OUR AMERICA: Those Who Don’t Know their History. . .
- By Igiaba Scego
New York, Chinatown, early 1900s. (Photo: Byron Company, Library of Congress)
AFTER THE US ELECTIONS and the resounding victory of Donald Trump, the word “fascism” has been trotted out widely in public discussions. Even during his campaign the new President-elect was associated from time to time with the figures of both Benito Mussolini and Adoph Hitler. Some writers, especially in Italy, also compared him to ex-Prime Minister (also billionaire) Silvio Berlusconi (even though, we should recall, the Italian leader did distance himself from the American). Some analysts labored further, defining Trump as a right-wing Hugo Chávez, a KKK caudillo. Each of these pairings have something in common: they all explain the Trump phenomenon—and that of his backers—by means of comparisons with cultures distinct from that of the United States.
It is no coincidence that the post-election leitmotif has been that “the 1930s are coming back.” But is that accurate?
It is certainly true that—as the scholar Ruth Ben Ghiat reminded us in her New Yorker interview—there are many parallels between Trump and Mussolini. The same authoritarianism, the same exaggerated machismo, the same scorn for the rules of civilized society. A view of the world dominated by a single supreme, misogynist, and racist ego, with elements of extreme vulgarity added in.
From this angle, the thirties comparison is timely and fits well. But it may not be the only historical parallel helpful in explaining Donald Trump.
In effect, together with the 1930s, the spectre of 1882 has come alive as well.
That year—on May 6, 1882 to be precise—the US Congress enacted the law most commonly referred to as the Chinese Exclusion Act, a legal measure banned the entry Chinese laborers from the national territory of the United States (though visas could be granted to “merchants, diplomats, and students.” This unprecedented, wholesale denial of rights to the Chinese targeted one of the most active (and numerous) of the immigrant communities in the West, particularly in California. Today, among US ethnic groups, Asian-Americans are stereotypically considered, in a way that is obviously false, as an undifferentiated population, and are often portrayed as an almost fully assimilated and therefore “model minority.” As a result, today one rarely hears of Americans whose ancestry is Chinese or Japanese spoken of as a “problem population,” a group to keep an eye on.
Lily Chu, the owner of a souvenir shop in Chinatown. New York, 1940s. (Photo: Marjory Collins, Library of Congress)
Roughly one hundred and fifty years ago, however, it was a different story entirely: public opinion and the media maintained that the Chinese (and later it would be the Japanese) were the group that needed to be watched. They were declared Public Enemy #1, top priority: the so-called Yellow Peril had to be vanquished and silenced. Their situation is reminiscent—in a contemporary America that prepared the rise of Donald Trump—of the current status of Muslims and Mexicans, targeted today by anti-immigrant propaganda. Shifting the analytic focus from political strongmen to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—that apparently distant history—allows us to understand the role that the undercurrents of homegrown, made-in-the-USA racism played during the recent electoral campaign.
Although a few came earlier, the first significant numbers of Chinese immigrants arrived in the 1850s.
In the nineteenth century, China was going through a difficult period. The Qing dynasty, which had held the reins for centuries, showed signs that it was sinking. The state bureaucratic machine had become massive, the economy was enduring an unending crisis, commerce was flagging, and the country’s demographic growth was unparalleled. Moreover, it was precisely during the first part of the nineteenth century that China, which had always been a somewhat isolated country, was forced come to terms with the leading powers of Europe (who themselves had enormous economic interests in Asia). This was a period where great instability and bloody revolts opened up across the country. In this precarious situation, the notorious Opium Wars administered the coup de grâce, causing many Chinese to seek security and serenity abroad.
For many, the destination of choice was the United States, a large, young country nourishing itself on low-cost labor as if workers were its daily bread. The Chinese were just what America needed—particularly after 1848, with the country working through its frenzy of gold fever. The Gold Rush involved above all California. And, in the short-term, as Iris Chang describes in The Chinese in America, it also created a demand for infrastructure of the like never before experienced in the US. There was a need for new housing, for new stores, and, more importantly, for railways. As so many Hollywood Western depictions of the frontier have taught us, the railway system in the United States was a truly serious enterprise: an enterprise that pitted the state against traditional landholders, modernity against an essentially rural past. The trains had to forge connections across distant and difficult terrain. What the Westerns don’t often tell us, though, is that many miles of this railway were built by the Chinese: without Chinese immigration, the Transcontinental Railroad (which united the Atlantic coast states with California and the Pacific Ocean) would never have seen the light of day.
