Gendering the Trans-Pacific World [1 ed.] 9789004336100, 9789004336094

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Gendering the Trans-Pacific World

Gendering the Trans-Pacific World Diaspora, Empire, and Race

Series Editors Catherine Ceniza Choy (University of California, Berkeley) Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (University of California, Irvine) Editorial Board Denise Cruz (University of Toronto) Miliann Kang (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Karen Leong (Arizona State University) Mary Lui (Yale University) Naoko Shibusawa (Brown University) Ji-Yeon Yuh (Northwestern University)

Volume 1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/gtpw

Gendering the Trans-Pacific World Edited by

Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Kibei Nisei (oil on canvas, 30 × 45 in., 2012) by Laura Kina. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017000993

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2352-7897 isbn 978-90-04-33609-4 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-33610-0 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Illustrations x Notes on Contributors xii

Part 1 Gendering the Trans-Pacific 1 Gendering the Trans-Pacific World 3 Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu 2 Notes on Trans-Pacific Archives 10 Denise Cruz 3 The Many Labors of the Gendered Trans-Pacific World 20 Karen J. Leong

Part 2 Geographies of Empire 4 Rethinking the Sexual Geography of American Empire in the Philippines Interracial Intimacies in Mindanao and the Cordilleras, 1898–1921 39 Tessa Ong Winkelmann 5 A Fascist Triangle or a Rotary Wheel The Sino-Japanese War and the Gendered Internationalisms of Sylvia Pankhurst and Carlos Romulo 77 Erika Huckestein and Mark L. Reeves 6 Moving within Empires Korean Women and Trans-Pacific Migration 107 Ji-Yeon Yuh

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Re-Franchising Women of Hawaiʻi, 1912–1920 The Politics of Gender, Sovereignty, Race, and Rank at the Crossroads of the Pacific 114 Rumi Yasutake

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Currencies of U.S. Empire in Hawaiʻi’s Tourism and Prison Industries 140 Liza Keānuenueokalani Williams

Part 3 Intimacies and Affect 9

The Sexualized Child and Mestizaje Colonial Tropes of the Filipina/o 165 Gladys Nubla

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“Ashamed of Certain Japanese” The Politics of Affect in Japanese Women’s Immigration Exclusion, 1919–1924 196 Chrissy Yee Lau

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Gendered Adoptee Identities Performing Trans-Pacific Masculinity in the 21st Century 221 Kimberly McKee

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Up in the Air Circuits of Transnational Asian and Asian American Mothering 246 Miliann Kang

Part 4 Beauty and the Body 13

Pageant Politics Tensions of Power, Empire, and Nationalism in Manila Carnival Queen Contests 257 Genevieve Clutario

Contents

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“Golden Lilies” across the Pacific Footbinding and the American Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion Laws 284 Fang He

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Traces of Empires in Breast Cancer in South Korea and the Trans-Pacific 307 Laura C. Nelson

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Graphical and Ethical Spectatorship Human Trafficking in Stanford Graphic Novel Project’s From Busan to San Francisco and Mark Kalesniko’s Mail Order Bride 316 Stella Oh

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Part 5 Culture and Circulation 17

Performing between Two Empires Colonial Modernity and the Racialized Politics of Filipino Masculinity in Okinawa and Japan 343 Nobue Suzuki

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A Careful Embrace Race, Gender, and the Consumption of Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific in Mid-Century Los Angeles 366 Shawn Schwaller

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We Are Pacific Men 389 Craig Santos Perez

20 Gendering the K-Vampire 396 Hyungji Park 21

Through a Trans-Vietnamese Feminist Lens The Cinemas of Vietnam and the Diaspora 407 Lan Duong

Index 423

Acknowledgments The publication of an anthology is the result of collective vision and effort. This volume and the Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (GTPW) book series would not have been possible without the foundational support of Brill acquisitions editor Nozomi Goto and the continuing advocacy of Brill acquisitions editor Jason Prevost. Our GTPW editorial board members Denise Cruz, Miliann Kang, Karen Leong, Mary Lui, Naoko Shibusawa, and Ji-Yeon Yuh offered engaging feedback as well as expertise. We thank anonymous readers for their constructive criticism that strengthened the individual chapters and the volume as a whole. We are also grateful for a publication support grant from the Humanities Commons at the University of California, Irvine, the technical assistance from Brian Waechter and Frank Naughton at the University of California, Berkeley, the copyediting and proofreading skills of Elizabeth Stone, and Judith Acevedo for creating our index. A special thank you to our families – Judy’s parents John Yu-Pu Wu and Betty C. H. Wu, her husband Mark, and their boys Konrad and Langston; Cathy’s mother Patria Ceniza, her husband Greg, and their children Maya and Louis – for sustaining us and supporting the work that we do. * Cover Illustration: The painting Kibei Nisei (oil on canvas, 30 × 45 in., 2012) by Laura Kina is based on a photograph of the artist’s grandmother, Mitsue, and her older sister Nubue, taken around 1937. They are standing in front of a ship named the Kamakura Maru, probably in a port stop in Tokyo en route from Honolulu to Okinawa. Mitsue’s older sisters were Kibei, born in Hilo, Hawaiʻi but raised in Yonabaru, Okinawa from the age of five years old through high school. Kina’s grandmother had come to join them to finish high school and to help take care of her nephews and nieces. She was already seventeen when she arrived and spoke Pidgin English/Japanese and could not fully understand the local Uchinaguchi language or even standard Japanese. Because of this, she had difficulties assimilating into life and school in Okinawa, so she went back to Hawaiʻi after only six months.

List of Illustrations 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 8.1 9.1 9.2 11.1 11.2 14.1 14.2 14.3 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.5

E. Sylvia Pankhurst speaking at an Anti-Nazi Demonstration in Hyde Park held in the 1930s. Courtesy of Bundesarchiv, Berlin (BildY1–402–90) 82 Carlos Romulo at the United Nations, ca. 1945. Courtesy of the Carlos P. Romulo Foundation 93 “The Baby Uses its First Tooth,” Philippines Herald, July 13, 1937. Library of Congress Collection 97 “President Roosevelt is Coming,” Philippines Herald, July 17, 1937. Library of Congress Collection 98 Adrienne Keahi Pao, Lei Stand Protest/Kapua Leihua Kapa (Lei Flower Covering), 30’’ × 36’’ C-Print, 2004. Courtesy of the artist 142 “Three girls from Kapangan, types 5, 6, and 7. Full length front views” (1907). With permission, courtesy of The University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology 176 “Three girls from Kapangan” (1907). With permission, courtesy of The University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology 177 Matthews shares his arrival at Incheon International Airport in South Korea with his Instagram followers. Courtesy of Dan Matthews 234 Matthews documents his arrival at the International Korean Adoptee Association Gathering at the Lotte Hotel, Myeongdong, Seoul, South Korea, on Instagram. Courtesy of Dan Matthews 234 X-ray of bound feet, China. Library of Congress Collection 290 Yang Jinge revealed her feet to British photographer Jo Farrell. Courtesy of Jo Farrell Photography 290 A ‘Lily footed’ woman of China. Library of Congress Collection 291 Mail Order Bride, 8. © 2016 Mark Kalesniko. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books 324 Mail Order Bride, 9. © 2016 Mark Kalesniko. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books 325 From Busan to San Francisco, 134. © 2012 Courtesy of Stanford Graphic Novel Project 327 Mail Order Bride, 117. © 2016 Mark Kalesniko. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books 329 Mail Order Bride, 224. © 2016 Mark Kalesniko. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books 331

List Of Illustrations

16.6 16.7 17.1 17.2 17.3

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From Busan to San Francisco, 101. © 2016 Courtesy of Stanford Graphic Novel Project 335 From Busan to San Francisco, 102. © 2016 Courtesy of Stanford Graphic Novel Project 336 A Filipino band on a U.S. base in Okinawa, ca. 1950s. Photo: courtesy of Totong 345 An example of cargo-passenger ship routes (services began in 1907). Postcard (n.d.): courtesy of Shōsen Mitsui (formerly Osaka Shōsen Kaisha) 356 Raymond Conde. Photo: courtesy of Yoshimi Fukasawa 357

Notes on Contributors Catherine Ceniza Choy is professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Duke University Press, 2003) and Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (New York University Press, 2013). Genevieve Clutario is an assistant professor of history and history and literature at Harvard University. She is currently working on a new book manuscript, “The Appearance of Filipina Nationalism: Embodying Nation and Empires.” She specializes in interdisciplinary and transnational feminist approaches to gender, race, and colonialism particularly in relation to Filipino-U.S. histories. Her other major research and teaching interests include Asian/American histories in global perspectives; comparative histories of modern empire; transnational feminisms; and gender, race, and the politics of fashion and beauty. Denise Cruz is an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012) and the editor of Yay Panlilio’s The Crucible: An Autobiography of Colonel Yay, Filipina American Guerrilla (Rutgers University Press, 2009). With support from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, she is currently working on a study of Philippine fashion. Lan Duong is associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Temple University Press, 2012). Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas: Imagining Nationhood in a Globalized Era, examines Vietnamese cinema from its inception to the present day. Her most recent work is a collaborative effort, an edited anthology called Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders in Literature and Art (University of Washington Press, 2013).

Notes On Contributors

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Fang He is a doctoral candidate in history at University of California, Santa Barbara. Fang specializes in the histories of gender, Chinese America, and American immigration. Erika Huckestein is a Ph.D. candidate in European history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the British feminist movement before and during World War II and the ways in which women’s opposition to fascism impacted their political activism. Miliann Kang is associate professor and graduate program director of women, gender, sexuality studies and affiliated faculty in sociology and Asian/Asian American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her book, The Managed Hand: Race, Gender and the Body in Beauty Service Work won awards from the National Women’s Studies Association and the American Sociological Association. She is currently researching Asian American women and the racial politics of mothering. Her writing has been published in Gender and Society, Contextsa, Newsweek, Women’s Review of Books, Huffington Post, and the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Chrissy Yee Lau is an assistant professor of history at Texas A & M University – Corpus Christi. Her research and teaching interests include Asian American history, women’s history, world history, and public history. She is writing a book manuscript on Japanese American respectability politics in the 1920s. Karen J. Leong is associate professor of women and gender studies and Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong Chiang and the Transformation of American Orientalism (University of California Press, 2005). Kimberly McKee is the director of the Kutsche Office of Local History and an assistant professor in liberal studies at Grand Valley State University. She also serves as the assistant director of KAAN (the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network).

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Laura C. Nelson is an associate professor of gender and women’s studies and chair of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. An anthropologist by training, her principal interests are in processes of cultural change and enculturation in South Korea and the U.S. Gladys Nubla received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has published her scholarship on Filipina/o American literature and film in MELUS, positions: east asia critique, and LIT. Stella Oh is associate professor and chair of the Department of Women’s Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Her area of expertise is Asian American literature and visual cultures. Her research has appeared in numerous peerreviewed journals such as LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, AJWS: Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, MOSAIC: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, and Amerasia as well as several anthologies. Hyungji Park is professor of English literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. She teaches and writes on the Victorian novel, Asian American literature, and of late has been interested in the cultural history of the vampire. Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently from unincorporated territory [guma’], which received an American Book Award 2015. He is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. Mark L. Reeves is a Ph.D. candidate in European history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is interested in the intersection of anticolonialism and internationalism from 1930 to 1970. Shawn Schwaller teaches for the Department of History at Chico State University. His 2015 dissertation, “Under a Plastic Palm: Pacific Island Myths and Realities in Twentieth Century Metropolitan Los Angeles,” explores the growth of romantic notions

Notes On Contributors

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about Hawai‘i and the South Pacific’s built and natural environment, and how racialized and gendered representations of Polynesians, South Pacific Islanders, and Asian Americans spoke to U.S. imperialism, consumerism, and tourism, and the way in which the growing relationship between Hawai‘i, the South Pacific, and the U.S. in the 20th century opened doors for the radical transformation of mainland U.S. popular culture. Nobue Suzuki is professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Chiba University. She has extensively published on Filipina/os in Japan and the issues of cross-border marriage, gender, citizenship, and transnationalism. Liza Keānuenueokalani Williams is a Kānaka Maoli scholar born in Honolulu and raised in Waimānalo on the island of Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi. She completed her Ph.D. in American studies at New York University, and is currently a University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Berkeley in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She is working on a book manuscript and is a cofounding member of Hinemoana of Turtle Island, a collective of Pacific Islander feminist scholar-activists. Tessa Ong Winkelmann is an assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas where she teaches U.S. foreign relations, women and gender studies in a global perspective, and Asian American studies courses. She received her B.A. at the University of California, Irvine (2005), her M.A. in ethnic studies at San Francisco State University (2008), and her Ph.D. in history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2015). Her research interests are in the fields of U.S. in the world, empires and imperialism, ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is professor and chair of Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine. She authored Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Cornell University Press, 2013). Rumi Yasutake is professor in the faculty of letters at Konan University. Her research areas include U.S. history, women’s history, and American studies. She is the author

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of Transnational Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–1920 (New York University Press, 2004). Ji-Yeon Yuh teaches Asian American history, Asian diasporas, race and gender, and oral history at Northwestern University. Her current projects include a digital oral history repository focused on Asian diasporas, an oral history and performance project on the Midwest as an Asian American space, and a book on the Korean diaspora in China, Japan, and the United States.

Part 1 Gendering the Trans-Pacific

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CHAPTER 1

Gendering the Trans-Pacific World Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu As the inaugural volume of the new Brill book series Gendering the TransPacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race, this anthology presents an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. While recent scholarship in trans-Pacific studies acknowledges the significance of gender as a category of analysis, attention to gender has not necessarily been fundamental to the scholarship. Yet, as Denise Cruz states in the opening of her chapter in this volume, “Given the centrality of a feminized, exotic East to the history of imperial expansion, gender has, for quite some time, been absolutely critical to the histories and cultures of the trans-Pacific.”1 Thus, our volume and the corresponding book series seek to make two important intellectual interventions. First, taking our cue from “Atlantic World” scholarship and building upon insights from the emergent field of trans-Pacific studies, we seek to explore “Pacific World” frameworks to understand the connections between the lands, people, cultures, environments, and nations that are in and border the Pacific Ocean.2 This construct is particularly compelling for us as scholars primarily based in transnational Asian American and American Studies. A trans-Pacific framework decenters a teleological and nation-centered narrative of U.S. exceptionalism. For example, the study of immigration need not focus primarily on adaptation and integration into the 1  Denise Cruz, Chapter 2, this volume. 2  Recent works on trans-Pacific studies frameworks include Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins, “Introduction: Transpacific Studies: Critical Perspectives on an Emerging Field,” in Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, ed. Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014), 1–38; Chih-ming Wang, “Editorial Introduction: Between Nations and Across the Ocean,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2012): 1–11, accessed September 12, 2015, DOI:10.1080/14649373.2012.659806; and David Igler, “Commentary: Re-Orienting Asian American History through Transnational and International Scales,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 4 (November 2007): 611–614, http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 10.1525/phr.2007.76.4.611 (accessed July 30, 2015). Recent works on Pacific World frameworks include David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336100_002

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U.S. nation. Instead, a Pacific World perspective encourages us to reimagine the migration of people, both coerced and voluntary, across the vast waters and the lands of the Pacific, and to explore persistent and new connections that migrants create with their homelands and with diasporic communities. The movement of people, goods, and ideas across geographic boundaries is intertwined with the process of changing political boundaries. The Pacific has been the site of multiple empires – Asian, Ottoman, European, and American. An oceanic perspective allows us to see how imperial and neocolonial powers have built their globalized economies and political identities on conquest and possession of waterways, lands, and peoples in and around the Pacific Ocean. As people of diverse backgrounds encounter one another through economic, cultural, social, and militarized exchanges within unequal political structures, they also construct racialized understandings of one another. A trans-Pacific framework inspires questions regarding how these racial formations occur at local, national, and oceanic levels. Second, this anthology and corresponding book series foreground the gendered nature of the trans-Pacific world. One of the major objectives of this anthology is to showcase how the analytical category of gender is constitutive of trans-Pacific world-making. Trans-Pacific migration is a gendered process that raises critical questions. As men and women rarely migrate in even gender ratios, what motivates one gender group to migrate or stay? What ideas about gender do they bring with them when they migrate and how do these ideas clash or coalesce with gender systems in the lands and waterways that they traverse? We also want to build on the rich scholarship on empire and sexuality to illuminate how political expansion and militarism are gendered projects that entail, for example, managing sexual relationships between colonizers and colonized.3 How are geopolitical relations of power articulated, visualized, and institutionalized through gendered language, imagery, and policies? How can attention to gender present innovative and ethical ways to rectify social, economic, and political inequalities? Finally, we seek to promote intersectional analyses of gender and race in order to understand how racialization is a gendered project and how genderization is a racial project. Deviant forms of gender roles and sexual practices helped mark particular groups as uncivilized, exotic, and biologically “other,” most notably in the historical contexts of the expansion of capitalism and the rise of modern empires. In other words, 3  See, for example, Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010) and Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

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we are interested in understanding how gender hierarchies are intimately connected to racial ones. In so doing, we hope that attention on these complex inequalities will help us create more equitable societies and a just world. We are excited to serve as co-editors of this new book series, and we are enormously proud to curate this collection of writings by emerging and senior scholars. This volume is comprised of both traditional and non-traditional works. Some book chapters are scholarly treatments featuring original research, while others are shorter “think” pieces in which the writers contemplate their questions, contributions, critiques, and hopes for the emerging field of gender and trans-Pacific studies. Authors of “think” pieces utilized a variety of genres – poetry, state-of-the-field, or reflective chapters on previous research and research-in-progress – to express their most passionate ideas for the field. This anthology is comprised of five parts that bring a wide range of interdisciplinary and disciplinary approaches, historical actors, thematics, chronologies, and geographies into conversation with one another through a common theme. The other two chapters in Part 1 explore the contours of trans-Pacific methodologies and undertake a trans-Pacific critique of Asian American studies scholarship. In a reflective think piece, Denise Cruz contemplates best practices for trans-Pacific archival research methodologies, and calls for a multi-sited approach to the study of race, gender, and sexuality in conversation with local, regional, and national modalities. In a state-of-the-field chapter, Karen Leong critiques Asian American studies scholars for foregrounding the U.S. – Asia geographic imaginary while ignoring Oceania, the Pacific Islands, and settler-colonial logics. The chapters in Part 2, Geographies of Empire, ask us to think spatially about where to locate the politics of empire, racialization, gender, and sexuality. Tessa Ong Winkelmann examines the complex sexual geographies of interracial intimacies in different regions of the Philippines under U.S. colonial rule. Erika Huckestein and Mark Reeves analyze the contrasting geopolitical visions of world order of British socialist and former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst and of Filipino political leader Carlos Romulo during the interwar years. Ji-Yeon Yuh focuses our attention on the impact of overlapping empires in fostering diasporic migrations of Korean women in Asia and the United States. Rumi Yasutake unpacks the complex colonial, racial, gender, and rank politics among Native Hawaiian and Asian, as well as local and mainland white women, as they worked to promote female suffrage in Hawai‘i. Liza Keānuenueokalani Williams elaborates on the critique of Pacific Islander invisibility and displacement by connecting the hypersexualization and overrepresentation of Native Hawaiian women in the military-tourism complex with the incarceration of Native Hawaiian men and their removal to private prisons on the U.S. mainland.

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Together, these writings ask us to reimagine how we map empire. They help us to see new connections between metropoles and colonies, as well as across and within oceans, archipelagos, and continents. They reveal how the logics of incorporation also rest upon erasure and displacement, and they demonstrate how gender and sexuality are central to projects of empire that span time and space. Part 3, Intimacies and Affect, illuminates how relationships, emotions, and seemingly mundane experiences – especially in relation to familial ties and friendships – have shaped and been shaped by larger social, political, and economic forces in the trans-Pacific world. For example, Gladys Nubla analyzes how discursive and actual parent-child relationships influenced U.S. colonial agendas in the Philippines, and created a trope of the Filipino hypersexual child, an image that persists, with dire consequences, to the present. Chrissy Yee Lau utilizes a young Japanese American woman’s friendships with her white American friends as a lens to view multiple trans-Pacific “affective economies” – groups who were bound by specific emotions and advocated distinct political aims – that debated the admissibility and assimilation of Japanese women immigrants. Kimberly McKee explores the performance of soft masculinity – the ability for Asian American men to express toughness and emotion – through the return journey to Korea of transnational adoptee and hip-hop/ social media artist Dan Matthews. In her think piece, Miliann Kang muses on the cultural mandates and uncomfortableness of idealized motherhood in Korea and the United States. These chapters emphasize the contradictory nature of intimacy and affect as the personal and the emotional reveal larger structural inequalities in the trans-Pacific world. It is easy to dismiss the topic of beauty as superficial and frivolous. The chapters in Part 4, Beauty and the Body, compel us to think otherwise by highlighting entanglements of beauty ideals and standards with the lived realities of colonial racism, immigration exclusion, disease, and human trafficking. In “Pageant Politics,” Genevieve Clutario documents the U.S. colonial origins of beauty pageants in the Philippines and explores how and why imperial spectacles of women’s style and comportment paradoxically became popular vehicles of Philippine nationalist expression. Fang He’s analysis of footbinding in China and the United States reveals that misperceptions of its actual practice enabled Chinese women to subvert U.S. exclusion laws and Americans to construct a distinctive national identity based on corporeal differences. In a think piece on current research-in-progress, Laura C. Nelson contemplates how a trans-Pacific approach that accounts for shifting Western and Korean knowledge about breast cancer may offer insights on the increase and possible prevention of the disease among young women in South Korea. The final

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chapter by Stella Oh presents a close reading of two graphic novels about the trafficking of Korean women to North America, and calls attention to the ethical possibilities of depicting women’s trauma and their objectification in graphic narratives. The fifth and final part of the anthology, Culture and Circulation, spotlights the mobility of culture – its producers, consumers, literary figures, and texts – across the trans-Pacific world, its impact on the lives and livelihoods of women and men, and notions of femininity and masculinity. While this mobility connects places and spaces across land and bodies of water, the authors emphasize that local places and one’s location matter in profound ways. For example, Nobue Suzuki illustrates that histories of U.S. colonialism, military presence, and occupation in Southeast and East Asian nations transformed the racial and gendered identities of Filipino male athletes and entertainers when they competed and performed in Japan. In Shawn Schwaller’s chapter, the rise of South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges in mid-20th-century Los Angeles popularized Polynesian food, music, and dance in the continental United States, but in ways that sexually objectified Polynesian women, and erased the contributions to this industry of Polynesian entertainers and Chinese and Filipino American male chefs and bartenders. In his poem, “We Are Pacific Men,” Craig Santos Perez pays tribute to the multifaceted lives of Pacific Islander men and the multiple identities that they perform, and are coerced into performing, as a result of conquest, colonization, and globalization. In her think piece on her current research on gendered analyses of Western and Eastern vampires, Hyungji Park raises cross-cultural questions about what she calls the “K-vampire,” a figure drawn from indigenous Korean culture but influenced by Western imaginaries of the vampire in film. Finally, Lan Duong calls for a trans-Vietnamese feminist theory that foregrounds the relations of power undergirding the production and distribution of culture in general and Vietnamese filmmaking in particular. We are also elated that work by artist and professor Laura Kina, specifically her 2012 painting entitled Kibei Nisei, graces the cover of this inaugural volume. According to Kina’s artist statement, her artwork focuses on “themes of distance, belonging and the fluidity of cultural difference and the slipperiness of identity.”4 Okinawan and Hawaiian diaspora and mixed race representations are subjects that permeate her work. Kina writes that her artistic process addresses the gaps and fissures in history and popular culture:

4  “About,” Laura Kina, 2002–2016, available at http://www.laurakina.com/about/ (accessed October 21, 2016).

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I start with autobiographical impulses and draw inspiration from popular culture, textile design, personal and community photographic archives and oral history interviews. I collect these images, stories, and histories, and I see what is missing, what is not being told, what is not obvious, and I go hunting for it. I am interested in the overlap, fusion, disjuncture, or vibration that happens when I bring back the missing pieces and put them together.5 The painting Kibei Nisei exemplifies this process of how Kina’s family history sparks the artistic expression that fuses gendered and trans-Pacific histories of empire and diaspora. The discovery of a family photograph inspired Kina’s painting of her grandmother and great aunt in front of the ship, the Kamakura Maru. The artwork records imperial Japanese, Okinawan, and Hawaiian connections, and sheds light on early 20th-century women’s migration, travel, and care work between continents and across the Pacific Ocean. As Kina explains: When my grandma passed in December 2010, I found an old photograph of her on which this painting “Kibei Nisei” is based. She is on the left with her older sister Nubue, taken around 1937, in front of a ship named the Kamakura Maru, probably in a port stop in Tokyo en route from Honolulu to Okinawa. Her older sisters were Kibei, born in Hawaiʻi but raised in Okinawa from the age of five years old through high school. My grandmother had come to join them to finish high school and to help take care of her nephews and nieces. She was already seventeen when she arrived and spoke Pidgin English/Japanese and could not fully understand the local Uchinaguchi language or even standard Japanese. Because of this, she had difficulties assimilating into life and school in Okinawa, and so she went back to Hawaiʻi after only six months.6 Collectively, this anthology has covered a lot of ground, both intellectually and geographically. However, more works on how to gender the trans-Pacific are still needed. For example, specific regions of the trans-Pacific world are underrepresented in this anthology. We hope for new and more scholarship that features the Pacific Islands, the Americas and the Austro-Oceanic realms, and inter-Asia relations. Methodologically, the writings in this anthology feature 5  Ibid. 6  Laura Kina, email correspondence to Nozomi Goto, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, and Catherine Ceniza Choy, October 6, 2014.

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socio-historical and literary approaches, but we welcome other social science and humanities methods in this book series. We envision complex analyses of queerness, trans-issues, and masculinity in addition to heterosexuality and femininity. We acknowledge the gaps, imbalances, and absences in the hope that this anthology will serve as a springboard for new scholarship and more expansive academic exchanges. We need diverse scholarly works that help us to understand the intellectual power of gendering the trans-Pacific World. References Igler, David. The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Igler, David. “Commentary: Re-Orienting Asian American History through Transnational and International Scales.” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 4 (November 2007): 611– 614. Accessed July 30, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/phr.2007.76.4.611. Kina, Laura. “About.” Laura Kina, 2012–2016. Accessed October 21, 2016. http://laurakina .ipage.com/about/. Kina, Laura. Email correspondence to Nozomi Goto, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, and Catherine Ceniza Choy, October 6, 2014. Matsuda, Matt K. Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Nguyen, Viet Thanh and Janet Hoskins. “Introduction: Transpacific Studies: Critical Perspectives on an Emerging Field.” In Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, ed. Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, 1–38. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014. Shigematsu, Setsu and Keith L.Camacho, eds. Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010. Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Wang, Chih-ming. “Editorial Introduction: Between Nations and Across the Ocean.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2012): 1–11. DOI:10.1080/14649373.2012.659806. Accessed September 12, 2015.

CHAPTER 2

Notes on Trans-Pacific Archives Denise Cruz Abstract This chapter uses the author’s familiarity with the Philippines as a case study to offer avenues of continued inquiry for scholars of gender, sexuality, and the trans-Pacific world. It focuses especially on archival recovery, digital and print research methods, and the importance of a self-reflexive approach to trans-Pacific studies.

Keywords archive – history – gender – sexuality – digital research – print culture – feminism

Given the centrality of a feminized, exotic East to the history of imperial expansion, for quite some time gender has been absolutely critical to the histories and cultures of the trans-Pacific. In the 150 years or so after Commodore Matthew Perry’s oft-mentioned “opening” (1853) of trade and commerce between Asia and the West, the Pacific became important in new ways. If the Black Atlantic was critical to the development of Western capitalism (primarily via the routes mapped by the slave trade and by the expansion of Europe into North and South America), by the end of the 19th century, the Pacific was emerging as a similarly contested space.1 Although colonial powers in Asia had already begun to reach outward in an attempt to dominate the region, what differed from the late 19th to the 20th century was the United States’ and Europe’s consistent interest in the Pacific. Building, of course, upon Edward Said’s foundational theorization of Orientalism, scholars of the trans-Pacific have thus contended 1  Paul Gilroy has famously theorized this region in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). On Pacific expansion, see David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). More recently, Lisa Lowe has offered a productive method for reading the entwined relations of Asian and African labor in The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015).

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that U.S. and European management of Asia and the Pacific islands depended upon a constellation of intersecting strategies: military encroachment (wars, incursions, the establishment of bases); epistemological endeavors (educational initiatives and programs; anthropological, biological, and zoological studies); discursive representations in varied cultural forms (exhibits, photography and cinema, literature); and geopolitical and economic measures that formalized European and U.S. power in the region (occupation, trade treaties, and agreements).2 Many of these practices constructed Asian and Pacific peoples and cultures as feminized and thus contributed to a male-female binary in which the East serves as the West’s submissive other. Gendered examinations of the trans-Pacific world offer an opportunity to work against the binaried, heteronormative divisions of the East–West framework that have long been essential to the involvement of Europe and North America in Asia and the Pacific. While the expansion of the West depended upon reifying the Pacific, a trans-Pacific framework resists this containment by underscoring that constructions of gender and sexuality have been, and still are, critical to the Pacific’s fluctuating status. The term trans-Pacific certainly indexes the movement or migration of people and forms of culture, but my use of the term in this chapter also underscores its capacity to map more than these literal crossings. “Trans,” helpfully observes Aihwa Ong, “denotes moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something.” Ong’s transnationality thus “also alludes to transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive.”3 Trans-Pacific modes of analysis can thus underscore how the overlap of multiple empires in Asia and the Pacific shaped the imagining of gender and sexuality in complex and varied ways. Given the importance of gender to the trans-Pacific, what might studies of gender and the trans-Pacific world look like in the 21st century? The discussion that follows offers a few avenues of continued inquiry for scholars of gender, sexuality, and the trans-Pacific world. With my own expertise in mind, this chapter centers on historical, cultural, and literary studies and focuses especially on archival recovery, digital and print research methods, and the 2  Said originally contended that “the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense” (though he referenced “recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures” as “creating a more sober and more realistic ‘Oriental’ awareness”). Trans-Pacific scholars frequently turn to his critical framework to link the U.S. to a broader history of “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 2–3. 3  Aiwha Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 4.

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importance of a self-reflexive approach to trans-Pacific studies. Ultimately, I offer these methodological comments as points of inspiration rather than as definitive approaches. The specificity and singularity of the examples I choose (which are based in the Philippines) highlight the importance of familiarity with the cultural context, histories, and academic work in a particular site. Thus, while the term trans-Pacific often implies comparative and multi-sited work, I contend that trans-Pacific work must also bear in mind the value of local specificity. Scholarship in the last few decades has done much to uncover sources that illuminate the importance of gender and sexuality to trans-Pacific relations, but continued archival recovery is still necessary. In addition to texts that are authored by women, for example, researchers should also: a) focus on finding records that illuminate non-gender-conforming desires, relationships, and communities; and b) analyze the dynamics of gender and sexuality within known trans-Pacific texts.4 This archival attention would search for perspectives that might be lost amid documents related to colonial administration or military expansion. Scholars of gender and sexuality studies have emphasized the importance of linking these areas of inquiry (think, for example, of the representation of Asian men as a threat to the bounds of normative sexuality or sociality, from the Filipino bachelor in U.S. taxi dance halls to the images of leering Chinese men in opium dens, or to the production of Asian women as exotic objects or Filipino women as idealized caregivers).5 This work not only calls attention to the circulation of varied “Asiatic racial forms,” as Colleen Lye has called them, but also makes it possible to examine how these discursive constructs are linked to contemporary versions of these stereotypes.6

4  See Martin Joseph Ponce, Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and Victor Roman Mendoza, Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015). 5  Linda España Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s to 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 6  Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003); Neferti Tadiar, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004).

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By emphasizing the continued importance of archival recovery a second suggestion arises: that we might further refine the practices that researchers employ to study the trans-Pacific, especially those based in North America and Europe. These methods have increasingly turned from the print archive to digital and multimedia forms, and for good reason. Indeed, some of the most compelling examples of trans-Pacific scholarship on gender and sexuality have analyzed new forms of media as countering dominant forms of representing Filipina and Filipino bodies. These include Robert Diaz’s reading of YouTube celebrity turned pop superstar Charice Pempengco, Lucy Mae San Pablos Burns’ examination of multimedia performance artists Barrionics and Mail Order Brides (M. O. B.), and Bliss Cua Lim’s theorization of queer time in Philippine cinema.7 Alongside these scholars who work with contemporary media, digital archives can facilitate trans-Pacific research on gender and sexuality, allowing researchers to access records, publications, texts, and/or photographs that are not always easily available. The increased prominence of digital archives and scholarly repositories, however, also poses potential challenges for trans-Pacific work. Practicing self-reflexivity in the wake of ever-increasing digital access is all the more important because our production of knowledge about gender and sexuality in the trans-Pacific world must extend to not only what we choose to study but also the critical context that we use to make our claims. I make this point as a scholar trained and rooted in North America who studies the Philippines. Scholars of the Philippines (based both locally and abroad) have for quite some time observed similar tendencies. “When the question shifts from representation to production,” contends Carline S. Hau, “the politics of location matters.”8 In her 2014 essay, “Privileging Roots and Routes: Filipino Intellectuals and the Contest Over Epistemic Power and Authority,” Hau traces the contentious aftermath that followed the 2002 publication of Reynaldo Ileto’s critique of political science scholarship on the Philippines (much of which was produced

7  Robert Diaz, “The Limits of Bakla and Gay: Feminist Readings of My Husband’s Lover, Vice Ganda, and Charice Pempengco,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40.3 (Spring 2015): 721–745; Bliss Cua Lim, “Queer Aswang Transmedia: Folklore as Camp,” Kritika Kultura 24 (2015): 178–225; Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 8  Caroline Sy Hau, “Privileging Roots and Routes: Filipino Intellectuals and the Contest Over Epistemic Power and Authority,” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 62, no. 1 (2014): 29–65, 55.

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by U.S.-based and American academics).9 This debate, she notes, reveals the complexities “of epistemic privilege and authority” (including histories of empire and race, and of funding, training, class, politics, and location) which not only “informs the relationship between American and Filipino scholars” but also “the relationship among Filipino scholars themselves.”10 Citing the overwhelming reliance on English-language (and sometimes Spanish) sources in studies produced by U.S-based scholars, Vicente Rafael has diagnosed what he calls a “failure to engage vernacular source materials and the alternative views of empire, nation, and everyday life that these contain.”11 Using the rise of Southeast Asian studies in the Philippines as a case study, Resil B. Mojares summarizes recurring patterns in critiques of knowledge production about Southeast Asia in that “much of this scholarship remains invisible outside the national contexts in which they are produced; that the most ‘influential’ works in the field (even those that purport to adopt indigenized and autonomous frameworks) are still written by non-Southeast Asians or Southeast Asians trained and based outside the region; that English remains the dominant language of scholarship; and that the contributions of Southeast Asians to ‘theory’ ” has escaped broader recognition in the academy.12 Along with other North American and European academics, I might readily visit archival sources and collections in Asia and the Pacific, but regular reminders are needed of how easy it is to forgo an engagement with work produced by researchers who are institutionally based in these fields. Digital scholarship, especially crucial in a climate of austerity surrounding research support in the humanities, can address some of the issues outlined above, but it can also contribute to them. Although online repositories and search engines, for example, might make access easier for transnational scholars, accessibility does not always translate into visibility or increased circulation. The reasons for this disparity are complex and beyond the scope of this brief chapter, but they certainly include: a lack of awareness of journal titles and presses based outside of Europe and North America; uneven resources that would allow access to electronic transfer of materials; and the tendency to rely 9  For the original see Reynaldo Ileto, “Orientalism and the Study of Philippine Politics,” Philippine Political Science Journal 22, no. 45 (2001), 1–32. 10  Hau, “Privileging Roots and Routes,” 40, original emphasis. 11  Vicente Rafael, “Reorientations: Notes on the Study of the Philippines in the United States,” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 56, no. 4 (2008) 475–492, 484. 12  Resil B. Mojares, “The Spaces of Southeast Asian Scholarship,” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 61, no. 1 (2013), 105–124, 107.

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on some digital databases and search engines over others. Thus, part of our work as trans-Pacific scholars is, through our citation of these texts, to reveal our connections to a broader network of critical production, and to expose others to this research. Trans-Pacific research must thus be situated not only in terms of objects and subjects of study, but also – as J. Neil Garcia and, more recently, Kuan Hsing-Chen have argued – in terms of critical conversations and contexts located within Asia and the Pacific.13 Such an approach is especially important given that constructions of race, gender, and sexuality have been influenced not only by the United States and Europe, but also in conversation with other local, regional, and national modalities.14 For example, as Garcia, Martin Manalansan, Kale Fajardo, and Bobby Benedicto have argued, the gender non-conforming identities of the bakla or tomboi do not conform uniformly to U.S.-based notions of queer identity.15 Vicente Rafael, Mina Roces, Neferti Tadiar, Raquel A. G. Reyes, Caroline Hau, and Fennella Cannell have examined the particularities of language and translation, systems of class and education, religion and regionalisms, and the overlap of colonialism and developing forms of nationalism and modernity.16 Their work attests to the complexities of trans-Pacific negotiations of gender and sexuality (those varied forms of transgression and translation theorized by Ong), and they call attention to how the trans-Pacific must be read (for the Philippines) in the context of relationships 13  J. Neil C. Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008) and Kuan Hsing-Chen, Asia As Method: Towards Deimperialization (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 14  See for example Raquel A. G. Reyes, Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882–1892 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); Mina Roces and Louise Edwards, eds., Women’s Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism, and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2004); Tadiar, Fantasy-Production; Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000); Rafael, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 15  Bobby Benedicto, Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture; Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinity, and Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Martin Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008). 16  In addition to previously cited work by Rafael, Reyes, Tadiar, and Roces, see Fenella Cannell, Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Caroline S. Hau, The Chinese Question: Ethnicity, Nation and Region in and beyond the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014).

