Strangers from a Different Shore

Takaki asserts that discriminatory immigration policies and anti-Asian racism forced Chinese settlers to live in “ethnic islands” in the mainland US, where they developed their own distinct communities (230). Immigration rules separated Chinese couples, as working men could emigrate but not permitted to bring their wives. Many lamented the long years they spent in the US trying to earn enough money to return home. Seeking to be reunited with their families, many Chinese settlers tried to find loopholes in the law, such as pretending to be merchants, who could bring family members to the US. Some took advantage of the San Francisco earthquake and fire, which destroyed immigration records, to pretend to be American citizens and invite their families to join them. These men forged or purchased American birth certificates, allowing them to bring their children, or other friends or family members, to the US. These children were called “paper sons” as they were not always actually been related to their “fathers.”

These men had to carefully prepare their stories as they traveled from China to the US, as they were questioned by immigration officials on Angel Island, who could deny them entry. The island had a detention center where potential immigrants stayed in squalid conditions while their applications were being processed. About 10% of them were rejected and sent back to China, while the rest continued on to San Francisco, where they sought homes and work in Chinatowns. In 1924, the federal government passed a law which banned immigration from China. Partly because of “paper sons” arrangements, about 50,000 Chinese people had still managed to emigrate through Angel Island.

By the mid-20th century the vast majority of Asian Americans lived in urban centers. Small towns, predominantly populated with white Americans, tended to hold few opportunities for Chinese immigrants, who increasingly moved to large cities where they mostly found work in the service industry, such as in restaurants and laundries. Because they faced intense discrimination in white society, many Chinese Americans worked for other Chinese people or began their own businesses, often borrowing money from relatives to start their ventures. Laundry work, a typical Chinese American business, was grueling and constant but not high paying. Takaki cites sociologist Paul Siu’s work, which documented the hardships laundrymen faced as they struggled with constant physical work as well as loneliness, poverty, family separation, and homesickness. Some Chinese American businesses, such as Joe Shoong’s National Dollar Store, were great successes, but their success often depended on exploiting Chinese workers. Moreover, most Chinese Americans in these decades were stuck in dead-end, menial jobs.

By the 1920s there were significant Chinatowns in San Francisco, New York, Oakland, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, and Boston. These communities were no longer temporary places of shelter for male Chinese workers, but now included Chinese families and a range of businesses. Takaki likens the average Chinatown to a “slum” or a “ghetto” where the standard of living was low, epidemics were more common, and there were few maintained public spaces (246). Chinese Americans encouraged “tourism” from white Americans who were curious to visit Chinatowns and held events such as the Dragon Festival and Chinese New Year festivities. Tourism decreased during the Great Depression, but its profits still helped Chinese Americans survive.

Children represented a small fraction of the Chinese American community. They often watched or helped their parents work, either laboring at home or accompanying parents to factories. Chinese parents tried to protect their children from discrimination by warning them away from white neighborhoods, where they could be victims of violence, and telling them to ignore the racist verbal abuse they experienced in school and in public. Second-generation Chinese Americans balanced their Chinese upbringing with American influences, often learning both languages and incorporating different foods, dress, and customs into their lives. Many had more liberal politics and lifestyles than the older generation, believing in women’s liberation and love marriages instead of arranged marriages. Some of the second generation also questioned their parents’ expectations of filial piety, preferring to be more independent. These younger Chinese Americans wanted a better life than their parents had, but most could not afford to go to college, and many faced discrimination in the labor market. When they were hired, some were still paid less than white colleagues. Facing these frustrating conditions, some Chinese Americans considered moving to China, but Japan invaded China in the 1930s. In the years preceding World War ll, Chinese Americans anxiously followed the news about China’s war with Japan.

Many Koreans moved from the harsh world of Hawaiian plantations to the mainland US in search of better work. They mostly settled in California, but some spread out across the country. Koreans came in much smaller numbers than Japanese or Chinese immigrants, and therefore did not establish populated enclaves. However, they still retained a strong sense of ethnicity and community. Like other Asians, Koreans experienced discrimination in the housing market and service industry and racist abuse from white Americans who saw them as competition in the labor market. Some white Americans organized xenophobic groups, such as the Korean Exclusion League, which specifically advocated for their exclusion from the country. These efforts were effective; in 1907, President Roosevelt banned Koreans from moving from Hawaii to the US, and in 1913 California passed the Alien Land Act of 1913, which prevented foreigners from owning or renting land. Like the Japanese, some Koreans got around this rule by listing land in their American-born children’s names.

