen- tally racist. This role was played out publicly after Lee decided to resign from the army and return to southern California to set up a medical prac- tice in Orange County. As was widely reported in mainstream newspa- pers throughout the nation, Lee's attempt to transition to civilian life was stalled when the West Orange County Real Estate Board twice thwarted his efforts to purchase a home in Garden Grove. The board maintained that it was a huge financial risk to allow Lee and his family to move into their all-white suburban tracts, as this would only encourage the flow of racialized minorities to West Orange County. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times fired back by reciting Lee's long list of accomplish- ments in order to establish how Lee's residence in Garden Grove would only bring prestige to the city. They especially called attention to the fact that Lee had just returned home from a goodwill tour in East, Southeast, and South Asia, where he served as a living example of the credibility of U.S. democracy:o

While mainstream newspapers drew on Lee's many accomplish- ments to show the injustice of denying residence in the suburbs to one so worthy, Lee, as the first, persisted in modeling the appropriate reac- tion that racialized minorities should demonstrate in the face of racism. He responded to being barred from the restricted neighborhoods of West Orange County by reiterating his belief in the American people and by delivering the same rhetorical sound bites that he issued while on tour in Asia. What Lee's activities showed was that racialized minorities could fight against racist practices only if they simultaneously assured the na- tion that its democracy was superior and legitimate. His affirmation by a nation that also marginalized him had in this way restricted his ability

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not only to discuss the realities of racism in the United States but also to combat its racist practices. This was a stark transformation for Lee, given his reputation as a feisty individual before becoming an Asian American first. As Lee recounted in his 1999 oral interview, he had never backed down against those who discriminated against him and was constantly getting into fistfights growing up with classmates who directed racial slurs at him. Lee also shared that the main driving force behind his 1948 Olympic win was to prove wrong "the bigots in my own country who said that I couldn't do it:'21

Interestingly, in his oral interview with the Amateur Athletic Founda-

tion of Los Angeles, Lee noted that after he won the Sullivan, he struggled with the question of how to go about protesting against racial discrimina- tion in the United States. Lee recalled that upon hearing of his win, he wrote a letter to the Amateur Athletic Union requesting that he receive the award in Pasadena, California, or at any other club besides the New York Athletic Club; he had been thrown out of the New York club "because they knew me as a Chinaman:·22 But as Lee recalled, after he mailed out the letter, he immediately contacted a friend in the army to retrieve the missive and prevent it from being sent. Lee subsequently expressed deep regret that he had ever written such a letter. The tension that he displayed showed how he continually struggled with the contradictions of U.S. de- mocracy. Although winning the Sullivan had made him reconsider the ef- ficacy of staging a protest against the discriminatory practices of the New York Athletic Club, this shift also shed light on how his promotion of the superiority of U.S. democracy may have also been an appeal to the Ameri- can public to move past its racist ways. In this view, these articulations were not merely blind espousals of the greatness of the American way. They illustrated how the first worked not just to affirm the credibility of U.S. democracy but also to petition for it to be credible.

The Exchanging of Cultures

When the U.S . State Department contacted Lee to be the nation's sports amb assador in Asia, it extended a similar request to the author Jade Snow Wong. Wong's national and international acclaim rested on her highly

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successful 1950 autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter. Although not the first published book-length work written by a Chinese American in Eng- lish, Fifth Chinese Daughter was the first nationally acclaimed commer- cially successful book written by a Chinese American. 23 Publishers es- timated that Wong's autobiography had acquired at least a quarter of a million readers by 1975.24 Scholars of Asian American studies, moreover, consider Fifth Chinese Daughter a foundational text of the field; the liter- ary critic Amy Ling has called Wong the "Mother of Chinese American literature:'25

Shortly after its U.S. release, the State Department acquired the rights to translate Fifth Chinese Daughter into various Asian languages and made the book accessible in Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, East India, and Pakistan. It further released Wong's autobiography in England and in Germany. As Wong noted in No Chinese Stranger, the 1975 follow- up book to her 1950 autobiography, the story of how a Chinese American woman went to college and became a working professional had generated an "unexpected impact on foreign readers:' The State Department, in its attempt to capitalize on this interest, sought to "produce the author in the flesh" and commissioned Wong on a four-month speaking tour to forty- five different locales throughout East and Southeast Asia. 26 In taking on this assignment, Wong consented to be the living proof that a female born to poor Chinese immigrants could emerge fully assimilated and accepted in mainstream U.S. society.27

Wong's autobiography expressed key ideologies that the state sought to promote through Wong's retelling of her lived experiences. Moreover, de- spite the fact that most of the events of Fifth Chinese Daughter took place prior to the postwar period, Wong's story contained an underlying mes- sage about the benefits of the American way of life that made this autobi- ography useful for the federal government during the early Cold War years. As with Sammy Lee, what distinguished Wong in the eyes of the govern- ment was that her acclaim as the first commercially successful Chinese American author together with the message of her book could work to rally the support of Asian countries behind the U.S. Cold War effort. In the wake of the communist revolution in China and the division of Korea, the State Department considered the testimonies of Wong and Lee critical, for they showed the failure of the Soviet Union to obtain the full backing of the Chinese and Korean people. Moreover, the State Department relied, as

