Perpetual Foreigner to Model Minority: The Tortured Evolution of Chinese Identity in America
Inherent excellence. Pervasive otherness. American success story. Subhuman. Stoic diligence. Perpetual foreigner. Acceptable but never accepted. These wildly differing appraisals of Chinese immigrants over the last 200 years have attempted to define but ultimately marginalized a group whose tortured history reflects its singular path toward the American dream. From almost the moment they set foot on American shores, Chinese immigrants were seen as something less than human. They were seen as economic competition, a people who were segregated — and self-segregated — for their cultural differences and unmissable foreignness. They were treated with hostility, violence, and an actual Chinese Exclusion Act: the first and only legislation to bar all members of any single ethnic or national group from immigrating to the United States. Although they worked long and hard to escape the shackles of an “in-between” acceptance, the myth of suffering in silence and pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps has made it more difficult to reconcile the terms of modern Chinese-American identity. Now, as anti-Asian hate crimes proliferate, the inherent xenophobia and distrust that the original immigrants were greeted with has begun to echo in the daily lives of Chinese-Americans. Their pain has been silenced under the guise of the Model Minority myth, just as it has been for centuries in this flawed country. Though many found success within a period of oppression, Chinese-Americans are now held to an impossible expectation to succeed no matter the systemic racism they face. The implications of what it means to be Chinese have fluctuated over the past two centuries, but in a country where hate is learned, a certain otherness will seemingly always mark the definition of Chinese identity.
The origins of Chinese hate in the United States run far deeper than government legislation to exclude people of Chinese descent that remained in place for more than half a century. When word first spread to the eastern hemisphere that America was a land rich in opportunity and good fortune, a first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in America, seeking wealth and a chance to support their families. But gold was scarce. So they ended up taking other low-paying jobs in fields like construction and mining. As numbers of immigrant workers increased, Chinese people were greeted with attitudes of hostility and xenophobia from their working-class American counterparts. The Asians’ outward foreignness and general reluctance to assimilate was greeted with increasing distrust. Many immigrants worked and lived together, didn’t speak English, rebuffed efforts at an American education and the practice of Christian religion, and seemed to generally avoid partaking in American customs or practices. Their refusal to play nice with the locals put a target on their back — further alienating the Chinese as a people whose looks, traditions, language, and work ethic had already distinguished them. On a cultural level, these factors contributed greatly to the creation of the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype.
From an economic perspective, however, Chinese laborers were a financial goldmine. Cheap labor was crucial to the construction and creation of transcontinental railways and infrastructure, and the Chinese were the only race willing to furnish it at a bargain-basement price. Despite their meager earnings and facing violent bursts of discrimination and bigotry, Chinese immigrants held their own and monopolized other low-skilled job fields like farming and laundry work. Many immigrants moved to Chinatown in San Francisco to find comfort in familiarity during a time where they were still not accepted, which only furthered the outside view that they refused to assimilate to “American” life and culture.
They remained an alienated people, resulting in a dual form of exclusion. The first, a voluntary exclusion, because white laborers antagonized their Chinese counterparts within economic competition, the second because employers preferred exploiting cheaper Chinese workers. These tensions came to a head in 1852, in what amounts to the first act of governmental Asian oppression: California sent a resolution to Congress proposing a tax that would be placed upon every Chinese or Japanese person moving to the United States. The final treaty stipulated that “The admission of laborers might be regulated, limited, or suspended, but not entirely prohibited for ten years.” This was the first of many official Chinese Exclusion Acts. The legal exclusion of Chinese people lasted for sixty-one years. Even when the exclusion acts were repealed, life did not instantly improve; the implications of Chinese identity in America continued to change following the repeal of the exclusion acts, leaving a lasting legacy on the origins of Chinese existence and citizenship in the United States.
Though anti-Chinese sentiment began when immigrant laborers undercut competition and effectively introduced multiculturalism in the United States, the movement had an underlying political agenda. It was often supported by the stereotypical notion that Chinese immigrants stubbornly refused to assimilate to “American” culture, when in reality American social mores actively worked to imprint an “otherness” on Chinese immigrants, making it more difficult for them to assimilate or prove their “American” work ethic and values. This received wisdom racialized Chinese as an inferior group. Indeed, for over a century, American identity had been monolithically White. Even after the Exclusion Act was repealed, Chinese identity in America continued to twist and change, building off their image as perpetual foreigners.
During World War II, Chinese Americans experienced what can only be described as a profound shift in societal perceptions and began to be portrayed as the “model minority.” They were newly celebrated for their economic motivation and stoic diligence, contrasted against Japanese Americans who were freshly painted as the face of disloyalty and suspicion after Pearl Harbor. Simultaneously, the Chinese were favorably compared against other minority groups like African Americans and Latinos, creating a new racial competition where none had been before. Though the Chinese had faced decades of extreme intolerance and denied citizenship, they were suddenly praised for their tolerance of oppression. “The model minority myth was used as a way to divide and conquer and to use Asian American immigrants against particularly the Black population,” says Angie Chuang, an associate professor in journalism at the University of Colorado, whose research focuses on race and identity. The true political agenda of separation and injustice supported the idea that, if Chinese immigrants could succeed and suffer in silence, other groups should be able to do so as well.