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not only between the United States and the Philippines but also with China, Japan, and Spain, or amid the discourses of Catholicism, Islam, and animism. The above thoughts on the importance of print archives stem from my work with recovering trans-Pacific Filipina-authored literature in the early 20th century. The methods I used will be familiar to scholars of literature and history, a search that centered on print archival methods: from tracking down singleline references to authors named in anthologies produced in the Philippines and the United States; to reading initial works of scholarship that often prioritized some writers over others; to looking at entire runs of literary periodicals and magazines housed in the basement of the microform and media services staff at the University of the Philippines. Along the way I built upon prior work in the Philippines (which had a longer history of familiarity with early women writers) by scholars such as Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Thelma Kintanar, and Soledad Reyes, and I was supported by institutional archives dedicated to women writers, like the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writing.17 Archivists and library staff, like Waldette Cueto at the American Historical Collection at Ateneo, allowed access to materials, pointed out new directions, and supported the research with their generosity and expertise. Although a handful of women writers were recognized and included in anthologies of early Filipino literature (Paz Marquez Benitez, Lina Espina Moore, Angela Manalang Gloria, Trinidad Tarrosa Subido, Gilda Cordero Fernando, Carmen Guerrero Nakpil), there were other names that soon emerged: Felicidad Ocampo, Yay Panlilio, Lyd Arguilla, Ligaya Victorio Reyes. Trans-Pacific – as opposed to transnational – research allowed for a consideration of how these women contributed to and had to negotiate their place as authors during a period in which questions of language, literature, and nationalism were complicated political enterprises that were produced by the overlap of multiple empires (the fraught place of the English language writer in Manila, for example, who published amid heated debates surrounding the use of Spanish, Japanese, English, and Tagalog). Reading this archive through a trans-Pacific framework was also important in that women writers who were initially dismissed (for a net of complicated reasons, including whether or not 17  See for example Thelma Kintanar, Women Reading: Feminist Perspectives on Philippine Literary Texts (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1992); Soledad Reyes, “The Romance Mode in Philippine Popular Literature,” Philippine Studies, 32, no. 2 (1984), 163–180; and Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Filipino Woman Writing: Home and Exile in the Autobiographical Narratives of Ten Writers (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994); eadem, A Gentle Subversion: Essays on Philippine Fiction in English (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1998).

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their work was deemed of aesthetic value) emerged as offering unrecognized perspectives on the overlap of Spanish, Japanese, and U.S. regimes. My experience with print texts reminds me of how easily trans-Pacific women authors disappeared from the records of literary and cultural history. To be sure, as a literary scholar and historian I am most comfortable surrounded by a stack of dusty envelopes, peering at fading print, and taking notes amid the steady whir of a microfilm machine. These comments, however, are not meant to valorize the print archive and print methods over digital or multimedia objects, cultural forms, or collections. Rather, my intention is to underscore the importance of working and teaching methods that are conversant with both digital and print realms to study, access, and circulate new understandings of gender and sexuality in the trans-Pacific world. References Benedicto, Bobby. Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Burns, Lucy Mae San Pablo. Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Cannell, Fennella. Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Diaz, Robert. “The Limits of Bakla and Gay: Feminist Readings of My Husband’s Lover, Vice Ganda, and Charice Pempengco.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 721–745. Fajardo, Kale Bantigue. Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinity, and Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Garcia, J. Neil. Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Hau, Caroline S. The Chinese Question: Ethnicity, Nation and Region in and beyond the Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014. Hau, Caroline S. “Privileging Roots and Routes: Filipino Intellectuals and the Contest Over Epistemic Power and Authority.” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 62, no. 1 (2014): 29–65. Hidalgo, Cristina Pantoja. A Gentle Subversion: Essays on Philippine Fiction in English. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1998.

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Hidalgo, Cristina Pantoja. Filipino Woman Writing: Home and Exile in the Auto­ biographical Narratives of Ten Writers. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994. Hsing-Chen, Kuan. Asia As Method: Towards Deimperialization. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Ileto, Reynaldo. “Orientalism and the Study of Philippine Politics.” Philippine Political Science Journal 22, no. 45 (2001): 1–32. Kintanar, Thelma. Women Reading: Feminist Perspectives on Philippine Literary Texts. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1992. Lim, Bliss Cua. “Queer Aswang Transmedia: Folklore as Camp.” Kritika Kultura 24 (2015): 178–225. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015. Lye, Colleen. America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Manalansan, Martin F. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008. Maram, Linda España. Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s to 1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Mendoza, Victor Roman. Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015. Mojares, Resil B. “The Spaces of Southeast Asian Scholarship.” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 61, no. 1 (2013): 105–124, 107. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Ponce, Martin Joseph. Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Rafael, Vicente. “Reorientations: Notes on the Study of the Philippines in the United States.” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 56, no. 4 (2008): 475–492. Rafael, Vicente . The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Rafael, Vicente. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Reyes, Raquel A. G. Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882–1892. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.

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Reyes, Soledad. “The Romance Mode in Philippine Popular Literature.” Philippine Studies 32, no. 2 (1984): 163–80. Roces, Mina and Louise Edwards, eds., Women’s Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism, and Democracy. New York: Routledge, 2004. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004.

CHAPTER 3

The Many Labors of the Gendered Trans-Pacific World Karen J. Leong Abstract This chapter addresses the importance of engaging the experiences of Pacific Islander and American Indian communities in scholarship about the trans-Pacific world. Acknowledging ongoing Indigenous existence and settler colonial states throughout the Pacific region requires a closer examination of how the United States has located Asian Americans in relation to other marginalized groups, including ethnic minority and Indigenous communities. Understanding how processes such as colonization and settler colonialism work together helps to untangle inequalities of power and diverse experiences of migration, citizenship, labor, and subjectivity. This chapter explores what is at stake for Asian American Studies and its scholars in acknowledging Indigenous claims to sovereignty, including disrupting the dominant narratives of American orientalism and the perpetual foreigner.

Keywords Asian American Studies – indigenous – orientalism – Oceania – Pacific Islander – settler colonialism

The trans-Pacific world simultaneously constitutes a political and economic structure organized by regional proximity, an ideological formation deployed to stabilize nation-states, and a field of emotion for the peoples who have shared connections and traversed this space. As documented by scholars of American orientalism, the trans-Pacific world is inherently gendered as an imaginary.1 Other scholars have documented how this imaginary inspired a 1  Jack Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University

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site of diverse economic, political, and cultural interactions.2 Some of these interactions resulted from the legacies of competing empires that sought to dominate the Pacific region, whether of China, Spain, the United States, or Japan.3 Despite the vast array of interpretations of the Pacific region, the transPacific world is demarcated most prominently by the land masses named as continents (Asia, Australia, and the Americas), by the movement of people, ideas, and resources between the nation-states situated on these land masses, and by the interconnections of peoples not bound by those national borders. Some of this movement is along the Pacific Rim. Ara Wilson illustrates this through her study of ethnic Han Chinese littoral migration along the southern coast of Asia to Thailand; in Bangkok, Chinese merchants created powerful mercantile families through marriage strategies to profit from the growing trans-Pacific trade.4 Asian Americanists are among the myriad immigration scholars who have explored how European and U.S. imperial interests in Asia resulted in a series of political and economic developments that instigated outmigration from China, Japan, and the Punjab region of India to the Americas and Australia. The trans-Pacific is a regional capitalist formation constructed upon the asymmetrical development of nations that resulted from colonization and settler colonialism. Several industrialized nations of the Pacific – including the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – are settler colonial states (often referred to as settler states) in which a permanent settlement of peoples from the metropole accompanied colonization. Some former colonial Press, 2003); Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Mayling Soong Chiang, Anna May Wong and the Making of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 2  Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), especially Part I; Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell, 2013). 3  Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); James A. Tyner, Oriental Bodies: Discourse and Disciplines in U.S. Immigration Policy, 1875–1942 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006); Adria Lyn Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 4  Ara Wilson, The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

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possessions, like Hawai‘i, have been incorporated into the U.S. settler state, while others, like the Philippines, are still subject to the economic domination of former colonial powers. Still other former colonies are now identified as industrialized nations – as in the case of South Korea, a former colony of Japan – or as emerging markets of developing nations, such as India, a former colony of Great Britain. The colonizing settlers’ claims to ownership require that the state and its institutions continually erase Indigenous claims to the lands and waters throughout the Pacific Rim. Jodi Byrd thus distinguishes settlers who relocate to the U.S. as part of settler colonialism, from arrivants.5 The latter are themselves displaced by European and U.S. imperialism elsewhere. Settler states, in the name of protecting the “native” rights of colonial settlers, rely upon intersecting social hierarchies of race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender and sexuality, to restrict the permanent settlement of certain peoples across their borders. Thus, those who migrate to meet the labor needs of the settler state may be denied full recognition by the state, even though they nominally enjoy permanent residence and citizenship. Increasingly, scholars of Asian American studies and Asian or American transnational women’s and gender studies are addressing diverse Indigenous Asian and Pacific histories. This chapter explores how state of the field Asian American Studies scholarship is beginning to understand the transnational through the frameworks and the local impact of settler colonialism on the social death of certain bodies in the United States. The relationship between the continual economic and political dynamics of the trans-Pacific and the U.S. settler state’s social formations might create new points of entry for analyzing the gendering of the trans-Pacific world. Scholars Candace Fujikane, Jonathan Okamura, Dean Saranillo, Adria Lyn Imada, Christina DeLisle, Keith Camacho, and Jodi Byrd have made significant interventions in making visible the Pacific and Indigeneity. As Epeli Hau‘ofa has noted, the Pacific is not a body of water that separates land and peoples, but a thoroughfare that connects islands of people and cultures.6 The Pacific 5  Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Byrd credits the term arrivant to “African Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite to signify those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism around the globe” (xix). 6  See Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 147–161. It is beyond my expertise and purview to address the Old World empires that first colonized Oceania and the Americas, but such an analysis of the implications of this history in relation to settler colonialism is needed. Nation-states dominant in the trans-Pacific world have long relied upon the forging of national mythologies to acquire state resources and power beyond their own borders. Nation building around the Pacific Rim relied on the destruction and

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is inhabited by a constellation of diverse communities with their own specific cultural and language systems. They engaged in contestation for power and economic dominance prior to European and U.S. colonizations.7 The vast expansion of the U.S. empire throughout the Pacific at the turn of the 20th century was not new but was an extension of the ongoing colonization and dispossession of Indigenous nations. The United States expended considerable energy in perpetuating a narrative of being exceptionally unburdened by the imperial ambitions of European nations to justify the extension of its interests at the turn of the 20th century. In 1898 the United States annexed Hawai‘i, and took possession of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after defeating Spain that same year, while insisting that it was not an empire. The United States’ 1899 “Open Door” policy carved China up for different international interests without the creation of formal colonies. The diplomats who crafted the treaty took considerable care to present the U.S. as protecting China’s independence. Granting Hawai‘i territorial status without statehood in 1900 likewise allowed for “self-governance” on the part of elite business interests who were not subject to U.S. federal regulations regarding labor conditions. The justification for U.S. influence and empire relied upon gendered and sexualized narratives of racial and cultural difference. American missionaries contributed to an image of the Chinese as savage and uncivilized by circulating stories of attacks on European and American women and children in the states.8 Similarly, Calvinist missionaries accused the Hawaiian kingdom as lacking in morality. During Queen Liliʻuokalani’s visit to Washington, D.C., the dispossession of Indigenous communities throughout Asia (including China, Japan, Taiwan, and Okinawa), the Americas (including Canada, the United States, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil), Australia, and New Zealand. Settler colonial mythologies credited divine mandates for the acquisition of territory and the destruction of Indigenous humans and other species. These mythologies relied upon gender to articulate distinctions of civilization between Spanish, British, French, and Chinese empires. The various revolutions that decolonized New World communities from the Old World were not so revolutionary as to address those Indigenous populations whose labor and resources built the Old World empires for repossession by the New, connected through colonization, genocide, and complicit silence. For a discussion of U.S. empire in the Pacific, Caribbean, and the Americas, see Alyosha Goldstein, ed., Formations of United States Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 7  For example, see Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, eds. Special Issue, The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (2001): Native Pacific Cultural Studies. In particular, see the introduction by Diaz and Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” 315–342. 8  Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwanted Immigrant: American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).

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U.S. press depicted her as highly sexualized and primitive, similar to depictions of African American women during this time.9 Finally, Kristin Hoganson has argued that gender politics and political posturing provoked U.S. imperial ambitions and the nation’s entry into war against Spain. Narratives of gender that imputed female promiscuity and questioned alien masculinity helped to construct the U.S. nation’s self-image as a protector of civilization and a necessary presence in the Pacific.10 The gendered discourses that justified U.S. colonization also accompanied the subsequent U.S. militarization of Guam, Hawai‘i, and the Philippines. Keith Camacho and Christina DeLisle noted in their work that the U.S. militarization of Guam, beginning with World War II and continuing to the present, has been highly gendered and sexualized. Camacho, for example, critiques the “homomilitarism” that has emerged, in which same-sex challenges to laws in Hawai‘i and Guam appear to challenge the heterosexist norms of U.S. militarization and the tourist industry that followed.11 Yet Camacho notes that these same-sex rights campaigns in fact have contributed to the continuity of U.S. imposed ideas of proper citizen subjects who desire the settler colonial state’s legitimation of their relationship. DeLisle’s research on the other hand shows how the U.S. military presence in Guam resulted in the medicalization of women’s reproductive health. The U.S. Navy diminished the role of midwives by promoting a dependency on western-trained medical personnel and western paradigms of medicine and the body.12 Although the navy sought to regulate the reproductive practices of native Chamorro women, many women continued to rely on traditional practices as valued forms of knowledge. Women’s bodies became sites of contestation between traditional systems of gender-specific knowledge and “modern” medicine. Despite the considerable work by scholars of Oceania, however, Asian Americanists often still focus on the interaction between the United States and Asia, or the Americas and Asia, to the exclusion of existing Indigenous 9  Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), especially chapter 5. 10  Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 11  Keith L. Camacho, author’s notes from unpublished presentation, “Queering Ethnic Studies,” Plenary Three, Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide. University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, March 12–20, 2011; also see Imada, Aloha America. 12  Christine Taitano DeLisle, “A History of Chamorro Nurse-Midwives in Guam and a ‘Placental Politics’ for Indigenous Feminism,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 37, March 2015, http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue37/delisle.htm.

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communities in Oceania and the United States. This, in part, is a result of training. As more ethnic studies graduate programs are now incorporating relational frameworks that require accounting for Indigeneity, we are beginning to see exciting new relational research.13 But the still-dominant focus on inclusion and exclusion may also reflect a longing by Asian Americans for recognition by the state. Acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty would undermine the triumphant narrative of United States liberalism in which many Americans have invested: that U.S. democracy allows anyone who is willing to work hard enough to create his or her individual success. Addressing the trans-Pacific world as a gendered social formation also requires a recognition of the racialized, imperial, and neocolonial aspects of this same world. We are fortunate that this important project is one to which several feminist, critical race, and Oceania scholars have contributed already. Their work illuminates the ways in which gender, intimacy, and belonging have been integral in building the trans-Pacific world. Their insights reveal that the trans-Pacific is more than a geographic place or economic and political formation; it is also an affective formation that continually re-forms in response to the political, economic, and ideological shifts that occur. Indigenous feminist scholars Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill emphasize that Indigenous epistemologies are based on relationships with the land, water, and species that emphasize a sustainable Indigenous future. What has been mapped as territory is not an object to be owned but a form of know­ ledge and knowing.14 Thus, unlike the colonizing epistemologies of certain nations in the trans-Pacific world, there is an affective relationship between Indigenous peoples and their environments, a recognition of place and being and, just as importantly, feeling out of place. Dian Million acknowledges this Indigenous way of knowing as felt theory, the validity of emotional knowledge as community knowledge.15 The United States, similar to Canada, Australia, Japan, China, Taiwan, and other settler nations, has used systems of law, education, and national security to destroy these relationships by desecrating the 13  Iyko Day, Alien Capital. Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Scholars like Janey Lew and Manu Vimalassery likewise are producing provocative relational analyses that engage settler colonial frameworks. 14   Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 8–34. 15  Dian Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 53–76.

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land, assimilating Indigenous peoples to a capitalist understanding of land as property to generate wealth, and denying that Indigenous knowledge is valid. Gender systems likewise were colonized, shifting the reciprocal roles of men and women who shared responsibility in sustaining the community to a heteropatriachy system imposed by the paternalist state. Understanding the diverse and multiple colonizations of the trans-Pacific world provides insights about the specific material effects of settler colonialism and its accompanying processes of exploitation and extraction upon the bodies of populations marginalized within this eco-political system. Much of the historiography of Asian America has reproduced in some way U.S. settler colonialism’s liberal narrative generated to obscure U.S. colonization. The system of whiteness as a settler colonial project seeks to incorporate whites with non-whites in overcoming individual hardships to harness the liberal promise of a system of meritocracy and the acquisition of social and material capital. These opportunities are the result of the settler colonial possession of Indigenous lands and the subsequent demand for unfree and immigrant labor. Racialized and gendered labor recruitment at the turn of the 20th century contributed simultaneously to the immigration of Asian labor and restricted the emergence of an Asian American community. This redistribution of resources among settlers was based on their race, socioeconomic mobility, gender, sexuality, national status, and religion. Filipino/American studies in particular have contributed to exploring the complex subjectivities that result from multiple colonizations within the trans-Pacific world; Martin Manalansan’s Global Divas, for example, explores how gay Filipino immigrants in New York City negotiate their subjectivities as bakla, or males who identify as “having a female heart.”16 Traveling from the Philippines, a site of U.S. colonization that has continued even after the Philippines declared its independence, to the United States, a site of settler colonialism, these bakla emphasize certain aspects of their postcolonial identity based on context. Lacking U.S. citizenship, they are subject to state scrutiny if they identify as Filipino. Motivated by the pursuit of (economic) success in the United States, several informants noted they would rather admit to being gay than Filipino because of their fear of deportation. They fear being marginalized among the Filipino diasporic community if they openly “come out” as desiring same-sex relationships.17 At the same time, Filipino Catholicism, a 16  Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 24–25. Bakla does not fully translate linguistically to English nor culturally to the U.S. 17  Ibid., 30–35.

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remnant of Spanish colonization, continues to be a salient feature of their selfidentification.18 Continual marginalization within the urban (primarily white) queer community and fear of deportation does not connote a settler status. Neither the status of arrivant nor that of settler seems to fully fit the experiences documented by Manalansan in his research. The colonization of gender systems and the imposition of a binary gender/sex system complicates the experiences of communities throughout the trans-Pacific. Jennifer Nez Denetdale has described how heteropatriarchy has masked traditional forms of social relations in some parts of the Navajo Nation. The United States imposed heteropatriarchy upon the Diné through a series of policy decisions about property ownership, head of household status, and governance.19 The contemporary Navajo Nation reproduces settler colonial ideologies by celebrating masculinity vis-à-vis military service and patriotism, while distancing itself from the more fluid gender system that existed prior to colonization. Similarly, heteropatriarchal definitions of femininity and masculinity have been institutionalized in U.S. immigration law, which has had a direct bearing on the history of Asian immigrant women to the United States.20 Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Winnie Tam assert an “alternative paradigm” of how Asian American history has been characterized by “gendered racial exclusions and entries” based on existing and highly gendered imaginaries of Asia.21 Their intersectional analysis of restrictive immigration laws re-centers Asian women in the history of Asian trans-Pacific crossings, and further emphasizes the transnational labor of women who maintained families in Asia while their husbands sought wage-paying work throughout the Pacific region. U.S. immigration laws undermined Asian migration to the United States and the development of Asian American communities.22 Immigration law has institutionalized settler colonialism as a structure by relying on family structures and gender relations to classify those who are and those who are not assimilable as Americans. Social formations of 18  Ibid., 118–120, 139–140. 19  Jennifer Nez Denetdale, “Securing Navajo National Boundaries: War, Patriotism, Tradition, and the Diné Marriage Act of 2005,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009), 131–148. 20  This may be true not just of the United States but also of Australia, Canada, and other nation-states that enacted restrictive laws against Chinese and other Asian immigrants. 21  Ibid., 113. 22  Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Winnie Tam, “The Derivative Status of Asian American Women,” in Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 110–133.

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difference based on religion, ethnicity and race, and gender and sexuality further entrenched Anglo and Northern European Americans as the rightful subjects of U.S. democracy. Restrictive immigration laws defined those who would be recognized substantively as American citizens. Immigration policy thus served to sustain the imagined settler nativist community based on who was excluded. These exclusions – apparent from reading Parreñas and Tam alongside Manalansan – are not constant but shift in relation to political and economic needs: Asian female immigrants were perceived as morally suspect in the 19th century; while in the 20th century bakla would rather self-identify as gay than Filipino due to fears of deportation. Today, the sending and receiving nations of the Pacific Rim rely upon these transnational family formations to sustain a globally mobile labor force who will work for low wages and support local economies with remittances.23 Many Americans, Asian Americans included, enjoy the material benefits of the settler colonial state in which they invest their desires for state recognition and participation. Other Asian Americans additionally benefit from the low wage work of immigrant women and men. Immigrants from emerging Asian markets in the late 20th and early 21st centuries who possess the capital of higher education and wealth enjoy greater access to U.S. legal and cultural recognition. Flexible citizenship, a new form of transnational citizenship, allows highly skilled professionals and affluent entrepreneurs to sustain trans-Pacific national affiliations while maximizing economic gains.24 How do these new forms of trans-Pacific citizenship and the increasing recognition of certain Asian Americans as participants in the U.S. body politic rely on and contribute to U.S. settler colonial discourses? New forms of migration and citizenship require new analyses that make visible the settler state and its logics; these emerging theorizations can help unpack how the state locates Asian Americans in relation to other racial ethnic minorities and Indigenous communities.25 23  Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, The Servants of Globalizaton: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), particularly 28–84; see also Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) and Anna Romina Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010). 24  Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 25  Karen J. Leong and Myla Vicenti Carpio, guest editors, “Carceral States: Converging Indigenous and Asian Experiences in the Americas,” special issue Amerasia 42, no. 1 (2016). Evelyn Nakano Glenn. “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative

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Has the focus on American orientalism within Asian American Studies in fact contributed to the lack of attention to Asian American participation in the U.S. project of settler colonialism? This question is raised based on the trajectory of my own research in Asian American Studies and trans-Pacific relations. When orientalism was emerging as a leading paradigm for Asian American Studies I wrote my first book, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Mayling Soong Chiang, Anna May Wong and the Transformation of American Orientalism, to explore U.S. orientalism in relation to China (and East Asia) from the turn of the century to World War II. It argued that foreign policy and popular culture were both articulations of U.S. nationalism and analyzed the ways in which three women – an American novelist born and raised in China, a Chinese American actress, and an American-educated Chinese woman – represented China to the United States public. It noted how systems of white privilege and socioeconomic status – or the lack thereof – at times transcended race and nationality for these three women. While still maintaining that American orientalism was at work in shaping the discourses about U.S.–China relations during this period, subsequent exposure to native feminisms, Indigenous and decolonizing theory, and attention to the U.S. as a settler colonial state has required a rethink of my own positionality as both an Asian American and a scholar of Asian American studies. The narrative of the perpetual foreigner framed by American Orientalism may presume that state recognition is required in order to not be perceived as foreign. This also affirms that the colonial state, in this case the United States, has the right to determine who belongs and who does not. Andrea Smith’s three pillars paradigm of heteropatriarchy conceptualizes how groups might recognize settler colonialism and its logics to create coalitions across differences. Her contribution illuminates what is at stake in insisting upon the transPacific as a world in which Indigenous sovereignty is central.26 Non-Indigenous Americans, including those denied full and substantive U.S. citizenship, are continually in triangulation between the United States as a nation-state and the Indigenous peoples who inhabited these lands prior to settlement by those outside of North America. Legitimating the settler colonial state of the United Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 54–74. Glenn explains settler colonialism as a comparative framework that can create powerful possibilities for coalition building, using Chinese and Mexican immigrants as examples. 26  Andrea Smith, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Daniel Martinez HoSang, Omeka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 66–90.

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States undermines Indigenous Hawaiian and American Indian claims to substantive sovereignty (and further legitimizes U.S. colonization of Guam, Puerto Rico, et al.).27 A current research project with American Indian Studies scholar Myla Vicenti Carpio illustrates how this triangulation works.28 We are studying the U.S. federal government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans on the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) reservation from 1942 to 1945. The diversion of the Gila River, using tributaries and dams engineered to supply water to white farmers and settlements in the late 19th century, devastated the agricultural economy of GRIC, who undertook a massive effort to reclaim thousands of acres of land in the 1930s. This land was ready for planting, but before GRIC members could farm it the government appropriated it in 1942. Without the initial approval of the tribal council, the U.S. military usurped the farm lands and additional acreage for the Japanese American prison camps that operated at GRIC until 1945. The years spent enriching the land for GRIC farming were not credited when Japanese American prisoners began harvesting abundant crops. Japanese Americans, perceived by government officials to be exceptional farmers, instead received the credit for rendering the land productive, and were thus unwittingly presented as more hardworking and productive than the U.S. imagined American Indians to be. This settler colonial narrative faulted Indians for lacking industry and initiative, ignoring the dispossession of water and lack of funds that rendered the land unusable.29 This is but one example of how reading Asian American histories and experiences through a decolonizing and Indigenous lens can generate new analyses. The asymmetrical experiences of Japanese Americans and American Indians during the 1940s and 1950s were deeply connected through U.S. transnational relations with American Indian nations and Japan, and the differential effects of U.S. settler colonialism on GRIC and the Japanese American immigrant community. The U.S. settler state, moreover, sought to partly reanimate Japanese Americans

27  Ibid. 28  Karen J. Leong and Myla Vicenti Carpio. “Carceral Subjugations: Gila River Indian Community and Incarceration of Japanese Americans on its Lands,” special issue Amerasia 42, no. 1 (2016): 103–120. More accurately, our attempts to build a collaboration between the Gila River Indian Community and Japanese American community in Arizona first demonstrated the ways in which place-making can disregard Indigenous meanings and histories of place. 29  Ibid.

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from social death even as it sought to terminate U.S. treaty obligations to American Indians.30 Recent scholarship emphasizing relationality has identified new contours and locations of American orientalism. Karen Kuo has demonstrated elegantly how orientalized imaginaries of East Asia performed cultural labor for the United States from 1910 to 1930.31 Interactions between East Asia and the United States increased as a result of trade, militarization, and migration. The imaginaries of exotic foreign-ness threatened and buttressed U.S. ideas of citizenship and belonging at a time when the nation was responding to new immigrants, concerns about New Women, and economic instability. Simultaneously, the United States served as a modern imaginary for elite Asian immigrants, aristocrats, and intellectuals, providing a means by which they could make sense of their own subjectivities in the rapidly changing trans-Pacific world. So, even though the United States deployed an orientalist gaze, Kuo shows how some Asians and Asian immigrants actively gazed back in a mutual assessment.32 Nor has American orientalism been linked only to Asian bodies. Adria Lyn Imada explores how Hawaiian culture was appropriated by the United States as the nation built up its Pacific presence after World War II.33 Imada describes the “intimate imaginaries” that the United States military presented to Americans from the 1940s to the 1960s, positioning native Hawaiian females as welcoming U.S. military personnel as honored guests/protectors.34 While she is careful to note the not-quite anti-colonialism of native Hawaiian female dancers, she also emphasizes how “they often evaded and deflected forces that sought to define and rule them.”35 The imaginary of Hawai‘i as a tropical paradise welcoming “militourism” contrasts greatly with the reality of underemployment, poverty, homelessness, and substance abuse among native Hawaiians.36 30  Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 31  Karen Kuo, East is West and West is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). 32  Ibid. 33  Imada, Aloha America. 34  Ibid., 215–233. At the same time Imada emphasizes that, by singing songs in the Hawaiian language about the meaning of hula in native Hawaiian culture, the hula performers performed resistance in response to the presence of U.S. military in service to the state. 35  Ibid., 65. 36  Haunani-Kay Trask, Notes from a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i, rev. ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), see “Introduction,” 1–23, and “ ‘Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture,” 136–149.

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These are only two examples of how American orientalism is being read in more complicated ways across the Pacific. Significantly, Kuo and Imada explore the possibilities of reading American orientalism sideways and in multiple directions. Understanding how American orientalism is differentially applied across the trans-Pacific world, requires attending to active responses of orientalized and/or colonized subjects within varied contexts. Looking for oppositional gazes that defy colonization’s “command performances” might help map a geography of resistance and anti-colonialism throughout the Pacific. A relational decolonial methodology can help us to re-imagine the transPacific world not in capitalist and neoliberal terms, but as a set of interconnected practices of deflection, evasion, subversion, and resistance. Relating Kuo and Imada’s analyses to the analysis Vicenti Carpio and I are developing also points to another dimension of the trans-Pacific world. The experiences are linked by a powerful desire for recognition. The significance of engaging Indigenous experiences and knowledge is a reminder that this recognition does not always have to come from the state in the form of citizenship, or from any other settler colonial institutions. Chandan Reddy has noted that belonging is an affective modality that reflects how a desire for state recognition sustains the state’s power. He suggests that several African American intellectuals, including Nella Larsen, looked to the Pacific as an affective formation.37 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu’s discussion of radical orientalism explores the fascination radicals of color have with Socialist Asia, including the Black Panther Party. Their vision of Asia as an alternate space to the United States similarly suggests that the Pacific represented a different political and affective terrain for African Americans; that traveling to Asia provided a way to be recognized, a way to belong outside of the United States.38 For Asian immigrants, traveling to the United States often resulted in negotiating legal and social exclusions, which inspired silence and shame for some and bold refashioning of identities for others. The trans-Pacific constitutes a field of emotions that accompany one’s marginality or inclusion in the nation-state, and often gives rise to subjugated knowledge and its praxis. Scholars such as Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura have acknowledged the affective investments some Asian American residents of Hawai‘i have in embracing Hawai‘i as an exceptional, multicultural paradise. Acknowledging what is at stake in these investments can be the beginning of decolonizing Asian American Studies and the trans-Pacific in relation to Indigenous nations

37  Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 93–94. 38  Wu, Radicals on the Road.

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and peoples.39 Re-orienting the field must take place at the structural level. We must rethink the training required for transnational Asian American and trans-Pacific studies and must apply new frameworks as they are relevant. This analysis requires skills and knowledge that transcend national borders. It also requires crossing disciplinary borders, including an openness to cross-field and transnational collaboration. In the words of Mari Matsuda, the analysis necessary to facilitate coalitional politics requires “asking the unasked questions” of our research, our teaching, and our knowledge.40 Bibliography Arvin, Maile, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill. “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 8–34. Azuma, Eiichiro. Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Cacho, Lisa Marie. Social Death. Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Camacho, Julia María Schiavone. Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Camacho Keith L. “Queering Ethnic Studies.” Comments presented at Plenary Three, Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, March 11, 2011. Chew, Selfa. “Re-imagining Collectivities: The Mexican Japanese During World War II.” April 1, 2008. National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Annual

39  Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism: from Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). 40  Mari J. Matsuda. “Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1183–1192. In this published talk, Matsuda called upon Asian Americans to account for their own location that might work against the movements for native Hawaiians sovereignty. Of course, the ability to provide and engage in this breadth of knowledge and skill acquisition is made more difficult by the general structure of graduate programs and higher education, which limits time spent in graduate work.

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Conference. Paper 6. http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/naccs/2008/Proceedings/6. Accessed January 2, 2016. Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Day, Iyko. Alien Capital. Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Delgado, Grace Peña. Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. DeLisle, Christine Taitano. “A History of Chamorro Nurse-Midwives in Guam and a ‘Placental Politics’ for Indigenous Feminism.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 37 (March 2015). Accessed January 4, 2016. Denetdale, Jennifer Nez. “Securing Navajo National Boundaries: War, Patriotism, Tradition, and the Diné Marriage Act of 2005.” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 131–148. Diaz, Vicente M. and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, eds. “Introduction.” In special issue, The Contemporary Pacific, Native Pacific Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2001): 315–342. Fujikane, Candace and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 54–74. Goldstein, Alyosha, ed. Formations of United States Colonialism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Guevarra, Anna Romina. Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 147–161. Hoganson, Kristin. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Hosokawa, Bill. Nisei: The Quiet Americans. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1969. Hu-Dehart, Evelyn. “Immigrants to a Developing Society. The Chinese in Northern Mexico, 1975–1932.” Journal of Arizona History 21 (1980): 49–85. Hu-Dehart, Evelyn. “Racism and Anti-Chinese Persecution in Mexico.” Amerasia Journal 9, no. 2 (1982): 1–28. Imada, Adria Lyn. Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through U.S. Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

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Kuo, Karen. East is West and West is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Lee, Erika. “The ‘Yellow Peril” and Asian Exclusion in the Americas.” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 4 (2007): 537–562. Leong, Karen J. The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Mayling Soong Chiang, Anna May Wong and the Making of American Orientalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Leong, Karen J. and Myla Vicenti Carpio. “Carceral Subjugations: Gila River Indian Com­ mu­nity and Incarceration of Japanese Americans on its Lands.” Eds. special issue “Carceral States: Converging Indigenous and Asian Experiences in the Americas.” Amerasia 42, no. 1 (2016): 103–120. Lew, Janey. “Meeting with Discomfort: Aboriginal, Asian Canadian, and Queer Women Writers Organizing Across Difference.” Paper presented at the NAISA Annual Meeting 2012. Mohegan Sun, Uncasville, CT, June 6, 2016. Manalansan IV, Martin F. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Matsuda, Mari J. “Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (2001): 1183–1192. Miller, Stuart Creighton. The Unwanted Immigrant: American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Million, Dian. “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History.” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 53–76. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar and Winnie Tam. “The Derivative Status of Asian American Women.” In Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar, The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization, 110–113. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. The Servants of Globalizaton: Women, Migration and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Reddy, Chandan. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Saranillo, Dean Itsuji. “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigeous Difference.” In Settler Colonial Studies 3, nos. 3–4 (2013): 280–294. Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Smith, Andrea. “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy.” In Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Daniel Martinez HoSang, Omeka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido, 66–90. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Tanaka, Stefan. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

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Tchen, Jack Kuo Wei. New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Trask, Haunani-Kay. Notes from a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999. Tyner, James A. Oriental Bodies: Discourse and Disciplines in U.S. Immigration Policy, 1875–1942. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. Vimalassery, Manu. “The Prose of Counter-Sovereignty.” In Formations of United States Colonialism, ed. Alyosha Goldstein, 87–109. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Wilson, Ara. The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. Yoshihara, Mari. Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Part 2 Geographies of Empire

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CHAPTER 4

Rethinking the Sexual Geography of American Empire in the Philippines Interracial Intimacies in Mindanao and the Cordilleras, 1898–1921 Tessa Ong Winkelmann Abstract This chapter uses a transnational approach to examine a range of interracial sexual relationships – from the casual and economic to the formal – between Americans and Filipinos in the Philippines during the first two decades of colonial rule. Departing from a largely Manila-centric body of literature that explores the contours of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, it explores the U.S. colonial borderlands of the northern Cordillera mountains, the traditional homelands of many indigenous tribal peoples, and Mindanao, the southernmost region with a predominantly Muslim population. The former attracted sporadic settlement from colonial officials and academics, while the latter became a region of U.S.-sponsored settler colonialism that facilitated Christian immigration and land appropriation. From the casual and economic (queridas, mistresses, prostitution) to the formal (marriage), interracial intimacies between Filipinos and Americans in the so-called colonial frontiers were crucial components in the consolidation and stabilization of regional colonial control, strengthening the overall U.S. imperial project in the islands. Further, rethinking the sexual geography of the colonial Philippines also highlights the centrality of the far northern and southern regions in the development potentials of the American colonial capital. The chapter presents new possibilities for connecting U.S.-based histories of gender and sexuality in the “frontiers” of the American West to include transnational considerations of “the farthest west,” across the Pacific Ocean, and opens up considerations of settler colonialism in the Philippines. Lastly, this chapter demonstrates that interracial sexual intercourse was not synonymous with anti-racism or anti-imperialism but, rather, relied on and reproduced violent racism and the oppressive logics of imperialism.

Keywords Philippines – settler colonialism – imperialism – interracial – intimacy – gender – marriage – prostitution – Mindanao – Cordillera

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In the early years of the American occupation of the Philippines, interracial Filipino-American couples were offered the opportunity to escape the disdain and hostility they faced in large cities like Manila, and encouraged to “homestead” in newly formed agricultural colonies in Mindanao. These couples and other Christian populations were encouraged to settle in the farthest southern region of the Philippines, furthering the colonial settlement plan of outnumbering local Muslim residents with non-Muslim residents. On the opposite side of the archipelago, in the mountainous northern Philippines, anthropologists, colonial officials, military men, teachers, miners, and others often married or had sexual relations with local Igorot women. These relationships incited the ire of nearby American populations, inspiring gossip not just in Manila, but all the way to the shores of America. Even though American men who crossed the sexual color line were disparaged by most in the American community for “going native,” they were simultaneously viewed by their countrymen as indispensable hosts, tour guides, and translators for colonial administrators and tourists alike. Through their established familial networks such men often facilitated U.S. imperial access to diverse indigenous communities in the hard to reach far north. Tribal communities in the Cordillera region would then be pointed to as the prime beneficiaries of U.S. civilization, demonstrating the need for a long-term American colonial presence in the islands. From the northern mountainous Cordilleras, to the southern Islamic islands, this chapter explores how interracial intimacies in the islands, particularly those in the regions farthest away from the colonial capital of Manila, were regarded by Americans, Filipinos, and the colonial government during the first few decades of U.S. colonization from 1898, through the period of Filipinization advanced under the lengthy Governorship of Francis Burton Harrison, until 1921.1 Interracial intimacies, meaning the sexual relationships that occurred between Americans and Filipinos – casual or committed, longor short-term, paid or unpaid, coerced or consensual – presented the colonial government with the complicated task of controlling the behavior and private lives of their own citizens, as well as that of the native population. As we shall see, these intimacies cannot simply be regarded as apolitical or as instances 1  Filipinization is the term used to describe the process by which an American-run government in the Philippines would come to eventually be replaced by Filipino civil servants. Seen as a process that spelled eventual independence for the Philippines, it was embraced by Filipino nationalists but criticized by many American imperialists. The Jones Act of 1916 mentioned the future independence of Philippines once a stable Filipino majority government could be achieved. It further brought the legislative branch of government under Filipino control, although the executive branch remained in American hands.