Most Korean migrants were men. In the city, they tended to work as janitors, gardeners, restaurant workers, and in domestic service, while in rural areas they worked on the railroad or in agriculture, the dominant profession for Koreans. Farm work was migratory, with laborers traveling from farm to farm seeking temporary planting or harvesting jobs. This work was physically grueling and offered workers little pay and no stability.

Many Koreans cooperated financially: In their kae system, Korean friends would put money into a shared fund, each taking a turn to borrow and repay their loans back to the group. This allowed Koreans to establish their own enterprises without traditional sources of funding. Some Koreans, such as fruit farming giant Kim Hyung-soon, created successful businesses.

Takaki characterizes Korean Americans as intensely patriotic and dedicated to Korea’s liberation from Japan, which occupied their country after a brutal invasion in 1909. Many Koreans in the US donated to American-based patriotic Korean organizations and to Korean language newspapers that supported freedom for Korea. Some groups were militant, training Koreans in how to fight in preparation for battles of liberation in Korea. They honored the thousands of Koreans that the Japanese had killed or tortured during their invasion of the country between 1907 and 1909. Anti-Japanese sentiment ran high in Korean communities, and many Korean people missed home but did not want to return to Korea to live under Japanese rule.

Takaki asserts that Koreans had an “accommodationist strategy” in which they learned English and converted to Christianity, hoping that this would help them win the acceptance and approval of white American society. However, Korean parents were still distressed to see Korean American children lose some of the Korean culture. Second-generation Korean Americans tended to dress more like white Americans and ate more Western food. They were less invested in Korean patriotism efforts and could not relate to their parents’ feelings of homesickness. These different experiences created a divide between the first and second generations of Koreans in the US.

Like Korean immigrants, people from India also came in small numbers and spread out across the US. As such, they did not establish “Indiatowns” or live in ethnic enclaves. Most Indian immigrants were Sikh, while a minority were Muslim or Hindu. However, white Americans tended to mistakenly identify all Indians as “Hindoo.” Although they had darker complexions than white Americans, Indians were perceived as racially “caucasian.”

However, this did not protect them from verbal and physical racist abuse by white Americans. Moreover, the Asiatic Exclusion League, an organization of white Americans who lobbied for a ban on Asian immigration, maintained that while Europeans and Indians shared ancestors, the Indians had become “Eastern Aryans” who were “slaves of Creation” and a “degraded race” (297-98). The courts ultimately agreed, acknowledging Indians’ status as “caucasians” but citing the law’s wording that naturalized citizenship should be limited to “white” people—and, crucially, ruling that Indians were not “white.”

While white American social commentators noted Indians’ “caucasian” origins, many writers argued that their presence in the US was unwanted as they posed troublesome competition in a labor market which should cater only to whites. As they had done to other Asians, white Americans caricatured Indians as “dangerous rivals” to white workers in the US (297). Like other Asian groups, Indians were negatively affected by the 1924 ban on immigration from non-white countries. Shut out from white society and prevented from ever obtaining citizenship, many Indians chose to return home. Those who stayed toiled in menial jobs. Their oppression in the US helped to reinforce the importance of securing independence for India by ending British colonial rule, and several hundred returned to India to participate in anti-colonial uprisings.

While most Indian immigrants came from farming backgrounds, the majority were first employed in railroad work along the west coast. Many later found jobs on farms in California, since white American farmers were eager to fill jobs with cheap labor. On these properties Indian men harvested fruit and vegetables, dug ditches, and cleared land. Farmers were sorely in need of such help, since other Asian immigration had slowed due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Laborers worked 10 to 14 hour days under the supervision of a foreman, who hurried them in their tasks.

These workers slept rough outside, or slept in bunkhouses, tents, or sheds. They ate different diets, depending on their religious requirements, and depended on milk, butter, and roti bread. As most Indian workers were unmarried and far from their loved ones, their work “gangs” became like families to many men. By the 1920s Indian workers were paid better wages and some had managed to buy land and become farmers themselves. When the government limited land ownership to citizens, many Indians had to work around these rules or return to working for others. Less than 1% of Indian immigrants were women, and as a result Indian men did not have American children who could own land for them. However, some Indian men and white women managed to evade anti-miscegenation laws, and Indian men often married Mexican women. Takaki attributes Indian immigrants’ high divorce rate to the linguistic and cultural differences they had with their partners.

Some Indians in the US coped with their hardships by frequenting brothels or gambling, others preferred to debate and converse with friends, and still others formed religious communities with fellow believers. By the 1940s, Indians remained one of the smallest minorities of Asians in America, and with the lowest rates of education and professional occupations. The small number of Indian American children born to these families felt both detached from India and rejected from broader American society.

