MCLC: Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion exhibt

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Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion exhibt
Source: NYT (10/2/14): http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/arts/design/chinese-american-exclusion-inclusion-exhibition-opens.html
Great Job on the Railroad. Now Go Back to China.
‘Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion’ Exhibition Opens
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
“Steinway Hall, East 14th Street, May 8, 1877,” on display as part of the exhibit “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” at the New-York Historical Society. CreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times
The tea dumped in Boston Harbor’s party came from China. So did George Washington’s china. The Erie Canal was inspired by China’s Grand Canal. And the lure of Chinese trade spurred the building of the transcontinental railroad. (The labor force for its western segment was 80 percent Chinese.) Without Chinese exclusion laws, which by the late 19th century were severely restricting Chinese immigration, the regulations and bureaucracy that now shape immigration policy might never have arisen.
But the narrative at the New-York Historical Society’s vigorous and imaginative new exhibition — “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” — is not just of China’s impact on United States history (which is part of the story) or of the experiences and suffering of Chinese immigrants (which is another part). It is how Chinese-American identity came to be, how immigration and discrimination were followed by recrimination and conflict, and how, finally, a people’s trials give way to celebration.
>From left, “Waves of Identity:35 Years of Archiving,” at the Museum of Chinese in America; Virginia Wong, left, and Hazel Ying Lee in the early 1930s; and the Chin family section of “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” at the New-York Historical Society.CreditLeft and right, Emon Hassan for The New York Times; center, Frances M. Tong, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) Collection
The exhibition offers, in other words, a variation on the theme of identity museums, our era’s most distinctive museum genre. For each social, ethnic and religious group — and American history has now become a history of groups — museums and exhibitions have been shaping similar stories.
The society’s show is being presented in conjunction with a separate, more modest exhibition downtown, “Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving,” in an institution that evolved out of these very impulses: the Museum of Chinese in America.
That show’s curators, Herb Tam and Yue Ma, have gathered artifacts around questions related to Chinese-American identity (“How do you become American?” or “What does it mean to be Chinese?”), explaining, along the way, how the museum arose out of 20th-century identity politics and set itself the task of preserving the ephemera of Chinatown. That museum’s permanent exhibition also surveys Chinese-American history, emphatically embracing the identity narrative.
Oversize ID cards in the “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” exhibition.CreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times
But the historical society show breaks many of that narrative’s boundaries. The material gathered by its curator, Marci Reaven, who oversees history exhibitions at the society — working with other historians, including John Kuo Wei Tchen, a co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America — shows almost no aspect of American life untouched.
The interactions began soon after the nation’s founding. In 1784, a boat called the Empress of China sailed from New York to Canton, bearing furs, lead, wine, 30 tons of American ginseng and Mexican silver dollars to trade for Chinese goods: porcelain, silk, tea. The Continental Congress sent along a florid letter, betraying the naïveté of a democratic nation by invoking every imaginable hierarchical title. It is addressed to: “Most serene, serene, most puissant, puissant, high, illustrious, noble, honorable, venerable, wise and prudent emperors, kings, republics, princes, dukes, earls, barons, lords, burgo-masters, counsellors, as also judges, officers, justiciaries and regents of all the good cities and places, whether ecclesiastical or secular.”
And though we are tantalized here by the portrait of Anson Burlingame (1820-70) — Lincoln appointed him minister to China; China later appointed him a consul, and he became an enlightened advocate of mutual understanding — the course of 19th-century relations was far from genteel. With China’s defeat in the two Opium Wars, it lost the power to restrict Western commerce; we see a reproduction of an opium ball as it would have been taken to China by traders, some six inches in diameter and wrapped in poppy petals.
The New-York Historical Society show also includes a re-creation of the detention barracks on Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, where many new arrivals from China were held while their immigration status was checked. CreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times
Another result of those wars, which opened China to proselytizing, is evident in a 34-star 1861 American flag, its stripes containing Chinese and English inscriptions; it flew on a steamboat that coursed through 1,200 miles of Chinese rivers as a Protestant American missionary distributed religious tracts.
