Abstract
Better remembering the Chinese Exclusion Act would also help us connect to potent examples of what has always been most right about America, in the form of profoundly inspiring American identities and stories: those of the poets who carved their texts on the walls of Angel Island’s holding facility; those of Yung Wing, his evolving Chinese American life and identity, and his multigenerational American family; and those of Yung’s 120 students at the Chinese Educational Mission, their own Chinese American experiences and lifelong impacts, and their climactic victory on an Oakland baseball field.
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Notes
Because the order of first and last names is generally reversed in Chinese (as compared to English), I will refer to Yung Wing in subsequent references as Yung. The other best candidate for the century’s most famous Chinese American would likely be Wong Chin Foo; for more on Wong see Scott Seligman’s biography (slated for a June 2013 release), which calls Wong in its title The First Chinese American.
This is only anecdotal evidence, but my sons’ Chinese American grandparents, who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s and for the past three decades have lived in Connecticut (where Yung likewise spent nearly all of his time in America), knew Yung’s name and that he had graduated from Yale but no other details of his American experiences or identity.
The full text of Yung’s memoir, along with many other relevant historical documents and materials, is available online (in addition to the published versions held by various libraries and collections) at the wonderful Yung Wing Project, http://ywproject.x10.mx/.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that Yung necessarily intended for the CEM students to marry in America and create multicultural and-generational Chinese American families. Rather, I believe that the CEM plan, from its earliest origins to every aspect of its design and execution, represented Yung’s attempt to bring together China and America and create new communities and identities out of that intersection, ones that would no matter their specifics thus parallel Yung’s own evolving life and experiences.
These debates and different perspectives, as well as many of the details of the students and their experiences to which I will refer below, are collected and presented at the excellent Chinese Educational Mission Connections website (http://www.cemconnections.org/).
Kearnyism refers to Denis Kearney, the San Francisco-area labor leader and inveterate anti-Chinese racist who contributed greatly to the nation’s rising nativist sentiment and the ultimate passage of the Exclusion Act. Since Kearney and his peers often addressed crowds in San Francisco’s sandlots, their movement was also known as Sandlotism.
Sherman refers to the court cases I discussed in Chapter 1, those that upheld the Exclusion Act and its subsequent extensions. The full text of this letter is transcribed at the Yung Wing Project website.
Just as I did with Yung, I should make clear that I don’t intend to treat the Mission students as representative of all Chinese Americans in this era. For the vast majority of Chinese (and Asian) immigrants, as I discussed above, their experiences of and with America were significantly different from those of the students, and deserve their own attention and remembrance. But nonetheless, the students’ experiences and identities form another, and to my mind a powerful and inspiring, Chinese American community, and one we can and should include in our national histories. Again, given the CEM’s ostensible emphasis on enhancing the students’ service to China, my description of them as Chinese American is certainly debatable—but I believe both that it was Yung’s goal to create such transnational identities, mirroring and carrying forward his own, and that the students’ resulting experiences prove that he succeeded in doing so.
This quote, and other details of the team and this game, can be found in Joel S. Franks’ contribution to the book The American Game: Baseball and Ethnicity (2002).
The pitcher in this final game was not specifically identified in Wen’s account; but Wen does note that the pitcher was a Yale man, which was the case with Liang (and not with Wu, the team’s other best pitcher). Per a 9/4/1881 story in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Celestials won the game 11–8. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for supplementing my own knowledge of many of these details.
References
Hing, Bill Ong. Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Hsu, Francis L.K. Americans and Chinese: Passage to Differences. 3rd edition. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981.
La Fargue, Thomas E. China’s First Hundred: Educational Mission Students in the United States, 1872–1881. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1987.
Leibovitz, Leil and Matthew Miller. Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese Boys Who Came to America, Went to School, and Revolutionized an Ancient Civilization. New York: Norton, 2011.
Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/America: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Peffer, George Anthony. If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Rhoads, Edward J.M. Stepping Forth into the World: The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States, 1872–1881. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011.
Seligman, Scott. The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013.
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© 2013 Ben Railton
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Railton, B. (2013). What the Act Can Teach Us about Forgotten and Inspiring American Stories. In: The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us about America. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339096_4
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