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it did for Lee, on Wong's shifting racial and national designations to lend credibility to her espousal of U.S. democracy. Interestingly, Wong found that in Asia, despite the popularity of her book, her Chinese American heritage did not bolster her ability to illustrate the benefits of the Ameri- can way of life. Rather, Wong's dual heritage often hindered her capacity to relate to the people in the countries that she visited.

As pointed out by many literary scholars, most notably Frank Chin, much of Fifth Chinese Daughter reads like an anthropological text. Wong sought to bring readers into the confines of San Francisco Chinatown and used this locale to signify the place where Chinese culture remained un- altered long after the arrival of the first group of Chinese immigrants to the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. Wong's portrayal of Chinatowr1 reinforced in this way its image as an insulated and for- eign site waiting to be discovered and explained.28 It further portrayed cultural differences, rather than race-based land use segregation, as the main reason the Chinese were separated from the rest of society. Wong's departure from Chinatown to attend Mills College became her symbolic entrance into dominant society. Notably, Wong's movement out of Chi- natowrl showed that her assimilation did not entail that she disavow her Chinese heritage. Rather, her Chineseness heightened her social worth, as it allowed her to play the part of the cultural ambassador introducing her white friends to the foods and habits of the Chinese. But what this bridg- ing of the two worlds laid bare was not an equal exchange of cultural prac- tices. Rather, it exposed the social unevenness that existed between Chi- natowrl and dominant society: Chinese culture was visible only insofar as it served to fulfill the curiosity of white Americans. Wong's willingness to play the role of the native informant further revealed how this exchange of cultures was but a means to prove the Chinese worthy of being accepted by mainstream society.

Fifth Chinese Daughter offered a quintessential look at how assimilation worked to overcome the color line. As Wong attributed her ability to gain acceptance in dominant society to her willingness to learn the ways of white Americans and to share with them the ways of the Chinese, her story importantly dowr1played the ways racism had structured and shaped this interaction. Specifically, it sidelined the way racial discrimination against the Chinese stemmed not just from lack of knowledge about them but from the ability of dominant society to determine what that knowledge

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was. Instead of revealing that there was nothing essential about Chinese culture that would allow it to be reduced to one or two characteristics,

Wong's 1950 autobiography promoted the importance of personal resolve

on the part of racialized minorities. She offered a compelling example of

how this tenacity enabled her to overcome roadblocks in her life. As Wong

recalled, her career counselor at Mills College had issued her the following advice:

If you are smart, you will look for a job only among yow- Chinese firms .

You cannot expect to get anywhere in American business houses. Af-

ter all, I am sure you are conscious that racial prejudice on the Pacific

Coast will be a great handicap to you.

To which Wong responded,

Stung and speechless, Jade Snow felt as if she had been struck on both

cheeks. The numbness gave way to the first anger she had felt against any of the college staff. She had been told because she was Chinese,

she could not go into equal competition with Caucasians. Her knowl- edge that racial prejudice existed had never interfered with her personal

goals. She had, on the contrary found that being Chinese had created a great deal of favorable interest, and because of its cultural enrichment of

her life she would not have traded her Chinese ancestry for any other.

No, this was one piece of advice that she was not going to follow, so opposed was it to her experience and belief. She was more determined to get a job with an American firm. 29

As Wong took it upon herself to combat racial injustice, the internaliza- tion of this task turned the struggle against institutionalized racism into a

personal challenge. While this form of agency provided the minoritized a sense of control over their circumstances, it overlooked the importance of

collective struggle for equal rights and the need for society as a whole to change in order to bring about racial equality. It further made race-based

social disparities an indication that racialized minorities were not trying

hard enough to be incorporated into mainstream society. During the early Cold War years, the story of how a Chinese American woman refused to

see her Chinese heritage as a social handicap and trusted instead in the

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goodness of white Americans to give her a chance to prove her worth

found a ready audience. Equally as appealing was Wong's portrayal of U.S.

society as being not so much racist as it was unfamiliar with the cultures

of Asian countries. The resulting commercial success of her work not only prompted the State Department to send Wong to Asia to help quell the

growing anti-American sentiment, it also imbued in Wong a moral obliga- tion to use her dual heritage as a Chinese and an American to foster better

East-West understanding. As Wong noted in her 1975 autobiography, No Chinese Stranger, she believed that her dual heritage had authorized her to "interpret what she knew of the U.S. to her fellow Asians:'3o

