Customer Reviews

Chinese American Portraits: Personal Histories, 1828-1988

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These are the first-person stories of some fifteen ordinary families - some composed by the subjects and some generated as oral histories - together with oodles of family photos - some in Old World regalia, some in tee-shirts and cut-offs; a cowboy, a NASCAR driver, a decorated Veteran, a Louisiana sheriff, a ballerina, an artist in his studio, a multi-millionaire real estate magnate with her bare feet up on her desk. They, like you and I, are all immigrants or the descendents of immigrants. In this album, the immigrants are Chinese.

In the current malodorous sump of American politics, where Screaming Heads on TV have more influence than face-to-face time with neighbors or books, certain demagogues have done their utmost to foment fear of immigration and loathing of immigrant groups who bring different religious cultures. The Chinese were subject to just such virulent racism during the last decades of the 19th Century. A national law was passed, by the Congress of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, to exclude the Chinese from immigration. They were branded as unassimilable, in large part because of their religion, or lack of a proper religion from a WASP perspective. They were called morally degenerate, phsyically unappealing, unsanitary, and over-sexed. It was a felony in many states for a "white" person to marry one. Certain writers, including Madison Grant, warned that they would outbreed the "great race" of Northern Europeans, that they had aspirations in fact to do so and to dominate the world.

One chapter in this book, concerning several generations of the Wong Family in Albert Lea, Minnesota, has powerful personal meaning to me. I was born on a farm near Albert Lea. My father was an immigrant and my mother's family were "old world" in all but clothing. There was one Chinese restaurant in the whole county, owned by the one Chinese family in Albert Lea, the Wongs. My mother went to high school with a Wong girl. I'd like to brag that they were friends, but the Wongs of her generation don't remember having friends until they moved away to Chicago and New York. One of the Wong girls married a Haitian in New York, becoming Eleanor Wong Telemaque, a writer. Shawn Wong also became a writer and a race-car driver. Eleanor's daughter Adrienne became a ballerina and married Philip Nash, of Irish and Japanese descent. I'm afraid my mother and her siblings lost a huge opportunity; the Wongs were probably the most interesting neighbors they had in Albert Lea, Minnesota in the 1930s.

I bought this for my wife. She did not read it but I have. The portraits are of people with different experiences. It's a good read.