Citation: Kwong, Peter. The New Chinatown. Macmillan, 1996.
During the late 19th century into the mid 20th century, Chinese migrants living in the United States often endured similar forms of violence and racism as did African Americans during the age of Jim Crow law dominance. While the struggles of Chinese people within time and space, those being the development of Chinatowns within the last century, have been highlighted in scholarship around anti-Asian sentiment。 It is important to apply lenses of intersectionality in order to better understand how the oppression placed on Chinese migrants was not only carried out, but developed using tactics that other minority groups suffered under during this time period.
The first important point that the author Peter Kwang made in the first chapter of the book is moderately explicit in his description of the skewed image of why Chinese came to work in the United States during the 19th century. While many see push and pull factors such as overpopulation in China as well as the Western Powers’ increasing influence in Asia, Kwang argues that such a relationship depicts a rather incomplete image on what was really going on. In terms of using a push and pull frame to explain why Chinese migrated to America, Kwong argues that such a frame “implies an equal and mutually beneficial relationship between the Chinese in need of work and the US employers in need of labor, and ignores the unequal power relationship between China and the Western powers” (Kwong, 18). Many of the push and pull factors such as lack of food due to overpopulation, which was common in areas of China at the time, show desperation and exigence that would not fit into a logical win for win situation.
Another important point Kwang surfaces in order to better the audience’s understanding of the history of Chinese in the United States is the concept of intersectionality in relation to the proliferation of systemic racism from African-Americans to Chinese-Americans. As Kwong writes, “Jim Crowism, first directed against “free-blacks,” began to affect the Chinese as well” (Kwang, 26). While many laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act that passed in the spring of 1882 showed oppression from institutions and governing agents, Kwang also dives into other places intersectionality can be applied to investigate oppression and prejudice, such as in employment where Kwang explains that “Chinese immigrant laborers, in short, were in many instances treated no better than slaves, and their survival rate was no higher” (Kwong, 20). He goes onto explain how institutions affect other realms such as personal and career life, by stating that “Such attitudes laid the groundwork for treatment of the Chinese as “exploitable” labor, for emigrants from a backward country that had been subdued by the superior powers of the West could never be viewed as equaled or truly “welcomed” by the people of the United States” (Kwang, 21).
An important considering Kwang forms in this first chapters in terms of intersectionality is important in understanding that while African Americans and Chinese migrants were oppressed using the same laws, the two minority groups in the United States were not liberated at the same time. Kwong gives an example where “although the Fifteenth Amendment of 1860 extended citizenship to “persons of African descent,” it explicitly allowed the extension of the exclusion to the so-called non taxed Indians, which included Mongolians and Chinese” (Kwoang, 27). While there are social motivations by those establishing such policies and laws into the United States on both state and federal levels of governance, there is a visible shift in terms of what other factors went into the United State’s evolving views on Chinese.
While many Americans wanted to welcome Chinese during the construction of the transcontinental railroad, such welcoming sentiment was hurriedly forgotten upon the near completion of the railway. It was after the development of the rail system that the United States started implementing its plethora of anti-Chinese legislation, including the Chinese Exclusion Act. Kwang describes this one sided relationship America had with Chinese migrants, claiming ”So long as the United States remained a largely agricultural country, the excluded peoples, blacks and Indians, could be exploited in isolation, within such closed institutional structures as plantations and reservations” (Kwong, 35).
While the application of Jim Crow law onto Chinese migrants in the United States has been discussed, there is another form of intersectionality that needs to be discussed in order to gain a more complete picture of the Chinese experience in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. While the Chinese were victims of a pre-existing method of minority suppression, they also, in consequence of white frames of normalcy and nationalism, were a sort of blue print in which White America used to perpetuate racism and oppression onto other minority groups. “It is easy to see that the language of these attacks justified assaults not only on the Chinese but also on blacks and other “undesirable” minorities. And in fact, the craft unions’ exclusion of Chinese workers was to serve as a model for their treatment of other racial and natural groupings” (Kwang, 35).
Finally, the way in which Kwong describes the Chinatown that was established in New York in conjunction with intersectionality studies helps us understand outside of white frames of normalcy why New York Chinatown had its specific social structures. A reason why many White Americans saw Chinatowns as slums and bad areas was because the ways in which society was organized was outside of white constructs. While the grand majority of Chinese were oppressed in the United States at this time, there was no comfort in American culture because there was no way of proper assimilation due to strong racial boundaries, therefore many Chinatowns adopted Chinese methods of hierarchy structuring. ”The internal social and political structure of all the Chinatowns was a virtual replica of that of the home province, with place of origin and kinship relationships remaining as critical in the United States as they had been in China” (Kwong, 39).
While Chinatowns today may be seem as vibrant hubs for culture from the distant east of the world, it is important to analyze them for what they really were in their conception. In doing so, along with critically analyzing “push and pull factors” and using the critical lens of intersectionality, we are able to gain from Kwong’s reading a deeper understanding of not only how Chinatowns got to America centuries ago, but also how Chinese were organized within a “copy and paste” system of proliferating and applying different oppressive boundaries on minority populations that arguably still occurs to this day.
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