Given Wong's focus on the importance of cultural exchange, her ac-

counts of her time in Asia differed significantly from those of Sammy Lee. Unlike Lee, Wong did not consider it her role to talk about race and U.S.

democracy. She was actually taken aback during one of her speeches in

Kuala Lumpur when an East Indian asked whether she was implying that

there was no racial prejudice in the United States. According to Wong, it

was the first time she was ever asked such a question; she considered the inquiry disrespectful, noting that the "uninvited" guest "was not trained

in Chinese courtesY:'3 ' Wong responded by echoing the views that she de-

veloped in Fifth Chinese Daughter and stated that it was a greater crime to let racism keep people from trying to improve their lot in life and from

striving to create better understandings between groups. With this reply,

Wong reiterated her adherence to assimilationist ideologies and deemed racism to be foremost the result of the lack of awareness and respect of each other's cultures, rather than the ability of the dominant group to cre-

ate knowledges about the other and to deny to them equal access to state

resources. Wong's espousal of assimilationist views fueled her desire to talk about culture and not about race.

Despite what appeared to be a deep commitment to cultivating cultural affinities between the United States and Asia, Wong's accounts of her time

in Asia were replete with ruminations about the fact that there was not

a coherent Chinese or Asian culture to speak of. In almost an about-face

from her 1950 account, which had forged a unified sense of Chineseness in order to show how it differed from and could enrich white America, Wong's

1975 account was hesitant to posit any essential quality to being Chinese. Her first stop, Hong Kong, afforded her the chance to establish herself as

an authentic Chinese, as she showed reporters that an American-born

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Chinese could not only speak Cantonese without an accent but was just as fluent as native speakers. However, Wong's subsequent trips to Singa-

pore, Malaysia, Burma, and Thailand made her question the existence of a

real Chinese. These trips further pushed her to realize that a unified Asian

sensibility did not exist either. This understanding resulted from her ex-

periences with anti-Chinese hostilities in these countries. Wong detailed how the Chinese had controlled the majority of these countries' resources

and exploited the labor of native populations.32 She was thereby not fully

welcomed by the natives of those countries. The deep distrust that these

nations harbored against the United States further contributed to the uneven and lukewarm reception of Wong. Wong recounted how report-

ers would constantly badger her to prove that she was "truly Chinese" and

not just a puppet of the United States with an Asian face. 33 Her time in Rangoon, moreover, produced another disconcerting experience. Wong

recounted how her hosts had taken an interest in her because they had thought that Wong, being from San Franciscds Chinatown, would be privy

to the dealings of the Kuomintang, which had retreated to Taiwan to es- tablish a "free" China following its defeat by communist forces in China.

This led Wong to express her dismay that many Asians did not see her as

an American citizen but as a Chinese representative.34

As the historian Ellen D. Wu has described, the mixed reception that Wong encountered led many U.S. officials to question the benefits of send-

ing a Chinese American to Asia.35 But for Wong, the issue went deeper than just the inability of Chinese Americans to relate fully to people in Asia. As

Wong noted in her 1975 autobiography, her trip to East, Southeast, and South Asia taught her the importance of not consigning people "to conve-

nient mental slots:' Wong remarked that just as it was a mistake for Asian communists to believe that all Americans were out to exploit the masses,

it was also wrong for the United States to use "communist" as "a catch-all, scapegoat term:'36 Moreover, she argued that cultural categories, like politi-

cal ones, were not only unstable but also not the best measure of an indi-

vidual's worth. While the mixed reception that she received in Asia certainly attested to this view, Wong also drew on the plight of mixed-race Asians in

Asia to underscore in an even more nuanced fashion the constraints of cul- tural categories. Given the discrimination that mixed-raced Asians endured

in Asia, she contended, it may appear that being pure Chinese would grant to those who did not intermarry a sense of social legitimacy. But Wong's

ASIAN AMERICAN FIRSTS

attempts to follow her mother's teachings and make white friends but se-

cure a Chinese husband did not secure her acceptance among the Chinese in the United States. Since Wong chose an unconventional career for a

Chinese American woman, her family and community ridiculed her even

though she was pure Chinese.37 In light of this effect, Wong pointedly asked, who benefited from the notion of pure Chinese?