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of cross-cultural acceptance, or even simply as sexual vice. Instead, these relationships served as routes through which both Filipinos and Americans in the Philippines tried to secure political, social, economic, and cultural power in the new colonial order. An examination of the far northern and southern regions of the colony, however, will demonstrate that the degree to which one could negotiate status or power through interracial sexual intimacies was largely skewed in favor of the American colonial project. Such relations were essential to the consolidation of regional control that would strengthen the overall U.S. project in the islands. Interracial intimacies in the colonial Philippines occurred with a frequency that was troubling to many colonial officials. Governmental reports lament the “presence in a large majority of the towns of the archipelago of dissolute, drunken and lawless Americans, who are willing to associate with low Filipino women.”2 An American teacher bemoaned, “Here was another American living with a native woman . . . Every civilian I had thus far met outside of the government employees were married or living with native women.”3 Another 1938 report on the mixed-race children of American-Filipino parentage reports, “from northern most Appari to southernmost Mindanao, American fathers had left children.”4 The overwhelming disdain for interracial intimacies is indicative of the prevailing U.S. racial ideologies and sentiments of the time. Ideologies that were invoked in the enacting of “separate but equal” in practice and in law had just been reconfirmed and upheld in the recent 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson trial. Anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting the marriage of people of color to whites were the norm, with thirty out of forty-eight states having laws barring these marriages in 1913. Filipinos, having been racialized in very similar ways to African Americans, Chinese, and Native Americans, were added to these laws in the early 1930s when their presence in the U.S. grew.5 2  U.S. Government Printing Office, Report of the Philippine Commission to the Secretary of War, (1900–1903), 495. 3  Herbert Fisher, Philippine Diary (New York: Vantage Press, 2005), 85. 4  “Statistics on Wards, Auditors Report for the year 1938” (Manila: The American Guardian Association Incorporated, 1938), 1. 5  For more on the history of anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S., and interracial marriage, see Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For the racialization of Filipinos by the U.S., see Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Nancy Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Julian

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The gender and racial privilege of white American men ensured that a large majority of such interracial relations were between white men and Filipina women. Historically, white men in the U.S. had always had sexual access to the bodies of women of color, despite anti-miscegenation laws that deemed such relations illegal.6 In the colony of the Philippines, where these laws did not apply, men could enter more freely into relations with Filipina women, despite the popular disapproval and loathing of miscegenation. African American men in the Philippines also entered into sexual relations with Filipina women. As many white Americans feared that traits associated with racial blackness would be negative influences upon the supposedly impressionable Filipino “wards,” Black sexuality came to be regulated more heavily in the islands. Black troops were rotated more regularly and faced deportation more frequently than white troops.7 Filipinas, Moro women in the south, and indigenous women alike also came to be associated with a deviant sexuality. Military pamphlets, travel writing, and medical publications spread the idea that native women were exotic and available, a fringe benefit of serving an undesirable tour in the tropics.8 The idea that, “There ain’t no ten commandments in the Philippines,” became widespread, even though it was, and remains, a

Go and Anne Foster, eds. The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 6  See Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Kevin Johnson, ed. Mixed-Race America and the Law (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Elise Lemire,“Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 7  Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 193. For more on the history of Black soldiers in the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, see Willard Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Cynthia Marasigan, “ ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Sea’: Ambivalence, Violence, and African American Soldiers in the Philippine-American War and Its Aftermath” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2010). 8  Navy Guide to Manila and Cavite: A Practical Guide and Beautiful Souvenir (Manila: [n.p.], 1908). Accessed at Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. Ayer Collection. For more on women and gender in the Philippines, see Mary Elizabeth Holt, Colonizing Filipinas: Nineteenthcentury Representations of the Philippines in Western Historiography (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002); Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Nerissa Balce, “The Filipina’s Breast: Savagery, Docility, and the Erotics of the American Empire,” Social Text 24, no. 2 (2006): 89–110.

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predominantly Catholic country. In this context, prostitution, marriage, and other types of sexual encounters between American men and Filipinas flourished.9 In the large body of scholarship about the U.S and the Philippines, the topic of interracial sexual relations between Americans and Filipinos is most often addressed as a post-World War II and even contemporary issue of sex-work and the military. The scholarship on the American colonial period typically overlooks interracial sexual intimacies, or usually only focuses on issues of prostitution and the military. Most notably, the work of scholars such as Victor Mendoza, Mary Elizabeth Holt, Richard Coloma, Paul Kramer, and Andrew Abalahin, whose works explore colonial prostitution and interracial relations in the Philippines have helped in the framing of this research.10 Mendoza’s recent study of same-sex intimacies, gender-sexual deviance, and colonial management has been particularly useful. This work is also heavily influenced by scholarship on domestic U.S. imperialism and expansionist policies in the American West, as well as works that examine interracial intimacies in European colonial sites. Scholars such as Julianna Barr, Kathleen DuVal, Ramon Gutierrez, and others highlight how imperial expansion in North America by French, Spanish and U.S. empires often relied on forming relations and kinship ties with indigenous people, in particular through intimate relations with indigenous women. Considerations of intimacies in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period, and India during British colonization have also offered interesting points of comparison.11 This study of the U.S. and the Philippines reflects some of the 9  Eclectic Medical Journal 72 (1912): 45. 10  Kramer, Blood of Government; Holt, Colonizing Filipinas; Roland Sintos Coloma, “White Gazes, Brown Breasts: Imperial Feminism and Disciplining Desires and Bodies in Colonial Encounters,” Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of Education, 48, no. 2 (2012): 243–261; Andrew Jimenez Abalahin, “Prostitution Policy and the Project of Modernity: A Comparative Study of Colonial Indonesia and the Philippines, 1850–1940” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2003); Victor Román Mendoza, Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 11  For the Dutch in Indonesia, see: Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); for the British in India see: Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Anjali R. Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). For histories that look at the intersections of intimacy, family and imperialism, see: Matt K. Matsuda, Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization

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themes of these later works and also adds to and complicates our understanding of intimate colonial relations. After all, although the U.S. had long been engaged in imperial expansion in its westward push for “manifest destiny,” it was a relative newcomer in acquiring overseas territories and colonies. Also, having acquired its new “possessions” from former Spanish occupiers, the U.S. was deeply influenced by other colonial powers in what to do and what not to do in its own imperial pursuits. U.S. imperialism had the added component of a more racially heterogeneous colonizing population, as both white and black Americans took formal roles in the process, especially in the military subjugation and eventual occupation of the islands. All these factors influenced the U.S. Empire in the islands, and also impacted the formation, representation, and geography of interracial sexual encounters. A review of interracial intimacies in the northern and southern regions of the colony highlights not only issues of the sexual economy and prostitution, but also foregrounds different types of interracial intimacies, such as long- and short-term liaisons and marriages. In addition, by illuminating the sexual geographies outside of Manila, the idea of a “frontier” region or a “peripheral” space in the colony will be exposed as a fiction of the colonial enterprise. Both the northern Cordilleras and southern Mindanao weighed heavily on the American imagination – neither had been fully brought under colonial control by the previous Spanish occupiers – and represented make or break opportunities for American power in the islands. Removed from the larger population of Americans and Europeans in Manila, the north and south were imagined by colonists as places where few white people had dared to tread, wild and untamed lands removed from the center of American power.12 The mystique surrounding these farthest geographies also led colonists to in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 12  See: Gerard A. Finin, The Making of the Igorot: Ramut Ti Panagkaykaysa Dagiti Taga Cordillera (Contours of Cordillera Consciousness) (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2005); Frank Jenista, The White Apos: American Governors on the Cordillera Central (Quezon City: New Day Publishing, 1987); Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Many travel accounts by American tourists and colonists remark upon how certain white men and women were reputedly the first white people to travel to and within the Cordilleras. Such acknowledgements also situate the American writer of these travel documents as adventurous, positioning them as following on the heels of the “first” white people in the region.

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imagine the regions as having immense potential for economic and civilizational development, spurring the desire for prompt incorporation to American rule. Native populations, cultures, and the actual physical landscape in both Mindanao and the Cordilleras were unlike Manila in many ways; yet it was here, in these peripheral geographies that the potentials and limitations of the American-controlled capital – and hence U.S. imperial aspirations in the AsiaPacific – could be realized or unraveled. The disparate populations and geographies of the north versus the south required different strategies for incorporation; these efforts were reflected in the types of intimacies that predominated in each region. For example, in the mountainous Cordilleras, where travel was difficult and ideas of savage headhunters prevailed, men in relationships with Filipinas could secure connections to local communities and act as the literal translators and guides to American colonial administrators and travelers. In predominantly Muslim Mindanao, interracial couples were offered tracts of land to homestead on, thereby increasing the population of non-Muslims in the region. The following sections on the southern and northern Philippines illustrate how such intimacies on the so-called frontiers were crucial components in the consolidation and stabilization of regional colonial control, strengthening the overall U.S. imperial project in the islands. To say that interracial intimacies created problems and challenges for the burgeoning colonial power would be true; however, an interrogation of colonial affairs outside of Manila also reveals how necessary these relations were in creating opportunities for empire building. The sexual geographies of U.S. Empire in the Philippines, by which I mean those locales wherein certain types of interracial intercourse were promoted, prevailed, or policed/tolerated in distinct ways, were determinant of American imperial possibilities in the Pacific.

Southern Philippines – Mindanao: Amalgamation as Colonial Policy

Colonial policy in the southern Philippines differed from that in the north, especially in the first decades of the American era. Never fully brought under Spanish colonial power and ruled over by Muslim Datu leaders, Mindanao was a major obstacle to the consolidation of American authority. Easy colonization of the region was difficult as pre-existing Spanish settlements or outposts that could simply be reoccupied by new U.S. forces were scarce. Americans were largely unfamiliar with Islamic cultures and imagined the Moros of the

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southern islands as barbaric, lusty, and uncivilized.13 Already busily engaged in fighting on the island of Luzon against Filipino insurrectos, people who opposed American occupation of the islands, the colonial government wanted to avoid the outbreak of hostilities with the Moro people of the southern islands. Therefore, an informal policy of collaboration and accommodation with the Datu leaders of Mindanao was the rule during the PhilippineAmerican war. In addition to formal acquiescence (on both sides) in the form of the Kiram-Bates treaty of 1899, which recognized some autonomy for the Sultan and a simultaneous recognition of American rule, other stop-gap measures were necessary to maintain the delicate balance of power in the southern Philippines. These stop-gap measures, like the Bates treaty, received much criticism from the American public. Many Americans voiced their opinions that the U.S. should not accept what they considered to be the morally corrupt ways of the Datus and Sultans, known to keep slaves and practice forms of polygamy.14 In this moment of triaged concessions, control over sexual relations between Americans and Moro women in Mindanao became a catalyst for both exultation and lamentation of U.S. imperialism in the islands. The U.S. military’s wartime regulation of prostitution on Jolo Island, for example, highlights the centrality of interracial intercourse in the stabilization of regional imperial control. For military strategists, the immediate cooperation of this southern region was vital to military success, as the bulk of wartime fighting was occurring on the main northern island of Luzon, and a two front war was undesirable. Thus, certain concessions were made to the Muslim inhabitants of the southern regions so as to focus on fighting insurrectos near the colonial capital of Manila. The prevention of interracial sexual contact was one such concession. Between 1899 and 1902, the pre-existing sexual economy in Jolo, which was quickly discovered by American troops, came under the scrutiny of Major Owen Sweet of the 23rd infantry. Taking the opportunity to showcase a resolute American objection to such social vices, Sweet took action against gambling dens, prostitutes, and saloons. In reports to his superiors, Sweet detailed his campaign to oust most women engaged in local prostitution

13  For more on the history of Mindanao during the Spanish and American colonial periods in the Philippines, see: Cesar Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1999); Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery; Samuel Tan, The Filipino Muslim armed struggle, 1900–1972 (Makati: Filipinas Foundation, 1977); Patricio Abinales, Making Mindanao: Cotabato and Davao in the Formation of the Philippine Nation-State (Quezon City: Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2000). 14  Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery, 35–40.

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work, especially Moro women. The removal of local Moro women in particular from the sexual economy was not only a targeted priority, but was also, according to Sweet, handled in a very discreet and delicate manner. The extra caution used in the case of these women was due to the fact that many were believed to be under the protection of the local rulers, men that the American military did not want to offend during this tenuous time. Sweet declared that his regulatory efforts showcased the “morality, discipline, and good administration” of U.S. colonial rule.15 The desire to remain on friendly terms with local rulers for the sake of larger imperial goals was not only dependent on preventing certain types of interracial sexual contact, but also relied heavily on creating the conditions for, and providing other, more acceptable types of intercourse. Sweet understood that without sexual recourse within the camp towns, men would seek amusements elsewhere, perhaps in the homes of Moro women. For this reason, while Moro women were extracted from the sexual economy, others were allowed to continue to work. Sweet allowed Japanese women, many of whom were attracted to the area from other parts of the Philippines or from neighboring parts of Asia due to the large influx of troops, to maintain their role within a sexual economy regulated by the military. These women, who were not necessarily integrated into the communities of local elites, were seen as a safer and necessary population for the sexual morale of American men. Thus, while some scholarship has described the Sweet campaign as an example of the regional specificities of vice control in in the early period of the U.S. occupation, this moment must also be understood as one in which successful imperial occupation hinged upon “safely” satisfying the sexual desires of American men and the extent to which certain women’s bodies could be controlled. In addition, the possibility that Moro women might evade and circumvent the restrictions placed upon the sexual economy heightened the fears over potentially dangerous interracial sexual contact. Military reports, for example, hint at the difficulty in controlling the actions of Moro women and other Filipinas within the sexual economy, stating that the “cleaner” Japanese 15  Paul Kramer describes Sweet’s campaign and its relation to international considerations in more detail in his article on prostitution in the Philippines during the PhilippineAmerican war. Paul Kramer, “The Darkness That Enters The Home: The Politics of Prostitution During the Philippines-American War,” in Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed, Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). See also, Paul Kramer, “The Military Sexual Complex: Prostitution, Disease, and the Boundaries of Empire During the Philippine-American War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 25, 2011, http://apjjf.org/2011/9/30/Paul-A.-Kramer/3574/article.html.

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women who presented “less trouble,” were “perfectly amenable” to the rules and regulations enacted by the U.S. military; this “could hardly be said of the various other women.”16 Indeed, reports of Moro women operating outside the military regulated systems of prostitution continued well into the next decade of American occupation.17 Sweet’s decision to regulate rather than eradicate, allowing some women and not others to continue working within the sexual economy, reveals two key insights. Firstly, in one way or another, interracial sexual relations would prevail. Secondly, that the U.S. efforts in Jolo (and hence the larger Philippines) could be jeopardized by the sexual desires of American men and the possible evasion of restrictions by some Moro women. The American public at home could express their disapproval of the regulation rather than the complete eradication of sexual vice in the southern Philippines, however, Sweet’s campaign shows that the concerns of moralist Americans were secondary to the “safe” satisfaction of men’s sexual desires. In Jolo, the regulated sexual economy that pushed American men towards Japanese women and away from Moro women was needed to prevent a larger collapse of relations with the Muslim rulers of the southern islands. In the end, it seems that Sweet’s actions may have accelerated the relations that he was attempting to prevent. As Sweet deported most of the prostitutes in Jolo, he continued to receive complaints from the local Muslim population about “impure proposals to their women by the soldiers.”18 After the volatile Philippine-American war period, when there was less need to recognize the sovereignty of the Muslim Datus and the Bates Treaty was abrogated, the U.S. government made further plans to incorporate the Mindanao region into the American colonial enterprise. The proposals for Mindanao varied. The American-led Zamboanga Chamber of Commerce called for a complete removal of Mindanao from the Philippines in order to use the region as a United States colonial plantation. Others argued that Mindanao should be a location for the settlement of undesired American populations, including recent immigrants to the U.S. and African Americans.19 While some 16  Report of Captain R. R. Stevens to the Hearings before the Committee on the Philippines of the United States Senate in Relation to Affairs in the Philippine Islands, Washington: Government Printing Office, Vol. 2, 1902, p. 1878. 17  “Periscope: Measures Instituted to Diminish the Frequency of Venereal Infections and Results,” Eclectic Medical Journal, John Scudder, ed. State Eclectic Medical Association, Ohio, Vol. 72, 1912, 46. 18  Report of Lt. Owen Sweet to the Hearings before the Committee, Vol. 2, 1864. 19  Samuel Tan, The Filipino Muslim Armed Struggle, ch. 7; Moshe Yegar, Between Integration and Secession: The Muslim Communities of the Southern Philippines, Southern Thailand, and Western Burma/Myanmar (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002), 223; Reuben Canoy,

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of these ideas were thoughtfully considered by the American colonial government, most were never implemented. Although all of these plans agreed that, in order to extend tighter control over the region, the Muslim rulers and the population in general had to be weakened and disempowered. Thus, in a period of brutal warfare followed by conquest and settler colonization – one that was quite similar to the campaigns against indigenous populations in the U.S. – the American military engaged in a process of “pacifying” the local Moro population.20 Following “pacification,” a policy of “amalgamation” was begun; the outnumbering of the local Moro population by non-Muslim Filipinos and Americans was the end goal. This amalgamation process included the resettling of large numbers of Filipino Christians and Americans from the northern and central islands to tracts of land around Mindanao. Like the policies of removal and displacement of Native American populations in the U.S., the amalgamation policy hoped that a large influx of new settlers would weaken the ruling Muslim population in the south by outnumbering them, and eventually “absorbing” them into the new, more acceptable, population.21 U.S. colonial officials promoted the settlement of the supposedly unoccupied lands with varying results over the next decade. The Philippine government would continue with similar plans well after the American colonial period. This internal colonization of Mindanao was meant to further imperial aims in several main ways. First, amalgamation was meant to purge the Muslim population. Second, importing a settler population would create a large and productive population in the south for economic growth, namely on American

The Quest for Mindanao Independence (Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines: Mindanao Post Publishing Company, 1987). 20  James Tyner, Iraq, Terror, and the Philippines’ Will to War (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 15. 21  The idea of the “amalgamation of the Mohammedan and Christian native population into a homogeneous Filipino population,” as stated by Frank Carpenter, Governor of the Department of Mindanao and Sulu, 1914–1920, quoted in: Peter Gordon Gowing, Mandate in Moroland: The American Government of Muslim Filipinos, 1899–1920 (Quezon City: Philippine Center for Advanced Studies, University of the Philippines, 1977), 292. For more on Indian removal in the U.S., see: Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Mary E. Young, “Indian Removal and Land Allotment: The Civilized Tribes and Jacksonian Justice,” American Historical Review 64, no. 1 (1958): 31–45; Deborah A. Rosen, Border Law: The First Seminole War and American Nationhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

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plantations. Last, this importation of settlers would supposedly “solve” the problem of population density in the Luzon and Visayan regions.22 Christian Filipinos and Americans were encouraged to settle on agricultural colonies in Mindanao and even received initial monetary support.23 Various public land acts encouraging non-Muslim settlement led to the creation of the Momungan agricultural colony in Lanao Del Norte in 1914, a colony that was primarily settled by interracial Filipino-American couples.24 As one early report on the state of the colony describes: The condition of these men [who married Filipino women] was pitiable. There is no place in the social and economic organization of the country for Americans of that class and the government . . . established them on public lands . . . where they will have an opportunity to work out their own salvations under the control of the bureau of agriculture.25 American men from the northern and central islands traveled to Mindanao with their Filipino families to try their hand at farming. Recently discharged U.S. soldiers from the Camp Keithly military outpost in Lanao also took advantage of the homesteading opportunities and went to Momungan.26 While interracial couples secured land in new agricultural colonies, the colonial government advanced their plan to increase the non-Muslim population of Mindanao. At the same time, this movement of white-Filipino couples to the south helped to obscure the existence of unsettling interracial relationships in places like Manila. Indeed, Mindanao was thought to be not only a place where undesirables could be resettled, but also a place where dangerous undesirables already existed. The prevalence and persistence of Islam, even throughout the Spanish occupation of the islands, conjured notions of wild and lusty Sultans, lascivious 22  See Karl Pelzer, Pioneer Settlement in the Asiatic Tropics; Studies in Land Utilization and Agricultural Colonization in Southeastern Asia (New York: American Geographical Society, 1945). Gowing, Mandate in Moroland. 23  For more on this land policy and mention of the colony in Momungan see: Pelzer, Pioneer Settlement in the Asiatic Tropics; Gowing, Mandate in Moroland; Yegar, Between Integration and Secession. 24  Iluminado Silao, “Lanao’s Best Agricultural Colony – Was Founded By Americans in the Face of Untold Difficulties” Graphic Magazine 7, no. 10 (1933), 11. 25  Charles Elliot, The Philippines: To the End of the Commission Government: A Study in Tropical Democracy (Indianapolis: The Bobbs–Merrill Company Publishers, 1917), 373. 26  Lewis Gleeck, Americans on the Philippine Frontiers (Manila: Carmelo and Bauermann, Inc., 1974), 116–117.

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harems and ruthless raiding and slavery.27 A poem written by a former SpanishAmerican war soldier illustrates this point.28 Entitled, “A Darky’s Mournful Wail,” this poem tells the fictional tale of a “Dixie colored man” named Mose Faggin, an African American who went to Jolo in Mindanao to meet the Sultan.29 While in Jolo, Faggin converts to Islam, apparently swayed by the prospect of having his own harem, and becomes the husband of four wives. “Now dis may soun’ good, but it ain’t so fine / ’cause yoh ain’t see’d dem women folks ob mine / dey is allus’ quarrelin’ an fightin’ ober me / Till I don’t know if I’se a husban’ or a referee.” The tale continues to describe the women as knife wielding and sexually inexhaustible. Eventually, Faggin can no longer “keep on luvin’ dem lak a good Moham,” and resolves to return to the U.S., where he will be “a onewife husban’ – the cullud Methodis’ kind.”30 Faggin, presented in typical minstrel fashion, is womanizing and comedic. The Muslim Filipinas are depicted as doubly dangerous in that they are armed and possess a voracious sexuality. “Mournful Wail” allowed its readership – mostly white male expatriates, many with Filipina wives or lovers – to understand and differentiate their own sexual relations as more acceptable or superior to other more dangerous and unacceptable relations. Polygamous intercourse between Black Americans and Filipinos is presented as a more dangerous type of interracial sexual contact, one that can flourish in a place like Mindanao. Faggin’s racial blackness is easily accepted by the Sultan and his four easily procured wives. Mindanao is further understood by the writer as a place of rampant and dangerous female sexuality. Moro women in the south are prescribed a racial inferiority in both their supposed sexual proclivities and willingness to associate with Black men. This story was published in a Manila newsletter that catered to the needs and concerns of “old timers,” those Americans – mostly men and former SpanishAmerican war veterans – who had been in the Philippines since the early days of U.S. colonization. Much of the readership were themselves married to, or cohabiting with, Filipinas. With this tale of Faggin and his harem in Jolo, the 27  For more on the issues of slavery and U.S. responses to it in the southern Philippines, see: Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery. 28  While the author is not named or identified, it is likely that this tale was written by a white expatriate, as it was mostly white men that wrote minstrel gags and poems such as this to depict Black men. Further, most of the readership, and especially the contributors to the magazine, were mostly, if not all, white Spanish-American war veterans based in Manila. 29  The name Mose Faggin is perhaps a reference to one of the most well-known African Americans in the Philippines during the colonial period, David Fagen. Fagen deserted the American Army and joined the troops of Emilio Aguinaldo and the insurrecto Filipinos fighting against the Americans during the Spanish American War. 30  “A Darky’s Mournful Wail,” The American Oldtimer 1, no. 9 (July 1934): 37.

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mostly white readership could become convinced that their own interracial relations were superior and more acceptable when compared with the worse evil of interracial polygamy involving Black men. The content and the readership of the poem flesh out the different levels of relative acceptance for miscegenation. If interracial intimacies could not be stopped, white monogamous relations were preferred to Black and/or polygamous ones that occurred in Mindanao. The resolution of “Mournful Wail,” suggests that the consequences of leaving one or four Filipina wives will be nominal. In fact, the abandonment of a polygamous interracial relation is preferred, in order to return to the monogamous and implied monoracial gender system in the U.S. Despite a lurid past of sexual and marital mishaps in the Philippines, a husband soldier is still imagined as acceptable to a wife back home. While the above examples highlight how Mindanao was often depicted as a place for unsavory and undesirable individuals away from the more surveyed colonial centers, more tempered and laudatory language that drew from ideas of the American West colored the resettlement propaganda used to attract non-Muslim settlers to the region. Framed in the language of the frontier, interracial couples were encouraged to be “homesteaders” on the Momungan colony. Relocation allowed them to secure a home outside of the larger American community. As a distant colonial site, the southern Philippines was framed as an internal colonial frontier, drawing heavily on the rhetoric and ideas of the American West as a place for natural settlement. Further, the fertile south was seen as ideal for capitalist endeavors. Many prominent Americans and imperialists agitated for its political removal from the Philippines to become instead, the “Mindanao Plantation.”31 Theodore Roosevelt’s “strenuous life” ideals and Frederick Jackson Turners “End of the Frontier” worries found new life in this overseas colony. If young men needed adventure and strenuous activity to remain manly, and if expansion across the farthest west into the Pacific could revitalize American identity, the southern Philippines – a “wild” colonial frontier – was a site where these dreams could be enacted.32 “Young Man, Go South!” and other slogans advertising the settlement of Mindanao graced the headlines of many agricultural and business publications in Manila from around 1910 through the 1920s.33 As many young men were being discharged from the military and choosing to stay in the Philippines, occupation 31  “Discussing Mindanao Problem,” Manila Times 12, no. 45 (1909): 9, 12. 32  For more on Roosevelt’s idea of the strenuous life, see: Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood. See also: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Report of the American Historical Association (1893). 33  Kilmer O. Moe, “Young Man, Go South,” The Philippine Farmer 7, no. 1 (1921): 9.

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options such as farming in the “wild south” were presented to them as alternatives to drinking, fornicating, and gambling in Manila. This romanticization of Mindanao as both a wilderness and a land of agricultural promise, and the representation of individuals as “homesteaders,” obscured any invidious sentiment about those who were targeted as settler populations. Nevertheless, the appeal of homesteading with the added bonus of initial government financial support did attract enough interracial couples to fill the Momungan agricultural colony, which had been carved out solely for them. Many couples undoubtedly took advantage of these public land acts to live more discreetly and away from the judgment of the American community. A later account of Momungan describes the vigor of the colony and attributes its success to the strong American male population, as well as to their interracial marriage practices.34 Written in 1920 by a Filipino journalist, this article praises the former U.S. soldier for turning the former “wilds” of Momungan into a thriving paradise. It goes on to state that one sure sign of the endurance of this settlement is that these men have mostly all married native women.35 The author does not go on to explain why he believes this to be the case. Perhaps he views Americans who legally wed Filipina women as more anchored to the Philippines compared with many other men who simply cohabited with Filipinas, only to abandon them and any children they might have upon their return to America. Since the latter example was more prevalent, it is likely that the author of the article saw these Momungan men as a more responsible and better class of American who would stay with and support their Filipino families. This sentiment, while not demonstrative of all Filipino feelings towards interracial relationships, does hint at the difference between how Filipinos viewed intermarriage compared to Americans. One would be hard pressed to find Americans during this time who would attribute their countrymen’s success in pioneering to their marriage to Filipinas. The praise heaped upon Momungan as a success story touted the potential of the southern Philippines as a settler location. However, by 1927 only sixteen families remained in the Lanao agricultural colony for interracial couples. Those who left cited “difficulties and lack of government support” as their reason for leaving.36

34  Silao, “Lanao’s Best Agricultural Colony,” 11. 35  Ibid. 36  Joseph Ralston Hayden Papers, “Memorandum on Agricultural Colonies,” Box 29, Folder, July 3, 1930, 5–6. Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Tan, The Filipino Muslim Armed Struggle, 175.

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Interracial intercourse fulfilled diverse functions for the U.S. colonial project in the Philippines. Interracial couples found that the sexual geography of the far south could be a refuge from castigation and harassment from other Americans, but settlement in this unstable region still marked them as undesirables. Their very presence had to be removed from large American populations in order to excise interracial sexual contact and marriages from a respectable colonial endeavor. Some Americans and Filipinos were able to “work out their own salvations” on agricultural colonies, or engage in economic sexual relations more freely than in Manila. Nevertheless, it cannot be overstated that imperial projects were also served through interracial intimacy. Certain types of interracial relations helped to stabilize initial non-hostile relations with the Moro population, and later aided in the efforts to “amalgamate” the native inhabitants. Interracial intimacies were also obscured and removed from Manila, promoting the colonial capital as a bastion of positive American influence in Asia. Model cities such as Manila could appear to be racially segregated and safe sexual geographies that would appeal to more conservative and moralist colonizers. In addition, American men with Filipina or Moro wives could be called upon when necessary as examples of Americans that “made good” by their “little brown sisters.” Stable American relationships with Filipina women strategically demonstrated the difference between Spanish conquest and American “benevolence,” or illegitimate Spanish “queridas” and legitimate American marriages.37

Northern Philippines – Cordilleras: Preservation as Colonial Policy

As with the south, many American colonists considered the Northern Philippines to be a frontier region. They looked upon its inhabitants – even more so than the Moros of the south – as facsimiles of the indigenous populations they were familiar with in the U.S. Also like the far south, the Cordilleras 37   Querida is a term that was used to describe the non-marital or extra-marital relationships popularized by the Spanish during their occupation of the Philippines; in essence it was used to describe a man (Filipino or American) who had a mistress while being married to another. One could also be unmarried and have several queridas at one time. Often this system meant that the man provided housing, or some other remuneration, to his lover in exchange for sexual companionship or favors. Women often performed domestic duties as well, such as cooking or laundry. The “querida system” continued in name and practice when the Americans took the Philippines. This practice is still widespread, no doubt influenced by the fact that divorce in the Philippines is not yet legal.

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had not been incorporated to any great extent by the previous Spanish colonizers because of the difficulty of traveling through mountainous terrain.38 The mostly indigenous groups of the north were not perceived as a threat to American occupation in the same way as the Moro population of Mindanao. Moreover, northern communities elicited an anthropological desire among Americans to study and learn their culture and ways. Muslims in the south were classified as “semi-civilized,” due to their system of leadership by ruling Datus, their practice of a recognized religion, and their clothing-covered bodies. In contrast, indigenous tribes in the north were seen as “non-civilized,” due to their pagan beliefs and their less clothing-covered bodies.39 Many educators and imperialists believed that expansionism spelled the end of indigenous people, a natural progression of sorts. American researchers took pains to study and document the various tribal cultures in this region before they would supposedly vanish. Other Americans felt a paternalistic affinity with the “wild men” of the Cordilleras, finding them more honorable and noble than their lowland counterparts in Manila. The latter were described as having absorbed too many of the vices of the Spanish. Some Americans admired the reputed “headhunters” of the north for their resistance to Spanish domination, imagining them as similar to the “noble savages” of the U.S. and sought to study and catalog the tribes of the north. Further, many American imperialists found these populations to be in need of protection from unscrupulous lowland Filipinos and Americans alike until they could reach their true potential through U.S. tutelage.40 The differences in religion and culture between the northern and southern Philippines meant that the position and status of women in their respective communities varied greatly across the archipelago. Correspondingly, what the presence of women signified for interpersonal relations between Americans and Filipinos was also quite different. As the previous description of Major Sweet’s anti-prostitution efforts in Jolo demonstrates, Filipina women in Mindanao were a concern to the American military. Fearing that Moro men would retaliate should American men improperly consort with native women, military restrictions were put in place and prostitution regulated for the purpose of excluding the Moro women.41 Women in the north were perceived 38  The Cordillera region is comprised of different provinces that are now recognized as the CAR, or Cordillera Adminstrative Region. These are: Mountain Province (Bontoc), Apayao, Kalinga, Abra, Benguet, Ifugao, and Baguio City. 39  Kramer, The Blood of Government. 40  Jenista, The White Apos, 185–206. 41  Kramer, “The Darkness that Enters the Home.”

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differently by American colonists. As one disciplinary case between U.S. Constabulary officials and several Kalinga leaders of the Guinabal district in the north demonstrates, Americans often described the presence of native women not as dangerous, but as symbols of accommodation. Colonial officials believed that the willingness of the different Kalinga tribes to bring women and children to visit the American camp indicated their peaceful intentions as well as a willingness to concede to foreign rule in the region.42 In his description of the American camp at Lubuagan, U.S. secretary of the interior Dean Worcester emphasized that the Guinabal people had only sent one woman and encouraged them to bring more to avoid future problems. He elaborated: People who have come a great deal farther than you have come this year have brought their women with them. You don’t have to bring your women if you don’t want to . . . you don’t need to be afraid to bring them; you can see that there is nothing to be afraid of over here.43 Worcester adds that while many tribes from the area initially had only one or two women accompany the parties traveling to Lubuagan, the following years saw an increase in the number of women accompanying men to the American camp. Worcester may have had knowledge or experience with indigenous peoples in the U.S. wherein the presence of women at various interracial encounters might signify peaceful intentions. His suggestion that women might represent amenable relations was also compatible with Western gendered ideas that associated women with pacifism. At the conclusion of the talks with the Guinabal people, the tribal leaders expressed their desire to avoid fighting and hostilities in the future. As if to emphasize this point, one man stated that, “The reason that our women did not come this time is that they have to do the work. . . . When we come back next year we will bring some women of our people.”44 42  Such instances of using women as political power gauges at imperial contact zones have been described in other studies, most notably, and quite similar to the description here, is the work of Julianna Barr. See: Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 43  Stenographers report of interview between Lt.-Gov. Hale, Dean C. Worcester, and people of the Guinabal District, at Lubuagan, October 6, 1911. Dean C. Worcester Papers, 1900– 1924, Box 1, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. See: Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman. 44  Stenographers report of interview between Lt.-Gov. Hale, Dean C. Worcester, and people of the Guinabal District.

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The different meaning ascribed to women in the Cordilleras also tempered, to a degree, American interests in tightly controlling sexual relations in the north. If amicable relations were suggested through the presence of women, then sexual or intimate relations might consolidate harmonious relations. Further, anthropologists, zoologists, and foreign travelers in the regions observed what they believed to be more open and freer expressions of sexuality. They showed an inordinate amount of interest in these practices, such as divorce, “trial marriage,” and rituals of courtship.45 Many American men utilized the differences in sexual values to fulfill their own desire for recreation and pleasure. These desires and local practices coalesced into an economic system of sexual trade that some native women and American men found mutually beneficial. The concept of trading sexual services for money or other items was not unheard of in the north. In many ways the American eagerness for sexual recreation fit within the already established socio-cultural framework of some of the native tribes. American men were quick to pick up on local nuances, offering to trade yards of cloth, food, or money for an evening of company.46 Several towns in the Cordillera region garnered infamous reputations among foreigners as places where sexual services could be secured easily. These locales drew large populations of American and European men alike.47 While American understandings of prostitution fit within already established practices in Ifugao, the influx of American money and goods likely impacted how widespread the sexual economy became. It is probable that Filipina women entered into these informal systems of sexual commerce understanding that Americans could provide them with a degree of stability and leverage in the changing socio-political system. It is also worth mentioning the previous Spanish colonizers and how this population also influenced the system of sexual trade that was already present when Americans came to the islands. In particular, the Spanish friars who took up the mission of spreading Christianity in the Cordilleras became notorious for their habits of taking mistresses from the native populations.48 American travelers in 45  See: Albert E. Jenks, The Bontoc Igorot (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1905); Samuel Kane, Thirty Years with the Philippine Head-Hunters (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, n.d.; reprint of U.S. edition of 1933); H. Otley Beyer, The Non-Christian People of the Philippines (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1921). 46  Jenista, The White Apos. 47  Jenista, The White Apos, 209. 48  One of the main antagonist in Jose Rizal’s famous novel Noli Me Tangere is Father Damaso, who represented the corruption and lecherousness that came to be associated with Spanish friars. His daughter with a native Filipina woman is one of the main protagonists, Maria Clara. So common was the Spanish practice of taking native mistresses that tales of

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the north often heard stories from local populations about the lecherous ways of Spanish friars who reportedly were trying to “whiten the race” through intercourse with native women.49 Away from the bulk of the Spanish population, friars in the Cordilleras and other provinces took mistresses and often offered support for women in the form of money or increased social status, no doubt, this also influenced the pre-existing expressions of sexuality in the region. The form and manner of dress prevalent in the north also intrigued and titillated American men in the region. Many wrote unabashedly about the pleasure of coming across bare-breasted Igorot women on their travels through the mountain region. One American described such an encounter with “topless” women working in the rice paddies in the Bontoc province: In seeing these near nude and often beautifully formed bodies, one at first had startled eyes only for the magnificent breasts, but after a time one began almost to ignore them and to look at and judge the body as a whole. . . . That in the end was all there was to it. One got used to the lovely display.50 Other American men reminisced poetically about the unclothed bodies of the, so-called, mountain nymphs in the region; most agreed that these encounters with Filipina women proved, “not hard on the eyes.”51 So, while the Cordillera region was also imagined as a colonial frontier, it was seen very differently from the south. The U.S. colonial enterprise prioritized or deprioritized control over interracial intercourse based on local variations in culture, population, and topography, as well as different imperial necessities. While American men who married Igorot women could be shunned by polite American society on the islands, they were also valued as cultural bridges between the colonial American government and the local communities they had married into. These men were commonly referred to by the American community as “squaw men,” a pejorative label that was first applied to white men in the American West who married or had sexual relations with Native lusty priests were commonly told to American and European travelers by native Filipinos across the archipelago, not just in the Cordillera region. 49  See, for example, the memoirs of American constabulary official Tiffany Williams. “The Spear and the Bolo Interlude,” Tiffany Williams Papers, Box 1.Worcester Collection, Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 50  Abram Van Heyningen (A. V. H.) Hartendorp, I Have Lived: Reminiscences of A. V. H. Hartendorp, Book 1 of 6 (Manila: Self Published, 1970), 135. 51  Major Wilfrid Turnbull, “Early Days in the Mountain Province,” Bulletin of the American Historical Collection 3, no. 1 (1975): 49.