Unfortunately, in this show, we then lose track of China until the 20th century. After being caricatured as the “yellow peril,” China became a welcome ally during the World War II and then regained yellow peril status after the Communists took over in 1949. The exhibition paints with overly broad strokes here (and gives no credence at all to concerns about Chinese espionage), but these political shifts affected the fortunes and opportunities of Chinese-Americans. The modern era of “normalization” is signified by two 1972 Ping-Pong paddles bearing the portraits of Richard M. Nixon and Mao Zedong, commemorating their diplomacy after the ice was broken by their countries’ table tennis matches. But what happened during this history to Chinese immigrants? From the 1850s to the 1870s, tens of thousands of Chinese mined for gold and silver and worked in the American West. According to an 1880 census, the residents of Deadwood (in what is now South Dakota) included 238 Chinese men and 15 Chinese women; among their number were cooks and miners but also a doctor, a land speculator and a barber. One in four miners during the 1860s was Chinese. And they were so successful that, in 1870, shipments of gold and silver to China were valued at $6 million.
But this success (there were 105,000 Chinese in the United States by 1880) was accompanied by hatred and anti-Chinese riots. An 1875 law required that any Chinese woman seeking to enter the country had to prove she wasnot a prostitute. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act: a law that limited Chinese immigration and was renewed in various forms until 1943, prohibiting entry to Chinese laborers while allowing students, teachers, merchants and diplomats.
We see an 1883 issue of a newspaper here, The Chinese American, whose name may have been the first time that term was ever used — in this case, as a provocation; its editor, Wong Chin Foo, defiantly opposed the new legislation. At the same time, lawsuits by Chinese-Americans began to attack discrimination and affirm citizenship rights.
The show’s central portion is a series of theatrical environments meant to evoke Angel Island: the Ellis Island of the West Coast. But no lamp is lifted beside a golden door. Because of the strictures of the Exclusion Act, many prospective immigrants were coached or took on counterfeit identities; vast numbers were held in detention barracks, at least until their immigration status could be scrutinized. Despairing, many wrote poems, . later preserved and transcribed, on the wooden walls.
The most touching element of the show is its simplest. A single family — ancestors of a Bronx-born Amy Chin (who is, unfortunately, not otherwise identified) — is traced over multiple generations, its history told in graphic-novel style. We see a 1940 license for Ms. Chin’s grandfather’s laundry on Lexington Avenue; a United States Army death certificate for Ms. Chin’s uncle in 1944; an account of her father and mother separated by immigration restrictions for nine years. But we also see the transformation of the Chins into an American family; they return to visit their ancestral home as tourists.
With a more pointed political edge, this transformation can be seen in the Museum of Chinese in America’s exhibition: traces left by multiple lives, wrestling with the development of an identity that had never before existed. (It is also worth seeing an exhibition of the artworks of Phillip Chen there: He distills his personal history into symbolic blueprints, mysterious and allusive, as if constructing an identity from artifacts and fragments.)
But I wish that the historical society’s identity narrative had been given an even wider perspective. This narrative has become so dominant in the museum world, partly to replace old “melting pot” accounts of immigration; it was also meant to modify the idealization of American history.
This has led to new insights but also new problems. Why, for example, in the face of certain hostility, possible imprisonment and inevitable poverty, was the demand for immigration so persistent? It isn’t as if the difficulties were unknown; we even see here an account of a 1905 Chinese protest in Canton against the Exclusion Act, with a call to boycott American goods. Yet demand continued.
We can begin to understand only by expanding the context. What led to the migrations from China? How did racism in the 19th-century United States compare with other nations’ treatment of alien peoples? Injustices cannot be assessed in isolation. There is no need to return to idealization, but also no need to leave so much unexplored.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 6, 2014
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