By posing this question, Wong sought to highlight the way Chinese pa-

triarchy and nationalism worked to police the behaviors and activities of the Chinese people. The cultural category of "pure Chinese" provided in

this view a sense of belonging and social legitimacy to those who con-

formed to that status quo. Besides making known how Chinese patriarchy

dictated the terms of social acceptability, Wong also called attention to

the way U.S. Cold War politics governed the notion of social and political belonging. As Wong noted, her career as a ceramic artist, instead of being

a subject of ridicule, had emerged as a distinguishing trait during her ser-

vice as a U.S. cultural ambassador, for it allowed her to show the people in Asia how U.S. democracy worked to extend equal opportunities to women

and not just to racialized minorities. The State Department's enlistment

of Wong to model this benefit of the American way of life was significant, as it went against all popular portrayals of women in Cold War America,

most notably the archetypal image of the assimilated Asian American

woman as suburban housewife and mother. A key reason that may have accounted for the State Department's use of Wong in this manner was

that Wong had directed most of her feminist critiques against Chinese pa- triarchy. For Wong, mainstream U.S. society, in contrast to Chinatown, had

afforded her the opportunity to prove her worth as a woman. An example of the constraints of Chinatown life was the refusal of her father to sup-

port her college education. As Wong detailed in her 1950 autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter,

It is the sons who perpetuate our ancestral heritage by permanently bear- ing the Wong family name and transmitting it through their blood line,

and therefore the sons must have priority over the daughters when pa- rental provisions for advantages must be limited by economic necessity.38

By recounting her father's rebuff, Wong revealed that her venture outside

Chinatown was also driven by her desire to show her Chinese father that

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a Chinese daughter was just as valuable as a Chinese son. As Wong de- tailed in her autobiography how she had managed to live out her dreams in the white world, her story worked to enhance the advantages of being assimilated into American society. Not only did it show Wong's resolve to cross the color line, it also manifested her endeavor to prove the worth of Chinese daughters.

Another key factor that may have accounted for why the State Depart- ment selected Wong to be the first Chinese American delegate in Asia was the growing influence of communist China. As China was rising in prominence as a major world power, it claimed the superiority of Chinese communism because of its capacity to improve the livelihood not only of the poor but of women as well. As the scholar of Chinese history Gail Her- shatter has argued, women in twentieth-century China were the preemi- nent symbols of national modernity. The prevailing belief among Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries was that "if Chinese women are liberated, the Chinese nation will be strong, leaving behind both feudalism and the precarious sovereignty of semicolonialsm:'39 Even though strains of this be- lief were apparent in China before the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese communist government did much to popularize this belief, as it relied on Chinese women to exemplify the nation's social and economic progress and its superiority to Western countries. Thus commu- nist propaganda not only incited the U.S. government to rely on the suc- cesses of racialized minorities to model the benefits of the American way of life, it also prompted the State Department to send a Chinese American woman to Asia for the purpose of showcasing the rising status of women in U.S. society.

Communist China actively disseminated accounts of Chinese commu- nism's capacity to ensure gender equality; a telling example was the pub- lication of the English-language magazine Women of China. First launched in 1939 at the Chinese communist revolutionary base in Yan'an, China, by the Women's Movement Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Women of China became in 1949 the official publication of the All-China Women's Federation, a group dedicated to improving the international im- age of China. Though it was published in Beijing, the intended audience for this English-language periodical was the Western world. The maga- zine thus found its way to the United States, Europe, and Latin America. In the decade after the communist revolution in China, Women of China

ASIAN AMERICAN FIRSTS

generated numerous articles that sought to debunk popular perceptions of the role of women in China. The articles described how the Chinese communist government encouraged peasant women to work in farming cooperatives and in industrial factories and also opened schools to help them get an education. Accounts of the advancement of Chinese women worked in this way to bolster the broader national narrative about how communism was effectively working to raise agricultural and industrial production in China while reducing rates of illiteracy. Additionally, this English-language periodical sought to make known how the 1950 Marriage Law was pushing the nation to break from its long-standing social con- ventions. Specifically, it wanted to highlight how China was moving away from arranged marriages in favor of individual choice and romantic love. Stories on the progress of communist China all followed the same narra-

tive pattern that drew on the 1949 communist revolution to distinguish a pre-liberated from a post-liberated China. This distinction showed how the Chinese communist government had freed the nation from the oppressive rule of Japanese colonizers and the corruption of the Kuomintang. Stories were almost all told from a first-person perspective so as to foreground the agency of Chinese women as builders of their own image and tellers of their own experiences.

The Women of China magazine also ran stories that underscored that communist China was leading the way in establishing gender equality and was in this way more socially advanced and progressive than its Western counterparts. To that end, the periodical prominently featured Chinese women as political delegates who attended and organized world confer- ences to protest against the atomic bomb and to promote world unity. Chinese women were, moreover, shown as high-ranking professionals who worked as doctors and engineers. The magazine also contained ac- counts of how the Chinese communist government devoted considerable resources to ensuring that Tibetan women and women who resided in the remote parts of Inner Mongolia received the same benefits as other Chi- nese women. Chinese communism was thus shown to work for the ben- efit of all Chinese women regardless of ethnic differences.