Chinese immigrants in San Francisco read the headlines about the Japanese invasion of Tianjin, in 1937, at the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. (Photo: Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress)
The Chinese cost their new American bosses next to nothing. They weren’t unionized and they were, according to all accounts, very efficient workers. Of them, it was said that “they never get tired” and that “they’re as tame as lambs.” For many who had witnessed the collapse of the slave system, the Chinese were worthy substitutes for the blacks—less unruly and more obedient. Such positive opinions were matched by positive legislative measures. The Burlingame Treaty between China and the US guaranteed that Chinese immigrants would have the same rights as other residents; it protected them from exploitation, discrimination, and violence. Mark Twain, particularly happy at the 1868 announcement of the treaty, commented,
“It affords me infinite satisfaction to call particular attention to [Article III of the treaty], and think of the howl that will go up from the cooks, the railroad graders, and the cobblestone artists of California, when they read it. They can never beat and bang and set the dogs on the Chinamen any more.”
Twain, who years later would denounce the colonial abuses in Congo by King Leopold, had been disgusted by legal attitudes toward the Chinese. Despite the violence they’d suffered he had never seen a police officer hasten to their defence. Effectively slaves without rights, Twain hoped he would at last see them freed, thanks to the Burlingame Treaty.
The reality was just the opposite. Suddenly the stereotypes shifted, and the Chinese became the enemy. No longer docile, servile, and polite, they were instead opium addicts, sly, shady, manipulative, pedophiles, carriers of disease, and repellent—plus they had way too many babies. All this because they’d tried to improve their lives by opening up shops, now that much of the work that had brought them to the States was finished. More importantly, Chinese Americans were forced to find work in restaurants, laundries, and the like, given that discriminatory laws and attitudes prevented them from making a living in other ways.
By the 1870s an unprecedented amount of anti-Chinese propaganda was in circulation. In such propaganda, union workers and their bosses were on the same side. Other workers, including other immigrant workers, saw the Chinese as competition and objected to their requests for better pay. And suddenly the newspapers most hostile to immigrants, but also the mainstream press, became filled with caricatures of long-braided Chinese getting kicked in the ass by Uncle Sam. The message was that “The Chinese Must Go,” a slogan coined by the union leader Denis Kearney; he was inspired by the Roman senator Cato and his dictum, Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam (“Carthage must be destroyed”). The Chinese had been warned: either they left, or their lives were in danger.
The Birth of Chinatown
Such hatred inevitably carried over into new legislative restrictions. As Erika Lee makes clear in America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943, the way for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had been prepared by other laws that, step by step, restricted the Chinese community’s field of operations. First it was prohibited for the Chinese to marry whites, then they were restricted from careers in public administration, in some states (including California) a mining tax was imposed at a level nearly equal to their wages, and there were also restrictions regarding housing policies. Such stipulations impelled many of the Chinese to give up their jobs in mining and agriculture in order to look for shelter near large cities, which many felt to be more secure. The mantra was “we have to stay together” and “we have to remain united.” And so, in suburban areas, all the famous Chinatowns rose up, urban areas built in response to the reality of racist thought. They were ghettos where those who felt threatened looked for protection from their peers.
The threat was real. Those once virtual boots in the butt from Uncle Sam now became all too concrete. One hundred and fifty armed whites in Rock Spring burned down the houses of Chinese citizens. The same rage ran through cities like Denver, Seattle, and Tacoma, Washington. In Los Angeles the lynchings of 1871 set a record for the cruelty with which they were committed. Twenty bodies, including some teenagers, were hung on lampposts, scattered on the ground, lacerated in a thousand different ways. Calle de Los Negros—a narrow street crowded with shops, laundromats, bordellos, and homes—was sacked and looted. And it was in this constant, increasing climate of hate that the Chinese Exclusion Act was developed, one of the most notorious pieces of legislation in all of American jurisprudence (abolished only in 1943).
