Strangers in the Land
I ended Asian-American Heritage Month with a Big Fat History Book: Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.
Michael Luo started thinking about writing such a history in the fall of 2016. He and his family were standing in front of a restaurant in Manhattan when a woman screamed “Go back to China” at them— twice. The only response Luo had was “I was born in this country!” It was a few weeks before Donald Trump was elected on a platform that rested in part on the nativist ideology that has been a consistent and ugly undercurrent in American politics. Strangers in the Land tells the story of the long history of anti-Asian racism which is the background for that encounter and the anti-Asian violence that swept the country during the COVID pandemic. Luo begins with the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the California gold rush of 1848 end ends with his own family’s immigration to the United States thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Luo’s prose is clear, even elegant. His accounts of historical events are vivid, and rooted in the broader context of the time. He makes historical links between the Chinese experience in American and the Civil War, the end of slavery, the larger question of nativism, the labor movement, China’s changing role in international politics, and the Cold War. At the same time, he has a good eye for the telling detail.
But despite Luo’s mastery of his craft, Strangers in the Land was a difficult book to read. His accounts of attacks on Chinese miners and railroad workers by their white counterparts, of violence against Chinese residents in small towns throughout the Western and Pacific regions of the United States, and the destruction of urban Chinatowns by enraged mobs were both new to me and all too familiar. I was reminded over and over of attacks on Black Americans: the Reconstruction, the Red Summer of 1919, the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. The repeated destruction of Chinese owned businesses made me think of the destruction of the Black Wall Street in the Tulsa race riots in 1921. Anti-immigrant rhetoric by politicians and rabble-rousers in the past could have come from a present day political rally.
It left me ashamed. And determined to learn more. It’s the reason I am trying to read my way through the heritage months this year. It is important to grapple with the tension between acknowledging our country’s mistakes and appreciating the things we have done well—a condition that social psychologist Dolly Chugh describes as being a “gritty patriot.” I’ve said it before. I’ll doubtless say it again. History can be hard.
They Called Us Enemy
And now, I return to the Japanese internment camps in World War II,* this time in the form of George Takei’s graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, written in collaboration with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker.**
Jumping back and forth in time,*** They Called Us Enemy tells the story of the camps from the inside, both through Takei’s eyes as a young boy and then through his growing understanding of what he experienced as a result of conversations he had as a teenager with his father about their times in the camps. As the book’s narrator, Takei explores the disconnect between his childhood memories of happy moments and humor as well as confusion and trauma and his later understanding of the events he lived through. He contrasts his experience as a child with that of his father—both as he saw it at the time and later. (In one particularly powerful scene, the teenaged Takei accuses his father, and Japanese Americans as a whole, for cowardice in not protesting their treatment. That scene is immediately followed by his later shame for his outburst.) Takei’s personal experiences are clearly set against the historical context of the internments—some of which I was not familiar with.****
The art is a powerful element of the story. Grey-scale drawings evoke the details of the camp. Children are drawn with less detail than the adults and setting around them, in a style reminiscent of Peanuts characters or the earlier Campbell Soup kids of Grace Drayton, evoking the childhood innocence that is a critical part of the book. Small details add to the whole, such as the subtle and brilliant use of guard towers and barbed wire in the title. (Click on the image in your browser to see this detail clearly.)
They Called Us Enemy ends with a montage of “clips” of Takei’s later activism. This section looks at the racism and fear that led to the camps in comparison to modern issues, specifically action against Muslim Americans taken during the first Trump administration and the detention of Mexican Americans in camps along the U.S. border. (The book was published in 2019.)
*Despite my claims that the beginning of the month that I wasn’t going to read more about the internment camps.
**And yes, I know I also rejected the idea of reading celebrity memoirs by Asian-Americans, but Takei spends only a few pages on his role as Lieutenant Sulu of the Starship Enterprise. This is not a book about Takei’s rise to fame in the face of adversity.
***FYI, some reviewers complained about this when the book came out. Personally, I did not find it distracting.
****Or perhaps I had seen those elements before, but needed to read another book about the subject to make me remember them.
****
They Called Us Enemy has been compared to two other powerful graphic historical works: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize- winning Maus, which draws on his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, and Rep. John Lewis’s three volume graphic memoir, March, which tells the story of Lewis’s life in the civil rights movement. Both are worth your time.
If you are interested in a slightly more hopeful graphic work about the internment camps, I strongly recommend the graphic novel Love in the Library by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, which is based on the story of her grandparents who met in an internment camp in Idaho. It is a story of joy, love, and resilience, though Tokuda-Hall in no way minimizes the racism that placed her grandparents in the camps, or the trauma related to it.
The Celestials’ Last Game
I’ve been following Ben Railton on social media for a long time now, first on the site formerly known as Twitter (back in the good old days) and now on Bluesky, where he is @americanstudier.bluesky.social Among other things, he curates a fabulous list, #SundayScholar, of people to follow and stuff to read. I always find someone new to follow, and I am always chuffed when I make the list.
Railton responded to my request for stuff about Asian-American history with a recommendation of his podcast, The Celestial’s Last Game. I am so glad he did.
Obviously this is not a picture of the Celestials. Such a picture exists. But I did not want to go through the permissions process with the archive that owns it. Permissions are often painful, always slow, and sometimes expensive. Not worth the effort for a blog post. Luckily, you can see it on the podcast website.
The Celestial’s Last Game is the kind of historical project I enjoy the most: it takes a small, relatively unknown, event and uses it to illuminate a larger picture.* The podcast tells the story of a semi-professional baseball team called the Celestials made up of Chinese students in America and the last game they played before they went back to China. The sub-title sums it up: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America.
The podcast is structured like a baseball game. There are nine episodes, labelled as innings, followed by what Railton dubs a “post game press conference.” Each inning is broken into smaller units that could be considered times at bat.
The story of the Celestials carries the action. A group of Chinese students who had studied at New England prep schools and colleges, including some who had been star athletes at Yale, formed a baseball team. They made a name for themselves on the New England semi-pro leagues. But rising anti-Chinese sentiment drove them back to China. In California, waiting to depart, a local Oakland team challenged them to a final game. I’m not going to tell you how it ends; you’ll have to listen to the podcast.
Railton uses the story to talk about the broader experience of Chinese immigrants in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, racism in other American immigrant groups, and the rise of baseball as an American cultural marker. It is a fascinating blend, even for someone like me who is not much of a sports fan.
I strongly recommend it. You can find it here: https://americanstudier.podbean.com/
*To quote the brilliant Chuck Wendig, “The small story always matters more than the big story…We think we care about the Empire versus the Rebel Alliance, we think we care about Spider-Man versus the Vulture, we think we care about Buffy versus the Vampires. But we don’t. Not really. Not deeply. What we care about is the small story embedded in there, the small story that’s the beating heart of a larger one.” (Damn Fine Story, p. 79) It is as true for non-fiction as it is for fiction. Maybe even more true. It’s the reason Big Fat History Books are sometimes so hard to read, unless the author successfully links together a series of small stories that make you care about the protagonists and consequently about the big picture. If you don’t manage that you have what one of my professors described as “just one damn thing after another.” But I digress.