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American women.52 In essence, the fact that these men had “gone native” was overlooked when their relationships could bring potential benefits to the American colonial government. Further, many American men learned to circumvent the unofficial U.S. policies regarding interracial intimacies, thereby safeguarding themselves and their careers by utilizing what they knew of native marriage practices and culture. William Dosser was one such American official who took on several common-law native wives. At the same time, he advanced his career in the police constabulary, eventually becoming the governor of Mountain Province. Local Igorot accounts of Dosser depict him as a ladies’ man, going from woman to woman, and entering into marriages according to local rites and customs. These marriages, while they were recognized by the local native communities, were not legally recognized by American law. Thus, Dosser and other American men were able to find and keep female mistresses during their stay in the northern Philippines without fear of reprisal. They engaged in interracial intimacies and marriages, even as both constabulary and military expressed a preference for single men and threatened to deport men found to be in unsanctioned relations with Filipinas.53 Women, for their part, came to understand that these Americans could provide a degree of financial support. The salaries of constabulary officers, while

52  See: Fisher, Philippine Diary, 85. The poetry and other works of fiction by American “old timers” in the Philippines often mentioned or alluded to “squaw men.” For example, see: Frank Cheney, “Brown of the Volunteers,” about a discharged soldier who now suffers the life of a squaw man in the Philippines. Frank Cheney Poems, Folder 1. Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, MI. For mention of the term “squaw man” applied to white men who married Filipinas, see Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House LLC, 2010); Bobby Wintermute, Public Health and the US Military: A History of the Army Medical Department, 1818–1917 (New York: Routledge, 2011). For more on the use of the term “squaw” or “squaw man” in U.S. native American history, see: Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” The Massachusetts Review 16, no. 2 (1975): 698–714; David Smits, “The ‘Squaw Drudge’: Prime Index of Savagism,” Ethnohistory 29, no. 4 (1982): 281–306. 53  John Bancroft Devins, An Observer in the Philippines; or, Life in Our New Possessions (New York: American Tract Society, 1905), 127. Civil Governor of the Philippines William Howard Taft, was quoted as saying in a report on the Philippines that, to avoid the stigma of the Spanish who left behind their common law Filipina wives and mixed-race children when they left the islands, Americans would be threatened with deportation if found to be in relations with Filipinas without having obtained a marriage license. Taft also stressed his opinion that married soldiers were a nuisance, and that single men were preferred to serve in the islands. See: “Marry for Keeps Here,” Manila Times 9, no. 333 (July 25, 1907): 1; “Secretary Taft’s Recommendations for the Army in the Philippines,” Manila Times 10, no. 114 (February 24, 1908): 9.

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not very large, were enough to maintain Filipina wives or mistresses in homes of their own. Despite the public and private disapproval of interracial marriages, and relations in general, men who could establish themselves within communities in the hard to reach mountainous north through marriage or other arrangements could be very valuable to the colonial government. For example, Henry Otley Beyer, a young American, traveled to the Cordillera region of the Philippines as a part of the Philippine Ethnological Survey in 1905 under the U.S. Department of Education. When he returned to the Philippines in 1910 he married Lingayu, the daughter of a prominent Ifugao tribal chief.54 Only around sixteen years old at the time of their marriage, Lingayu was much younger than Beyer, as was the case in many American-Filipino relationships. Beyer’s relationship with the daughter of a tribal leader opened doors for him within the Ifugao community. A trained anthropologist, Beyer was able to collect ethnographic data from the community he was living in and was largely considered a part of the community through his marriage. Using this source material he wrote articles on the origin myths of the Cordillera people and developed theories of their early migration to the mountains. In 1921 he wrote a sweeping narrative encompassing most of the peoples of the Cordillera region entitled, The Non-Christian People of the Philippines. His works became the definitive books and articles on Ifugao customs and practices and eventually on those in other Cordillera groups. He became lauded as the “father of anthropology” of the Philippines and helped to create the department of anthropology at the University of the Philippines. There, as an associate professor, he taught mostly Christian Filipinos about the communities in the Cordilleras and his ideas about the origins of Filipino peoples. His work bolstered the colonial state aims of building an American-style education system as well as teaching an American perspective of Philippine history and culture. Through his marriage to Lingayu, Beyer gained not only cultural capital, in the form of insider access to the Ifugao people and the mountain province in general, but also economic capital. His studies on the tribe that he had married into had become his source of income and livelihood. He made a prominent career for himself and was often asked to advise the American colonial government on matters that concerned the Cordillera region and, eventually, the Philippines as a whole.55 Memorials written for Beyer upon his death in 1966, describe him as: 54  Arsenio Manuel, “The Wake and Last Rites Over H. Otley Beyer,” Philippine Studies 23 (1975): 123. 55  Joseph Ralston Hayden, “Democracy in the Philippines,” Joesph Ralston Hayden Papers, Box 21, Folder 21–16. Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

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the giant in Philippine pre-history. . . . He was Mr. Anthropology. . . . While in Ifugao, early in his career in the Philippines, he married the daughter of a prominent Banaue Chieftain. The establishment of this kin relation provided Beyer a lasting bond between him and the Filipinos. In 1966 the Ifugao gods took him to dwell with them forever in their heavens.56 This memorial, unlike many other recollections of Beyer that do not mention his Ifugao family, delicately acknowledged that he owed much of his success to his “kin relation” through his marriage to Lingayu. Beyer himself notably said as much to a colleague that knew of his relationship, giving him the advice to, “get next to the chiefs and datus,” if he wanted to get ahead in the Philippines.57 Lingayu and the Ifugao family of Beyer were also able to benefit socially and economically from this relationship. In an interview with Henry Beyer, the great-grandson of Otley and Lingayu, Lingayu was revealed to be the first female council member of her town: Because of her marriage to my grandfather, actually when they were organizing local government officers, she cannot read and she couldn’t write but she was the first councilor woman in the whole mountain province and the whole cordillera! She was appointed, so it was a [higher] status to be married to Dr. Beyer . . . She was more accepted . . . She stayed there [as councilor] for one term, which was two years at that time . . . but yeah I think she has a privilege as a council woman.58 While Lingayu already possessed the high social status of being the daughter of an Ifugao Chief, her stature grew through her association with Beyer. Just as Beyer benefitted from their relationship, Lingayu’s interracial marriage helped to facilitate her subsequent prominence in local politics as the first female councillor of the region.

Other men in long-term marriages to Filipina women also came to be considered “experts” on the Philippines and their people, being able to parlay this “expertise” into prominent careers. Another such “expert” was A. V. H. Hartendorp, who documents in graphic detail his many Filipina liaisons and several marriages in his autobiography, I Have Lived. 56  Juan R. Francisco, “H. Otley Beyer’s Contribution to Indo-Philippine Scholarship,” Bulletin of the American Historical Collection 4, no. 2 (April 1976): 25–28. 57  Hartendorp, I Have Lived, Book 2 of 6, 260. 58  Henry Ngayawan Beyer. Interview by Tessa Winkelmann. Personal Interview. Baguio, Philippines, June 15, 2012.

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Although Beyer and Lingayu both benefitted from their marriage, their relationship was one that was selectively recognized or hidden from American society. While Henry spoke of Beyer’s great love and pride for his wife and that Lingayu refused multiple invitations to live with him in Manila, he also does not recall ever seeing a photograph of the two of them together. Most archival accounts from Beyer’s American friends report not knowing that he was married and had children. He seldom spoke of them and lived mainly in Manila, away from his Ifugao, mixed-race family in Banaue.59 Perhaps this was strategic on the part of Beyer, as ostracism from the well-to-do American community was common for those labeled “squaw men.”60 Lingayu’s refusal to live with Beyer in Manila may also have been a strategic decision, given the poor treatment of interracial couples by the American community. This disconnect of accounts – in my interview with Henry and accounts from Beyer’s contemporaries found in the archives – speaks to the differences in how interracial relations were viewed by both Filipinos and Americans. As Henry elaborated, “people here saw it as a good thing that Americans wanted to marry the women. . . . It made them feel good about themselves, that they were good enough.” This sentiment of approval, however, was less likely to be found within the American community.61 Some men, like Dosser and Beyer, were able to advance their careers, both in spite of and in part due to their relations with native women in the Philippines. Both were labeled as experts in some way on the people of the Philippines. Their ability to fulfill the aims of the colonial project – Dosser in governance and Beyer in education – outweighed the disdain for their personal relationships. The same was true for many other men living on the colonial fringes of the Philippines. Others might not have advanced their careers as far as Dosser or Beyer, but they were nonetheless vital to advancing the goals of the American colonial regime. In the early years of colonial occupation, when not much was known about the Philippines, white men with a familiarity of the islands were needed to help commission members, missionaries, teachers, and others to become acquainted with the local people and the land. Men 59  Manuel, “The Wake and Last Rites.” See also: Hartendorp, I Have Lived, Book 1 of 6, 137. 60  Many accounts of interracial or common-law marriages reference the secretive nature of such arrangements, with many men keeping their families secret, or unremarked upon. Alva Hill, an American lawyer in the Philippines, described how some American men would never legally marry their Filipina lovers due to the prejudice of the American community, one man even waiting until he was on his deathbed to marry his long-term partner, so that she and their children would receive his pension. Alva Hill, An American Lawyer in the Philippines (Manila: Self Published, n.d.), 318. While the source is undated, Hill was a lawyer in the Philippines between 1910–1920. 61  Henry Ngayawan Beyer. Interview by Tessa Winkelmann.

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with knowledge of the Cordillera region in particular were sought out by the U.S. Commission to the Philippines in 1901 to help navigate the terrain and the people. Not coincidentally, most of these men who served as figurative bridges between cultures lived on the outskirts of the American community and were married to native women. James Leroy, secretary to the U.S. Commission to the Philippines in 1901 wrote profusely of the commission’s travels around the archipelago. Because of the large group that would be traveling and their lack of knowledge about certain regions, the commission needed help to arrange the logistics of their trips, from food and lodging to translators and guides. On the trip through the Cordillera region, LeRoy describes how the large group trekked up the winding mountain trails led by Otto Scheerer, a European who had lived in the mountains with his Filipina wife and two mixed-race children since the Spanish period. Scheerer was fluent in native dialects and was tasked with navigating the way for the commission and for arranging meetings between commission members and local leaders. Scheerer was even responsible for fetching subjects – human and otherwise – for commission member Dean Worcester. Worcester photographed these local inhabitants for his zoological research projects. He ultimately used this research to justify a continued American occupation in the name of “civilizing” the “wild men” of the north. The resulting photographic collection remains to date one of the largest on early U.S. – Philippines history.62 For their help in the cause of empire, men like Dosser, Beyer, Scheerer, and others were generally not directly disparaged about their personal relationships with Filipina women. The services they offered to the colonial government were invaluable and would not be risked by proffering slanderous comments or judgments on the life choices of men who, literally, led the way in the mountain provinces. Further, the sexual geography of the far north was one that was already more amenable to interracial intercourse, allowing more opportunities, flexibility, and a relative acceptance for mixed marriages in comparison to places like Manila, with its larger population of disapproving Americans. Nevertheless, miscegenation was not something that could go completely unremarked. In the company of others similarly concerned about the problem of improper interracial relations in the islands, these private lives became a public concern, and fodder for condemnation. As reported by Americans living and traveling through the Philippines,

62  The Worcester Collection, housed at the University of Michigan within the Anthropology Museum, houses the largest collection of the Worcester photos, including the original glass slides and prints.

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A number of Americans have married Filipina women; and, as one of our hosts was of that number, it may seem ungracious to criticise the custom. . . . American members of the Philippine Commission have set the stamp of their disapproval upon the querida system on the east – a European or American man living with a native woman without a marriage ceremony. While they do not encourage mixed marriages, they feel that even these are better than the evil practice which helped to make the name “European” offensive in the Philippines. Frequently a Spaniard, soldier or civilian, when he returned home would leave his common-law wife with a little family to support.63 The U.S. government had official and unofficial “stances” on interracial marriage and sexual relations. To advance colonial agendas, however, involvement in the private affairs of American men was often limited, even while “official” policy often took a hardline stance against most types of sexual intercourse. Interracial marriages and affairs were ignored selectively where it was deemed necessary for the longevity of colonial rule and the facilitation of American affairs in the Philippines. Conclusion The different sexual geographies in both the northern and southern Philippines were integral factors in securing regional American colonial power, especially in the first two decades of the U.S. occupation. Imagined by colonialists, and occasionally reproduced in a Manila-centric historiography as “frontier” zones of the colony, these sexual geographies were in fact ever present and central in the constituting of American power in Manila and across the archipelago. In Mindanao, the exclusion of Moro women from prostitution meant that a more focused war against Filipino nationalists could be fought on the Island of Luzon. Further, the opportunity for interracial couples to homestead on agricultural colonies satisfied two colonial administrative goals: peopling the south with more non-Muslims; and removing American-Filipino couples from more densely populated American communities. In the Cordilleras, “squaw men” provided surveyors, administrators, teachers, and others with access to indigenous communities, communities that imperialists could then claim to be “saving” from barbarism through benevolent American tutelage. Others, like Beyer, could become “experts” on the Philippines and their people through 63  Devins, An Observer in the Philippines, 126–127.

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marriage to indigenous women, thereby strengthening the colonial regime by building up the educational apparatus of empire. Away from the large population of Americans and Europeans in Manila, the Cordilleras and Mindanao necessitated a different approach to empire building. Fewer white people in these farther afield regions meant fewer allies in most cases, which in turn meant that a certain degree of laxity could be exercised in social norms and expectations. Further, regional specificity in terms of population, culture, and geography shaped the options that Americans had in terms of their strategies for gaining and consolidating colonial power. Securing U.S. power at times required the selective maintenance of prostitution, as in the case of Mindanao, or the reliance upon ostracized “squaw men” in the north. Because imperial consolidation required different efforts in different geographies, opportunities arose for American men to engage in certain types of interracial sexual relations, in often freer and less restrictive ways. Couples bound for the Momungan colony in Mindanao, for example, were given the opportunity to live more discreetly, away from a discriminating American society. Also, men like Dosser, Beyer, and Scheerer directly benefitted in their professions because of their access to Filipino communities. Facing the difficulties of bringing the entire archipelago under control, the U.S. colonial state harnessed the “problem” of miscegenation to serve imperial needs. Thus, the strict regulation of interracial intercourse in certain regions was simply not an option for colonial officials; such restrictions would counter colonial aims and jeopardize the stability of the American foothold in the Asia-Pacific region. Indeed, the types of intimacies that could or did prevail in the sexual geographies of the Philippines were essential in the consolidation and maintenance of colonial rule. Recognizing the variation and significance of sexual geography in the Philippines during this period gives us new insights regarding U.S. imperial policy and settler colonialism in the archipelago. While the colonial capital of Manila was not a place where interracial sexual intercourse could advance careers or go unnoticed, other locales facilitated long-term settlement by interracial Filipino-American couples. As this chapter highlights, in the northern and southern Philippines, permanent settler colonialists were often interracial couples and families. The work that these settlers did in forging an empire and supporting American rule in the Philippines has historically been obscured, and the American occupation of the Philippines is largely unacknowledged as a settler colonial endeavor. This chapter has sought to illuminate some of the reasons why settler colonialism has rarely been used as a lens to view this period in American-Philippine history. The realities of settler families in the American colonial Philippines have historically been obscured both by

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colonial governments attempting to hide such families, and by the fact that many interracial families eventually became absorbed into Filipino society. While such families might have been inflected with American culture and values, they were also more often accepted into Filipino communities, especially if the American spouse was white. Indeed, the very nature of settler colonialism is transformed and remade in the Philippines, marked by social ostracism from both the United States and from American society in the colony. The American settler society in the Philippines demonstrates who could and who could not come home after a stint in the islands. Men who married Filipina women and had mixed-race children could either choose to abandon them, as most did, or remain in the islands indefinitely with their families. Few chose to take their foreign brides and children home to America, where racial intolerance was more legally institutionalized. Instead, they chose settler life in the Philippines, advancing U.S. imperial ideals and goals well after independence.64 Further, settler processes of native removal in the islands were envisioned as a process of amalgamation or gradual acquiescence to shifting demographics, rather than the enforced removal and extermination as practiced in the U.S. (although brutal warfare in Mindanao resembled this after 1902). It is my hope that this chapter will also contribute to broader discussions of settler colonialism in the wider Asia-Pacific by foregrounding the importance not only of gender and sexual relationships, but also of local and regional comparative analysis. The study presented here highlights the tenuous stability of imperial rule and of what the farthest north and south could mean, both for colonial administrators and for interracial intimacies. Administrators adopted different strategies for pacification and knowledge production in these regions. For individuals engaged in interracial sexual relations, the northern and southern Philippines could mean lessened restrictions and often lessened ostracism. American-Filipino couples looking for opportunities knew this to be the case and often moved away from the American population in the capitol. This push to the borders of colonial American society furthered the imperial aims of hiding the seamy and undesirable realities of interracial sexual contact, and also helped to establish an American presence in distant Filipino communities. 64  By looking at the Census of the Philippines for the years 1903, 1918, and 1939, one sees the population of mixed race American-Filipino residents increase, whereas the American population slowly decreases. Programs dedicated to the care of American-Filipino mixed race children abandoned by their American fathers started in the early 1920s, such as the Manila-based American Guardian Association, which exists to this day.

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Ironically, it also created what it sought to prevent or regulate, giving rise to different, and often less restricted, sexual geographies of interracial intercourse. Bibliography

Archives Consulted

The Philippines Ateneo De Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines American Historical Collection Filipiniana Collection Henry Otley Beyer Papers Pardo de Tavera Collection University Archives Beyer Family Private Papers, Baguio City, Philippines Lopez Museum and Library, Pasig City, Metro Manila, Philippines Filipiniana Collection Historical Periodicals and Magazines Mario Feir Filipiniana Library, Makati, Philippines Filipiniana Rare Postcards Collection National Library of the Philippines, Ermita, Philippines Otley Beyer Ethnographic Collection Rizaliana Collection Nielson Tower Filipinas Heritage Library, Makati, Philippines University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines Filipiniana Collection Microfilm and Reference Collection University Archives and Records Depository – Beyer Collection The United States National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Missouri (NPRC) Civilian Personnel Records Military Personnel Records The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois Ayer Collection Evangelina Lewis Postcard Collection Main Library Worcester Collection

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United States National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (NARA) Philippine Archives Collection University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Main Library University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Bentley Historical Library Anti-Imperialist League Papers Bandoltz Papers Bertha Schaffer Letters Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies – Luce Interviews Dean C. Worcester Collection Evans Family Papers George A. Malcolm Papers Grace Miller Papers Frank Cheney Papers Frank Murphy Papers Frederick McMurray Papers James Fugate Papers James A. Leroy Papers John C. Early Papers Joseph Ralston Hayden Papers Nanon Fay Worcester Papers Taylor Family Papers University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library Tiffany Williams Papers Worcester Collection University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Anthropology Museum Dean C. Worcester Photo Collection

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Devins, John Bancroft. An Observer in the Philippines; or, Life in Our New Possessions. New York: American Tract Society, 1916. Elliot, Charles. The Philippines: To the End of the Commission Government: A Study in Tropical Democracy. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers, 1917. Fisher, Herbert. Philippine Diary. New York: Vantage Press, 2005. Hartendorp, A. V. H. I Have Lived: Reminiscences of A. V. H. Hartendorp, Books 1–6, Manila: Self Published, 1970. Hartendorp, A. V. H. “An Autobiographical Sketch.” Self-published: Manila, July, 1964. Hearings before the Committee on the Philippines of the United States Senate in Relation to Affairs in the Philippine Islands. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900–1902. Hill, Alva. An American Lawyer in the Philippines, Manila: Self-published, n.d. Jenks, Albert. The Bontoc Igorot. Manila: Bureau of Public Printing. 1905. Kane, Samuel. Thirty Years With the Philippine Head-Hunters. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, n.d.; reprint of U.S. edition of 1931. Miscellaneous Hearings Before the Committee on Military Affairs, U.S. Senate, 1900–1919, Washington: Government Printing Office. Public Laws and Resolutions Passed by the U.S. Philippine Commission. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901. “Statistics on Wards, Auditors Report for the year 1938.” The American Guardian Association Incorporated, Manila, Philippines, 1938. U.S. Government Printing Office. Report of the Philippine Commission to the Secretary of War, 1900–1903.



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De Bevoise, Ken. Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. DuVal, Kathleen. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Espiritu, Augusto Fauni. Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Findlay, Eileen. Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920. American Encounters/global Interactions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Finin, Gerard A. The Making of the Igorot: Ramut Ti Panagkaykaysa Dagiti Ttaga Cordillera (Contours of Cordillera Consciousness). Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2005. Garraway, Doris Lorraine. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Gatewood, Willard. Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Gershman, John. “Is Southeast Asia the Second Front.” Foreign Affairs 81 (2002). Ghosh, Durba. Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Gleeck, Lewis E. Americans on the Philippine Frontiers. Manila: Carmelo & Bauermann, 1974. Gleeck, Lewis E. The Manila Americans: 1901–1964. Manila: Carmelo & Bauermann, 1977. Go, Julian, and Anne L. Foster, eds. The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. González, Deena J. Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820– 1880. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuna. Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Gowing, Peter G. Mandate in Moroland: The American Government of Muslim Filipinos, 1899–1920. Quezon City: Philippine Center for Advanced Studies, University of the Philippines, 1977. Green, Rayna.“The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture.” The Massachusetts Review 16, no. 2 (1975). Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Greene, Julie. The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.

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Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Gross, Ariela J. What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008. Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Hattori, Anne Perez. Colonial Dis-Ease: US Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898–1941. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2004. Hoganson, Kristin L. Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Holt, E. M. Colonizing Filipinas: Nineteenth-Century Representations of the Philippines in Western Historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Hurtado, Albert L. Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California. 1st ed. Histories of the American Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917. Jenista, Frank Lawrence. The White Apos: American Governors on the Cordillera Central. Manila, Philippines: New Day Publishers, 1987. Johnson, Kevin, ed. Mixed-Race America and the Law. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1994. Karnow, Stanley. In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines. New York: Random House LLC, 2010. Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Kramer, Paul A. “The Darkness That Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution During the Philippines-American War.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of

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Walsh, Thomas P. Tin Pan Alley and the Philippines: American Songs of War and Love, 1898–1946, a Resource Guide. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013. Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Cultural Studies of the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Williams, Daniel Roderick. The Odyssey of the Philippine Commission. Chicago: McClurg, 1913. Willis, Henry Parker. Our Philippine Problem: A Study of American Colonial Policy. H. Holt & Company, 1905. Wintermute, Bobby. Public Health and the US Military: A History of the Army Medical Department, 1818–1917. New York: Routledge, 2011. Yegar, Moshe. Between Integration and Secession: The Muslim Communities of the Southern Philippines, Southern Thailand, and Western Burma/Myanmar. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002. Young, Mary E. “Indian Removal and Land Allotment: The Civilized Tribes and Jacksonian Justice,” The American Historical Review 64, no. 1 (1958): 31–45.



Newspapers and Magazines



IRB Approved Interviews



Other Interviews Consulted

The Manila Times The New York Times The Washington Post The San Francisco Argonaut The Independent The Cable-News American (Philippines) The Philippine Farmer The Philippines Free Press The American Oldtimer El Renacimiento (Philippines) Graphic Magazine (Philippines) Lincoln Evening Journal Philippine Magazine

Beyer, Henry Ngayawan. Interviewed by Tessa Ong Winkelmann. Personal Interview. Baguio, Philippines, June 21, 2012.

University of Michigan, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies – Luce Interviews.

CHAPTER 5

A Fascist Triangle or a Rotary Wheel

The Sino-Japanese War and the Gendered Internationalisms of Sylvia Pankhurst and Carlos Romulo Erika Huckestein and Mark L. Reeves Abstract In comparing the political discourses of two newspaper publishers, politically and geographically worlds apart, this chapter seeks to understand how gendered visions of the world directly influenced geopolitical analysis. The disparity in responses to the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 from a British socialist and former suffragette, Sylvia Pankhurst, and an upper-class, center-right Filipino, Carlos Romulo, reveal how their gendered political imaginaries shaped their ability to offer solutions to war and envision a new world order. Both Pankhurst and Romulo interpreted the significance of the Sino-Japanese War from the perspective of their own gendered forms of internationalism; Pankhurst was inspired by an anti-fascist feminist internationalism, and Romulo embraced a masculinist socially elite internationalism. Though both wrote sympathetically about China’s plight in the face of Japanese aggression, their reasons for sympathy and their proposals for restoring order diverged along the lines of their gendered internationalisms.

Keywords internationalism – Sino-Japanese War – Carlos Romulo – rotary – Philippines – Sylvia Pankhurst – feminism – women – anti-fascism

The outbreak of a second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 quickly brought explicitly gendered images into the global media narrative. These ranged from the “Rape of Nanking” to the diplomatic role played by Madame Chiang Kaishek to rally support for Nationalist China. During the 1930s, onlookers from a destabilized Europe, a wary United States, and concerned nations all across East and Southeast Asia placed the war in China in a global context, especially alongside the ongoing Spanish Civil War. It appeared that 1937 was the

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beginning of a global world war against fascism.1 When the war broke out, the British radical publisher and political activist Sylvia Pankhurst interpreted the war in China as part of an international fascist menace, and the more conservative Filipino publisher Carlos Romulo ran a cartoon in his English-language Manila daily, the Philippines Herald, depicting “the world’s two major headaches,” as large lumps on Spain and China.2 While not explicitly connecting the conflicts’ causes, Romulo nevertheless recognized the global scale of the international crisis. This chapter begins the process of placing the Sino-Japanese War in the context of a gendered trans-Pacific by analyzing the responses of two intellectuals to the conflict’s beginning. Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960) was an activist and former suffragette who was deeply involved in the pacifist and socialist movements. Carlos Romulo (1898–1985) was a center-right Filipino newspaper editor who eventually served as his nation’s ambassador to the United States and the United Nations. The ideas of these individuals do not necessarily represent their respective nations (much less regions), sexes, or political ideologies. Rather, as interwar newspaper editors with activist interests in politics, their commonalities illuminate their different gendered readings of the SinoJapanese War. That is, their interpretations of the conflict reveal how these figures gendered international politics and understood the scale of the war differently. Sylvia Pankhurst saw in Japan’s attack on China another example of a global fascist advance, stemming in part from the exclusion of women from politics. In contrast, Romulo regarded the war as less explicitly global in reach; instead, he understood international relations as akin to the intimacy of clublike interactions between equal, rational, and reasoning men. War, in his eyes, was an implicit violation of an idealized masculine, international social circle. Pankhurst and Romulo were both outsiders to China, but they recognized China’s centrality in world affairs. They viewed China as the lynchpin for maintaining peace in the Pacific; the fate of the Middle Country could affect the stability of Europe, Asia, and the trans-Pacific alike. Pankhurst recognized that China was imminently threatened by the global forces of fascism. The fall of China could portend an advance in Asia, just as fascism menaced the 1  The year also could be interpreted as the middle of a “Fifteen-Year War” of Japanese expansion, dating from 1931’s invasion of Manchuria to the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945. What followed from the events of 1937, from the bombing of civilians to the coercion of thousands of “comfort women” into forced prostitution, would become part of a gendered narrative of the Second World War. 2  “The World’s Two Major Headaches,” Philippines Herald [hereafter PH], July 10, 1937.

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heart of Europe. Similarly, Romulo feared that China’s loss would lead to a Japanese domination of Asia, which would fundamentally alter the U.S. relationship with Southeast Asia, and thus the Philippines. However, Pankhurst and Romulo did not look at China through purely geopolitical lenses. For both, China’s political importance came from its symbolic importance as a part of their respective internationalist projects: an anti-fascist feminist internationalism for Pankhurst; and a liberal, American-style internationalism for Romulo. Thus, Pankhurst saw China as the latest victim of fascist aggression, while for Romulo, China represented the need for Pacific nations such as the Philippines and the United States to cooperate as equal members of an internationalist liberal project. As this chapter shows, Pankhurst and Romulo’s respective internationalisms were profoundly shaped by their gendered politics. These two journalists wrote from very different vantage points. Yet the similar origins of their thinking reveals how gendered politics played a significant role in generating competing forms of internationalism.

The “Berlin–Rome–Tokyo Triangle”: Sylvia Pankhurst and the Sino-Japanese War

On August 22, 1936, almost a year before Japan would invade China for the second time within the decade, Professor Hu Chow Yuan expressed his support for the Ethiopian cause. In a newspaper article, Hu described the outpouring of support for the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, from a variety of Chinese organizations. He argued that this great sympathy between the countries resulted from the fact that “both have suffered from Fascist robbers and gangsters – Italy and Japan;” he was referring to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.3 Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 would further strengthen the sentiment that China and Ethiopia were united by their victim status. This was especially true among activists on the British left whose ‘Aid China’ campaign framed the war in China as one fascist conflict among many.4 3  Professor Hu Chow Yuan, “Chinese Opinion: Long Live Ethiopia,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 22, 1936. 4  Arthur Clegg, Aid China 1937–1949: A Memoir of a Forgotten Campaign (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2003); J. K. J. Perry, “Powerless and Frustrated: Britain’s Relationship With China During the Opening Years of the Second Sino–Japanese War, 1937–1939,” Diplomacy &

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The British anti-fascist and socialist activist Sylvia Pankhurst edited the New Times and Ethiopia News, a weekly newspaper that printed Hu’s article in 1936.5 Although Pankhurst initially established the newspaper to advocate on behalf of Ethiopia, she portrayed the conflicts in Ethiopia, Spain, and China as intimately connected. She viewed all three as theaters of fascist aggression.6 Unlike some leftist activists, Pankhurst did not privilege the European conflict in Spain above those in Ethiopia and China. Instead, she repeatedly reminded readers that despite differences in race or language, the global victims of fascism shared a common humanity. Pankhurst also departed from other activists, particularly men, in her analysis of the gendered threat of fascism. In her opinion, the exclusion of women from positions of power within governments contributed to the emergence of fascist dictatorships and their militaristic policies. In fact, she believed that bellicose, autocratic policies would be particularly damaging to women. The equal participation of women in government and politics was a central component of Pankhurst’s vision of peaceful internationalism. For Pankhurst, internationalism had the potential to facilitate progress toward a better future in which transparency, democracy, and justice were the basis of diplomacy and lasting peace. An examination of Pankhurst’s stance on the Sino-Japanese War illuminates her internationalist vision and demonstrates the role that her feminist politics and experiences of World War I played in shaping her beliefs and activism.

Statecraft 22, no. 3 (2011): 408–430; Tom Buchanan, East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925– 1976 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Buchanan, “ ‘Shanghai-Madrid Axis’? Comparing British Responses to the Conflicts in Spain and China, 1936–39,” Contemporary European History 21, no. 4 (2012): 533–552; Buchanan, “China and the British Left in the Twentieth Century: Transnational Perspectives,” Labor History 54, no. 5 (2013): 540–553. 5  According to her son Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia was partly inspired to name her newspaper New Times and Ethiopia News by Charlie Chaplin’s popular 1936 film Modern Times. Richard Pankhurst, “Sylvia and New Times and Ethiopia News,” in Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-Fascist, ed. Ian Bullock and Richard Pankhurst, 1992, 154. 6  Most of the biographies of Pankhurst focus on her Ethiopian activism, but do not examine the connections Pankhurst made between the conflicts in Ethiopia, Spain, and China in particular. Patricia Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Ian Bullock and Richard Pankhurst, eds., Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Antifascist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Mary Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics (London: Pluto Press, 1999); Shirley Harrison, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Crusading Life 1882–1960 (London: Aurum, 2003); Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst Suffragette, Socialist, and Scourge of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2013).

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Many women, including Pankhurst, turned to international activism after the World War I. Though these women did not necessarily agree on a specific feminist program, many activists viewed working beyond the national level as the way forward to achieve equal rights for women.7 British women activists on the international stage had distinctly gendered responses to international conflict and fascism, as the work of Julie Gottlieb has shown.8 The Women’s Co-operative Guild, for instance, linked women’s roles as mothers to pacifism and stressed that women as nurturers had a crucial role to play in promoting peace through propaganda and education.9 This gendered understanding of conflict and pacifism was prevalent among many women internationalists in the interwar period. They used this to argue that women were more suited than men to be diplomats. As “natural pacifists,” women were believed to be far less likely than their male counterparts to use war as a means to settle conflicts.10 Their use of an essentialist gender strategy to remedy unequal access to international politics and diplomacy underscored the importance of women’s work for international peace.11 A life-long political activist, Sylvia Pankhurst was a leading participant in the suffrage movement and a feminist who campaigned against the Great War, supported Bolshevism, advocated for maternal welfare, opposed fascism and imperialism (Illustration 5.1), and championed Ethiopian independence until her death in 1960. The daughter of the radical Liberal barrister Richard Pankhurst, and Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the Women’s Social and 7  Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 108, 130; Carol Miller, “ ‘Geneva – the Key to Equality’: Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 2 (1994): 219–245. 8  Julie V. Gottlieb, “Varieties of Feminist Responses to Fascism in Inter-War Britain,” in Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period, ed. Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 101–118; Julie Gottlieb, “Guilty Women,” Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 9  Andrew Flinn, “ ‘Mothers for Peace’, Co-Operation, Feminism and Peace: The Women’s Co-Operative Guild and the Anti-War Movement between the Wars,” in Consumerism and the Co-Operative Movement in Modern British History: Taking Stock, ed. Nicole Robertson and Lawrence Black (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 144. 10   Julie V. Gottlieb, “ ‘Broken Friendships and Vanished Loyalties’: Gender, Collective (In)Security and Anti-Fascism in Britain in the 1930s,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 13, no. 2 (2012): 205–206. 11  Ibid., 207; Jo Vellacott, “Feminism as if All People Mattered: Working to Remove the Causes of War, 1919–1929,” Contemporary European History 10, no. 3 (2001): 393.

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E. Sylvia Pankhurst speaking at an Anti-Nazi Demonstration in Hyde Park held in the 1930s. Courtesy of Bundesarchiv, Berlin (BildY1-402-90).

Political Union (WSPU), Sylvia Pankhurst was well-positioned for an entry into political life in Britain. She followed the example set by her parents and became a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) as a young woman, and joined her mother in the suffrage movement. She later created her own suffrage organization, the East London Federation of Suffragettes, after becoming disenchanted with the politics of the WSPU, which catered to middle-class women. In her work for her own organization, Pankhurst fulfilled her desire to advocate for both women’s and workers’ rights. In 1914, she launched her first periodical, The Woman’s Dreadnought. As Pankhurst turned toward socialism, and later communism, she changed the name of this paper to the Workers’ Dreadnought and filled its columns with articles supporting the Bolshevik revolution, communism, and socialism. The next political step in Pankhurst’s career became clear in 1922, as Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome marked the beginning of the rise of fascist governments in Europe. Pankhurst’s first published condemnation of fascism appeared in the same year.12 According to Sylvia’s son Richard Pankhurst, 12  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Fascisti Menace,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 11, 1922.

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her political opposition began a few years earlier in 1919, when she witnessed members of a fascist squad in Bologna, Italy, violently suppressing their political rivals. She also was influenced by Silvio Corio, her Italian partner, who was forced to flee Italy due to his politics. He routinely published articles about Italian fascism in the New Times and Ethiopia News and served as its unofficial co-editor.13 Pankhurst’s critique of fascism became broader and more severe, however, when confronted with the rise of Hitler, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and Japan’s invasion of China. In October of 1935, after months marked by border skirmishes and Ethiopian appeals for League of Nations intervention, fascist Italy invaded independent Ethiopia.14 Pankhurst immediately opposed the Italian invasion. She worked to publicize the Ethiopian cause and win over British public support. This time she did so through a new newspaper, the New Times and Ethiopia News, which first appeared in London in May 1936.15 She viewed the Italian invasion as a violation of the founding principles of the League of Nations. Established in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I, this international body sought to prevent war by advocating for the right of nations to determine their own governments. In the first years after the Italian invasion, Pankhurst continued to pressure the British public and government to take steps in support of Ethiopia. In an article in the New Times and Ethiopia News, she wrote that the “duty of all honest people” was clear; the “violations of Fascism – the arch-promoter of dissension, violence and civil war” did not start in Ethiopia and thus would not end there either.16 Pankhurst warned that the injustices and violations caused

13  Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader, 185; Richard Pankhurst, Ethiopian Reminiscences: Early Days (Los Angeles: Tsehai Publishers, 2013), 7–8. 14  For more on this period of Ethiopian history see Saheed Adejumobi, The History of Ethiopia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007); Alberto Sbacchi, Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, 1935–1941 (Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press, 1997); Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Addis Ababa University Press, 2001). 15  She continued to publish and serve as the editor of the paper until moving to Ethiopia in 1956. During its first year 10,000 copies were printed per week and at its peak circulation reached 40,000. Metasebia Woldemariam, “Sylvia Pankhurst: Against Imperialist Occupation of Ethiopia,” in African Agency and European Colonialism: Latitudes of Negotiation and Containment: Essays in Honor of A. S. Kanya-Forstner, ed. Kwabena Opare Akurang-Parry and Femi J. Kolapo (Lanham: University Press of America, 2007), 147; June Purvis, “Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960), Suffragette, Political Activist, Artist and Writer,” Gender & Education 20, no. 1 (2008): 84. 16  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Not for C3 Men,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 5, 1936.