Throughout this long period, as Fabio Giovannini describes in Ugly Yellow Mugs: The Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Cambodians –New Monsters in Our Fantasy World, the Chinese are made to seem inferior in a variety of ways. Giovannini reviews a long list of cartoons, theatrical performances, films, and books where the Chinese are described as “racial enemies.” One of the heroes of this negative epic, lucidly analyzed by Giovannini, is the crime lord Fu Manchu, a creation of the British writer Sax Rohmer. Published serially by Collier’s, the story of this Bin Laden in Szechuan sauce quickly expanded into a saga.
New York, Chinatown, between1901 and 1913 (Library of Congress)
Fu Manchu has a cruel mother, a wide forehead, arched eyebrows, a treacherous stare, and garish clothing. Rohmer describes him as a man who likes to make a show of himself, first of all for his height, and then by his excessive care to language. He is a cultivated man, and he has earned many diplomas, all in the West, yet he is assigned a form of magical thinking that mixes scientific knowledge with superstition. In effect, like a shaman in certain voodoo rituals, he mixes the poison from scorpions with that of vipers. Fabio Giovannini emphasizes that, for the author, Fu Manchu is a fifth column, an infiltrator in the West, someone who has studied the white man in order to eat him alive—a bit like those cartoons where in the eighteenth century the Chinese gobbled up Uncle Sam. Fu Manchu was actually preparing an invasion and the coming Chinese dominion over humanity. The only thing that stands in his way is Nayland Smith (an ante litteram Trump?): the white man, and frequently blond, Scotland Yard inspector, the last bastion against the greatest enemy for us all.
The saga of Fu Manchu would continue to have unprecedented success, especially in cinema. Records were set by the Fu Manchu of Boris Karloff in 1934, but also by Christopher Lee in the seventies, when the Chinese enemy was led by Mao Zedong. With Fu Manchu, Hollywood began a practice it has followed practically up to the present day, to put it simply, a “ready-to-wear” China: yellowface, the custom of giving white actors a Chinese makeover, a practice later adapted for the Japanese. Even a quick run through the list of famous Hollywood actors who performed in yellowface is shocking: Marlon Brando is Sakini in The Teahouse of the August Moon, Katherine Hepburn plays a Chinese farmer in Dragon Seed, Mickey Rooney is the bumbling Lord Yunioshi, continually made fun of by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s—and that leaves unmentioned a truly improbable Genghis Khan, played by John Wayne, in The Conqueror. These actors all submitted to the torture of eye clips (or adhesive strips) in order to simulate epicanthic folds, not to mention an excessive use of greasepaint and ridiculous accents.
Fu Manchu and the Dragon Lady
If, on the one hand there was Fu Manchu and his feminine counterpart, the sensual Dragon Lady (a woman better killed and dismembered than loved), on the other, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America did its best to reassure itself, producing innocuous, chubby, and peaceful characters like Charlie Chan. Or the countless Chinese or Japanese women who were always head over their heels in love with a white man, a man they could never marry and who would only bring them to kill themselves. Oriental women were either Turandot or Madame Butterfly.
The few Asian-American actors (above all we should remember the great Anna May Wong) had a hard life in Hollywood. They had a choice: accept stereotyping or give up. And the representation of the other was never harmless; it confirmed the inferiorization of a community that had been used and abused by a capitalist system with no interest in pacifying conflicts—the system preferred to exacerbate tensions in order to profit from them. Fu Manchu and his eponyms (think of Dr. No in 007’s Spectre in License to Kill—a mixed-race Chinese man, and thus twice as dangerous—or of Ming, the ruthless enemy in Flash Gordon who became George Lucas’s model for Darth Vader and Palpatine) were in fact only the cogs of a system that would find ever-new enemies, ready for use in a brutal form of capitalism.
It’s not by chance that Jean Pfaelzer, in his book Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americas, speaks about war. Because from time to time, the immigrants of yesterday and today become the protagonists in wars for their destruction. In the United States as in Italy, in France as in Australia. It is far from clear that the real goal for the wall Trump that promises to build is stopping the immigrants. What is certain is that such talk makes the status of these immigrants, as residents in the US, more precarious and coercible.
The dictators of the 1930s may be useful in understanding something about the rise of Trump, but taking an additional step back and examining the history of anti-Chinese hysteria might clarify what we should expect from the future.
Igiaba Scego is an Somali Italian writer. A translated excerpt from her novel Adua was published in Summer 2016 Issue of the Massachusetts Review (Vol 57, Issue 2) and her work is forthcoming in the Winter issue. The original version of this essay can be found here.
Translation by Jim Hicks.