Filipino immigrants differed from other Asian groups in that the US occupation of the Philippines meant that they arrived in Hawaii and the US mainland as “American nationals” (315). After arriving in San Francisco, most Filipino newcomers began working in agriculture, domestic service, or fisheries. About a quarter of Filipinos worked as janitors, kitchen helpers, door men, or similar positions in private households or hotels. White employers were happy to hire Filipinos, as they were more desperate for work and did not expect to be tipped.

Almost 10% of Filipino workers were hired by Filipino or Japanese labor contractors to work in fisheries in Alaska for a seventh month season. There they worked 12 hour days, six days a week, cleaning salmon and packing it in boxes. Labor contractors manipulated and exploited Filipino workers by promising them a certain wage, but deducting most of it for various expenses. After months of work the laborers made very little, or sometimes were indebted to the contractor.

Sixty percent of Filipino workers in the US were migratory agricultural workers, traveling farm to farm as part of large crews doing menial farm jobs. They lived in basic camps with other workers, where resources were scarce, since the farm owners were not obligated to provide any kind of shelter or food for the workers. Farmers tended to make Filipino workers do “stoop labor,” a difficult working style in which they were bent over all day, working with the crops by hand.

In some instances Filipino workers struck to try to improve their terrible working conditions. However, with more low wage workers readily available, farmers often hired scabs, leaving the striking Filipinos out of work. In 1930 Filipino, Mexican, and white workers in the Imperial Valley struck, and even established the Agricultural Workers Industrial League, but the police arrested strikers and set bail at $40,000, ending the strike. Soon, Filipino workers formed the Filipino Labor Union (FLU), which organized strikes throughout the 1930s. Farmers pitted Filipinos against other ethnic groups, like Mexicans, and the police broke up many of the FLU’s strikes, however they did ultimately succeed in acquiring a higher wage and gained recognition as a legitimate union. Takaki asserts that these events were the beginning of “ethnic labor unionism” in the US (323).

The US government had justified its invasion of the Philippines with goals to educate Filipino people, referring to them as a “little brown brother” to Americans. However, Filipino people in the US received not “paternalism and benevolence” but racist discrimination from white individuals, businesses, and the housing market. Some white residents did not want Filipino people to live in their neighborhoods and tried to prevent them from renting or owning homes. Filipinos were also victimized by racist slander and caricatures circulated in the media which portrayed them as criminals and compared them to animals. Like other Asian workers, Filipinos were the victims of verbal abuse and violent attacks by white Americans who resented their competition for jobs. In numerous incidents white Americans beat Filipino people, or attacked them at their job sites, sometimes lethally.

Romantic relationships between Filipino men and white women prompted outrage and public discourse on interracial relationships, with politicians and writers publicly shaming and demonizing Filipino men, accusing them of being predatory toward women. Many public officials explicitly called for “race preservation” of white people, banning interracial marriages between Filipinos and white Americans in 13 states. Takaki attributes Filipinos’ tolerance for interracial relationships to their country’s history of ethnic mixing, as well as their lack of an arranged marriage system or the notions of racial purity found in other communities, such as the Japanese. Some Filipino-white couples moved to Washington state, where their marriages were legal, but still encountered hostility there.

Like other Asian immigrants, Filipinos were barred from naturalized citizenship because of their race. With cheap labor now readily available from Mexican immigrants, the US sought to exclude Filipinos and tried to incentivize them to return to the Philippines by offering free passage. Afraid of the stigma of failure, or limited by their poverty, four fifths of Filipino workers stayed in the US permanently. Filipino emigration to the US slowed after the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, which granted independence to the Philippines and limited Filipino immigrants to 50 per year.

Because of their smaller numbers, migratory work, and lack of merchant and business experience, Filipinos did not establish ethnic enclaves like Chinatowns. Instead they socialized at dance halls, gambling dens, and barbershops. With men vastly outnumbering women in the Filipino community, and with interracial relationships persecuted, many Filipino men were lonely and desperate for companionship. Some married Mexican women, with whom they shared a common language and religion.

Takaki recounts the life story of Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan, who endured years of exploitation and discrimination in the US as a menial laborer before becoming a journalist. He wrote about the contradictions of American society, in which white racists viciously abused people such as himself, while other white Americans were welcoming and compassionate. Bulosan wanted to give a voice to the United States’ most disrespected and exploited people, and observed that employers often pitted workers of different ethnicities against each other for their benefit. The author sought to help workers such as himself unite and discover their shared goals, and claim the US as their own.