Long before the phrase “Chinese flu” gave some folks the green light to harass Asian Americans, a lot of other folks had been doing it anyway.
Asian Americans, a five-part series that launches Monday at 8 p.m. ET on PBS and finishes the next night (check local listings), explores both the tensions and triumphs in the 200-year emigration of Asians to the United States.
Like almost all “newcomers,” Asians were often scorned and demeaned when they first arrived here. Primarily, they were “tolerated” because they were considered exploitable – people willing to do hard work for low wages just to get their foothold.
While Asian immigrants include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, and persons from other nations as well, the first wave was primarily Chinese.
Those pioneers sailed to California in the late 1840s, drawn by reports that the Gold Rush could make lucky people wealthy.
As that dream dissipated, thousands of migrants decided they still had better opportunities here than back home. Some settled in cities like San Francisco, but many others went to work on the transcontinental railroad – a backbreaking and extremely dangerous gig that claimed thousands of lives.
And when the railroad finally connected, in 1869 in Promontory, Utah, Chinese workers were told they were not allowed to attend the ceremony where the celebratory photographs were taken. Thousands of people are in the photos, yet virtually none of the men who actually built the railroad.
Thirty-five years later, after the U.S. had colonized the Philippines, the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair had a “Filipino” section, where native Filipinos were put on display every day performing rituals that Fair organizers felt would show visitors how “savages” lived.
Consciousness has been raised a little since then, and today Asian Americans are the fastest-growing group in America.
But the intervening years have also seen the Chinese Exclusion Act; a Supreme Court ruling that made Asians ineligible for U.S. citizenship and thus stripped them of all their property; the World War II internment camps; and a litany of other events and measures that remind us some significant portion of white Americans still don’t think that “others” – black, brown, yellow, red – can be “real” Americans.
Asian Americans lays out that unfortunate truth while noting that millions of persons of Asian ancestry have become pretty solid Americans anyway.
In fact, Asian Americans sometimes face a problem unique among “minorities”: they are resented for being too successful. Asian Americans comprise a disproportionate percentage of higher education students, for instance, sometimes leading to the bizarre accusation that they study too hard and make other students look bad.
At the same time, Asians struggle for proportionate representation on TV and in the movies, where they still face the long-standing issue of stereotyping.
Asian Americans makes a convincing case, from the Chinese railroad workers of the 1850s right up through the present, that people of Asian ancestry have had to work constantly to be accepted, and that many of them have done so – to the great benefits of both themselves and the country that needs them at the same time it still too often suspects them.