One approach the magazine took to show China as more socially ad- vanced than Western countries was to feature testimonies by women who had previously lived in Western countries but had come to China to witness and take part in the advancement of the Chinese communist

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regime. Included among these testimonies was one penned by a Chinese American woman, Lee Ming-Hua, aptly entitled "What I Have Seen in My Motherland:' 40 In this first-person account, Lee talked about how she had always kept a close eye on the rising status of China while living in the United States. Lee, along with her husband and two children, finally de- cided to leave the United States and returned to China via Europe in 1954. Given that Lee grew up in China but spent a good part of her adult life in the United States, her story allowed her to attest to how life in communist China differed greatly from the days of the anti-Japanese war, as food and basic household goods were now plentiful. Her story also allowed her to speak about how China fared in comparison with the United States. With this latter goal in mind, Lee shared how her decision to become an en- gineer was met with numerous questions in the United States, where no one had understood her desire to take part in national construction. Lee rationalized that this reaction was understandable, given that it was also the response of "Old China:· Thus Lee effectively grouped the United States with a past that the Chinese communist regime had moved away from, since such a question was ridiculous in this newly formed China, where women were encouraged to work in all fields. Lee used her experience to back this claim, as she was able find work upon her return to China at the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where she headed a plastics group .

In addition to detailing the ways communist China afforded greater op- portunities to women professionally, Lee sought to show how living un- der a communist regime had improved her personal life. Lee noted that teachers in China, unlike the United States, treated her children as if they were their own. She also remarked that despite the appearance that women in the United States were treated as equals, American women ac- tually resembled Chinese women of pre-liberation days and were almost wholly dependent on their husbands for social and economic sustenance. As women under the Chinese communist regime were encouraged to take on high-ranking positions, their rising status enabled them to forge rela- tionships with men based on mutual care. While Lee conceded that there were still many areas of Chinese life that could be improved, she never- theless professed her unwavering belief in the ability of Chinese commu- nism to bring about greater social and economic advancement in China. Lee's testimony demonstrated how stories about Chinese communism,

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like those on American democracy, conceived China as the country that was on the actual path toward social progress. Accounts about the supe- riority of communist China, by focusing on the growing social standing of women in Chinese society, further pointed to an aspect of societal life that it believed outperformed capitalist nations.

In light of the Chinese government's attention to the role of women, the story of Jade Snow Wong and her success in U.S . society held great political significance for the U.S. Cold War effort in Asia. Specifically, the tale of a college-educated Chinese American woman who was also a work- ing professional effectively illustrated the capacity of U.S. democracy to extend equal opportunities to racialized minorities as well as to women. The transnational exchange that took place between the United States and communist countries over which form of government was superior, U.S democracy or communism, had in this way detailed how the concept of "working women" was becoming a measure of the preeminence of the American way of life. Together with the growing status of racialized mi- norities, the increased presence of women in high-ranking professional positions would function for decades after the early Cold War years as a measure of national progress.

The First as a Token

The appointment of deputy attorney general Delbert Wong as the nation's first Chinese American judge by California governor Edmund G. Brown marked yet another history-making event. It served, as the Los Angeles Ex- aminer declared, as an added tribute to the nation's democratic process.4 ' The nationwide coverage of Wong's appointment, which included main- stream papers as well as ethnic periodicals such as the Chinese World, the Pacific Citizen, and the Pan American Chinese Week{y, further worked, as the Hollywood Citizen News observed, to foster goodwill in Asia where communists "spread the impression that Americans persecute minority groups:·42 This was because the coverage of Wong's distinction as another first did not dwell on the singularity of this national accomplishment. Rather, it spoke to an overall increase in the number of distinguished Asian American professionals in California.43 Even more noteworthy, contended

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the New York Times, was how Wong's appointment along with the election results in Hawaii had turned 1959 into a year that saw Asian Americans obtain on a national scale a foothold in American political life.

When voters in Hawaii picked Daniel K. Inouye and Hiram L. Fong to be their state representatives in Congress in 1959, they made Inouye the first Japanese American elected to the House of Representatives and Fong the first Chinese American elected to the Senate.44 The Pacific Citizen, a national newspaper published by the Japanese American Citizens League, noted that the election of Inouye and Fong worked not just to foster bet- ter understanding and tolerance between the East and the West, it also served as an example to the world of American democracy at work. 45 In thus stating, it echoed the sentiments of state-generated narratives that frequently drew on the "firsts" to model the progress and credibility of U.S. democracy. The New York Times further detailed how the situation in Ha- waii had built on similar results in California and Arizona, where voters had elected notable Asian Americans to local office. More importantly, the paper noted that the election of Inouye and Fong had come after Cali- fornia voted Dalip Singh Saund, an immigrant from India, into Congress in 1956, making Saund the first ever U.S. congressman of Asian descent. 46

Moreover, Wong's judgeship followed the appointment of John Aiso as the first Japanese American judge to the municipal and later, the superior court of Los Angeles. 47