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by fascism had occurred elsewhere in Europe and would continue to spread beyond Ethiopia. Fascism, reasoned Pankhurst, was an insidious and dangerous disease that threatened world democracy. She linked Italian fascism to Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi movement. She also connected the Italian invasion of Ethiopia to the Spanish Civil War.17 Pankhurst characterized Ethiopia and Spain as sacrifices in vain “to the god of war.”18 She also lamented that “the horrors which are suffered in Ethiopia and Spain to-day may at any time break upon any and every other country, for the peace of the world is broken, and none can tell how fast or how far the breach will spread.”19 Pankhurst presciently warned that fascism as a global force could plunge the world into another war. Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 escalated Pankhurst’s fears about world war. Japan had previously attacked Manchuria in 1931. Pankhurst traced the historic links between the 1931 and 1937 invasions with other instances of fascist violence. She argued that “the [1931] Japanese aggression against China in the Manchurian case paved the way for Italian aggression in Ethiopia. The collapse of the League measures of restraint of Italy’s Ethiopian crime opened the path for the Italo-German aggression against Spain. Now China is again the victim.”20 She was not alone in this assessment. In an interview she conducted with the Chinese Ambassador, Dr. Wellington Koo, he also condemned the League for failing to take sufficient action. The lack of response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the civil war in Spain, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria led to renewed Japanese aggression in China, according to Koo. Furthermore, he warned that there was the potential for another world war with battles ranging from Europe to Africa and Asia.21 In response to the conflict in China, Pankhurst offered her support to the newly founded China Campaign Committee (CCC). Chaired by the leftist publisher Victor Gollancz and political writer and activist Dorothy Woodman, the CCC was the most influential organization in Britain attempting to press the 17  “Fascists Versus Nazis,” Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst Papers (ESPP), Internationaal Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam. 18  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Not Universal,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 10, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Fascism As It Is,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 19, 1936. 19  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Grave International Situation,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 28, 1936. 20  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “No Recognition of Conquest,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 14, 1937. 21   E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “An Interview with Dr. Wellington Koo the Famous Chinese Ambassador,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 2, 1937.

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British government into aiding China.22 In his historical account of the China Campaign, national organizer Arthur Clegg remarked on Pankhurst’s willingness to aid the campaign run by the CCC. Pankhurst’s offer was not accepted, according to Clegg, because Woodman “for some reason, was far from enthusiastic, and nothing came of it.”23 Clegg acknowledged his unwillingness to challenge Woodman at the time. Decades later, Clegg still thought “it is a pity we did not accept her [Pankhurst’s] help.”24 Despite her rejection from the CCC, Pankhurst began publishing a supplement to New Times and Ethiopia News, titled China News. In the first issue of China News Pankhurst explained her threefold motivations for creating the supplement. She hoped to increase awareness of China’s plight among the British public, advocate for the independence of China, and protect the lives of the people who were living in conflict zones.25 Only three issues of the separate supplement were published, but Pankhurst also featured articles on the conflict in China in her newspaper. Pankhurst argued that Japanese aggression in China should be of concern to the entire world as a global conflict could emerge. In keeping with Dr. Koo, she warned that “if Japanese militarism subjugates China[,] the dragon’s teeth may be sown there[,] as they were in Germany at the close of the Great War!”26 Pankhurst argued that those who wished to prevent another world war, including the League, could not afford to disregard the conflict in China due to its geographic distance from Europe.27 She emphasized that the Chinese people deserved as much sympathy as those fighting fascism in Italy, Germany, and Spain. In her coverage, she portrayed Japan as a member of a global fascist alliance.28 To counter the attacks of such an alliance, Pankhurst argued the need for a common humanity, regardless of geographical or racial divides. In accordance with her particular brand of internationalism, she viewed “humanity as a whole: White, Black, Red, Yellow, all have their rights, their hopes, their 22  Clegg, Aid China 1937–1949, 8–11; Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community Culture and Colonialism, 1900–1949 (Manchester; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 233. 23  Clegg, Aid China 1937–1949, 54–55. 24  Ibid. 25  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “To Our Readers,” China News supplement to New Times and Ethiopia News, September 4, 1937. 26   E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Ethiopia . . . Spain . . . China,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 4, 1937. 27  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “No Recognition Uphold the Covenant,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 4, 1937. 28  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Fascist Armies Mutiny in Ethiopia,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 13, 1937.

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lives.”29 According to Pankhurst, the “unity of the human family” had to be recognized and thus people had a duty to prevent fascism and jingoism from fostering divisions between nations.30 In an effort to gain widespread support for her opposition to fascism, Pankhurst both promoted a gendered analysis of the impact of war and utilized gender symbolism as a call for action. She proclaimed that “war is the inferno of women, and under Fascism the State is perpetually at civil war!”31 Pankhurst’s empathy for the suffering of women and children as innocent victims of war had already emerged as a fundamental component of her pacifism during World War I.32 Female pacifists, who adopted essentialist maternal identities, argued for the need to protect other mothers and children. To urge the British people and government to take action in the fascist conflicts around the world in Ethiopia, Spain, and China, Pankhurst again highlighted the suffering and devastation experienced by women and children. She denounced Italy, both for its bombing campaigns in Ethiopia and for its sale of weapons to Japan. She argued that “the bombs Fascist Italy sells to Japan will destroy, have destroyed, thousands of non-combatant lives, women and children.”33 Disarmament campaigners, and feminists in particular, shared this concern about the vulnerability of the civilian population. They strategically portrayed non-combatants as female and as those underage, utilizing normative cultural assumptions regarding womanhood and youth, to emphasize the defenselessness of innocent victims of war. They marshaled these cultural gender scripts to argue against new forms of warfare, such as aerial bombing, that enacted random violence experienced by combatants and non-combatants alike.34 After the bombing of the Chinese city of Canton, Pankhurst hoped that the appeal from the mayor of that city would move other city officials in Britain and France to pressure their governments to take action. The newspaper reported that “two thousand civilians have been killed and upwards of five thousand injured in this one city during about a fortnight’s air raids. Hundreds of mothers, with their babies in arms, have been crushed to death by falling 29  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Quest” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 18, 1938. 30  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “War Here at Home?” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 1, 1938. 31  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Fascism As It Is,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 28, 1936. 32  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Going to War: What Women Can Do,” Woman’s Dreadnought, August 8, 1914. 33  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Boycott the Aggressors,” New Times & Ethiopia News, September 25, 1937. 34  Susan Grayzel, At Home and under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Gottlieb, “ ‘Broken Friendships and Vanished Loyalties,’ ” 205–206.

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masonry.”35 The evocation or overrepresentation of women and children as victims of war revealed how those who tend to be underrepresented or unrepresented in the national polity nevertheless suffer from the political decisions and military actions of men. Pankhurst’s gendered analysis of and gendered arguments against war also addressed the pro-natalist concerns of European policy makers. She argued that the wars in Ethiopia, China, and Spain not only caused immediate suffering and death to family members but that they also contributed to decisions about whether to reproduce. For Pankhurst, it was commonsense that “women shrink from bearing children with the menace of war;” with war “overhanging every country,” women fear that “their children have barely a chance of escape.”36 She maintained that falling birthrates were not surprising as European women watched newsreels of Chinese cities being bombed and the overall devastation of war in China.37 In addition to arguing that fascist war harmed women and families, Pankhurst emphasized the ways in which fascism threatened women’s rights, both globally and domestically. Even though she evoked the symbolism of female innocence and vulnerability, Pankhurst was committed to women’s political engagement. As she wrote, “in view of this danger, I utter the strongest appeal I can to women: ROUSE YOURSELVES AGAINST FASCISM . . . it certainly means war.”38 Pankhurst also was concerned by fascist attacks on women’s rights. She decried women’s lack of economic and political autonomy in Italy and Germany, as women were forcibly removed from employment as teachers and other professional positions. Although Pankhurst appealed to pro-natalist arguments to argue for intervention, she also criticized the Italian Fascist Government for its reproductive politics. She contended that the government only valued women as reproducers of militant men who would serve and fight for the fascist cause. Pankhurst critiqued how the women’s movement were “menaced on every hand” by fascism; in “an attempt to put back the clock,” these governments reduced women “to a position of even greater subjection than that against which Mary Wollestonecraft [sic] issued her

35  Pankhurst, “Our Quest,” 1938. 36  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Population Problem,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 4, 1937. 37  Mary Stott, the editor of the Woman’s Outlook the journal of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, shared Pankhurst’s view of the situation publishing an editorial in 1939 which also credited women’s fears of war and economic uncertainty. 38  “What the Suffragettes Should Do,” ESPP.

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historic ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’ in 1792.”39 At the end of an article Pankhurst published in the New Times and Ethiopia News, she exclaimed, “alas, poor woman; hers is a wretched position in the Fascist State!”40 For Pankhurst, and her fellow British feminists, fascism presented a threat to all the achievements of the women’s movement.41 To combat fascism from Ethiopia to China, Pankhurst proposed a politics of gendered internationalism rooted in democracy and international justice. She advocated for support for victims of fascism, understood as women and children. She argued for the arbitration of disputes by the League of Nations, but also warned against making concessions to dictators. Pankhurst maintained that “the League of Nations must be made a bulwark of peace and democracy.”42 For her, this was the proper way to fight for peace, security, democracy.43 In an effort to garner more support for the Chinese, Pankhurst stressed that China was an innocent and peaceful victim, coded female, while Japan was the male aggressor.44 In her weekly editorials Pankhurst tried to convince her readers that China lived up to internationalist ideals through social campaigns of social reform, including gender reform. Pankhurst cited women’s progress, advances in education and social justice, and the Chinese government’s work in combating opium trafficking as evidence of China’s worthiness for British support. She also highlighted the reluctance on the part of the Chinese to break diplomatic relations and confront the Japanese militarily. On May 20, 1938 a “good-will flight” of Chinese planes took place over Japan. This plan, devised by Madame Chiang Kai-shek and approved by the Chinese government, consisted of Chinese planes scattering “leaflets appealing for peace and

39  “What the Suffragettes Should Do,” ESPP. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a British writer and advocate of women’s rights considered to be one of the leading heroines of the feminist movement by Pankhurst and her contemporaries. 40  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Fascism As It Is,” New Times & Ethiopia News, November 21, 1936. 41   Julie V. Gottlieb, “Feminism and Anti-Fascism in Britain: Militancy Revived?,” in British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State, ed. Nigel Copsey and Dave Renton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 76; Gottlieb, “Varieties of Feminist Responses to Fascism in Inter-War Britain,” 101–102. 42  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “A New Year – A New Policy,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 31, 1938. 43  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Courage, and Again Courage,” New Times and Ethiopia News, March 11, 1939. 44  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Lest We Forget,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 21, 1937; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Conspiracy Against World Peace,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 2, 1937.

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friendship” instead of dropping bombs.45 For Pankhurst, this was persuasive evidence that support for China, with its commitment to female progress and respect for female leadership, was support for international justice. Pankhurst portrayed women’s status in China as a stark contrast to the restricted roles of women in fascist states. While attending League proceedings in Geneva in 1937 Pankhurst interviewed the female member of the Chinese Delegation to the League, Miss Hilda Yen. Yen expressed her disapproval of the League’s inaction in terms of the conflict in China and proposed economic sanctions as a means to force Japan to withdraw from China. In addition to these policy recommendations, in the course of the interview, Yen also highlighted women’s status in China. She maintained that women in China “have complete equality!” pointing to women’s participation in the diplomatic service, a sector in which British women would not be allowed to hold senior positions until 1946.46 When reporting on the Equal Rights Committee luncheon at the League, Pankhurst also used the opportunity to praise the gains of Chinese women. Pankhurst noted that Hilda Yen was present and conveyed “the most striking success of all to record” in terms of women’s equality in China.47 Combined with her portrayal of China as democratic and peaceful, and therefore an innocent victim of Japanese aggression, Pankhurst also framed China as beacon of women’s progress in order to gain support for the Chinese cause. Pankhurst conceived of women as ideal agents of anti-fascism and internationalism.48 Fascism endangered women and threatened women’s rights. In addition, Pankhurst understood women as particularly suited to pacifist activism. She attributed the League’s decision to establish a Committee for the Study of the Legal Status of Women around the globe to “the strenuous work of women for peace.”49 Additionally, women were valued in the international organization because in every country women’s organizations provided “the most faithful support, the most constant work, for the League of Nations 45  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Important News of Ethiopia,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 4, 1938. 46  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “A Chinese Woman Sees the League,” China News supplement to New Times and Ethiopia News, October 2, 1937. 47  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The League and the Work and Status of Women,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 2, 1937. 48  For more on feminists who argued that women made ideal internationalists and diplomats see Gottlieb, “Varieties of Feminist Responses to Fascism in Inter-War Britain,” 104– 105; Gottlieb, “ ‘Broken Friendships and Vanished Loyalties,’ ” 205–206; Flinn, “ ‘Mothers for Peace’, Co-Operation, Feminism and Peace,” 144. 49  Pankhurst, “The League and the Work and Status of Women,” 1937.

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and for peace itself.”50 Chinese women shared, or perhaps strategically invoked, female internationalism and pacifism. Yen, in an interview with Pankhurst, appealed to English women in particular regarding the war in China, asking Pankhurst to “tell them women have an instinct for peace and justice. They must educate themselves to defend peace: they must fight for it – not peace at any price. We must fearlessly say to the aggressor, ‘you are the wrong party in this quarrel!”51 Pankhurst and her internationalist allies ironically utilized gender essentialism to encourage women to break political barriers. Pankhurst challenged mothers who had been “long excluded from public affairs,” but were now full citizens in Britain and many other countries, to work for peace.52 She called on British women to push the British government to support China in the face of Japan’s abuse and “rise up . . . to prevent this monstrous iniquity receiving the support of this nation.”53 Without women, lasting peace and international justice could not be attained in China or anywhere else. Through her publication of the New Times and Ethiopia News, Pankhurst attempted to convince the British public and government that the aggressive and masculinist policies of Italy, Germany, and Japan should be of concern to every member of the international community. She viewed fascism as a global threat to independent countries, and she foregrounded the gendered threat of militarism and fascism to women around the world. Unlike some activists on the British left, Pankhurst did not privilege the European conflict in Spain. Instead, she championed the cause of Ethiopian independence, seeing that conflict as intimately connected to the violence in Spain and China.54 While she primarily focused on women who were victims of fascism in Ethiopia and Spain, Pankhurst highlighted both the progress and the suffering of women in China, to rally support for the country. Though women’s emancipation in China was far from complete, Pankhurst presented an image of China to her readers that would elicit sympathy and support for China’s strength as well as its weakness. Pankhurst’s advocacy for China thus demonstrates her commitment to a feminist internationalism. As someone who was dismayed by the secret treaties of World War I and sought to promote the international 50  Ibid. 51  Pankhurst, “A Chinese Woman Sees the League,” 1937. 52  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Challenge of the Dictators to the Peaceable World,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 11, 1937. 53  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Honesty Still the Best Policy,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 29, 1939. 54  Buchanan, “ ‘Shanghai-Madrid Axis’?,” 549.

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language interlingua, Pankhurst wanted an international system based on transparency and justice, and viewed the participation of women as an essential part of this project.55 She was not the only activist to understand fascism in gendered terms or make connections between global theaters of war, but Pankhurst’s life and work is compelling evidence that feminism and anti-fascism were compatible in the interwar period.

“Any Group of Enlightened and Progressive Men”: Carlos Romulo, Rotary, and the Sino-Japanese War

In comparison with Pankhurst’s panoramic view of a fascist international, Carlos Romulo’s writings, which failed to explicitly connect the China war to events in Spain or Ethiopia, might seem less complex. However, the fact that Romulo did not see a global fascist threat does not indicate he did not think internationally. Rather, he saw a different configuration of power. Other columnists writing in Romulo’s Philippines Herald did make connections similar to Pankhurst’s, but their views cannot be read to reflect Romulo’s thinking directly. The Herald’s columnists differed over the Spanish Civil War, as did many in Manila. Consequently, the paper did not present a clear editorial preference on that ideologically charged conflict. Thus, this analysis will not use opinions voiced in columns from the paper, even though Romulo served as editor and publisher. However, Romulo did have a history of close involvement with the Herald’s political cartoons. His interest dated back to 1922, when Romulo oversaw the creation, and eventual retraction, of a cartoon depicting a U.S. governor-general “raping” the honor of Philippine democracy.56 As this powerful example shows, political cartoons in the newspaper provide a window into Romulo’s thinking about gendered internationalism. Political cartoons in the Philippines have generated a limited but fruitful scholarly discussion since the 1980s. Political illustrations in the Philippines and the U.S. were both heavily gendered. American cartoons have typically represented the Philippines as female, helpless, and victimized, in need 55  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The League of Nations,” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 18, 1919; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, Delphos: The Future of International Language (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1927). 56  Bernardita Reyes Churchill, The Philippine Independence Missions to the United States, 1919–1934 (Manila: National Historical Institute, 1983), 39; Carlos P. Romulo, I Walked with Heroes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), 163–164.

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of a strong American savior. Conversely, they also depicted Filipinos as savage men in contrast to a virtuous woman representing American liberty.57 Moreover, American political illustrations often coded Filipinos as children, in need of an elderly Uncle Sam’s paternal leadership.58 As we will see, the Philippines Herald reused but also altered these gendered representations. A close reading of the images support Alfred McCoy’s argument that the transformation of the cartoonists’ America into a “wise paternal figure” reflected changing Filipino attitudes, from a rejection of the U.S. toward an embrace of binationalism. This political stance emerged from the success of an American educational system that “worked to instill a bi-national loyalty in the Filipino child – loyalty to an emerging Philippine nation and loyalty to its protector America.”59 Carlos Romulo’s personal background demonstrates how the U.S. educational system shaped the political subjectivity of Filipinos. Born in 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War, Romulo came of age under the U.S. occupation and describes in vivid detail how his American teachers wooed him away from his father’s anti-American guerrilla activity. Instead, they taught him to embrace the occupation.60 Romulo’s success in ascending the educational ladder offered by the new American regime led him to his first transPacific venture. In 1919 he traveled to New York to attend Columbia University. He graduated in 1921 with Master’s degrees in foreign trade service and comparative literature.61 The next year, Romulo accompanied a Philippine Independence Mission as a “publicity agent” while he was assistant editor of the Philippines Herald.62 Even though Romulo recognized the benefits of U.S. occupation, his participation in the Mission demonstrates that he also supported Philippine independence through negotiation with the United States. Romulo’s loyalty to the U.S. manifested itself in his faith in the country’s benign intentions in the Philippines and its magnanimity in ceding independence to the archipelago. Throughout his post-World War II political career 57  Abe Ignacio et al., eds., The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons (San Francisco: T’Boli Publishing, 2004); Servando D. Halili, Iconography of the New Empire: Race and Gender Images and the American Colonization of the Philippines (Diliman, Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2006). 58  Halili, Iconography of the New Empire, 43–59. 59  Alfred W. McCoy, “Images of a Changing Nation, 1900–1941,” in Philippine Cartoons: Political Caricatures of the American Era 1900–1941, by Alfredo R. Roces and Alfred W. McCoy (Manila: Vera-Reyes, 1985), 17. 60  Romulo, I Walked with Heroes, 30–33, 45, 48, 55, 58. 61  Augusto Fauni Espiritu, Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 9. 62  Churchill, Philippine Independence Missions, 429.

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Carlos Romulo at the United Nations, ca. 1945. Courtesy of the Carlos P. Romulo Foundation.

as ambassador to the United Nations (Illustration 5.2), the United States, and then as Foreign Minister, Romulo would continue to affirm his faith in the good intentions of the United States. This faith contrasts sharply with the anti-colonial posture of Sylvia Pankhurst; it was an optimism shaped in part by Romulo’s apparent lack of exposure to the horrors of total war. Despite the brutality of the U.S.-Philippine War during his youth, Romulo rarely wrote or spoke about it. Looking at Romulo’s writing

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at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War thus provides a useful lens for comparing his thoughts to Pankhurst’s. She viewed the Japanese invasion of China through the tragic prism of 1914–1918. Romulo, in contrast, recognized a breakdown in international order but still retained his optimism for a better future. Unlike Pankhurst, World War I left Romulo relatively unscathed. Still in his early twenties in the late 1910s, he makes no mention of the conflict in his memoir. The global cataclysm made very little impact on the Philippines, particularly compared to Britain. The United States did not enter the war until 1917, and relatively few Filipinos were involved in the conflict. Romulo’s experience of war before 1941 remained limited to his early childhood memories of the U.S.-Philippine War, when his father fought as a guerilla against the occupying U.S. forces. However, both Romulo and his father appeared to have been reconciled to the Filipino defeat. Romulo’s father became a member of the U.S. regime as a local politician and state governor. Romulo interpreted his father’s actions as an indication that acceptance of the U.S. represented a continuation rather than a contradiction of his father’s fight for Philippine freedom.63 Romulo even understood his grandfather’s torture at the hands of U.S. troops as an unrepresentative aberration. This lack of an aversion to war and violence framed Romulo’s internationalism, as did his masculinist politics. In comparison with Pankhurst’s insistence on the need for a female-inclusive internationalism, Romulo envisioned diplomacy as the realm of robust businessmen. This understanding of an international fraternity emerged in his response to the outbreak of the SinoJapanese War, one of the most destructive conflicts of the 20th century. Unlike Pankhurst, Romulo expressed little concern for civilian casualties, much less the gendered burden of those casualties on women. If Pankhurst’s position as a pro-Chinese propagandist blinded her to the political realities of Chiang’s non-democratic regime, Romulo’s bloodless, masculinist, liberal internationalism blinded him to the reality of its destructiveness. Pankhurst saw war as an inexcusable aberration and a blight on the international system. Romulo saw violence as a routine problem for cool-headed men to respond to evenly. War was to be solved in the company of male social equals. Romulo relished his own part within such a world order, viewing himself as a personification of the Philippines. Both he and the Archipelago served as intermediaries between West and East. He saw himself performing an indispensable role of interpretation. He faced “both East and West, and [was] both

63  Romulo, I Walked with Heroes, 30–33, 45, 48, 55, 58; Carlos P. Romulo, “My Father Fought Americans, but I Fight for the U.S.A.,” The Rotarian, February 1943.

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of the Occident and of the Orient.”64 Similarly, from early in life he characterized the Philippines not quite as the center of the world but as “the meeting place, the melting pot of the nations, the bridge upon which rested the four corners of the world.”65 Thus the Philippines, and Romulo in particular, became interlocutors and facilitators for other nations gathered around the conference table of international affairs. By 1937 Romulo could claim a seat at such a table. He secured a lucrative deal in 1935 as the publisher and part-owner of four newspapers, including Manila’s flagship English daily, the Philippines Herald.66 Romulo had a strong patron in Manuel Quezon, president of the Philippine Commonwealth, the internal self-government scheme set up by the U.S. in 1934. The Commonwealth was created as a compromise that allowed the U.S. to immediately begin restricting Filipino migration to the states while promising independence for the Philippines in 1946. In addition to Quezon, Romulo retained strong relationships with Americans, and traveled to the United States several times throughout the 1920s and 1930s.67 In 1931 Romulo joined the Manila Rotary Club, an organization predominantly for U.S. businessmen. As a Filipino, he was in a distinct minority. Nevertheless, Romulo was able to rise to the Club’s presidency in 1935.68 The Rotary Club constituted another forum for imperial education. Romulo’s experiences in the club served as a model of how he envisioned international governance by elite men. Throughout the 1930s Romulo openly embraced the United States as a good faith broker, and even a righteous actor in bringing democracy and self-government to the Philippines. Writing for Rotary International’s magazine in 1936, 64  Carlos P. Romulo, Mother America: A Living Story of Democracy (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1943), 7. 65  Romulo, I Walked with Heroes, 27. 66  For the story behind this coup, arranged through Philippine Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon, see Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929–1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 115; Churchill, Philippine Independence Missions, 288. The other papers were a Spanish daily, El Debate, a Tagalog daily, Mabuhay, and the English-language weekly, Monday Mail. 67  Espiritu, Five Faces of Exile, 9. 68  Romulo, Mother America, 43–44; Romulo served as the Manila Club’s president in 1935, and Rotary International’s Third Vice-President in 1937–1938: “Rotary’s New Board of Directors,” The Rotarian, July 1937, 42; for an excellent analysis of Rotary Club ethnic politics in Southeast Asia more generally, see Su Lin Lewis, “Rotary International’s ‘Acid Test’: Multi-Ethnic Associational Life in 1930s Southeast Asia,” Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (July 2012): 302–324.

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Romulo described the U.S. imperial role in the Philippines as an embodiment of Rotary’s core values. These included “neighborliness,” a trait that combined a paternalist “service to his fellow man” with a solidarity-like “fellowship.” America had served the Philippines by protecting “a weak people who could use help and plenty of it,” and extending “a hand of Fellowship to a people who could at the time offer them nothing but opposition.” Thus, America emerged as the older brother, bringing light to a benighted Philippines. The U.S. performed its role despite initial Filipino opposition, which “disappeared in the warming glow of fellowship.” America, symbolizing Rotary values, ushered the Philippines into diplomatic manhood; the U.S. endowed Filipinos with “individualism, the feeling that every man is a man, that he can stand side by side with other men, that he can defend his own rights.” This spirit had always been found in Filipino elites, “but America has liberated it . . . among the great masses of the people.”69 Thus, Romulo’s internationalism, inflected through his Rotary experience, positioned the U.S. as the mature, patrician, older figure who groomed less advanced peoples and cultures into manhood. Having attained that manhood, the Philippines could participate as an equal, as a neighbor, but only after they had relied on the intimate intervention of the U.S. to achieve that status. This age- and masculinity-based hierarchy framed how Romulo’s newspaper presented the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. The Philippines Herald offered an image of the Far East as a childish place, awaiting the parental correction of strong, male leaders. A cartoon that appeared days after the beginning of the war showed Generalissimo Chiang as a mother holding an infantile China that has just bitten the finger of a cruel Japanese military figure (Illustration 5.3).70 The cartoon mixed several gendered metaphors: showing Japan as a male aggressor violating the sacred mother–child bond, and presenting China as a weak child still in its mother’s arms. The cartoonist coded the martial Chiang as female, victim of the male Japanese violation but still cool and collected, with a wry smile, firmly in control of the situation. In the cartoon’s configuration, Chiang became the midwife of a new nation, the birth-mother for China’s rebirth as a virile power. The country, here still an infant, has the ability to “use its first tooth” to fight from the start rather than stoically accepting abuse.71 The infantilization of China surfaced in another cartoon. This time the nation attempted to draw in the parental correction of a strong father-figure 69  Carlos P. Romulo, “A New Nation Is Born,” The Rotarian, February 1936, 21–22. 70  “The Baby Uses Its First Tooth,” PH, July 13, 1937. 71  Ibid.

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“The Baby Uses its First Tooth,” Philippines Herald, July 13, 1937. Library of Congress Collection.

for the Pacific: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Capitalizing on rumors circulating during the summer of 1937, the Herald editorialized on a possible visit by the U.S. President to the Philippines as part of a larger Far Eastern tour. Based on FDR’s success in brokering the promise of Philippine independence in 1934, the editorial argued, he would be uniquely suited to “weave . . . a design of friendly cooperation” between the nations of Asia.72 The cartoon accompanying the editorial showed infantilized personifications of the Philippines, China, and Japan, eagerly awaiting the adult FDR; the Asian countries are portrayed as children awaiting their father’s daily return from work. The paternal FDR appeared complete with briefcase and hat (Illustration 5.4).73 With the headline’s cry, “President Roosevelt Is Coming!,” the childish Asians await a stern but loving 72  “President Roosevelt Is Coming!” PH, July 17, 1937. 73  Ibid.

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“President Roosevelt is Coming,” Philippines Herald, July 17, 1937. Library of Congress Collection.

assessment by their father. An editorial two weeks later bemoaned the lack of European interest in the Sino-Japanese crisis due to growing tensions on the continent. However, the column reassured readers with the notion of a paternal United States. Their father would surely not “leave China and the entire Far East at the mercy of an Empire steadily on the march.”74 The Sino-Japanese relationship, according to Romulo, presented a stark contrast to the U.S.-Philippine relationship. After the latter war, the U.S. had come alongside its “little brown brother.” America had taught the child-nation of the Philippines a proper sense of self-respect. In contrast to the U.S. treating the Archipelago as a mature equal, Japan was bullying the child China. Romulo and his Rotary counterparts certainly recognized that the SinoJapanese war reflected the distance between East Asia’s geopolitics and their Rotarian ideals. Shortly after the beginning of the war, U.S. High Commissioner Paul McNutt, the highest U.S. official in the semi-autonomous Commonwealth, spoke at the Club’s bimonthly gathering. Contrasting the decorum of the gathered Rotarians with the collapse of international order, McNutt imagined “if men all over the world were calm and cool and willing to listen to reason[,] it would not be difficult to make the necessary adjustment to insure peace.”75 According to McNutt, world conflict did not arise out of competition over 74  “The Other Powers Look On,” PH, July 28, 1937. 75  “Local Rotarians Honor McNutt At Impressive Affair Held Last Night At Hotel Grand Ballroom,” PH, July 16, 1937.

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scarce resources or deep-seated problems. Rather, violence resulted from mere misunderstanding that could be corrected by the actions of a few cool and reasonable men. Naturally, the U.S.-based Rotary International represented such rationality. In contrast, the leaders of Germany, the Soviet Union, and Asian nations simply would not listen to reason and comply in a rational peace. A Rotary speaker two weeks later likewise called for the Rotary “to spread a ‘little sanity around the world for the benefit of us all.’ ”76 The Herald, reflecting Romulo’s prominent position in Manila’s Rotary, supported McNutt’s idea and advocated Rotarianism as a philosophy for international relations. The newspaper introduced the “Rotary method and a Rotary principle . . . for adoption in the handling of international relations.”77 According to this Rotary method, creating international peace required simply gathering bourgeois leaders to deal with the problems of their international neighborhood. As Romulo would write for the Rotary magazine in 1938, “all that is required of any group of enlightened and progressive men is to do its bit in conjunction with other groups of right-thinking people.”78 While Pankhurst foregrounded the role of Chinese women, like Madame Chiang Kai-shek in the Sino-Japanese War, Romulo focused on Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek as a worthy national and international elite. Carlos Romulo scored a major interview with Chiang in early August, a month after the beginning of hostilities. His admiration for Chiang shone through in the Herald as the paper described a city recently attacked and bombed by Japan. Romulo characterized Nanjing, the capital city of the Republic of China, as calm, with “none of the mob hysteria so common in pre-war days.” The people in the city were remarkably stoic, despite “its territorial integrity seriously menaced by an aggressor nation.” This rational response flowed from Chiang, who not only led but also personified China. Romulo described Chiang as “quiet mannered, calm and serene,” “unruffled,” a man who “preserves all the time a most becoming poise.” Although, at times, “a slight flash of unrepressed emotion is shown . . . in his eyes,” Chiang retained control, which Romulo respected. Romulo also insisted there is “nothing dictatorial in either his appearance or speech,” eliding Chiang’s political autocracy by finding him temperamentally innocent. Romulo did permit the Chinese leader some emotion, given the gravity of the situation. Romulo came away from the interview impressed at “the maturity of mind of this patient, peaceful nation.” China “cannot be rushed off her feet by propaganda or provocations,” but “knows its destiny and in calmness and 76  “Rogers Urges Brotherhood,” PH, July 29, 1937. 77  “Rotarian McNutt and Rotary,” PH, July 16, 1937. 78  Carlos P. Romulo, “A Philippine View of Rotary,” The Rotarian, April 1938, 7.

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serenity it moves onward to make its rendezvous with it.”79 Romulo presented an adult, self-possessed China, a nation that could participate in the liberal international world order that he envisioned. The Herald’s editorial follow-up to the interview re-emphasized this interpretation. The column lauded Chiang’s diplomacy and tact as expressed through his reserved demeanor. Chiang was described as exemplary for how he “realizes his responsibility as the leader of his nation.” The Chinese leader controlled his emotions as an adult and as a representative of his nation. He did not “speak wildly.” Even better, “he is not a man to be stampeded into saying anything or taking a step that might result in injury to his people more than it will redeem their right to existence and their honor.” Chiang thus performed the role of a responsible father, protecting his nation/children through restraint, even when their childish passions demanded action.80 In 1943 Romulo went even further, comparing Chiang to Gandhi and Lincoln, describing him as a “gentle warrior,” “spare, esthetic, delicately built, sensitive, and abstemious,” “deeply religious,” “direct and sure,” “calm and controlled,” but still the quintessential “Oriental.”81 In this rapturous tribute, Romulo projected the Rotary vision of an international order on to Chiang. As a rational, calm Chinese male leader who converted to Christianity, Chiang demonstrated how an “Oriental” might be worthy of Occidental respect. The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, rather than being a tragedy, presented an opportunity to realize the Rotary worldview. The war brought a mature, rational leader like Chiang Kai-shek into the limelight. He proved worthy, in Romulo’s eyes, of joining the international conference table and had the capability of enacting the Rotarian model of “neighborliness.” Rather than bringing women into the international system as Pankhurst advocated, Romulo envisioned a world of men like himself and Chiang Kai-shek managing the world as neighbors, meeting in the club. Conclusion When confronted with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Pankhurst and Romulo understood the conflict through their gendered politics and advocated solutions through their version of internationalism. These 79  Carlos P. Romulo, “Chiang Kai-shek Says Nation Near Endurance Limit,” PH, August 10, 1937. 80  “No Peace Without Honor,” PH, August 11, 1937. 81  Romulo, Mother America, 117–119.

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two newspaper editors, immersed in the politics of the interwar period, articulated two contrasting visions of a global order. For Pankhurst, the rise of fascism, which manifested itself in conflicts in Ethiopia, Spain, and China during the 1930s, was indicative of an increasingly bi-polar world. She saw the world as split between democracy and fascism. She also criticized the gendered divide in politics and diplomacy that marginalized women in global affairs. Pankhurst pursued a feminist internationalism in order to challenge these divisions. As an activist who sought to imagine the world as a global community, she believed that only with men and women working together across racial and national lines could democracy triumph over fascism and peace over war. The Rotarian internationalism of Romulo served as an alternative model for ending the conflict between Japan and China. Romulo similarly understood the world as divided, but along imperial and generational lines. Romulo promoted an internationalism that would maintain a hierarchy between “fathers,” or imperial powers, and “sons,” representing colonies. The paternalistic relationship between imperial powers and their colonies reified Romulo’s Rotarian understanding of international affairs as conducted by men, divided into students and teachers, depending on their place within the world order. Unlike Pankhurst, Romulo advocated for an internationalism that was more concerned with maintaining the order of things than altering the basis of politics. The contrasting internationalisms of Pankhurst and Romulo demonstrate how central gender was to their understanding of politics and diplomacy. Their gendered political imaginaries shaped their ability to offer solutions to war and envision a new world order. An analysis of how Pankhurst and Romulo understood the Sino-Japanese War reveals competing understandings of internationalisms during the interwar period. Pankhurst’s feminist internationalism and Romulo’s masculinist Rotarian internationalism represent two opposing views of global division and offered rival gendered solutions to political and military conflicts. Both editors projected their own visions of Republican China according to the needs of their respective internationalisms. For Pankhurst, Chiang’s China became a democratic oasis in an authoritarian East Asia, permitting the expansion of women’s rights. For Romulo, Chiang served as an ideal patriarch, comparable to Lincoln or Gandhi, shepherding his people through crisis. From Pankhurst’s perspective, if more nations could imitate China’s brave resistance of fascist aggression and women’s advancement, perhaps the worldwide scourge of fascism could be averted. Likewise, for Romulo, if more leaders could emulate Chiang and come to a level, rational discussion of international affairs, peace could be restored.

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China’s reality did not conform to the desires of Pankhurst or Romulo. By examining how they constructed their own imagined China, however, we can understand how thinkers such as Pankhurst and Romulo envisioned a particular global system that included Asia. That is, the writings of Pankhurst and Romulo do not necessarily tell us about China or even the Sino-Japanese War. However, they do reveal how Pankhurst and Romulo used the conflicts in East Asia to advocate for their respective gendered internationalisms. The concern with affairs in China by civil society leaders in England and the Philippines supports what Andrew Arsan, Su Lin Lewis, and Anne-Isabelle Richard have called an interwar moment of global civil society. During the period between World Wars I and II, a newly vibrant network of individuals and organizations emerged that engaged in internationalist projects around the world.82 The trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific political imaginaries of Sylvia Pankhurst and Carlos Romulo suggest that Asia played a key role in this interwar moment for global civil society, and that gender shaped their respective worldviews. Further research on the interwar period is needed, and perhaps juxtapositions like that of Pankhurst and Romulo, pairing the views of seemingly disparate figures from worlds apart, will most effectively point us to the underlying contours of global, and trans-Pacific, intellectual history. References Adejumobi, Saheed. The History of Ethiopia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007. Arsan, Andrew, Su Lin Lewis, and Anne-Isabelle Richard. “The Roots of Global Civil Society and the Interwar Moment.” Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (July 2012): 157–165. “The Baby Uses Its First Tooth.” Philippines Herald, July 13, 1937. Bickers, Robert. Britain in China: Community Culture and Colonialism, 1900–1949. Manchester; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Buchanan, Tom. “China and the British Left in the Twentieth Century: Transnational Perspectives.” Labor History 54, no. 5 (2013): 540–553. Buchanan, Tom. East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925–1976. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

82  Andrew Arsan, Su Lin Lewis, and Anne-Isabelle Richard, “Editorial – the Roots of Global Civil Society and the Interwar Moment,” Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (July 2012): 157–165.

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Buchanan, Tom. “ ‘Shanghai-Madrid Axis’? Comparing British Responses to the Conflicts in Spain and China, 1936–39.” Contemporary European History 21, no. 4 (2012): 533–552. Bullock, Ian and Richard Pankhurst, eds. Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-Fascist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Churchill, Bernardita Reyes. The Philippine Independence Missions to the United States, 1919–1934. Manila: National Historical Institute, 1983. Clegg, Arthur. Aid China 1937–1949: A Memoir of a Forgotten Campaign. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2003. Connelly, Katherine. Sylvia Pankhurst Suffragette, Socialist, and Scourge of Empire. London: Pluto Press, 2013. Davis, Mary. Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1999. Espiritu, Augusto Fauni. Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Flinn, Andrew. “ ‘Mothers for Peace’, Co-Operation, Feminism and Peace: The Women’s Co-Operative Guild and the Anti-War Movement between the Wars.” In Consumerism and the Co-Operative Movement in Modern British History: Taking Stock, ed. Nicole Robertson and Lawrence Black, 138–154. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Friend, Theodore. Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929–1946. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Gottlieb, Julie. “Guilty Women,” Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Gottlieb, Julie V. “ ‘Broken Friendships and Vanished Loyalties’: Gender, Collective (In)Security and Anti-Fascism in Britain in the 1930s.” Politics, Religion & Ideology 13, no. 2 (2012): 197–219. Gottlieb, Julie V. “Feminism and Anti-Fascism in Britain: Militancy Revived?” In British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State, ed. Nigel Copsey and Dave Renton, 68–94. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Gottlieb, Julie V. “Varieties of Feminist Responses to Fascism in Inter-War Britain.” In Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period, ed. Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz, 101–118. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Grayzel, Susan. At Home and under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Halili, Servando D. Iconography of the New Empire: Race and Gender Images and the American Colonization of the Philippines. Diliman, Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2006. Harrison, Shirley. Sylvia Pankhurst: A Crusading Life 1882 – 1960. London: Aurum, 2003.