And as the Model Minority myth continued to develop, so did the implications of what it meant to be Chinese. Attempting to avoid having a target painted on their backs, they were forced to assimilate in order to keep their heads down in society. “By trying to prove we were 100 percent American, we hoped to be accepted,” wrote psychologist Amy Iwasaki Mass in 1991.“We paid a tremendous psychological price for this acceptance,” she writes. Under the antagonizing political agenda, Chinese Americans were made to feel that they had to assimilate to “American” culture to receive equal chances in society and the workforce. This pervasive injustice both celebrated and segregated Chinese people, trapping them in a purgatory of the American dream; though they had to work twice as hard to find economic success, their achievements were celebrated while their suffering was silenced.
Describing the implications of the model minority myth, a group of public health experts at New York University wrote that it “overstates the success of Asian Americans in terms of resiliency, health, wisdom, and wealth.” The pressure to succeed in all capacities has detrimental effects on Asian Americans as a group; Kristy Shih at California State University Long Beach commented that the myth has been correlated with increased depression and anxiety, higher suicide rates, and a lower likelihood of seeking mental health services. The myth has been painted as a blessing to Chinese Americans who have overcome decades of oppression as a minority, but it has historically and presently continues to adversely affect life for Asian Americans. Nor has it protected Asians from bias, xenophobia, and more recently, racially fueled violence.
Today, nearly two centuries after Chinese immigration began in the United States, there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States, and Asians are projected to be the largest immigrant group in the nation by 2055. However, echoes of inequality and “otherness” will forever stain the history of Chinese identity, and leave Chinese Americans forced to live with the implications of their racial status. Asian-Americans have been placed under the pressures of the model minority myth for decades, held to an impossible standard of socioeconomic success regardless of their minority status. At the same time, Asian-Americans experience greater income inequality than any other ethnic or racial group.
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States two years ago, Asian Americans have found themselves facing a new tension: President Donald Trump’s continuous claims that the virus was at the fault of China, and that it had originated there. His racist language and torrent of misinformation triggered a new fear within the daily lives of many Chinese Americans, as anti-Asian hate crimes have increased and discrimination has become presidentially sanctioned. In April 2020, an IPSOS poll found that three in 10 Americans blamed China or Chinese people for the virus. California Congresswoman Judy Chu estimates 100 hate crimes were committed against Asian Americans each day in March.
Although decades have passed since the exclusion acts were repealed, these racially charged attacks serve as an echo and reminder of the original American attitude towards the Chinese identity. Historically, anti-Chinese racism has been contingent on the belief that Asians harbor disease;in 19th century America, China was referred to as “the sick man of Asia.” A headline in a November 1878 edition of the Medico-Literary Journal of San Francisco reads: “How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison into the Anglo-Saxon Blood.” The article continues, “If the future historian should ever be called upon to write the Conquest of America by the Chinese Government, his opening chapter will be an account of the first batch of Chinese courtesans and the stream of deadly disease that followed.” The same sentiment towards Chinese immigrants prevailed in later years, as well; the Bubonic plague spread through San Francisco in 1900, and although the outbreak originated in an Australian ship, a Chinese immigrant was the first victim to catch the plague. Consequently, Chinese immigrants on the West coast were instantly assumed to harbor the disease and were banned from leaving their houses, subjected to home searches and property destruction.
The same attitude embodied within these seemingly ancient incidences of xenophobia and false claims towards Chinese people has begun to resurface in a blatantly obvious way. The protrusive discrimination and bigotry expressed by the former president, and shared by many of his supporters, feels overt and blatant during a period where the U.S is supposed to be a more accepting nation. Yet, today’s targeted political rhetoric and harassment is almost unsurprising when considering the moments in U.S. history when anti-Chinese racism was state-sanctioned. The pandemic has proved that racism can be as contagious as the disease, and has echoed the historical implications of the U.S relationship with China. According to Adrian De Leon, an assistant professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, “the way the U.S. would frame a rising Asian superpower as a threat is then reflected onto people with that ethnic genealogy.” Current events, Leon says, are following a disturbingly similar framework. Chinese pain in America has always been silenced, or justified. The inclination to blame and alienate Chinese people is inherent in the American mindset; all these incidents have proved is that it was just simmering under the surface. “There’s always been a systemic, official and unofficial exclusion for Chinese, and this pandemic brought the debate back up again,” says full-time activist and advocate for crime victims, Karlin Chan. “When they look for someone to blame, they blame the Chinese.” “We’re acceptable,” he adds. “We’re never really accepted.”
America has been slow to acknowledge its anti-Asian history. It was only in 2011 that the U.S. Senate issued a formal apology for the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the House followed the next year. Yet systemic racism towards minority and immigrant groups is woven into the fabric of American history, and now and then it surfaces in more obvious ways. For Chinese people living in America today, equality and societal perception are being threatened in a more prevalent way than they have been in the past 30 years. Although modern-day America is a nation that is supposed to have long-buried it s racial prejudices, they resurface, and Chinese fear is muted under the idea that model minority status is a “privilege.” Simply by existing, the myth silences Chinese discrimination, persecution, and oppression. But although those fears are silenced, just as they have been since Chinese immigrants stepped foot in this country 200 years ago, they are no less valid.
Scarlett Lee is a Junior at Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, California. She is passionate about politics, women’s rights, and climate change, and works with various organizations like Habits of Waste and the Joyful Heart Foundation to push for change and spread awareness. She spends her free time playing tennis, writing about current events, and learning French. Scarlett hopes to use her voice through writing and social media to build the presence of younger generations in the political world.