In this context, Wong's distinction as another Asian American first be- came a resounding testament to the progress of American democracy. As Wong figured in popular imaginations as both a nonwhite and as a rep- resentative of Asia, the mainstream press drew on Wong's distinction as the first Chinese American judge to speak not only to the nation's triumph over the color line but also of its goodwill toward all people in Asia. De- spite the popularity of this signification, stories on the first did not always promote the nation's Cold War agenda. An interesting example is the Pa- cific Citizen's discussion of]ohn F. Aiso's 1953 appointment as the first Japa- nese American judge to the Los Angeles municipal court. As this paper had strongly opposed Japanese internment during World War II and had argued that the portrayal of Japanese Americans as the direct extension of people in Japan had brought about this mass incarceration, it argued that Aiso's appointment was a necessary move to establish Japanese Ameri- cans as full-fledged Americans. It further noted that California governor

Fig. 3.1. Sammy Lee (center) with gold medal at the 1952 summer Olympics. Also pictured are P.J. Capilla (left) ofMexico, who finished second, and G.

Haase (right) of Germany, who took third . Courtesy of the Associated Press

Fig. 3.2. Jade Snow Wong at a reception in Rangoon, Burma, with U Thant,

minister of information, 1953. Courtesy of the Jade Snow Wong family

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Fig. 3.3. Municipal Judge Delbert Wong with his wife, Dolores, and their children, Kent, Shelley, and Duane, 1959. Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection

Earl Warren had benefited from making this appointment, for it quelled the negative publicity that surrounded his "anti-Japanese actions" during

World War II. The Pacific Citizen thus declared Aiso's judgeship to be an

essential demonstration that Japanese Americans, and more broadly Asian Americans, were finally being accepted into mainstream American life. 48 It sought thereby to recognize only the Americanness of Asian Americans,

so as to correct the misconception that Asian Americans were representa-

tives of Asia. Besides revealing the circumstances where race and nationality were at

odds with one another, the publicity surrounding Asian American firsts il- lustrated the nation's anxiety around its unmitigated attention to race as a

symbol of American democracy at work. This was because the use of race to show that U.S. democracy functioned to reward personal merit also sug-

gested the contrary-that race and not personal merit had determined an individual's access to state resources. 49 The danger that racial issues would

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expose how the nation remained deeply divided along racial lines and that American democracy did not work to treat all people equally prompted

the Hollywood Citizen News to declare,

Judge Wong was appointed and Congressman Saund was elected be- cause they had proved their fitness for the offices they fill. They were

not successful because of their race or in spite of it. They were success-

ful because Americans do not believe that the question of race should arise in determining the fitness of anyone for office. That attitude is the

best way to combat Communist propaganda. The worst way would be

to attempt to select people for office on the basis of race or in propor-

tion to the percentages of their race in the community. That would mag-

nify the question of race instead of minimizing it. 5°

The discussion on Asian American firsts in the Hollywood Citizen News re-

veals that the nation was engaged in an ongoing struggle to reclaim the

legitimacy of its democracy during the early Cold War years. In this view, Asian American firsts did not necessarily work to signify the nation's tri-

umph over the color line, given how the Hollywood Citizen News had to

make a case that Wong and Saund were actually qualified for the positions that they obtained. The firsts illustrated the double bind of using the ac-

complishments of racialized minorities to signify the credibility of Ameri- can democracy. Asian American firsts worked not only to show how the

nation was no longer rewarding whites based on race rather than merit;

they also revealed the state's attempt to use the accomplishments of ra- cialized minorities to deflect charges of racism.

Notably, Judge Wong called attention to the ways the first demonstrated that the nation remained deeply divided along racial lines. He developed

this point of view during a 2000 interview, where he reflected on his life's

accomplishments and especially his 1959 appointment as a judge of the Los Angeles municipal court. As Wong detailed, his service in the air force during World War II was a meaningful undertaking that he believed al-

tered not only his life but also the lives of the many Chinese Americans who had enlisted. As Wong recalled,

The service enabled the Chinese to broaden their horizons. In other

words, they met and associated and lived with people who were

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non-Chinese. For example, in my bomb group, I was the only Chinese

flier. I was the only Chinese of the 640 flying combat members. Many

of my colleagues, my fellow servicemen have never seen a Chinese, cer- tainly have never lived with one and never fought with one. I mean we

flew thirty missions together, so they got to know me and I got to know them.s'

Service in World War II was in this view significant because it brought

together a racially divided nation to interact and get to know one another. Wong's emphasis on his status as the only Chinese among the 640 combat

members was further notable, given how it identified him as the racial mi-

nority in these interactions. The status of being the only Chinese thereby bestowed on Wong the task of showing dominant society how Chinese

Americans were fit to be integrated. Moreover, it became Wong's preferred

way of describing almost all of the key events in his professional life. The rank of being the only Chinese effectively captured how Wong saw himself in relation to dominant society.