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Ignacio, Abe, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio, eds. The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons. San Francisco: T’Boli Publishing, 2004. Lewis, Su Lin. “Rotary International’s ‘Acid Test’: Multi-Ethnic Associational Life in 1930s Southeast Asia.” Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (July 2012): 302–324. “Local Rotarians Honor McNutt At Impressive Affair Held Last Night at Hotel Grand Ballroom.” Philippines Herald, July 16, 1937. McCoy, Alfred W. “Images of a Changing Nation, 1900–1941.” In Alfredo R. Roces and Alfred W. McCoy, Philippine Cartoons: Political Caricatures of the American Era 1900–1941, 13–18. Manila: Vera-Reyes, 1985. Miller, Carol. “ ‘Geneva – the Key to Equality’: Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations.” Women’s History Review 3, no. 2 (1994): 219–245. “No Peace Without Honor.” Philippines Herald, August 11, 1937. “The Other Powers Look On.” Philippines Herald, July 28, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Boycott the Aggressors,” New Times & Ethiopia News, September 25, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Challenge of the Dictators to the Peaceable World.” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 11, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “A Chinese Woman Sees the League.” China News supplement to New Times and Ethiopia News, October 2, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “The Conspiracy Against World Peace.” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 2, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Courage, and Again Courage.” New Times and Ethiopia News, March 11, 1939. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. Delphos: The Future of International Language. London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1927. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Ethiopia . . . Spain . . . China.” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 4, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Fascism as It Is.” New Times & Ethiopia News, November 21, 1936. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Fascism as It Is.” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 28, 1936. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Fascism as It Is.” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 19, 1936. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Fascist Armies Mutiny in Ethiopia.” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 13, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Fascists Versus Nazis.” Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst Papers. Internationaal Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam. Pankhurst E. Sylvia. “The Fascisti Menace.” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 11, 1922. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Going to War: What Women Can Do.” Woman’s Dreadnought, August 8, 1914.

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Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “The Grave International Situation.” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 28, 1936. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Honesty Still the Best Policy.” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 29, 1939. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Important News of Ethiopia.” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 4, 1938. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “An Interview with Dr. Wellington Koo the Famous Chinese Ambassador.” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 2, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “The League of Nations.” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 18, 1919. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “The League and the Work and Status of Women.” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 2, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Lest We Forget.” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 21, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “A New Year – A New Policy.” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 31, 1938. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “No Recognition of Conquest.” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 14, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “No Recognition Uphold the Covenant.” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 4, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Not for C3 Men.” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 5, 1936. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Not Universal.” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 10, 1936. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “Our Quest.” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 18, 1938. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “The Population Problem.” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 4, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “To Our Readers.” China News supplement to New Times and Ethiopia News, September 4, 1937. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “War Here at Home?” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 1, 1938. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. “What the Suffragettes Should Do.” Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst Papers. Internationaal Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam. Pankhurst, Richard. Ethiopian Reminiscences: Early Days. Los Angeles, CA: Tsehai Publishers, 2013. Pankhurst, Richard. Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Paddington Press, distributed by Grosset & Dunlap, 1979. Perry, J. K. J. “Powerless and Frustrated: Britain’s Relationship with China during the Opening Years of the Second Sino–Japanese War, 1937–1939.” Diplomacy & Statecraft 22, no. 3 (2011): 408–430. “President Roosevelt Is Coming!” Philippines Herald, July 17, 1937. Purvis, June. “Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960), Suffragette, Political Activist, Artist and Writer.” Gender & Education 20, no. 1 (2008): 81–87. “Rogers Urges Brotherhood.” Philippines Herald, July 29, 1937.

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Romero, Patricia. E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Romulo, Carlos P. “Chiang Kai-shek Says Nation Near Endurance Limit.” Philippines Herald, August 10, 1937. Romulo, Carlos P. I Walked with Heroes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961. Romulo, Carlos P. Mother America: A Living Story of Democracy. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1943. Romulo, Carlos P. “My Father Fought Americans, but I Fight for the U.S.A.” The Rotarian, February 1943. Romulo, Carlos P. “A New Nation Is Born.” The Rotarian, February 1936. Romulo, Carlos P. “A Philippine View of Rotary.” The Rotarian, April 1938. “Rotarian McNutt and Rotary.” Philippines Herald, July 16, 1937. “Rotary’s New Board of Directors.” The Rotarian, July 1937. Rupp, Leila. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Sbacchi, Alberto. Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, 1935–1941. Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press, 1997. Vellacott, Jo. “Feminism as if All People Mattered: Working to Remove the Causes of War, 1919–1929.” Contemporary European History 10, no. 3 (2001): 375–394. Winslow, Barbara. Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Woldemariam, Metasebia. “Sylvia Pankhurst: Against Imperialist Occupation of Ethiopia.” In African Agency and European Colonialism: Latitudes of Negotiation and Containment: Essays in Honor of A. S. Kanya-Forstner, ed. Kwabena Opare AkurangParry and Femi J. Kolapo, 141–150. Lanham: University Press of America, 2007. “The World’s Two Major Headaches.” Philippines Herald, July 10, 1937. Yuan, Hu Chow. “Chinese Opinion: Long Live Ethiopia.” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 22, 1936. Zewde, Bahru. A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991. 2nd ed. Oxford: Addis Ababa University Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 6

Moving within Empires

Korean Women and Trans-Pacific Migration Ji-Yeon Yuh Abstract The migration stories of Korean women around the Pacific are a significant window to understanding the enduring influence of empires, material conditions, race, and gender from the early 20th century into the 21st. They demonstrate how multiple and overlapping empires, globalized labor structures, gender roles, and racialization shape individual and communal choices. The stories of less familiar migrants, such as comfort women, military brides, mail-order brides, and adoptees also reveal the specific racialization of Koreans within the Japanese empire and the U.S. racial hierarchy. The trans-Pacific thus becomes an important site for theorizing race, gender, and migration.

Keywords adoption – camptowns – diaspora – empire – gender – labor – marriage – migration – militarism – race – transnationalism – war

While past scholarship in Asian American studies has primarily focused on migration and settlement in the United States, this chapter seeks to understand how multiple systems of empire shape movement and relocation across locales in both Asia and the U.S. The focus is particularly on the diaspora of Korean women, whose lives and stories reveal how a historical period, war and colonialism, racial and class positions, and the demands of a globalizing labor economy all shape their life choices and experiences of migration. A brief examination of the experiences of four Korean women who crossed oceans and whose lives spanned the 20th century exemplifies these connections. Mary Paik Lee immigrated to the U.S. sugar plantations at the age of five. She arrived in 1905 with her father, a contract laborer, and her mother, who

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was part of the quota of wives. She later wrote a memoir about her Korean American life in California.1 Margaret Pai was born in Honolulu to immigrant parents in 1914.2 Her mother was a picture bride and an active churchwoman in Hawaiʻi, involved in Korea issues. As a young child, Margaret Pai accompanied her mother when she returned to Korea to help organize a major demonstration. The demonstration was part of the March 1, 1919 uprising of Koreans against the Japanese Empire. When they returned home to Honolulu, they were laden with packages of delicacies not easily available outside Korea. Myungja Kim is among thousands of Koreans who re-migrated to Japan in the late 1940s. She was a seasonal vendor between Korea and Manchuria in the 1930s who ended up migrating to Osaka in the early 1940s.3 When Korea was liberated in 1945, she returned to her hometown but then migrated back to Japan. She discovered that making a living in liberated Korea was no easier than making a living in colonial Korea. Heeja Lee left her Korean hometown in the late 1930s to study in China, returned briefly and worked as a translator and nurse, and then immigrated to the United States in response to recruitment from American hospitals. She was part of the first wave of nurse migration following the 1965 adoption of labor criteria for U.S. immigration.4 Despite the differences in time and context, the migration stories of these women have four interconnected commonalities: the disruptions produced by empires; the gendered opportunities offered by modern industrial capitalism; the prevalence of kinship migration for women; and the significance of racialization in colonial and neocolonial projects. Japanese colonialism, the Pacific War, the Korean War, the Cold War, the U.S. military, and the globalization of the labor economy have been significant forces in Korean migration. When Mary Paik Lee’s parents left Korea in 1905, for example, they became part of the 7,000 plus Koreans who entered Hawaiʻi as contract laborers for the sugar plantations. They left largely due to poor economic conditions and 1  Mary Paik Lee and Sucheng Chan, Quiet Odssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in American (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990). 2  Pai writes that her mother arrived in Hawaii in 1912 and gave birth to her two years later. See p. 2 and p. 7 in Margaret K. Pai, The Dreams of Two Yi-Min (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989). 3  Myungja Kim is a pseudonym. Her story comes from oral history interviews conducted by the author at her home in Osaka, Japan, in 2003. 4  Heeja Lee is a pseudonym. Her story comes from oral history interviews conducted by the author in 1999 at her home near Atlanta, Georgia.

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fears that a Japanese incursion would only worsen their circumstances. Her father’s recruitment was part of a trans-Pacific search for labor systematically pursued by the plantation owners. Myungja Kim’s labor migrations were likewise a response to poverty. She was keenly aware of the irony of spending the bulk of her life in the very country, Japan, that had exacerbated impoverished conditions for Koreans like her. Heeja Lee was among the privileged during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945) and able to study in China. However, her permanent migration to the United States was sharply influenced by Korean national division and the unequal relationship between South Korea and the United States. Not only was the mobility of these four women shaped by imperial politics, their migrations also reveal the gendered nature of labor recruitment. The arrival of Mary Paik Lee’s mother, for example, hinged on her status as a wife. The plantations in Hawaiʻi initially had no interest in women as laborers, and began to allow them in only when they started to view wives as a stabilizing influence on the workforce. Mary Paik Lee’s mother was thus allowed to immigrate with her husband, and Mary herself was allowed in as a concession. Margaret Pai’s mother immigrated in 1912 as a picture bride to a man who had come to Hawaiʻi as a plantation contract laborer and became a store owner. She was one of approximately 25,000 picture brides from Korea and Japan who arrived in Hawaiʻi and the U.S. between 1908 and 1920.5 Heeja Lee’s migration as a nurse was part of the feminization of labor migration, as nurses, domestic workers, and other care workers comprised increasingly larger proportions of the migrant labor force. At the start of the 20th century Korean men, like Mary Paik Lee’s father, were recruited to Hawaiian plantations, by the end of the same century Korean women, like Heeja Lee, were recruited as nurses to American hospitals.6 5  For a close study of the recruitment of Koreans as laborers to Hawaiian plantations, see Wayne Patterson, The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896–1910 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1988). For more on Korean picture brides, see Sonia Shinn Sunoo, Korean Picture Brides: A Collection of Oral Histories, 1903–1920 (Bloomington: Xlibris Corp., 2002); Sonia Shinn Sunoo, “Korean Women Pioneers of the Pacific Northwest,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 51–63; Alice Yun Chai, “ ‘Mrs.K’: Oral History of a Korean Picture Bride.” Women’s Studies Newsletter 7, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 10–13; Alice Yun Chai, “Women’s History in Public: ‘Picture Brides’ of Hawaii,” Women’s History Quarterly 16, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 1988): 51–62. 6  See Rhacel Parrenas, Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) for an account of how economic globalization has influenced the migration of Filipina domestic care workers. See Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University

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Marriage migration is another unifying theme for Korean and other Asian women. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, women entered the United States as wives of U.S. permanent residents and citizens in phenomena called spousal migration, picture bride migration, family migration, military bride migration, or mail-order bride migration. In a global labor migration economy, a strategic marriage – often to a complete or nearly complete stranger – has been a significant migration path for women. Becoming a picture bride, for example, was one of the few ways for an Asia woman to migrate, for they were excluded from labor markets that sought Asian men as workers. These paths of marriage migration are also influenced by colonial relations. One military bride who arrived in the U.S. in 1951 remembered that her goal of escaping Korea for Japan changed virtually overnight with the arrival of the U.S. in Korea. She began to study English and dream of moving to America. The only path, she said, was to marry an American soldier. In her story, one can almost pinpoint the moment that Korea moves from a Japanese colonial sphere to a U.S. neocolonial sphere and glimpse the influence of that shift on ordinary Koreans seeking to better their circumstances. These two spheres created the conditions for a Pacific world within which women circulated as laborers and wives.7 In both spheres, Korean women were positioned as racially different and inferior, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and coercion. As wives of American men – most of whom were white – and as Asian immigrants Korean military brides were subject to racial objectification and discrimination. They were often stereotyped as prostitutes or gold-diggers. In Japan, Korean women were stereotyped as sexually immoral, uneducated, and unsuitable as wives. Both sets of stereotypes arise from the historical relations between Korea and Japan and between Korea and the United States. Given that Japan deliberately used Korean women as sex slaves for its military, while the United States encouraged and then managed a camptown system of brothels for its military, it is not surprising that both countries developed stereotypes of Korean women as sexually immoral.8 Press, 2003) for an account of how U.S.-Philippines colonial and neocolonial relationships influenced the education and migration of Filipina nurses. 7  See Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown (New York: New York University Press, 2002), for a history of Korean military brides. 8  For a description of how the United States encouraged and maintained a camptown system, see Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: New Press, 1992) and Katharine H. S. Moon. Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.–Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). For a concise history of Japan’s system of comfort women, see George L. Hicks,

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Women’s migration occurred both across the Pacific and within Asia. In the years leading up to the Japanese annexation of Korea and during the colonial period Koreans like Myungja Kim migrated between China, Manchuria, Japan, and Korea in search of work. The Japanese Empire also brought Taiwan and the Philippines into the circuit. Similarly, the U.S. recruited laborers from Asia from the mid-1800s onward, only to ban their entry altogether in 1924. By the 1940s wives of U.S. soldiers were virtually the only immigrants allowed from Asia, and during the 1950s and 1960s wives and children for adoption constituted the only significant migration into the U.S. from Asia. Once the U.S. opened its doors again with immigration reform in 1965, trans-Pacific crossings became almost commonplace. Yet, even as the U.S. became possible as a migration location, migrations within the Pacific remained important. Japan, in particular, remained a primary destination from colonial and post-colonial Korea. In the stories of Myungja Kim and Heeja Lee, we can see the overlap between the Japanese and U.S. spheres and the importance of migration both within and across the Pacific.9 Paying attention to women also highlights the stories of less familiar migrants. Comfort women, military brides, mail-order brides, and adoptees are often placed in separate, individual categories as distinct phenomena. However, we need to place them within the Japanese and U.S. spheres as migrations shaped by gender and race. Doing so reveals their commonalities with the more familiar labor and family migrations. It illuminates the ways in which empire and colonialism morphs in the post-war period, exerting influence under a new guise. It also reveals the specific racialization of Koreans within the Japanese empire and the targeting of Korean girls and women for sexual enslavement; and how the positioning of Koreans within the U.S. racial hierarchy affected the marriage of Korean women and the adoption of Korean children into American families. Once the differential racialization of Koreans in Japan and the United States is noticed, it then becomes necessary to pick apart the ways in which race functions in different locations and times. The trans-Pacific, then, becomes an important site for the theorization of race.

The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995, 1st American ed.). 9  The stories of Myungja Kim and Heeja Lee are based on oral history interviews and field work conducted by the author in Osaka and Tokyo, Japan; in Yanbian Prefecture and Shenyang City, China; and in the United States from 1999 to 2005. Their stories are from: Myungja Kim, Osaka, Japan: February 2003, oral history interview in author’s possession, and Heeja Lee, Atlanta, GA: April and May 1999, oral history interviews in author’s possession.

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In these migration stories, we can see the enduring influence of empires, material conditions, race, and gender from the early 20th century into the 21st. By delving deeply into the particulars of Korean women’s migration, we can better understand how multiple and overlapping empires, globalized labor structures, gender roles, and racialization shape individual and communal choices. We see how structural factors shaped life experiences, and also how these factors themselves have changed over time. References

Secondary Literature

Chai, Alice Yun. “ ‘Mrs.K’: Oral History of a Korean Picture Bride.” Women’s Studies Newsletter 7, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 10–13. Chai, Alice Yun. “Women’s History in Public: ‘Picture Brides’ of Hawaii.” Women’s History Quarterly 16, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 1988): 51–62. Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Hicks, George L. The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War. 1st American ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. Lee, Mary Paik, and Sucheng Chan. Quiet Odssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in American. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990. Moon, Katharine H. S. Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.–Korea Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Pai, Margaret K. The Dreams of Two Yi-Min. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989. Parrenas, Rhacel. Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Patterson, Wayne. The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896–1910. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1988. Sturdevant, Saundra Pollock, and Brenda, Stoltzfus. Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia. 1st ed. New York: New Press, 1992. Sunoo, Sonia Shinn. Korean Picture Brides: A Collection of Oral Histories, 1903–1920. Bloomington: Xlibris Corp., 2002. Sunoo, Sonia Shinn. “Korean Women Pioneers of the Pacific Northwest.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 51–63. Yuh, Ji-Yeon. Beyond the Shadow of Camptown. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

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Kim, Myungja. Osaka, Japan: February 2003, oral history interview in author’s possession. Lee, Heeja. Atlanta, GA: April and May 1999, oral history interviews in author’s possession.

CHAPTER 7

Re-Franchising Women of Hawaiʻi, 1912–1920

The Politics of Gender, Sovereignty, Race, and Rank at the Crossroads of the Pacific Rumi Yasutake Abstract This chapter examines the struggle of Hawaiʻi’s women’s suffrage movement under the leadership of prominent Native Hawaiian women. It provides a view of their relationship with white and non-white women in Hawaiʻi, the U.S. mainland, and the homelands of Asian and white immigrants. Focusing on how the suffrage leaders transformed their strategy and identity, this chapter analyzes the complex workings of gender, sovereignty, race, and rank in the emergence of a women’s mass suffrage movement in postannexation Hawaiʻi between 1912 and 1920.

Keywords Hawaiʻi – trans-Pacific – suffrage – civilizing mission – settler colonialism – hybrid – sovereignty – World War I

On October 28, 1912, Carrie Chapman Catt gave a lecture on the women’s suffrage cause at the Hawaiian Opera House in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.1 Following forced annexation in 1898, the United States had installed a territorial government in Hawaiʻi in 1900. Island society in the early 20th century was both a culturally hybrid and a neocolonial plantation society. It was racially * The author of this chapter owes a great deal to valuable comments and suggestions from Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Catherine Ceniza Choy, and anonymous readers in clarifying the writing and argument in the early version published in The Journal of Konan University, Faculty of Letters, no. 165 (March 2015), 119–126. 1  Ida Husted Harper, ed., The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 1900–1920 (New York: J. J. Little & Ives Co., 1922), 717; The Papers of Carrie Chapman Catt (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., 1976), Reel 1, 40, 42; “Noted Suffragist to Speak Here Tonight,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 28, 1912.

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diverse and racially stratified, with whites, Native Hawaiians, and Asians – who were mostly recently arrived immigrant laborers. There were other groups of laborers, such as those imported from Portugal and the Caribbean. Native Hawaiian women, including racially hybrid “Part-Hawaiian” women, sometimes straddled the divide between indigenous and white. Their political citizenship also spanned different systems. Native Hawaiian women, who had opposed annexation, viewed U.S. territorial suffrage as a means both to regain female political power and to restore indigenous sovereignty. In contrast, white women, who were a tiny minority of the islands’ population, had disdainful racial views about non-white societies and were anxious about challenges to white settler colonialism.2 Consequently, local white women in Hawaiʻi were reluctant to engage in the suffrage movement in the post-annexation era. In fact, Catt’s lecture was due to an invitation by a group of Native Hawaiian Women.3 Catt was a former president and influential member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and was then serving as the president of the International Woman Suffrage Association (IWSA). She was on her return from a world tour that had lasted one year and seven months.4 Insisting that the coming of women’s suffrage was “as certain as the rising of the sun,” Catt urged the women on the islands to get their vote while Hawaiʻi was still a territory.5 She also encouraged the Native Hawaiian women’s group to take the form of a modern women’s organization and to establish an affiliation with the NAWSA.6 Although the NAWSA records, after Catt’s visit, proclaimed 2  For a discussion of settler colonialism in relation to Asian Americans, see Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008); Karen J. Leong and Myla Vincent Carpio, “Gila River Indian Community and Incarceration of Japanese Americans on Its Lands,” Amerasia Journal 42, no. 1 (2016): 103–120. 3  The term ‘Native Hawaiian’ is used to indicate people who previously were categorized as ‘Part-Hawaiian’ or ‘Hawaiian,’ even though these categories were based on blood- (and race-) quantums. According to Judy Schachter, “ ‘native Hawaiian’ with a small ‘n’ refers to individuals with 50 percent or more Hawaiian blood, while ‘Native’ with a capital ‘N’ refers to those with some Hawaiian ancestry” in official state agencies. See Judith Schachter, The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation: From Territorial Subject to American Citizen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), x. 4  Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 717; The Papers of Carrie Chapman Catt, Reel 1, 40, 42; “Noted Suffragist to Speak Here Tonight.” 5   “Mrs. Chapman Catt Speaks to Hawaii Audience on Suffrage,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 29, 1912. 6  “Mrs. Catt to Help Hawaii,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 30, 1912.

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territorial enthusiasm for enfranchising women in Hawaiʻi, the women citizens of the islands were granted suffrage only through the Nineteenth Amendment that was applied to U.S. territories in August 26, 1920.7 The woman suffrage movement in Hawaiʻi has received little historical attention. Scholars have interpreted global women’s movements for equal rights as emerging through modern Western political systems.8 Consequently, scholarship on suffrage in the U.S. and Asia tends to focus on two main topics: how white women of the modern West introduced women in Asia to the movements for women’s rights and freedom; or how non-white women of the East adopted the women’s rights movements from the modern West. However, there needs to be greater attention paid to Hawaiʻi, which sits at the crossroads of the Pacific and has embraced visitors and settlers both from West and East. There, racially hybrid Native Hawaiian women were the most enthusiastic in generating a woman suffrage movement. This chapter explores the complex politics concerning gender, race, sovereignty, and rank in the woman suffrage movement in Hawaiʻi between 1912 and 1920. Using English language sources, it focuses on the multiple subject positions of Native Hawaiian and local white women in Hawaiʻi. There is also some speculation on the position of Asian and Asian immigrant women in Hawaiʻi’s woman suffrage movement. This chapter endeavors to answer such questions as: Who were the Native Hawaiian women who allied with Carrie Chapman Catt and the NAWSA? How did they carry out the woman suffrage movement in Hawaiʻi in the 1910s, especially during World War I? How did their movement relate to mainland suffragists of the NAWSA as well as women of other racial groups in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific?

White Settler Colonialism and Women’s Rights in Hawaiʻi

The politics of woman suffrage in early 20th century Hawaiʻi reflected a complex legacy of American women’s civilizing missions on the islands and their complicity with white settler colonialism. Based on the conviction that AngloProtestant American society stood atop the hierarchy of world civilization, white U.S. women pursued civilizing missions to ‘save’ and uplift the ‘heathen’

7  Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 719. 8  Ellen DuBois, “Woman Suffrage: The View from the Pacific,” Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 4 (November 2000): 540.

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and the ‘less-fortunate’ across the U.S. continent and the Pacific.9 Arriving as early as 1820, missionary wives from the U.S. northeast embarked on missionary work in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, where they discovered high-ranking Native Hawaiian women who held political and economic power, ruling as chiefs or queens.10 Advocating their own gender system, white women’s civilizing endeavors facilitated the transformation of Hawaiʻi’s rank-based society that allowed for female leadership into a race-and-gender-based society that gave white men the exclusive privileges of political and economic rights. Concurrently, the kingdom was brought under the pressure of commercialization, modernization, and democratization. By the end of the 19th century, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, once a self-supporting society of Native Hawaiian people ruled by their own leaders, was transformed into plantation communities that embraced a large number of immigrant workers under the control of white businessmen. In this process, the power of both monarchs and women were stripped, prompting the 1893 coup under the leadership of an oligarchy of white men. Although U.S. President Grover Cleveland (Democrat) concluded the overthrow to be illegal, the white oligarchs in Hawaiʻi deposed Queen Lili‘uokalani and formed the Republic of Hawaiʻi in 1894.11 The deposed queen and her loyal subjects, male and female, led an active but ultimately unsuccessful anti-annexation political campaign. They initially prevented the U.S. Senate from ratifying the annexation treaty, which was concluded in 1897 between the United States and Hawaiʻi’s republican government and was signed by President William McKinley (Republican).12 With the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, however, the United States annexed the Republic of Hawaiʻi by an exceptional means of joint Congressional resolution (Newlands Resolution). Furthermore, unlike other future territories that wrote their own constitutions, called organic acts, the U.S. Congress took charge of writing the Hawaiian Organic Act.13 9  Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Allison Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 10  Laura Fish Judd, Honolulu: Sketches of Life: Social, Political, and Religious, in the Hawaiian Islands, from 1828 to 1861 (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1880). 11  See, for example, Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance To American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989); Judith Gething, “Christianity and Coverture, Impact on the legal status of women in Hawaii, 1820–1920,” The Hawaiian Journal of History 11 (1977): 188–220. 12  Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 123–203. 13  Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 87–116.

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Accordingly, Hawaiʻi, under U.S. rule, became a site for the second wave of U.S. women’s civilizing mission, this time for the woman suffrage cause. It also served as mainland suffragists’ fighting ground to facilitate women’s enfranchising by a federal action. Susan B. Anthony, former NAWSA president and Quaker pacifist, did not object to the United States annexing Hawaiʻi through extralegal means. Committed to the strategy of focusing on the national level rather than state-by-state, she saw the annexation as an opportunity to set a precedent for the federal enfranchisement of women. At the same time, Carrie Chapman Catt, who would later take over the NAWSA presidency from Anthony, insisted that the word male be omitted from the proposed Hawaiian Organic Act, because the “declared intention” of U.S. annexing the Hawaiian Islands was to give them “the benefits of the most advanced civilization.” In her opinion, “the progress of civilization” was measured by “the approach of women toward the ideal of equal rights with men.”14 Despite such mainland suffragists’ efforts, the Hawaiian Organic Act of 1900 made the franchise a male privilege of only whites and Native Hawaiians, regardless of rank. Asian immigrant men were defined by the U.S. law as “ineligible to naturalization” and thus barred from suffrage.15 The Organic Act also confiscated “the absolute fees and ownership of all public, Government or Crown lands” from former Queen Lili‘uokalani and her subjects.16 Instead of resorting to military measures, Lili‘uokalani directed Native Hawaiian resistance to follow the American political ideal and to take legal methods in recovering their rights. The Hawaiian Organic Act of 1900, although it denied woman suffrage, had expanded the Native Hawaiian male electorate by eliminating the property qualification of the late kingdom and the Republic of Hawaiʻi. Accordingly, Native Hawaiian men came to constitute a clear majority of voters in Hawaiʻi from 1900 through 1922. Granted with suffrage, Lili‘uokalani’s former male subjects joined U.S.-style party politics. Robert Wilcox of the Home Rule Party, Native Hawaiian born to an American father 14  Ibid., 6, 87–116; Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, eds., The History of Woman Suffrage IV, 1883–1900 (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902), 346. 15  Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 87–116; Ralph S. Kuykendall and A. Grove Day, Hawaii A History: From Polynesian Kingdom to American Statehood (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall: 1948), 193–213. 16  Lili‘uokalani resorted to litigation against the United States in 1909 to restore her rights over the Crown lands. Neil Thomas Proto, Liliuokalani’s Enduring Battle with the United States, 1893–1917 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2009), 1–5. Sydney Lehua Iaukea, The Queen and I: A Story of Dispossessions and Reconnections in Hawai‘i (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

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and a Hawaiian chiefess mother, was elected to be the delegate to U.S. Congress. Lili‘uokalani’s nephews, David La‘amea Kahalepouli Piikoi Kawānanakoa (Prince David) and his younger brother Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana‘ole (Prince Kūhiō), joined the Democratic Party. Nonetheless, Hawaiʻi in the early 20th century was under the complete control of Republican men, many of whom were born or married into families of missionary heritage. Kūhiō aligned himself to the Republican Party to be elected as the second territorial delegate to U.S. Congress in 1902 and kept that position until his untimely death in 1922.17 The disfranchisement of Native Hawaiian women led them to take an interest in the suffrage movement under the leadership of mainland white women. For the white suffragists, female enfranchisement was a benevolent gesture to let the women of Hawaiʻi enjoy the best of American civilization. For Native Hawaiian women, however, women’s suffrage offered the possibility of restoring indigenous female political power and indigenous sovereign rights in the islands.

Hybridity and Whiteness of Native Hawaiian Suffragists

The suffrage movement in Hawaiʻi was shaped by complex racial and local politics. Indigeneity in Hawaiʻi encompassed multiraciality and cultural hybridity. In October 1912, Carrie Chapman Catt’s lecture was sponsored by the Woman’s Equal Suffrage Association of Hawaiʻi (WESAH). Formed specifically for this occasion, the WESAH was under the leadership of Wilhelmine K. Widemann Dowsett (Mrs. J. M. Dowsett, 1861–1931).18 Dowsett embodied the cultural and social practice of intermarriage in the islands. Native Hawaiian society, unlike missionary community, never abhorred miscegenation. Landed Native Hawaiian chiefs married their daughters to foreign businessmen as a means to maintain high social status. These intermarriages also facilitated not only Western investment in chiefs’ lands through the establishment of plantations and ranches, but also Western undertakings of capitalism. These unions created a privileged class of culturally and racially hybrid women

17  Lawrence E. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono “Hawaii the Excellent,”: An Ethnic and Political History (Honolulu: Bess Press, 1961), 152–153, 161; Kuykendall and Day, Hawaii A History, 196. 18  “ ‘Votes for Women’ Brought to Hawaii,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 28, 1912, 4; “Noted Suffragist to Speak Here Tonight”; “Mrs. Chapman Catt Speaks to Hawaii Audience on Suffrage.”

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who nevertheless identified themselves as Native Hawaiian.19 Wilhelmine K. Widemann Dowsett, daughter of a Hawaiian mother of chief rank and German planter father, belonged to this group of high-ranking, racially and culturally hybrid Native Hawaiian women.20 Of note among these women were descendants of Chinese immigrants, such as Emma ‘Aima Ai‘i Nāwahī (1854–1934), a Hawaiian patriot and journalist. Her mother was a Hawaiian princess, her father a Chinese sugar miller.21 Before the sugar business took hold in Hawaiʻi in the late 19th century, the islands’ population was composed mostly of ‘pure’ Hawaiians, but there were a small number of foreign residents, including Asians. During the early years of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, the monarchs bestowed opportunities to become their subjects – with all the rights, privileges, and immunities of Hawaiians – on any alien the monarchs recognized as useful and loyal, regardless of race.22 The Chinese began arriving in Hawaiʻi as early as the late 18th century. Early immigrants were mostly bachelor traders, artisans, and entrepreneurs; the Chinese also became the first national group to engage in commercial sugar production in the islands. Accordingly, they collaborated with Native Hawaiian chiefs in their economic ventures and married Native Hawaiian women, some of whom were of a very high rank.23 Both Dowsett and Nāwahī were among the group who were active in the anti-annexation movement. For example, Nāwahī worked to preserve the sovereignty of the Native Hawaiian nation in the 1890s, along with her husband Joseph Nāwahī (1842–1896), the president of the Hui Hawaiʻi Aloha ‘Aina (Hawaiian Patriotic League). The Nāwahīs also collaborated with Abigail 19  Davianna Pomaika‘i McGregor, “Constructed Images of Native Hawaiian Women,” in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, eds. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 32. 20   Wilhelmine Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett’s father was Judge Hermann A. Widemann and her mother was Kaumana Pilahiuilani Kapoli Kealaimoku. Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 715–719; The Papers of Carrie Chapman Catt, Reel 1, 40. 21  Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai‘i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 213; Women of the West Museum, “Emma ‘Aima Nāwahī (1854– 1934).” http://theautry.org/explore/exhibits/suffrage/nawahi_full.html (December 21, 2013). 22  Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002), 63–65. 23  Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 25–26; Clarence E. Glick, Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1980), 1–3; Andrew W. Lind, Hawaii’s People (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1955), 16.

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Kuaihelani Maipinepine Bright Campbell (1858–1908), the president of the Hui Hawaiʻi Aloha ‘Aina o Na Wahine (Women’s Hawaiian Patriotic League). Together, they led an anti-annexation petition drive among the people of Hawaiʻi. Once their efforts ended in vain, they sought new ways to recover their political and economic rights.24 To raise the voices of colonized Hawaiians within the U.S. representative political system, Emma ‘Aima Ai‘i Nāwahī, based in Hilo on the Island of Hawaiʻi (Big Island), assisted in organizing the local Democratic Party in 1899.25 In contrast, local white women leaders were reluctant to engage themselves with the woman suffrage movement. Catt was an internationally renowned suffragist, but she only attracted a “small but representative audience” for her lecture. Among the attendees were territorial governor Walter F. Frear and his wife Mary Emma Dillingham Frear (1870–1951), a granddaughter of missionaries to Hawai‘i.26 According to an English newspaper article announcing Catt’s lecture meeting in Honolulu, “though a large number of women prominent in the social circle of this city [were]interested in Woman’s Suffrage, few of them [had]come forward to take any important part in the work.”27As pointed out by historian Patricia Grimshaw, Hawaiʻi’s white women suffered from “settler anxiety.” Achieving women’s suffrage meant more votes for the more numerous and more politically experienced Native Hawaiian women. Native Hawaiian men already constituted the majority of voters. Enfranchising Native Hawaiian women would further increase their political dominance. Hawaiʻi’s white women also took longer than their mainland counterparts to cast off the “cult of womanhood;” their embrace of western domesticity served as a hallmark of their “civilized” status vis-à-vis Native Hawaiian women.28 Carrie Chapman Catt, without fully understanding the historical background of the territory, advocated the suffrage cause and revealed her Eurocentric, racially and culturally hierarchical, worldview. Although she had just witnessed Chinese women voting and sitting in the Canton revolutionary assembly on her tour to China, her talk on woman suffrage movements was 24  Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 123–203. 25  “Woman Suffrage in Non-Partisan Sense,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 31, 1912. 26  “Mrs. Chapman Catt Speaks to Hawaii Audience on Suffrage”; The Papers of Carrie Chapman Catt, Reel 1, 42. 27  “Noted Suffragist to Speak Here Tonight.” 28  Patricia Grimshaw, “New England Missionary Wives, Hawaiian Women, and ‘The Cult of True Womanhood,’ ” The Hawaiian Journal of History 19 (1985): 71–100; ibid., “Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women’s Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii, 1888–1902,” Pacific Historical Review 69 (November 2000): 553–572.

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focused on Europe and America.29 Arguing that women were enfranchised through Parliament in “all other countries,” Catt deplored the hardships of American women who had to rely on male voters, many of whom were naturalized foreigners. She was resentful that “a man from Italy who [had]remained in the United States long enough to become a citizen should have the right to vote on a ballot for women[,] when the daughters of the revolution whose ancestors came to America hundreds of years ago [should] not.”30 In the early 20th century, although the American suffrage movement of the time included women of diverse racial, class, and cultural backgrounds, its primary leaders, like Catt, had embraced the racial and cultural hierarchy to argue for native-born white women’s political rights. The movement had emerged from the abolitionist movement in the mid-19th century and initially demanded women’s votes as a human right.31 Nonetheless, witnessing men whom they saw as ‘less-civilized’ and enfranchised before them – for example, black men, by the Fifteenth Amendment, and white immigrant men, by naturalization – the white suffrage leaders began to claim that native-born women like themselves were more qualified than those men.32 In the early 20th century, their resentment turned toward increasing numbers of “new immigrant” men who were mostly against woman suffrage. In the Hawaiʻi context, Catt’s privileging of native-born women over foreign interlopers was interpreted rather differently on the mainland. Catt’s argument probably appealed broadly to Native Hawaiian women, who were nativeborn with historical roots in Hawaiʻi. In fact, women’s suffrage would extend political participation beyond Native Hawaiian women of high social rank to include members of the commoner class. In contrast to this democratization of a political voice among women with native roots in Hawaiʻi, white women were more likely to be immigrants to the islands. They tended to be naturalized foreigners, whom Catt criticized. Catt’s political message also alarmed white male elites. To support her call for suffrage, Catt reassured her audience that women would vote in a nonpartisan way; a woman was likely to exercise her franchise independent of her husband. Catt shared that she knew of “a man who (was) a republican, his

29  Mary Gray Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1944), 197–198. 30  “Mrs. Chapman Catt Speaks to Hawaii Audience on Suffrage.” 31  Ellen DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). 32  Newman, White Women’s Rights.

