May is AAPI heritage month, so PBS has been airing their new
Asian Americans special this week. It covers a lot of fascinating history that I hadn't heard of before, and it focuses on many immigrant communities such as Filipinos, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc. The episodes are narrated alternatingly by Daniel Dae Kim and Tamlyn Tomita.
It does cover Anna May Wong and Hollywood's practice of yellowface, then later mentions Margaret Cho's sitcom, and
The Joy Luck Club, but mostly the show spends its time on political, social, and legal issues about citizenship and discrimination. In the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, a number of Filipino people lived in a human zoo, on exhibit for the curious tourists to watch scripted "savage" culture such as dog-eating. Meanwhile, Chinese immigrants come for the Gold Rush but ended up staying as railroad workers, and other laborers. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act and
the fact that they are denied citizenship, the Chinese are forced to
essentially become undocumented immigrants, forging identity papers and trying not to get deported. Being unable to vote also meant that they had to sue for legal rights, such as
the case of Wong Kim Ark establishing birthright citizenship. Unfortunately, because U.S. legal rights were so often tied to either black or white race, that created contradictory treatment for people of yellow or brown races, trying to figure out their rights with respect to that dichotomy.
The episode on WW2 covers the Japanese internment camps through the saga of the divided Uno family, but also points out that Korean Americans were angry about Japan's imperial occupation of Korea. Philip Ahn, a Korean American, plays Japanese villains in propaganda movies while his sister Susan enlists in the Navy and becomes a gunnery officer. After the war, when China becomes communist, the McCarthy era makes Asian Americans fearful of being targeted as the enemy, just as the Japanese were during the war. Asians in general are looked on as sneaky and suspicious, perpetual foreigners who can't be trusted no matter how many years we've lived in America.
In the 1960s, Asian Americans become inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement to speak up and to unify. Filipinos join with Hispanic farm workers to strike for better working conditions, while college students on campus form a Third World Liberation Front to protest for ethnic studies classes. In the 70s, with the collapse of the American auto industry, a lot of people blame the Japanese for putting them out of work. As usual, white Americans can't tell us apart, so someone brutally murdered Vincent Chin, mistaking him for Japanese. (Not that murder would have been okay if Chin actually were Japanese, or in anyway connected to a Japanese automaker.) I was too young to have heard of Vincent Chin at the time, but apparently this hate crime attracted widespread outrage. Diverse activists have a vision of a Rainbow Coalition promoting peace and harmony among all races. However, we're far from such a utopia. In the wake of Rodney King's beating, racial tensions arise when Koreans and blacks are pitted against each other during the L.A. riots, instead of working against their mutual enemy, the racist whites committing police brutality.
Even today minorities are still trying to join together and put differences aside for the greater good. And we're trying with our white liberal allies to ensure that we vote out all these Trumpists and sycophants trying to kill us before the election. I read a news article that Governor Abbott and the indicted Lt. Governor are claiming that their reopen orders override all the local shelter-in-place orders by cities and counties. Republicans say they want local control, except when it's democratic officials in our big cities trying to save us. Fuck them!