In his discussion of his time at Stanford Law School, Wong stressed

that he was the only Chinese and the only Asian in a class of fifty. with only three women and no blacks or Latinos. 52 The construct of "only" also

shaped his discussion of his job as a nonpartisan civil service staff law-

yer for the California state legislature and his experiences in Los Angeles,

where he worked as a state employee starting in 1951. Wong noted that when he came to Los Angeles, he was only the second Chinese American

attorney in Southern California. He recalled that there were about a dozen Chinese lawyers working in San Francisco, but most of them practiced im- migration law and, like the lone Chinese lawyer in Los Angeles, had offices

in Chinatown with a Chinese clientele. There was no Chinese lawyer work-

ing in mainstream society except him.53 As Wong employed the notion of the only to describe his time in law school as well as his early career ex-

periences, he took a less celebratory approach to discussing his achieve- ments, and chose instead to use the singularity of his experiences to con-

vey that the nation was deeply divided along the lines of race during the early Cold War years. In taking the identity of the only rather than the first,

Wong further looked to convey how the opportunities that were afforded him in dominant society had also brought with them a level of social and cultural isolation.

ASIAN AMERICAN FIRSTS

Wong also noted that there was a productive side to being the only. As Wong recalled, this distinction had helped to set him apart from other members of his profession:

That's [being a Chinese] an interesting aspect in that many of the coun-

ties, they have never seen a Chinese lawyer before and I was kind of a

curiosity. But the plus factor was that people always remembered me. I

had a name like Wong and a face to match, so when I went to different cities to try a case, lawyers would meet me for the first time and they

remember me and the judges would remember me. I think that was

helpful because when Pat Brown was campaigning throughout the state

and I was told that he would go to some community and they would

say, "Oh, you have a Chinese deputy general, and yes he has been in our court before, he has been in our city before:· so it was very helpful.54

The fact that he was the only Chinese American had allowed his peers, and ultimately Governor Brown, to remember him. Wong believed that

this was why just two weeks after Governor Brown took office, he received a call from the governor offering him the judgeship.

Notably, what Wong confirmed in this interview was that the state had

actively sought to recognize and promote notable racialized minorities. As Wong recounted,

Normally you know a judge is appointed and there is an announcement in the newspaper. But for my appointment, he [Governor Brown] asked

me to fly to Sacramento. I was in Los Angeles and he asked me to fly to Sacramento and I did. And he had a press conference and he appointed

me. So in fact, there is a picture of Pat Brown swearing me in.55

With this recollection, Wong revealed how his recognition as the first was a planned affair. Elected officials and news organizations were aware that

race worked to establish the credibility of U.S. democracy, and that their support of a racialized minority's advancement showed that they were

doing their part to help the nation's Cold War effort. Interestingly, it was also in this retelling of the widespread recognition that he received for his

judgeship that Wong abandoned the use of the only to describe his sta- tus in mainstream society and remarked, "It was really a significant event

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because I became the first Chinese judge in the United States" (emphasis mine).56 Public discourse on the first provided a means for Wong to use his

distinction to speak to how the nation was on its way to becoming a more

inclusive society. Moreover, the status of the first provided a way for Wong

to situate himself as a pivotal figure and one of the pioneers who helped to

make racial integration desirable.

What was therefore striking about Wong's account of his judgeship was that he did not stick to the narrative path laid out by popular discourses

on the first. Unlike Jade Snow Wong, he did not use this distinction to

show that hard work and individual resolve were the secrets to his success

and to the successes of all racialized minorities. Judge Wong further re- fused to draw on his distinction as the first to let it be wholly a sign of how

the nation was moving to provide equal opportunities to all. Rather, Wong sought to show how being the first did not always imply that he was the

first of many. This was seen in the way he continued to draw on the notion of the only to recount his experiences as a judge. As Wong stated,

In the earlier years anyways, every day when I went down to the court- house I would realize that I was the only Chinese person in this room.

For a time, I was the only Chinese judge in this state, for a long time. I

think that I was the only Chinese at the Judges' Association. I was the only Chinese to go to the Judges' Conferences. 57

Wong also recalled,

I think that the people who invited me to speak, and I knew that the

reason, one of the reasons why I was being invited to come and make a talk was that I was Chinese and that they wanted to get my point of

view. You know that we have over 200 judges in this country and specif- ically, why me? For example, I was invited to join the Hillcrest Country

Club, which was a very exclusive club and it was mostly Jewish. It was a Jewish country club. But they wanted to broaden their base and invited

me to join. But I could not because it was so expensive. I mean, on my judge's salary, I would never be able to afford that.58

In both these accounts, Wong drew on the singularity of his distinction

to problematize the notion of the first as signifying the nation's inevitable

ASIAN AMERICAN FIRSTS

move toward social progress. As he remained the only Chinese in the courthouse for a long time after his appointment, Wong relied on his sta-

tus as the only to call attention to how the first had evolved into the to-

ken. Wong attempted in this way to show how the first functioned largely to give the appearance of diversity. More importantly, he sought to make

known his attempts to resist becoming a symbol of social progress. His

recounting of his refusal to join the Hillcrest Country Club was thereby

notable, because it demonstrated his awareness of why he was even asked

to join. As Wong suggested in his recollection of this event, the Hillcrest

Country Club was more invested in warding off critiques of exclusivity and elitism than expanding the racial makeup of its membership. Wong's insis-

tence on assigning himself the distinction of being the only thus showed

how he wanted to make use of this status to point to the problem of rac-

ism and to express his desire to see more efforts made to mitigate the ra- cial divide.