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wife a democrat and his daughter a prohibitionist.”33 The possibility of politically active Hawaiian wives of Republican men voting for Democrats was a real concern to the white oligarchic men in Hawaiʻi. To continue their party control Republican men were unwilling to grant suffrage to women. As a result of these gender, racial, and rank politics on the islands, Native Hawaiian suffragists were the most eager constituency for suffrage. According to Catt, the suffrage “society [that] formed” in Honolulu was “composed of native women mostly.”34 Despite her own racial attitudes and ethnocentrism, Catt was willing instruct the WESAH in revising the organization’s constitution and promised to represent the group at the NAWSA’s upcoming convention. Because the NAWSA required its affiliates to have a membership of at least fifty, the WESAH did not become part of the NAWSA until a year later. At the Convention of 1913, NAWSA records documented that “for the first time Hawaii took her place among the auxiliaries.”35 To generate a viable women’s movement in Hawaiʻi, Native Hawaiian suffragists called out to all women, but there was a long way to go for them to be truly inclusive by transcending such boundaries as party, class, and race. Dowsett was reputedly a Democrat then, and she was connected with another Native Hawaiian Democrat, the earlier mentioned Emma ‘Aima Ai‘i Nāwahī. After Catt’s visit to the islands, Dowsett turned to Nāwahī for advice about building a woman suffrage movement in Hawaiʻi.36 In response, Nāwahī called for cooperation among all women citizens in Hawaiʻi. All women throughout the Territory, who are American citizens, from the highest to the lowest, from the richest to the poorest, the whites, the Portuguese and the Hawaiians, signed by the women of Hawai‘i, will be presented to Congress by our Delegate, be he Republican, Democrat or Home Ruler, because this is a public matter, touching a whole class, and one in which all the women are interested, be they Republicans, Democrats or Home Rulers. When we have become successful and have obtained the franchise, then it will be time enough for each one of us to choose from among the political parties of our husbands, fathers, 33  “Mrs. Chapman Catt Speaks to Hawaii Audience on Suffrage.” 34   The Papers of Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, Reel 1, 42. 35  At the time of Catt’s visit to Hawaii in 1912, the WESAH had only twenty-two active members, four life members, and two annual members. See “Mrs. Catt to Help Hawaii,”; Ida Husted Harper, ed., The History of Woman Suffrage V, 1900–1920 (New York: J. J. Little & Ives Co., 1922), 381–382. 36  “Woman Suffrage in Non-Partisan Sense.”

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brothers, and sons. But if we squabble among ourselves and do not act in unison upon this great question, we will be sorry at the uselessness of our attempt to obtain this privilege. I have the belief that the question of woman suffrage is a very important one, and that it will play an important part in political history in Hawai‘i.37 Note how this statement reveals the racial limits of Native Hawaiian suffragists’ strategy of the time. Nāwahī herself was part-Chinese, but her statement did not refer to women of Asian ancestry. Arguably, Nāwahī, a descendant of early Chinese immigrants to the islands, was distant in lifestyle and identity from a large number of recently arrived Asian immigrant laborers who lived in rural plantation camps. Due to racially discriminatory U.S. laws, they were barred from naturalization and citizenship. An American-born generation, with birthright citizenship, was still emerging.38 Nāwahī and other Native Hawaiian women only recognized the importance of generating an inclusive women’s movement that united Native Hawaiian and white women of all ranks. They sought to include not only commoner Hawaiians but also the Portuguese, whose social status placed them higher than Asians but lower than whites. Nonetheless, this concept of all women excluded those without U.S. citizenship, most notably Asian immigrant women. Nor did the movement make particular efforts to include the small numbers of women citizens of the Asian communities.

World War I and Woman Suffrage

World War I, which transformed suffrage politics on the continent, also played a key role in reshaping women’s political coalition in Hawaiʻi. The effect of the war on Hawaiʻi’s woman suffrage cause was contradictory and ironical. Because the U.S. military and the mainland public regarded Hawaiʻi with suspicion, due to its large population of non-whites and foreign nationals, the islands’ wartime mobilization fostered intense Americanization campaigns. White and Native Hawaiian women leaders, despite their reservations about U.S. rule, were compelled to prove their loyalty. In the process, however, white women assumed more central leadership roles in forming multiracial connections, while Native Hawaiian women became increasingly focused on their 37  Ibid. 38  Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1983).

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community. In addition, the political leadership of white men was further consolidated as women of varying backgrounds had to devote their energies to serving U.S. military servicemen. For example, the multinational and multiracial Red Cross movements in the islands fell under the leadership of white men of American extraction. When war erupted in Europe in 1914, women in Hawaiʻi with international connections began making hospital garments and collecting donations. They each planned to send clothes and money to the Red Cross of their homeland, such as Britain, Germany, Portugal, or Japan. Concurrently, white women of missionary heritage initiated similar efforts to support the American Red Cross. War created greater opportunities for the white community in Hawaiʻi. Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry enjoyed windfall profits from surging sugar prices due to the war, and white businessmen of missionary heritage became eager to turn the international emergency into an opportunity to showcase island-wide humanitarian endeavors and to promote the positive image of Hawaiʻi, nationally and internationally. As a result, their wives and daughters became invested in integrating multiracial and multinational war-relief initiatives into a united territorial endeavor.39 When the U.S. government began to mobilize its citizens for possible participation in the war, the women’s Red Cross movements in the territory of Hawaiʻi came to reflect a broader pattern of female service under top-down male leadership. In 1916, on the mainland, when President Woodrow Wilson created the Council of National Defense, the Women’s Committee was also organized as its advisory body. It was headed by Anna Howard Shaw, who had served as the NAWSA president from 1904 to 1915. To support the male-led Council’s work, the Women’s Committee integrated a variety of women’s voluntary efforts throughout the nation.40 In the U.S. territory of Hawaiʻi, the multiracial and multinational women’s Red Cross work, along with other women’s war-relief activities, were first brought under the supervision of white women of missionary heritage; they led the Hawaiian Allied War Relief Committee. With U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, this white, female-led committee in Hawaiʻi changed its name to the Hawaiian Allied War Relief Auxiliary. This women’s auxiliary became subsumed by the male-led War Relief Committee

39  Ralph S. Kuykendall, Hawaii in the World War (Honolulu: Honolulu Historical Commission, 1928), 91–118, 215–238. 40  “Women in the Progressive Era,” National Women’s History Museum. (September 11, 2011).

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of Hawaiʻi, first organized in 1914. Both would eventually be incorporated into the American National Red Cross Hawaiian Chapter.41 As the wartime pressure for a 100 percent Americanism prevailed in the territory, Native Hawaiians were compelled to contribute to patriotic Red Cross work, which fell under the control of the white elite of American missionary heritage. Native Hawaiians of German heritage, such as the Widemann sisters (Wilhelmine and Emilie), probably experienced acute political pressure, from both their ancestral connection to the U.S. enemy and their past support of anti-annexation. Native Hawaiian women responded by channeling their wartime work in support of Native Hawaiian servicemen. Hearing that the boys of Hawaiʻi who had been transferred to the mainland were suffering from the cold weather, Emilie K. Widemann Macfarlane (1859–1947), Dowsett’s sister, and Emma Ahuena Davison Taylor (1856–1937), daughter of a Hawaiian chiefess and with British and American ancestry, started Native Hawaiian knitting units.42 Princess Kawānanakoa (Abigail Wahi‘ika‘ahu‘ula Campbell Kawānanakoa, wife of the late Prince David who was a brother of Prince Kūhiō, 1882–1945) secured wool during her visit to the mainland. With the alleged endorsement of Lili‘uokalani for their American Red Cross work, these knitting units successfully mobilized commoner Native Hawaiians. These included not only women and girls but also men and boys. Princess Kalaniana‘ole (Elizabeth Kahanu Kaleiwohi-Ka‘auwai Kalaniana‘ole, wife of Prince Kūhiō, 1878–1932) came to head a unit known as the ‘Iolani Unit. When the Hawaiian Knitting Unit was organized in March 1918, Dowsett became its president.43 The enthusiastic response of women and men in the islands to the United War Work Campaign, called by President Woodrow Wilson, received much publicity on the mainland. Hawaiʻi’s “overflowing tide of generosity” greatly impressed the American public.44 Concurrently, local white women of missionary heritage expanded their political circles to include previously disdained groups. White women recruited elite Portuguese and Asian immigrant women to push the war-support 41  Alfred Lowery Castle, grandson of missionaries, became the secretary and executive officer of this male-led Hawaiian Chapter; his sister Beatrice Castle (1888–1931) became the chair of the women’s auxiliary. Kuykendall, Hawaii in the World War, 91–170. 42  Eileen Root, “Kalaniana‘ole, Princess Elizabeth Kahanu Kaleiwohi-Ka‘auwai,” in Notable Women of Hawaii, ed. Barbara Bennett Peterson (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1984), 186–189; Eleanor H. Williamson, “Taylor, Emma Ahuena Davison,” in Notable Women of Hawaii, 369–373. 43  Kuykendall, Hawaii in the World War, 149–150. 44  Ibid., 298–303.

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endeavors in their respective communities. Through this emerging transnational and multiracial elite women’s network, each ethnic community was mobilized and squeezed for wartime service and contributions. World War I both expanded and altered women’s political networks in Hawaiʻi. Under the wartime pressure for Americanization and patriotism, the power imbalance between white elite women of American missionary heritage versus Native Hawaiian women of privileged rank tilted in favor of the former. Because of white female loyalty to male Republican leaders, Hawaiʻi’s women’s movements were ultimately brought under oligarchic white male control. The NAWSA and its Effect on Woman Suffrage in Wartime Hawaiʻi As on the mainland, suffrage became a secondary issue in wartime Hawaiʻi. Territorial oligarchic men, however, appeared willing to grant increasing support for women’s political rights in exchange for female war-relief and warsupport contributions. Furthermore, mainland suffragists sustained their attention and pressure on Hawaiʻi, which provided a positive effect on the islands’ push for women’s votes. For example, when mainland suffragist Alice Locke Park of Palo Alto, California, visited Hawaiʻi to investigate the islands’ situation in early 1915, she reported that she found no opposition to woman suffrage in Hawaiʻi. Recognizing similarities between Hawaiʻi and Arizona, prior to the state’s woman suffrage victory in 1912,45 Alice Locke Park wrote: Both political parties have endorsed equal suffrage, so the amendment has no political opponents. The situation is similar to that in Arizona a few months before the suffrage victory. There is no excitement and no objection. People say in a matter-of-fact way that the women of the territory will vote just as soon as the necessary legal steps have been taken once.46 Indeed, by the end of 1915, local parties on the islands pledged themselves to support votes for women. The territorial legislature also adopted a joint 45  Alice Locke Park was the wife of a mining engineer with a wide range of reform, labor, and socialist interest and experience, and she assisted the victorious suffrage campaign in Arizona. See Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 51–52, 122. 46  Alice Park, “Moving Towards Women Suffrage,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, March 3, 1915, in Alice Park Papers, Scrapbooks, 1: 108, The Huntington Library, San Mateo, CA.

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resolution to request Prince Kūhiō, the territorial delegate to U.S. Congress, “to urge upon Congress the passage of an amendment to the Organic Act of this Territory, so that the right to vote be extended to women.”47 Prince Kūhiō, brought the resolution to Congress twice in 1915 and 1916, but it did not receive any attention at the national level. For two years, the amendment to the Hawaiian Organic Act remained pending.48 Another optimistic observation of Hawaiʻi’s support of female enfranchisement was made in 1917 by mainland suffragist, Almira Hollander Pitman (1854–1930) of Brookline, Massachusetts. She was married to Benjamin F. Pitman, a Native Hawaiian, born to an American merchant father and Hawaiian mother Kino‘ole-o-Liliha (1827–1855), a chiefess of Hilo.49 Accordingly, Almira Pitman had a deep connection and interest in Hawaiʻi. She visited the islands in early 1917 and conversed with nearly all the members of the territorial legislature. Pitman reported unanimous support for the woman suffrage bill and that the legislature had adopted “strong resolutions calling upon Congress to sanction it.”50 By that time, the Hawaiʻi’s woman suffrage movement, initiated by a small group of Native Hawaiian women, was gaining momentum. As a result of World War I, some of the once-hesitant elite white women of missionary heritage became supporters. Describing the circle of local women who gathered to meet her, Pitman recalled a large reception given by “Madame Nakuina, who was known as the Court historian.” Among “all the women of the highest social circles in the Islands” who attended the reception were Wilhelmine K. W. Dowsett, Emma Ahuena Davison Taylor, and Harriet Angeline Castle Colman (1847–1924), a granddaughter of missionaries. Importuned by them, Pitman held her first meeting at Dowsett’s residence, followed by two more meetings; “one attended mostly by the middle class and the other by high-caste Hawaiians and the ‘missionary set.’ ” Pitman was deeply impressed at their fluency in English, world knowledge, and strong desire for the vote. She promised to respond to their request for an investigation regarding the status of Hawaiʻi’s territorial resolution on women’s enfranchisement as soon as she returned home.51 47  Hawaii Territorial Legislature, Journal of the House of Representatives of the Eighth Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii, Regular Session 1915 (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co., 1915), 457, 1019, 1043. 48  Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 716–718. 49  Ibid., 717; “Benjamin F. Pitman,” New York Times, July 3, 1918. 50  Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 716–718. 51  Ibid., 717.

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Nonetheless, both Maud Wood Park and Almira Hollander Pitman turned out to be novices about the islands’ peculiar political conditions. Mainland suffragists’ efforts to support the campaigns of socially established and influential women in Hawaiʻi resulted in assisting the islands’ oligarchic men to avoid federal intervention. In other words, mainland suffragists advocated for placing the enfranchisement issue in the hands of the territorial government, which was under the strong grip of the local white male Republicans. Indeed, the efforts of mainland suffragists ran counter to the original intentions of the NAWSA president, Susan B. Anthony. Anthony, in an attempt to facilitate the enfranchisement process, wanted to set a precedent for enfranchising women by a federal action. In contrast, Pitman endeavored to achieve suffrage more rapidly in Hawaiʻi by advocating for territorial jurisdiction. Based on the information provided by Pitman, the chairman of the NAWSA’s Congressional Committee, Maud Wood Park, raised the issue with Senator John F. Shafroth, chairman of the Committee on Pacific Islands and Puerto Rico. On June 1, 1917, Shafroth introduced a bill presented by Kūhiō to the Senate,52 which asked “granting the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii additional powers relative to elections and qualifications of electors.”53 While Kūhiō failed to convince the federal legislators, NAWSA leaders pushed for Hawaiʻi’s ability to enfranchise women. The Senate passed the bill without any discussion on September 15, but the House referred it to the Committee on Woman Suffrage, chaired by Judge John E. Raker. The Committee held a hearing on April 29, 1918, at which Maud Wood Park, Anna Howard Shaw, and Almira Hollander Pitman were present.54 On behalf of the women of Hawaiʻi, Pitman argued; I, as stranger and an American, was in a position to feel the pulse of the Hawaiian people in regard to the enfranchisement of their women. . . . In the days of the monarchy Hawaiian women took great interest and could be effectively active in politics. The women are to-day, as heretofore, the possessors of great wealth and hold a large share of the property. Their men fully appreciate the wisdom, public spirit, and executive ability of their women, both the native and missionary classes, but since the monarchy ceased to exist and Hawaii became a Territory of the United States, they have been obliged to take their place beside their American sisters of 52  Ibid., 717–718. 53  House Committee on Woman Suffrage, Woman Suffrage in Hawaii, 65th Cong., 2d sess., 1918, H. Rept. 536, 1. 54  Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 718.

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the unenfranchised States. The gallant men of Hawaii believe with us in the old cry that taxation without representation is unjust, and have gone as far as they can to rectify the injustice.55 Just like Alice Locke Park, Pitman believed that the territory of Hawaiʻi would enfranchise women if the issue was left to the local legislature. She publicly made her impressions known in the speech she gave at the hearing. At the same time, Anna Howard Shaw, in her attempt to neutralize opposition, emphasized that the bill was not asking Congress to enfranchise the women of Hawaiʻi but to “permit the people of Hawaii to decide this question for themselves.”56 The Committee recommended the passage of the bill, and it became law, signed by President Wilson in June 1918.57

The Territorial Suffrage Campaign for All Women

With this development in Washington, enfranchising women in Hawaiʻi became a territorial issue. The territory indeed appeared ready to grant women the vote, but in reality there was a strong undercurrent against woman suffrage. As the year 1919 unfolded, mainland suffragists diverted their attention away from Hawaiʻi, while suffragists in the islands gathered together for a last push for their movement. Members of the movement hoped to achieve the vote in time for the county and primary elections in May 1919. In January of that year, Democrat territorial governor Charles J. McCarthy declared his strong support for woman suffrage and urged the Hawaiʻi Legislature to enfranchise the women of Hawaiʻi without calling for a plebiscite vote on the subject.58 When a suffrage bill was introduced, the Senate judiciary committee voted to recommend the passage of the bill in February. Senators Pacheco and Baldwin, however, were against such a move and proposed that any resulting law would only become effective on July 1, after the county and primary elections. Senator Harry Alexander Baldwin, a missionary’s son elected from the island of Maui, favored the postponement. He claimed to support woman suffrage but felt that the time for registering women for the county election would be too short.59 55  House Committee on Woman Suffrage 536, 4. 56  Ibid. 57  Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 716–718. 58  “M’Carthy Strong For Woman Suffrage,” Maui News, January 24, 1919, 2; January 24, 1919, 4. 59  “Bill to Raise Maui Salaries Is Introduced,” Maui News, March 7, 1919, 2; “Baldwin Opposed to Rushing Suffrage Bill,” Maui News, March 7, 1919, 3.

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The delay tactic, however, also meant that women would not play a role in determining the candidates for their first vote. By then, Native Hawaiian women leaders of the privileged class had recognized the power of mobilizing people of varying social, racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds. In the aftermath of the war and on the eve of attaining suffrage, the expanding multiracial and multiethnic women’s network forged by women’s war work was primed to become a mass movement for the suffrage cause. To demand the vote so that women would be able to vote in the upcoming election in May, Dowsett gathered both Native Hawaiian and white suffragists to a women’s meeting held at the capital building on the morning of the Senate voting day, March 4, 1919. At the gathering, Dowsett declared the regeneration of the dormant woman suffrage organization, and advocated cooperation of “all” women.60 This included Native Hawaiian women of both chief and commoner ranks, white women, and also “Oriental sisters.”61 In evoking the phrase Oriental sisters, Dowsett called for interracial as well as international female solidarity. According to a newspaper article about the meeting held on March 4 in 1919, Dowsett, “speaking as a Hawaiian Woman,” said: Sister Hawaiians, our foreign sisters are with us. Senator Wise asked us yesterday if the so[-]called “society women” were leading us, and we told him that this was not so. We are working all together, and we want the legislature to know this. And we must also remember our Oriental sisters, who are not here today but who will also unite this great cause.62 The absence of Asian women suggested that a divide continued to exist, but Dowsett at least articulated a politics of unity. According to a newspaper report, the Senate, having “several hundred women” in its chamber, passed the bill that would make women’s suffrage effective immediately.63

60  Most probably, she was referring to the woman suffrage association organized at the time of Carrie Chapman Catt’s visit in 1912. Its Hawaiian name might have remained the same, but English newspapers referred it as the Woman’s Equal Suffrage Association of Hawaii (WESAH) in October 1912, but as the Woman’s Suffrage Association (WSA) in 1919. 61  “Hawaiian Women Join with Haoles to Work for Vote,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 5, 1919, 1. 62  Ibid. 63  “Bill to Raise Maui Salaries Is Introduced”; “Women Win Out in Senate,” Maui News, March 7, 1919, 3.

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Speculatively, the political activism of women in Asian immigrants’ homelands had some effect on Dowsett approaching the Oriental sisters. In fact, Carrie Chapman Catt, during her visit in China in 1912, had encountered Chinese women’s enthusiasm in demanding women’s suffrage at the time of their revolution to end imperial rule.64 She also had observed that women in Canton, the province from which Hawaiʻi’s Chinese immigrants mostly came, were voting for and being elected to the provincial assembly.65 Although these developments were temporary, Chinese women activists in China sustained their cause through the 1910s. After the war, inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s call for self-determination, both Chinese and Korean women became active in their respective anti-colonialist nationalist movements. Hawaiʻi’s Chinese and Korean communities were also involved in their homeland’s politics. Dowsett might have learned of such developments in Asia through trans-Pacific networks in Hawaiʻi.66 Although the possible effect of Asian suffrage on women in Hawaiʻi requires further research, the most significant factor affecting the suffragists’ strategy must have been the recognition that enormous numbers of Asian American girls in the territory would soon reach voting age. In the late 1910s there were only small numbers of women citizens of Asian ancestry. They were either a Hawaiʻi-born second generation who were citizens due to birthright, or the, socalled, 1.5 generation who were actually foreign-born but arrived in the islands at a young age and gained citizenship, possibly by registering their birth retrospectively under Hawaiʻi’s paternalism.67 As of 1917, the estimated numbers of eligible women voters of Asian ancestry, if women were enfranchised in the territory, were 638 Chinese and 278 Japanese.68 Furthermore, the majority of this, increasing but still small, group of eligible women voters of Asian ancestry

64  “Enlist Chinese Women,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 12, 1912, 3:30 edition, 17. 65  Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: The Feminist Press, 1987), 95–105. 66  Wilhelmine K. W. Dowsett’s husband, J. M. Dowsett, was possibly a grandson of James I. Dowsett (1829–1898), a paternalistic employer of young C. K. Ai (Chung Kun Ai). C. K. Ai was a schoolmate of Sun Yat-sen in Hawaiʻi, and later became a successful entrepreneur and prime supporter of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary efforts. Glick, Sojourners and Settlers, 94, 269–309. 67  Robert Chang with Wayne Patterson, The Koreans in Hawai‘i: A Pictorial History, 1903–2003 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2003), 123. 68  “Orientals Born Here Soon Vote,” Maui News, July 30, 1920, 6.

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failed to register in the 1920s. Only 31 percent Chinese and 25 percent Japanese, in contrast to 73 percent “pure” Hawaiians, registered to vote.69 Nonetheless, there was increasing recognition in Hawaiʻi for the need to approach Asian American girls, especially those of Japanese ancestry, who would soon become eligible voters en masse. According to an anti-suffrage newspaper article of September 18, 1917, the granting of woman suffrage would first double the Hawaiian majority, and then hasten the process of making Japanese the majority of voters. At the time, Japanese girls outnumbered Native Hawaiian girls under the age of twenty-one. The article attributed this ethnic disparity to the higher birth rate among Japanese immigrants, compared with that of Native Hawaiians. The writer expressed a cultural and racial anxiety by cautioning readers that Japanese women would “overtake and outvote the other women considerably sooner” than Japanese men, and that Japanese women and men combined would lead to “a Japanese majority over all.”70 Such an argument not only compelled the islands’ woman suffragists to approach Asian women but also facilitated the narrowing of the divide between Native Hawaiian and white women. While they successfully fanned the public’s sentiment for the suffrage cause, they still failed to enfranchise themselves by a territorial act. On March 6, 1919, to expedite the House passing the abovementioned Senate suffrage bill, Dowsett and her organization called another women’s mass meeting and adopted a resolution demanding that the House grant women the rights and privileges of participating in the upcoming primary in May as well as the regular elections in June of 1919.71 Nonetheless, instead of promptly adopting the Senate Bill, the House introduced another bill that referred the woman suffrage question to a plebiscite. According to this bill, the suffrage question would be submitted to the electorate at the primary in May 1919 but be voted on at the general election in 1920.72 In response, Dowsett, representing the island of O‘ahu, joined by Louise MacMillan from the island of Hawaiʻi, conducted mass agitations on March 23, 1919. According to an English newspaper report, “nearly 500 women” of 69  Michaelyn P. Chou, “Ethnicity and Elections in Hawai‘i: The Case of James K. Kealoha,” Chinese America: History & Perspectives – The Journal of the Chinese Historical Society of America (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America with UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2010), 105–11. 70  “Hasting Japanese Control,” Hawaiian Gazette, September 18, 1917, 4. 71  “Women of City Want Vote for Next Election,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 7, 1919. 72   “Suffrage Plebiscite is Sought,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 11, 1919; “Democratic Candidates Fails in Discrediting Record of Baldwin,” Maui News, March 10, 1922, 1.

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“various nationalities, of all ages” crowded on to the floor of the House, carrying “a huge banner bearing the words ‘Votes for Women’.” The House was compelled to have a two-hour hearing on the woman suffrage issue, inviting both supporters and opponents, on the following day.73 That evening, the suffragist leaders gathered a large crowd at A‘ala Park to further press their cause. Dowsett and MacMillan were joined by both Native Hawaiian and white women of various social status as speakers. Among them were Princess Kalaniana‘ole, Emilie K. Widemann Macfarlane, Lahilahi Webb (1862–1949) who was formally a lady-inwaiting in Queen Lili‘uokalani’s court, Mary E. Dillingham Frear, and Margaret Knepper from California, who had recently joined the faculty of McKinley High School with a large student body of Hawaiʻi-born youngsters of Asian ancestry.74 ‘Mrs. Atcherley’ also was present at the meeting, who was probably Mary Kinimaka Ha‘aheo Atcherley (1874–1933), who ran for office during the elections in 1920 and 1922.75 Nonetheless, the territorial legislature engaged in bitter ‘word wars’ on the suffrage issue; thus, the ultimate question of enfranchising women or not became secondary to such questions as who would be voting on the issue, how, and when.76 By early April of 1919, woman suffragists on the islands began losing patience with the territorial legislature. Dowsett redirected efforts to lobby for woman suffrage to the U.S. Congress through their territorial representative Prince Kūhiō. To prepare themselves for the vote suffragists in Hawaiʻi also began organizing precinct clubs.77 As deliberations at the two-house territorial legislature dragged on, suffragists themselves became divided over the question of how and when to decide the woman suffrage question, and under party

73  “Vote of Measure Deferred,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 24, 1919. 74  “Women Stage Suffrage Meet at A‘ala Park,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 25, 1919. This newspaper article reported that Mrs. Kamanoulu, Mrs. Mignonette Miller, Mrs. Clara Miller, and Mrs. Elizabeth Robinson also spoke at the meeting. 75  Ibid.; Atcherley’s campaigns occurred after women were granted voting rights, but when their right to hold office was still being debated. 76  For example, see the following articles in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin; “Compromise on Suffrage Meets with Opposition,” March 25, 1919; “City Hall is Much Excited Over Suffrage,” March 25, 1919; “Plebiscite Favored by Solons,” March 26, 1919; “Vote on Suffrage End in Deadlock,” March 26, 1919; “Suffrage Bill Due to Come Up Again in House,” March 31, 1919; “Action on Suffrage Delayed,” April 1, 1919; “Political Steam Roller Defeats Suffrage Bill,” April 2, 1919. 77  “Ask Congress for Suffrage,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 3, 1919; “Women Form Clubs to Get into Politics,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 23, 1919.

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politics.78 Male politicians took advantage of these divisions to further delay granting women their suffrage.79 Meanwhile, the Nineteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the federal government and each state from disenfranchising women, passed both Houses by June 1919 and was ratified by three-fourths of the states in August 18, 1920. This amendment, proclaimed by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby on August 26, 1920, included the women of U.S. territories. Thus, only through the Nineteenth Amendment were women citizens in Hawaiʻi finally granted the right to vote.80 Historian Roger Bell, who examined the statehood movement in Hawaiʻi, argued that the early debate on statehood that emerged in the 1910s, along with women’s suffrage, soon “submerged beneath a common concern: how to avoid or at least delay the triumph of the non-Caucasian majority in politics, economics, and society” in the islands.81 A small group of white women, mostly of missionary heritage, were present in the woman suffrage movement in Hawaiʻi. However, it would not be surprising if other white women never fully eliminated their settler anxiety, like their husbands. They also never liberated themselves completely from the cult of womanhood, a gendered understanding of society that reinforced a particular racial and colonial order. As Native Hawaiian women were politically active and Asian immigrant women were toiling in the fields, domesticity and women’s private sphere of activity had long served as the hallmark of advanced white civilization. Indeed, Hawaiʻi’s white women’s hesitation was reinforced by mainland anti-suffragists who came to the islands promoting their anti-suffrage cause. NAWSA’s Almira Hollander Pitman from Massachusetts recorded that “almost the first person” she saw in the islands during her visit in early 1917 was the field-secretary of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women.82 In February 1919, it was reported that among seventy-five women of the Outdoor Circle, a women’s club in Honolulu under the leadership of white women of missionary heritage, only twenty supported the woman suffrage cause; ten opposed the vote, and the rest were undecided. Apparently, 78  “Women Divided on Election to Decide Suffrage: Some Favor Plebiscite at June Vote, Others Want It Next November,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 18, 1919. 79  “Women Are Losing Suffrage Interest; Divided on Policy,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 19, 1919. 80  Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 719. 81  Roger Bell, Last Among Equals: Hawaiian Statehood and American Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press), 45. 82  Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 717.

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a substantial number of influential white women remained hesitant about enfranchisement of woman citizens in Hawaiʻi.83 Retrospectively writing about her observation of politics in Hawaiʻi in her diary, Alice Locke Park discussed the “peculiar situation” in Hawaiʻi. Asians, comprising more than half of the population, were disenfranchised. In addition, a “nip and tuck in politics” existed between Hawaiians and whites. According to Alice Locke Park, The Hawaiians see that it will be to their advantage to have votes for women and double their total vote – the solid vote. The whites all claim to be in favor of suffrage – some times – but are not eager to see it immediately in Hawai‘i. They are torn with conflicting emotions – for they can’t oppose the movement when it is advancing all over the world. If the whites could restrict the vote to whites, both men and women, they would do so at once. But there is an awkwardness in the political situation, when the whites know that equal suffrage would double the solid Hawaiian vote, and give the whites a lesser number of new voters, and these of various opinions.84 Conclusion Alice Locke Park’s observations illuminated the settler anxiety of Hawaiʻi’s white women over the suffrage cause. However, the color line was not so clearly drawn in the woman suffrage movement in Hawaiʻi. The islands had their own peculiar colonial, gendered, and racial dynamics. Racially and culturally hybrid Native Hawaiian women of privileged class and white elite women of missionary heritage shared similar interests. They expressed their concern about the semi-colonial status of the islands, the newly enfranchised commoner Hawaiians, and the ever-increasing numbers of American-citizen children of Asian immigrant communities who would soon be reaching voting age. Various groups of women in and out of Hawaiʻi both competed and collaborated with each other for influence and power in the islands’ politics. In opposition, obvious numbers of white women in the islands remained reluctant to support suffrage. Indeed, Hawaiʻi remained under white male oligarchic rule for the first half of the 20th century, despite the fact that Native Hawaiian men 83  “Honolulu Women Not Sure About Suffrage,” Maui News, February 14, 1919, 5. 84  “Park Travel (manuscript),” Alice Park Papers Scrapbooks, Book 1, Clippings 21, 11. The Huntington Library, San Mateo, CA.

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constituted a clear majority of voters between 1900 and 1922. Under the oligarchy of paternalistic white men of missionary heritage, Native Hawaiian men negotiated rather than confronted white male Republican rule. Native Hawaiian men opposed white settler colonialism, deposing Lili‘uokalani, their woman monarch, and taking over Hawaiian sovereignty. However, Native Hawaiian men also embraced 19th-century American gender and racial ideologies that had naturalized the hierarchical social system of privileging whites and men. Engaged in the woman suffrage movement on the gender and racial frontier in the Pacific, hybrid Native Hawaiian suffrage leaders were compelled to generate an all-inclusive women’s mass movement. Accordingly, they gradually loosened their elitism, classism, and racism in order to reach out to women of various social, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, including Asian women. Their collective struggle for woman’s rights indicates intricate workings of gender, rank, race, and sovereignty in the politics of Hawaiʻi. Bibliography

Primary Sources



Secondary Sources

Alice Park Papers. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Hawaii Territorial Legislature, Journal of the House of Representatives of the Eighth Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii, Regular Session 1915. Hawaiian Gazette (1865–1918) from the Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers site. Honolulu Star-Bulletin (1912–1922) from the Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers site. House Committee on Woman Suffrage. U.S. Congress. Woman Suffrage in Hawaii. 65th Cong., 2nd sess., 1918. H. Rept. 536. Maui News (1912–1922) from the Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers site. New York Times (1918). The Papers of Carrie Chapman Catt (Microfilm). Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., 1978.

Anthony, Susan B., and Ida Husted Harper, eds. The History of Woman Suffrage V, 1883– 1900. Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902. Bell, Roger. Last Among Equals: Hawaiian Statehood and American Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1984. Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

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Chang, Robert with Wayne Patterson. The Koreans in Hawai‘i: A Pictorial History, 1903–1003. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2003. Chou, Michaelyn P. “Ethnicity and Elections in Hawai‘i: The Case of James K. Kealoha.” Chinese America: History & Perspectives – The Journal of the Chinese History Society of America. San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America with UCLA Asian American Studies Center (2010): 105–111. DuBois, Ellen. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. DuBois, Ellen. “Woman Suffrage: The View from the Pacific.” Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 4 (November 2000). “Emma ‘Aima Nāwahī (1854–1934),” Women of the West Museum. http://theautry.org/ explore/exhibits/suffrage/nawahi_full.html. Accessed December 21, 2013. Fuchs, Lawrence E. Hawaii Pono “Hawaii the Excellent,”: An Ethnic and Political History. Honolulu: Bess Press, 1961. Fujikane, Candace, and Jonathan Y. Okumura, eds. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008. Gething, Judith. “Christianity and Coverture, Impact on the Legal Status of Women in Hawaii, 1820–1920.” Hawaiian Journal of History 11 (1977): 188–220. Glick, Clarence E. Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1980. Grimshaw, Patricia. “New England Missionary Wives, Hawaiian Women, and ‘The Cult of True Womanhood.’ ” Hawaiian Journal of History 19 (1985): 71–100. Grimshaw, Patricia. Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989. Grimshaw, Patricia. “Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women’s Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Hawai‘i, 1888–1902.” Pacific Historical Review 69 (November 2000): 553–572. Harper, Ida Husted, ed. The History of Woman Suffrage V, 1900–1920. New York: J. J. Little & Ives Co., 1922. Harper, Ida Husted, ed. The History of Woman Suffrage VI, 1900–1920. New York: J. J. Little & Ives Co., 1922. “History of the Red Cross in Hawaii,” accessed December 10, 2010, http://www.hawaii redcross.org/about_us/abus_history.html. Iaukea, Sydney Lehua. The Queen and I: A Story of Dispossessions and Reconnections in Hawai‘i. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Judd, Laura Fish. Honolulu: Sketches of Life: Social, Political, and Religious, in the Hawaiian Islands, from 1828 to 1861. New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1880. Kuykendall, Ralph S. and A. Grove Day. Hawaii A History: From Polynesian Kingdom to American Statehood. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall: 1948.

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Kuykendall, Ralph S. Hawaii in the World War. Honolulu: Honolulu Historical Commission, 1928. Leong, Karen J., and Myla Vicenti Carpio. “Gila River Indian Community and Incarceration of Japanese Americans in Its Lands,” Amerasia Journal 42, no. 1 (2016): 103–120. Lind, Andrew W. Hawaii’s People. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1955. McGregor, Davianna Pomaika‘i. “Constructed Images of Native Hawaiian Women.” In Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Mead, Rebecca J. How the Vote was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Merry, Sally Engle. Colonizing Hawai‘i: The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Newman, Louise Michele. White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Osorio, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole. Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002. Peck, Mary Gray. Carrie Chapman Catt: A. Biography. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1944. Proto, Neil Thomas. Liliuokalani’s Enduring Battle with the United States, 1893–1917. New York: Algora Publishing, 2009. Root, Eileen. “Kalaniana‘ole, Princess Elizabeth Kahanu Kaleiwohi-Ka‘auwai.” In Barbara Bennett Peterson ed. Notable Women of Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1984. Schachter, Judith. The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation: From Territorial Subject to American Citizen. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Sneider, Allison. Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 1870–1929. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Takaki, Ronald. Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1983. Van Voris, Jacqueline. Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987. Williamson, Eleanor H. “Taylor, Emma Ahuena Davison.” In Notable Women of Hawaii, ed. Barbara Bennett Peterson. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1984. “Women in the Progressive Era,” National Women’s History Museum. http://www .nwhm.org/html/exhibits/progressiveera/worldwarI.html, accessed September 11, 2011. Yasutake, Rumi. “Hawaiian Nationalism, American Patriotism, and Re-franchising Women in Post-Annexation Hawaiʻi, 1912–1–1920.” Journal of Konan University, Faculty of Letters, no. 165 (March 2015), 119–126.

CHAPTER 8

Currencies of U.S. Empire in Hawaiʻi’s Tourism and Prison Industries Liza Keānuenueokalani Williams Abstract This chapter examines the intersecting ways that the State of Hawaiʻi’s investments in tourism and a privatized prison in Eloy, Arizona, give shape to contemporary colonialism for Native Hawaiians. It draws from Native Hawaiian artist Adrienne Keahi Pao and her photograph Lei Stand Protest, as a foregrounded text which illuminates how tourist images objectify Native Hawaiian women’s bodies, masking the stark reality of colonialism for Native Hawaiians. While tourism sexualizes Native Hawaiian women through image, creating a form of cultural commodification and “containment,” as benign and desirable, the physical removal of Native Hawaiian men from the islands to the contracted privatized prison in Eloy, Arizona, produces another form of “containment,” one in which incarceration supports the civilizing process that targets Native Hawaiians. This chapter concludes with thoughts on how these gendered systems of cultural commodification, hyper-visibility, removal, and containment shape the potential for political reparation as Native Hawaiians navigate these colonial strictures into the 21st century.