As his wife, Dolores Wong, shared, following Wong's appointment as

the first Chinese American judge, they were bombarded with dinner in- vitations from the Chinese community in Los Angeles. Even though these

social engagements proved to be quite taxing, Judge Wong always ac- cepted the invitations and rarely missed an event because he understood

that the community took pride in his accomplishments and wanted to

be in on the rising status of Chinese Americans in mainstream society. According to Dolores Wong, Judge Wong knew that he was a model for

"what the Chinese community would aspire to become, ... what the Chi- nese community would want more of' Besides taking on the role of liv-

ing example of the aspirations of the Chinese American community, Judge Wong endeavored to help other Asian Americans enter the legal profes- sion. As Dolores Wong recalled,

I think he must have written fifty to seventy-five letters of recommen-

dation for aspirants to law school. So we recognized that along with the recognition came the responsibility and also the responsibility

to give back to the community what the community had given to us personally.59

Dolores Wong thus acknowledged another role that the first played. Be-

sides working to assure the nation as well as the international community

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that U.S. democracy was indeed legitimate, the first served as proof for his or her community that social advancement was a viable goal. Her account reveals that many of these firsts were also actively working to help miti- gate the racial divide.

During the fifteen years after Sammy Lee won his second gold medal in platform diving, the nation witnessed a proliferation of accounts that attested to how the United States was moving toward becoming a more racially integrated society; but it was also bombarded with stories about bus boycotts, sit-ins, and marches that undercut the nation's professed commitment to ending racial segregation. As civil rights activists staged protests against racist practices in the United States, they highlighted how structural racism and the inaction of government officials had led to the growth of a black underclass and argued that the nation was not mov- ing toward the creation of a racially inclusive society. In the face of these charges, mainstream media such as U.S. News and World Report, Newsweek, and the New York Times ran stories that featured the successes of Asian Americans, particularly Judge Wong and Judge Aiso, for the purpose of discrediting the claims of black civil rights leaders.60 According to a 1966 article in U.S. News and World Report, during "a time when it is being pro- posed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other mi- norities, the nation's 300,000 Chinese-Americans are moving ahead on their own-with no help from anyone else:'6' It further argued that Asian Americans "faced even more prejudice than Negroes today. We haven't stuck Negroes in concentration camps, for instance, as we did the Japa- nese in World War IP'

In the same year that the U.S. News and World Report article utilized the successes of Asian Americans to attack the claims of civil rights activists, the Los Angeles Unified School District released a three-part children's book series that highlighted the accomplishments of racialized minorities in the United States, including Sammy Lee, Delbert Wong, and John Aiso. But instead of denying the realities of racism, this grade school resource sought to use the successes of notable Angelinos, Californians, and Ameri- cans to correct the effects of racism. Specifically, it hoped to "assist chil- dren of minority races in developing feelings of greater personal worth and dignity as they identify with those members of their group who have con- tributed to the development of our city and country:'63 Besides the attempt to address the needs of minoritized youths, the LAUSD believed that this

ASIAN AMERICAN FIRSTS

publication could encourage white children to respect the contributions of racialized minorities to the development of this nation.

The recirculation in popular discourse of the successes of Lee, Wong, and Aiso made clear the contradictory terms through which Asian Ameri- can firsts were conceived during the early Cold War years. On the one hand, the accomplishments of Asian Americans were supposed to attest to how the nation had moved away from its racist past. Civil rights activ- ists had in this view exaggerated the effects of Jim Crow laws in keeping blacks down. They should instead redirect their attention and learn from Asian Americans so that they could help blacks get ahead in society. On the other hand, the accomplishments of Asian Americans were supposed to show how the nation was actively working to overcome its racist ways; in the case of the Los Angeles Unified School District, this entailed help- ing grade school children rise above the negative impact of racism. In this context, the successes of Lee, Aiso, and Wong were supposed to help mi- noritized children develop a healthy sense of self-esteem while prompting white children to recognize the contributions of raciali zed minorities to the growth of the nation so that they could move past their racist views. Notably, what both th ese examples reveal are the various ways Asian American firsts became vehicles to promote state agendas. These notable pioneers had revealed a continuing struggle to define the credibility of U.S. democracy through racial progress; Asian Americans figured centrally in these attempts.

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