Keywords settler colonialism – capitalism – Hawaiʻi – Indigenous Studies – tourism – prisons When I cover my body with leis, I simultaneously wear and protest the appropriation of cultural symbol for tourist consumption. A welcoming device, the “spirit of aloha,” represented by the lei, is now something plastic, bought and sold around the world to conjure the idea of paradise. Adrienne Keahi Pao, adriennepao.com

∵ © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336100_009

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In a provocative photograph titled Lei Stand Protest / Kapua Leihua Kapa (Lei Flower Covering) Native Hawaiian artist Adrienne Keahi Pao positions herself prostrate on the tiled floor of the outdoor lei stands at the Honolulu International Airport, located on Oʻahu Island (Illustration 8.1). Covered in a thick layer of purple orchid lei, the artist comments on commodification and the ways it ‘covers’ understandings of culture, place, and belonging, especially through gendered representations of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) women as the sexualized icons of Hawaiʻi as paradise.1 Appearing completely undressed beneath the lei, Pao’s Lei Stand Protest challenges the viewer to see beyond the cursory illusion of Hawaiʻi as inherently desired. Pao positions her own body – literally and figuratively – as both object and subject, as both gazed upon and the gaze. She creates a performative stage that both recreates and overturns familiar images of the passive Native female.2 As Teresia K. Teaiwa has shown regarding the two-piece bikini and the history of military violence in the Marshall Islands in the mid-20th century, “By drawing attention to a sexualized and supposedly depoliticized female body . . . The sexist dynamic the bikini performs – objectification through excessive visibility – inverts the colonial dynamics that have occurred during nuclear testing in the Pacific, that is, objectification by rendering invisible.”3 As Teaiwa points out, the ways the Native female body has been objectified over time masks the colonial legacies of military domination in the Pacific. This chapter draws from Teaiwa’s consideration of “objectification by rendering invisible,” – as a theoretical frame that illuminates how other forms of colonial domination are also undergirded by these very dynamics – and foregrounds how currencies of the U.S. Empire travel beyond the bounds of tourism and militarism. Pao’s Lei Stand Protest symbolizes the heavy touristic commodification through which the Hawaiian culture is rendered invisible, a dynamic that uses excessive visibility to gloss over the colonial relationships at play. Pao’s play on what becomes “covered” allows us to analyze more deeply the myriad ways that commodification 1  In this chapter several terms are used interchangeably to describe Native Hawaiians – including Hawaiian, Native, Kanaka Maoli, and Maoli. Kanaka Maoli literally translates as true or real people. The diacritical marks ‘okina (glottal stop) and kahakō (macron) are both found in the Hawaiian language. When a kahakō is used over the ‘a’ in Kānaka, it indicates a plural, whereas Kanaka with no kahakō indicates a singular form of the word. 2  See this small but powerful anthology on representations of Pacific Island women: Alison Jones, Phyllis Herda and Tamasailau M. Suaalii, eds., Bitter Sweet: Indigenous Women in the Pacific (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 2000). 3  Teresia K. Teaiwa, “Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans,” in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 15.

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Adrienne Keahi Pao, Lei Stand Protest/Kapua Leihua Kapa (Lei Flower Covering), 30’’ × 36’’ C-Print, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

“conceals” the uneven social conditions that histories of colonialism have engendered in the islands. The State of Hawaiʻi’s use of private prisons on the continent works similarly to tourism in that it renders its colonial project invisible through commodification, relying on physical removal as a form of invisibility and commodity production.

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Building upon feminist scholarship that has established the multiple colonial connections between tourism and militarism in the Pacific, this chapter theorizes ways that the hypervisibility of the Native female and male bodies mask forms of commodification that undergird neocolonial logics and focuses in particular on the connections between tourism and incarceration. Scholars such as Angela Y. Davis have theorized the gendered ways the carceral state unevenly targets African American communities, especially young black men. She states, “Prisons, of course, thrive on class inequalities, they thrive on racial inequalities, they thrive on gender inequalities, because they segregate and isolate the individuals they punish. They also conceal the inequalities that they reproduce.”4 In Hawaiʻi, Kānaka Maoli are overrepresented in the prison system. While the reasons behind these unequal conditions differ from the historical social conditions that affect African American communities, some of the same logics of removal regarding ‘undesirable’ communities come to the fore. The similarities surface when we bring our attention to the larger dynamics of commodification behind tourism and prisons in Hawaiʻi. This chapter traces how the contemporary commodity production of Native Hawaiian male bodies in the profit-seeking private prison industry is undergirded by the historical ways Hawaiʻi has been feminized in the long project of colonial domination in the islands. This chapter makes three main contributions: it offers a preliminary comment on the links between tourism and the private prison industry; it critiques ways the Pacific is still viewed as remote in the American cultural imaginary and therefore in academic study; it concludes with thoughts on ways Native Hawaiian resistance is limited because of cultural commodification and the strictures of imagining the islands as ‘small.’ At the heart of these issues are Maoli bodies and culture – two inextricably linked forms of commodity production from which both tourism and the prison industries extract value and capital.

Feminization and Tourism

The Native Hawaiian body, especially the Native female body, has, since the inception of tourism in the late 18th century, worked to naturalize the desirability of Hawaiʻi as passive islands ripe for the colonial project of domestication. As Adria L. Imada has revealed, hula performers played an important role in establishing an “imagined intimacy” between Hawaiʻi and the United States. 4  Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2012), 142.

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During the Territorial period, World War II, and the Cold War, hula performances were often geared to U.S. soldiers. They served as a platform through which a fantasy of mutual desirability was deployed; it was through hula that “colonial encounters between Hawaiians and Americans were frequently imagined as points of intimate contact, with Hawaiians freely giving Aloha to Americans, and Americans eagerly accepting these gifts of hospitality.”5 This exchange of apparent domestic benevolence between Hawaiian women and American audiences, particularly U.S. military troops, historically links to neocolonial logics of commodification in the present. The consumption of native women’s aloha justifies the continued project of ‘civilizing’ Native Hawaiians in contemporary ways. Neoliberal capitalist logics are not, on the surface, thought to inform social values in Hawaiʻi. Aloha, a familiar term to most Americans, is hyper-utilized and codified in what Stephanie Nohelani Teves calls the “aloha state apparatuses.” This aloha mandate shapes all types of social norms, from being kind to your neighbor, to living in a welcoming and loving way, to providing excellent customer service.6 These values are considered desirable, benign, even necessary for economic stability, and work to support state motives that seek to invest in maintaining the islands as a ‘paradise.’ The well-theorized concept of the feminization of Hawaiʻi through tourism, and therefore the commodity production of the Native Hawaiian female body, is linked to the under-theorized conceptualization of the incarcerated Native Hawaiian male body. This shows the depth of contemporary neocolonial logics in Hawaiʻi. We must look at the State of Hawaiʻi’s use of private prisons on the continent to address its issues of overcrowding in island prisons, along with the state’s investment in maintaining tourism as its top economy. The move towards privatized incarceration and removal and the continued state support for cultural commodification reveal the neoliberal logics of the free market and trade. In other words, examining the tourist and prison industries allows us to cast a wider net across the ways contemporary colonialism takes shape in Hawaiʻi and beyond. While this chapter centers the Native female body as a fulcrum of colonial domestication, it is important to point out that the State of Hawaiʻi’s current contract with its prison on the continent houses males only. What does it mean that Hawaiian female bodies are desired in the commodity production 5  Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 9. 6  Stephanie Nohelani Teves, “Aloha State Apparatuses,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015): 705–726.

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of tourism and framed as a ‘natural’ extension of the islands, while incarcerated Hawaiian male bodies are sent away from the islands, commodified in their undesirability, and viewed as a population in need of removal? Jane C. Desmond writes this of gender and tourist representations in late 19th-century postcards: An image of an obviously successful Native Hawaiian male was a rarity. In fact, the majority of postcards of Hawaiʻi during this early period . . . feature women only. Native Hawaiian males were rarely pictured, and when they were, almost never with Hawaiian women, only alone or perhaps fishing with other men; they usually are pictured wearing only malos, or loincloths, thus perpetuating a stereotype of the primitive native. In the visual iconography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the absence of Native Hawaiian men is constitutive.7 In contrast to the absent or primitivized Native Hawaiian male, Desmond points to the overrepresentation of Native Hawaiian women: “the emerging tourist iconography of the hula dancer = beautiful female = Native = Hawaiʻi stand out in full relief and leaves the pictured women available for visual consumption by white males.”8 This difference between the representation of Maoli women and men flags up an important historical legacy that reveals the gendered ways colonialism is imagined and enacted upon a whole people. Desire and the body runs through these colonial logics. Representations of Native Hawaiians must fall in line with logics of capitalism where consumption of the gendered Hawaiian is at the heart of tourism and domestication. These kinds of colonial legacies become ever more apparent when Hawaiian males are overrepresented in the criminal justice system; they are sent away to facilities on the continent and literally displaced from their own land. The profound undesirability with which this population is viewed, supports the militourist project of maintaining the islands as intrinsically feminine and, therefore, ultimately desired. Maintaining this fiction entails ideologically supporting the project of removing Hawaiian men from Hawaiʻi, displacing those feared as threatening. While incarcerated Native Hawaiian men are framed as ‘undesirable,’ it is important to note that scholars such as Desmond and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan, have articulated that Hawaiian men were also sexualized through tourism, especially in the early 20th century, on the shores of 7  Jane C. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 47. 8  Ibid., 47.

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Waikīkī. While Hawaiian women are more readily seen as sexualized icons of Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian men have also been either feminized or hyper-masculinized through tourism, often depicted as fierce Polynesian dancers, surfers, warriors, or ancient chiefs donning war regalia.9 Differing strategies of containment emerge when we compare how tourism uses the exotification of Hawaiian men to contain a ‘threatening masculinity’ versus the ways the prison industry uses incarceration and removal as a strategy of containment. These strategies of containment reflect multiple ways the state invests in the long project of civilizing Kānaka Maoli. Since the year after statehood in 1960, tourism has been Hawaiʻi’s top economy. State officials invest economically, socially, and culturally to sustain the centrality of this industry. But at what cost, and for whom? Tourism becomes a flashpoint in this contemporary moment. It reveals the ways Native Hawaiians have, over time, been subjugated through political losses such as the 1893 overthrow and the 1898 annexation to the United States. The loss of nation came on the heels of massive depopulation and major cultural shifts, such as from traditional land stewardship to private property ownership. The ways Hawaiian culture is centered as a main selling point for tourism comes after a century of political dispossession.10 Cultural dispossession through tourism and commodification only adds to these losses. In other words, when Hawaiian culture is caricaturized in the service of tourism as a welcoming device and symbol of hospitality, Kānaka Maoli must continue to struggle against the cultural erasure that arises not only through tourism, but also through historical legacies such as Christianity and the banning of Native language. The hyper-visibility of Hawaiian culture in tourism is, as Teaiwa points out, “objectification through excessive visibility” and “objectification by rendering invisible,” masking the colonial dynamics at play by saturating the socio-cultural landscape in Hawaiʻi with images of happy Hawaiians. The rise of tourism points to a long history of colonial domination in the islands, where the industry was viewed by territorial officials as a boon for 9  See Ty P. Kāwika Tengan, Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawaiʻi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 10  See these foundational histories: Lilikalā Kame’eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea Lā E Pono Ai? (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992); Jonathan Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002); Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Tengan, Native Men Remade; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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the burgeoning state in the wake of waning sugar and pineapple industries. The advent of the jet age in 1960 and the greater ease with which the middle class was able to afford global air travel coincided with statehood to create a perfect storm for the rapid development of infrastructure and new suburban enclaves. The rise in tourism spawned a boom in urban development that further marginalized Native Hawaiians by driving up the cost of living and displacing them from rural areas, in essence, dispossessing Hawaiians in their own land.11 As we are able to see in this brief history, capitalism and the commodification of Native land and people has remained central to colonialism in the islands. Pao’s Lei Stand Protest is a lens through which we can broaden our view of colonial subjugation in Hawaiʻi. The history of cultural commodification becomes ‘uncovered’ as Pao draws upon her own body to illustrate how feminization anchors the relationships between cultural commodification and tourism. Pao positions herself in front of the Honolulu International Airport lei ‘stands,’ which are twelve adjacent storefronts for separately owned and operated commercial businesses, each differentiated by the bold, block-letter names of the primary lei proprietor. In anticipation of the rapid increase in visitors to Hawaiʻi, the airport lei stands were constructed in 1955. This construction concretized the importance of the lei greeting to tourism, ensuring its future embeddedness within the global economy of cultural trade.12 Today, there are over seven million visitors to the islands each year.13 In Pao’s photo, a lei stringer sits at her table in an adjacent stand busily performing the cultural labor of making lei, paying no attention to the artist or her political statement. By staging a thick covering of lei, Pao comments on both the cultural labor of lei making and the lei as cultural commodity. Pao’s photograph comments on the history of the lei, where tourism in Hawaiʻi has been sustained by women’s labor on a number of fronts. Since the early 20th century, when steamships brought wealthy patrons to Hawa‘i for extended periods of time, lei making for tourists has overwhelmingly been women’s (especially Maoli women’s) work. Their labor historically links 11  Haunani-Kay Trask, “The Birth of the Modern Hawaiian Movement: Kalama Valley, O’ahu,” Hawaiian Journal of History 21 (1987): 126–153. 12  State of Hawaiʻi, “Honolulu International Airport, HNL 1950–1959,” State of Hawaiʻi, Department of Transportation, Airports Division, http://hawaii.gov/hnl/airport-information/hnl-1950-1959 (accessed January 17, 2014). 13  Daniel Naho’opi’i, Lawrence Liu, Minh-Chau T. Chun, Michele Shiowaki, and Carrie Miyasato, “Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority 2012 Annual Visitor Research Report,” Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority, http://www.hawaiitourismauthority.org/default/assets/File/reports/ visitor-statistics/2012%20ANNUAL%20REPORT%20(FINAL2)(1).pdf (accessed February 13, 2014).

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these first lei greetings at the Honolulu Harbor docks to the airport lei stands.14 When steamship arrivals came to a halt due to World War II, the lei proprietors took their businesses to the, then burgeoning, Honolulu Airport by setting up makeshift stands on a nearby dirt road.15 When Honolulu Airport was slated for expansion to accommodate the sharp rise in air travel during the mid-20th century, territorial officials sought to regulate the lei proprietors by moving their businesses to the Honolulu International Airport where they remain today. Lei making, postcard images, hula, and the feminization of Hawaiian culture point to ways tourism and state interests extract value from the sexualization and cultural appropriation of the Hawaiian body.

Pacific Exceptionalism

Commodification, state interests, and the struggle for political restitution point to some of the cultural and political tensions that arise from marginalization on multiple fronts. Hawaiʻi’s utility as an appendage to the United States gives rise to American exceptionalist frameworks that delink Oceania from global histories of oppression. Hawaiʻi has long been regarded as small and insignificant, as a military outpost or as a paradise. The ‘currencies’ of the U.S. Empire – in terms of neoliberalism and capitalism – point to the current theoretical limitations of theorizing the Pacific within fields such as American studies.16 The pervasive force of cultural commodification requires a framing of colonial occupation in Hawaiʻi as a relational exchange between “distancing” and the forging of “intimacies,” as Lisa Lowe writes, through an “economy of affirmation and forgetting.”17 Narratives of Hawaiʻi as paradise reinscribe settler colonial logics of American exclusion that work to ‘forget’ the colonial project(s) of Native/Pacific erasure. As Teaiwa 14  On a related note, for a good discussion of how hula became commodified as a “distinct form of wage labor,” in the early 20th century, see Adria L. Imada, Aloha America. 15  Janis L. Magin, “Historic Airport Lei Stands Face Tough Foreign Competition,” Pacific Business News, January 28, 2007, http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/stories/2007/01/29/ smallb1.html?page=all (accessed December 10, 2014). 16  In a special issue of the American Quarterly scholars address the issue of the Pacific as both a marginalized site of U.S. empire and of academic study. See Paul Lyons and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan, eds., “Pacific Currents,” special issue, American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015). 17  Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. by Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 206.

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and Imada have shown, there is a forging of intimacies between tourism and the military, which suture the industries as colonial institutions. Vernadette V. Gonzalez writes, “Military bases and tropical tourist paradises would not seem to occupy the same universe, but in Hawaiʻi they are inextricably linked, illustrating that securing paradise is an ongoing project, and one achieved through the mutual workings of tourism and militarism.”18 This mutuality informs a capitalist system that ‘forgets’ histories of dispossession by naturalizing the consumption of Maoli culture. Accommodating the heavy presence of tourists and military personnel also works to forget histories of dispossession while Kānaka Maoli remain politically marginalized. While feminist scholars have created a field that links the colonial projects of tourism and militarism, the intellectual links between fields such as American studies and Pacific studies continue to remain tentative at best. Amy Kaplan’s foundational essay “Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” figures American exceptionalism as a “still resilient paradigm” that “links the political practice of empire with its academic study.” Her intervention remains relevant and timely with regard to the Pacific.19 Kaplan reminds us of the continued need to unsettle U.S.-centric notions of power by reconstituting important sites of contact, exchange and cultural collision.20 The ways the Pacific is often tacked on as an appendage to fields such as American studies, Asian American, and Native studies, calls forth a need to further theorize Oceania as an important region of imperial control. The region serves as a site that transcribes, as Kaplan states “the imperial dimensions of power and violence that structure, underwrite, and are informed by cultural ‘interpenetrations’.”21 By tracing the threads of American imperialism and its cultural interpenetrations, Oceania is refigured as transcultural and transnational. It is a site that is central and dynamic, rather than an afterthought to the study of American empire.

18  Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawaiʻi and the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 117. 19  Kaplan, “Left Alone with America,” 11. 20  Feminists of color have used the theoretical site of the border to reconceive and deconstruct identity, formulating anticolonial critiques of patriarchy, racism, sexism, and homophobia. See Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981); Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Paula Gunn Allen, Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing, Loose Canons (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 21  Kaplan, “Left Alone with America,” 16.

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Revisiting Kaplan’s foundational essay allows us to unfurl the ways American exceptionalism continues to influence academic inquiry regarding the Pacific across disciplines. Kaplan takes Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness as an expedition that mapped the contours of Americanness against and within an African background, thereby “demarcating the narrative of American origins from the African setting.” In other words, Kaplan frames ways a coherent American identity originates from a “distancing Africanism.”22 The historical expeditions into, explorations of, and the domesticating projects of Africa as a repository, suggest current ways the Pacific and Hawai‘i is produced, procured, and positioned as a contemporary background repository for an exceptional American identity. American exceptionalism ‘forgets’ its histories of (cultural) genocide and military occupation through modes of touristic ‘benevolence,’ patriotic/militaristic memory, and narratives of economic security.23 In this sense, the Pacific remains an “apparently remote, exterior setting [that] produces inner meaning and gives coherence to the central narratives . . . of America itself.”24 By framing the Pacific as an integral site of exchange, the remoteness of the Pacific is unsettled to refigure the Pacific as an important juncture in this 21st century. This chapter asks what new theoretical links emerge when we think of the Pacific as a place that is not physically bordered by fences, policing and racial anxieties, but rather by the inked lines penned across Oceania on maps, slated in museums, or solidified in our minds through militouristic logics? Whereas the southwestern borders of the United States symbolize imaginaries of imperial control and impenetrability, Hawaiʻi and the Pacific are imagined as permanently penetrable. The islands are depicted as readily available, as a respite for weary Americans and the global traveling public. The Pacific Islands also offer a safe harbor for the global military, couched in ideologies of rest and recuperation. As the State of Hawaiʻi’s investment in using continent based privatized prisons exemplifies, the commodity production of Native bodies and land takes shape in myriad ways. The commodification of Hawaiian bodies threads through complex histories of dispossession and displacement that mark the Native experience of colonialism across imperial geographies from Hawaiʻi to North America. It is important to unsettle the ways American exceptionalism insists upon the Pacific as remote, or as a distant and faraway place that gives coherence to America through its definition of Hawaiʻi as its prized 22  Kaplan, “Left Alone with America”, 4. 23  See Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and Gonzalez, Securing Paradise. 24  Ibid., 5.

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possession. Comprehending Oceania as central to the project of U.S. Empire provides new ways to theorize anti-colonial resistance. In this vein, our attention shifts to the private prison industry in Arizona.

Private Prisons and Commodification

In the small city of Eloy, Arizona, 2,900 miles from the Hawaiian Islands – and even farther in geographical landscape, climate, and culture – the area’s largest employer is the Corrections Corporation of America (or CCA). The CCA is the nation’s largest private prison corporation and has grown over the last three decades. The private prison industry began in 1983. CCA incorporated that year and received a federal contract from the U.S. Department of Justice for an Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) facility in Houston, Texas.25 Today, the CCA touts itself as “the nation’s leading provider of correctional solutions to federal, state and local government.”26 The corporation manages over 85,000 beds, over sixty facilities nationwide, and currently houses 70,000 incarcerated people. Located less than two hours north of the Mexican–American border, the CCA owns and operates four major facilities in Eloy alone: the La Palma Correctional Center, a medium security facility for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation; the Eloy Detention Center, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) facility; the Red Rock Correctional Center, which, at the end of 2013, shifted its contract with the State of California to the State of Arizona; and the Saguaro Correctional Center, a medium security facility for the State of Hawaiʻi. As mentioned earlier, all facilities house male inmates. In Eloy, the four facilities provide 8,508 beds – and each bed commands a profit for CEOs and shareholders when filled. The company went public in 1986, three years after the CCA was formed, going on the NASDAQ stock exchange at an initial share price of $9.27 Surrounded by dusty roads and fallow cotton fields, the Saguaro Correctional Center is just one of the sprawling, white, industrial facilities that break the muted, flat desert landscape with its barbed wire fences and rectangular 25  Holly Kirby, “Locked Up and Shipped Away: Interstate Prisoner Transfers & The Private Prison Industry,” http://grassrootsleadership.org/sites/default/files/uploads/locked_up_ shipped_away.pdf (accessed March 29, 2014). 26  Corrections Corporation of America, “CCA,” CCA, http://cca.com (accessed March 29, 2014). 27  Corrections Corporation of America, “The CCA Story: Our Company History,” CCA, http:// cca.com/our-history (accessed March 12, 2014).

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angles. Bound by the American Indian Reservations of the Gila and Tohono O’Otham Nations, the facilities evoke the feelings of separation and isolation across the sightscape. The Saguaro Correctional Center maintains 1,926 beds and 1,700 of them are currently filled.28 Built specifically for Hawaiʻi, Saguaro opened in 2007 after Governor Linda Lingle abruptly stopped the construction of new prison facilities in Hawaiʻi. Lingle justified her decision by stating: I cannot envision a community coming forward to support building a new prison facility of any size in this state. People simply don’t want one in their community. There is no support for one anywhere. I said if a community did come forward, we would take a look at it. I haven’t seen that community yet in the last four years.29 According to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs 2010 report on Native Hawaiians in the criminal justice system, Native Hawaiians represent 24 percent of the general population, but constitute 40 percent of Hawaiʻi’s incarcerated.30 Native Hawaiians are more likely to receive prison terms than rehabilitation when convicted of a crime and are also given longer sentences. In annual reports issued by the CCA, it is of utmost importance that beds remain filled to meet the minimum monetary quotas the corporation requires for their state contractors. This quandary leaves the State of Hawaiʻi in the position of maintaining an active incarcerated population on the continent. These inmates have longer sentences, and therefore are kept away from Hawaiʻi for decades, even lifetimes. The State of Hawaiʻi has been transferring individuals – initially women and then men – since 1995 to alleviate overcrowding. In June of 1985, the Hawaiʻi Department of Public Safety was required to address deficient prison conditions as a result of a 1984 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) class action lawsuit. The lawsuit was brought on behalf of O’ahu prisoners that called crowded conditions life-threatening at the O’ahu Community Correctional Center and the Women’s Community Correctional Center. As a result of the 28  Kirby, “Locked Up and Shipped Away,” Appendix C: Hawai‘i, 20. 29  Richard Borreca, “Lingle Ends Push for New Prisons: Lack of Community Support Prompts a Strategic Shift,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, “Honolulu Star Bulletin.com,” 11, no. 195 (July 14, 2006), http://archives.starbulletin.com/2006/07/14/news/story01.html (accessed April 1, 2014). 30  Treena Shapiro, “Seeking Sanctuary: The State Takes Steps Toward a Puʻuhonua Concept as an Alternative to Prison,” Ka Wai Ola: The Living Water of OHA 29, no. 12 (December 2012).

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lawsuit, Hawaiʻi was the first to implement interstate transfers. There are currently four states that utilize interstate transfers to alleviate over-crowding: Hawaiʻi, Idaho, Vermont, and California. Currently, Hawaiʻi only uses interstate transfers for male inmates. As stated in an interview conducted with prison advocate Kat Brady, the State of Hawaiʻi has ceased sending women to private mainland facilities due to the high rates of sexual assaults perpetrated by guards on women inmates.31 While a deeper analysis of these issues is beyond the scope of this paper, attention needs to be drawn to the specifically gendered ways the state has opted to handle its incarcerated populations. After multiple assaults on women in continental facilities, Brady worked to return women to Hawaiʻi where closer oversight would reduce these attacks. However, despite advocacy and a number of inmate deaths in Arizona prisons, the State of Hawaiʻi refuses to cease interstate transfers of male Hawaiʻi inmates, citing that communities in Hawaiʻi do not want more prisons. As Angela Davis states, “Addressing issues that are specific to women’s prisons is of vital importance, but it is equally important to shift the way we think about the prison system as a whole. Certainly women’s prison practices are gendered, but so, too, are men’s prisons practices.”32 What this means is that while there is important work to be done to theorize how interstate transfers have adversely affected women, the focus here is on incarcerated men because they are currently transferred out of state. The transfer of incarcerated men away from Hawaiʻi highlights how commodification underscores larger capitalist links between tourism and the private prison industry. The private prison industry measures its capacity and profit through the number of occupied beds – in other words, through the number of bodies present in a given facility. This measurement is akin to the tourist industry, which also measures its profitability through the number of occupied beds. These material links give shape to the continued domesticating process of indigenous peoples across multiple fronts. Tourism images of Hawaiʻi necessitate invisibility through the sexualization of Maoli women; the neoliberal logics of trade also render this population of Hawaiian men invisible through the commodification of their bodies as removed and incarcerated. These dual moves work in tandem as a system of oppression that operates from multiple angles at once. Occupancy – or shall we say occupation – is reflected in the CCA prisons at Eloy as a commodity driven framework. The movement of masses of people and the reliance on importing and deporting bodies, define the relation 31  Kat Brady, interview by author, Honolulu, HI, June 20, 2013. 32  Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 61.

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between colony and metropole, state and Nation, people and place, and individuals and communities through currencies of exchange. These currencies suture Hawaiʻi to the United States by creating flows of capital between the islands and the metropole; in essence, creating monetary exchanges that rely on the objectification and subjugation of Kānaka Maoli in different ways. For each body that fills a bed in a CCA prison, shareholders are guaranteed a profit from minimum payments through the contracting state, and by selling stock on Wall Street.33 In addition, the four facilities in Eloy are juxtaposed against a historical background of Native dispossession for those American Indian Nations that once made those lands their home. The State of Arizona, with its contested immigration policies, employs overlapping projects of imperialism through its investment in private prisons. By incarcerating Native bodies, bodies of color, and by detaining bodies the nation-state deems ‘alien,’ profit-driven incarceration becomes an imperial project of containment that is made manifest in its tandem facilities in Eloy. The CCA’s facilities in Eloy exemplify the binding of multiple histories of oppression to a racialized and classed commodification that rearticulates dominance through capitalism. This simultaneously engenders forms of state-controlled ‘intimacies’ through incarceration. M. Jaqui Alexander states, “Physical geographic segregation is a potent metaphor for the multiple sites of separation and oppositions generated by the state, but which are also sustained in the very knowledge frameworks we deploy.”34 The State of Hawai‘i relies heavily on the importation of vacationing bodies for continued revenue and economic support. The government invests millions of dollars each year advertising the islands as a source of respite for the overworked. Meanwhile, the state (in)advertently makes room for those vacationing bodies by uncritically addressing unfavorable prison conditions with outsourcing solutions and deporting Native bodies away from their home and communities. The State of Hawaiʻi generates narratives of economic security by touting the need for a thriving tourist industry and investment in military operations; however, the resources to maintain these industries are diverted from investing in solutions to incarceration that are community based. This keeps the state from adequately addressing the root problems that lead to incarceration and from investing in keeping incarcerated individuals in Hawaiʻi. As Governor Lingle’s statement exemplifies, the state refuses to invest in building facilities 33  Corrections Corporation of America, “The CCA Story.” 34  M. Jaqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 5.

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within the islands because “there is no support for one anywhere,” whereas the investment in tourism and the military are continuously touted as good for the economic security of Hawaiʻi. The prioritization of the military-tourism complex are supported by cultural narratives that underscore feeling aloha (coded as appreciation) for visitors and the patriotic service of military personnel. Likewise, the state’s use of private prisons goes virtually unchallenged. Contemporary colonialism therefore, is sustained through commodification. The state and its complicit corporate actors prioritize the investment in beds or housing for transient populations, such as tourists and military personnel. Simultaneously, they disregard the lack of beds for the incarcerated, mostly Native, population. Rather than analyzing larger societal and community issues that lead to incarceration, the state has relied on capitalist, U.S. continent-based solutions that, like other dominant industries in Hawaiʻi, commodify Native bodies. Relying on the criminal justice system to ensure people are incarcerated for profit rather than healed for community health, the system divides communities, sustains financial and political dependence on the metropole, and perpetuates uncritical approaches to solving societal issues. Incarcerated Native men become symbolic of the contemporary ways that civilizing takes shape in the islands, with the justice system operating as an institutional form of control that threatens with removal. Across industries, gender becomes central to the ways Kānaka Maoli are imagined, suggesting “the deeply gendered character of punishment [that] both reflects and further entrenches the gendered structure of the larger society.”35 As Eloy exemplifies, the exchange that occurs through the State of Hawaiʻi’s use of private prisons demarcates the ways commodification operates as a neocolonial force that extracts from Native Hawaiian bodies for its provision.

Notes on Native Hawaiian Resistance

As we continue into the 21st century, and as the United States continues to facilitate the growth of the global economy from its position in the Pacific, it becomes increasingly apparent that there is a need to understand the ways Hawaiʻi’s politico-economic position works to both delimit and authorize potential paths of self-determination for Kānaka Maoli.36 Returning to Pao’s 35  Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 61. 36  On June 18, 2014, the United States Department of the Interior announced that they were beginning a first step toward considering the formal establishment of a government-togovernment relationship between Native Hawaiians and the United States in an Advanced

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Lei Stand Protest, her photograph impresses upon us the need to theorize more deeply on how cultural commodification threads a net of global economic dependency through the state. This economic dependency keeps Kānaka Maoli politically invisible (disenfranchised) and yet culturally hyper-visible (economically necessary) to support the global tourist industry in Hawaiʻi. As the tourist industry touts familiar narratives of welcome and aloha, the State of Hawaiʻi entices investors to support the growth of tourist capacity by an ongoing investment in increasing hotel accommodation. Meanwhile, the state simultaneously backpedals on its problem of prison overcrowding by contracting out-of-state beds with the CCA and sending incarcerated individuals, overrepresented by Native Hawaiians, to facilities based on the continent – away from families, communities, and homes. These issues are ‘covered’ as the State of Hawaiʻi strongholds a vested interest in subsidizing tourism and disinvesting in community driven efforts at rehabilitation. The inherent entanglement that ensues from colonial economic ties issues, in part, from the contested terrain of seeking reparation from the United States. This in turn, issues forth the state’s investment in naturalizing a tourist-friendly social climate by ‘softening’ Native resistance, cultural expression, and political claim through discourses that such articulations be done with aloha.37

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) that allows for a series of public meetings to be held in Hawaiʻi and what the DOI refers to as “Indian Country.” This recognition is otherwise referred to as Federal Recognition, and bears a resemblance to the political relationships established between some American Indian Nations and the United States on the North American continent. Federal Recognition is a deeply contested and controversial path toward reparation, as many Kanaka Maoli critics view Federal Recognition as an option that furthers Maoli dependency on the United States and forecloses paths toward full sovereignty and true self-determination. Federal Recognition is just one strand of the political possibilities that now confront the Kānaka Maoli people. See U.S. Department of the Interior, “Interior Considers Procedures to Reestablish a Government-to-Government Relationship with the Native Hawaiian Community,” U.S. DOI Press Release, http://www .doi.gov/news/pressreleases/interior-considers-procedures-to-reestablish-a-govern ment-to-government-relationship-with-the-native-hawaiian-community.cfm (accessed July 31, 2014). 37  The concept of aloha is both conveyed and coopted in multiple, often-contradictory ways, by many different groups, including Kānaka Maoli and the State of Hawaiʻi. The state however, has a vested interest in utilizing the concept to evoke affective expressions that lessen the outward vocalization that is often necessitated by Native resistance. While a discussion of how aloha is utilized as both a reclamation of Maoli resistance and as a commodified concept for tourist consumption is beyond the scope of this chapter, the following article is a useful discussion of the concept’s multiplicitous uses: Keiko

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The Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s was integral in setting forth Maoli articulations of resistance, sovereignty, and a culturally based sense of Hawaiian nationalist pride that continues to inform discourses of anti-colonialism.38 As Kānaka Maoli continue to make headway in cultural recovery, the constant reinvention of the capitalist machine has found ways to enfold those cultural strides in the service of tourism and the military. Cultural expertise has been integrated in hotel décor and activities, architecture, design, and consultation for both tourist and military institutions – both unwittingly and with complicity.39 In light of these types of corporate move, questions of what constitutes autonomy and what defines self-determination are increasingly important issues that require redefinition. In other words, although lines between colonizer and colonized are delineated in this chapter, in actual Maoli lives these lines are blurred. Economic struggle and the necessity to sustain livelihoods in a service industry influences how Native Hawaiians navigate occupations in tourism, the military, and even in the prison industry. The lack of choice that arises from an economy that is bound within militourism become stark realities for Kānaka Maoli who are unevenly affected as the indigenous people who, historically, have suffered great land, political, and cultural losses. Debates on federal recognition, sovereignty, and self-determination are often – and necessarily – shaped within economic constraints, for instance, through such questions as how the profit garnered through the leasing of ceded lands can benefit Native Hawaiians. Simultaneously, these debates are articulated against economic terms, for instance, through assertions of anti-development, Ohnuma, “ ‘Aloha Spirit’ and the Cultural Politics of Sentiment as National Belonging,” The Contemporary Pacific 20, no. 2 (2008): 365–394. 38  Trask, “The Birth of the Modern Hawaiian Movement”: 126–153. 39  I make this statement based on interviews conducted with seven Kānaka Maoli artists in Hawaiʻi during the summer of 2013. The artists were at various stages in their careers, from just beginning to established figures. Some of the artists interviewed had contributed their work to the design of Aulani: A Disney Resort & Spa at Ko Olina, on the West side of the island of O’ahu. Other artists had participated in designing art for Waikīkī hotels, corporate plazas, newly constructed Honolulu buildings, and a major military institution. One of the artists I interviewed refused the solicitation made by a representative of The Walt Disney Company for original art. All the artists spoke of the contentious and controversial relationship they had with producing Maoli images within touristic and militaristic frameworks that allowed a certain amount of creative freedom and good compensation but presented conflicts of representation when their work would be viewed as complicit with colonialism in militouristic sites. A specific interview is not used for this chapter, but they are cited within a larger context that reveals similarities in the issues the Maoli artists grappled with – whether they chose to provide art for touristic purposes or not.

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anti-corporation, or food sustainability.40 As Kānaka Maoli work to shape a coherent national identity through a culturally astute citizen-subject, a more authentic representation of Kānaka Maoli and Maoli culture, and, in turn, feed the state’s hunger for an idealized Hawaiian representation that is legible and palatable and therefore subsumed to multicultural narratives of social harmony. Said another way, the authentic Hawaiian becomes a good representation for Hawaiians, tourists, and Hawaiʻi residents, and therefore functions in the service of the state. Meanwhile, Kānaka in the prison system are sent away from the islands in a move that represents the state’s investment in keeping Hawaiʻi a desirable locale – a paradise where only the most ideal Hawaiian citizen-subject is allowed to remain. Colonialism in Hawaiʻi is capitalist at its core and the forced removal of Native bodies from Hawaiʻi – to the continent and on displaced Native lands – shows the physical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions that pose obstacles to political restitution for Kānaka. The global economy and its corporate actors engage in continuous reinvention, shifting commodity production to define new appetites and tastes that then redefine our social, political, and cultural lives. Used for projects of both respite and war, the Hawaiian Islands will continue to capture the American imaginary as the State of Hawaiʻi continues to entice ever more visitors for vacationing and military defense. This militourist project will continue its use of Native land, Native culture and Native people as the sustenance upon which the U.S. Empire maintains its global strategies 40  For example, on January 16, 2013 hundreds of protestors, many of which were Kānaka Maoli, gathered for a “Helekū March” and a “We the People Rally” at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol in a show of solidarity against colonial occupation and corporate interest in Hawaiʻi. Activists linked the march to the global indigenous Idle No More movement, which was sparked in late 2012 by indigenous feminist activists in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Organizers of the Idle No More Rally in Honolulu brought attention to three pressing issues: first, to insist on labeling GMO foods in Hawaiʻi; second, a demand to repeal the Public Land Development Corporation (PLDC), a state entity that was created by the Legislature in 2011 to develop lands for leisure and recreation using private/public partnerships to generate revenue for the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR), and first conceived as an arm of the DLNR to allow the rapid development of land by bypassing permitting and zoning laws; and third, to recognize Hawaiian rights and deoccupation, by demanding the protection of ʻiwi kūpuna and placing emphasis on reducing the military presence in the islands. Because of strong public resistance, the PLDC was repealed during the 2013 session. Governor Neil Abercrombie signed the measure into law on April 22, 2013. See Sophie Cocke, “Public Land Development Corporation,” Honolulu Civil Beat, July 25, 2011, http://www.civilbeat.com/topics/public-land-development-corporation/ ?gclid=CM6glejh0LoCFex7QgodACQANA (accessed November 6, 2013).

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of power and expansion. In this complex era of Hawaiian justice and the currents of sovereignty at hand, it is increasingly important to both broaden and deepen the theoretical lens of colonialism to more effectively tease apart and resist those imperial projects that keep Kānaka Maoli politically disenfranchised. As Lisa Kahaleole Hall states, “I have been consistently struck by the phenomenon of separate spheres that distorts our understanding of the relationships between race, imperialism, and indigeneity that have so profoundly shaped the development of the U.S. nation-state.”41 Naming the separation of intellectual spheres a “conceptual erasure,” Kahaleole iterates the ways that the colonial histories of Hawai‘i and the Pacific have been marginalized in the study of U.S. imperialism. To redraw the ways we view colonialism in the Pacific allows us the potential to navigate, in new ways, the unsettled waters of colonial power each day. As the waves of colonialism and resistance continue from history to the contemporary moment, understanding the depth and breadth of neocolonialism is integral to filling in collective histories. This brings the future into sharper focus and opens up the theoretical possibilities of more deeply understanding the currencies of U.S. empire. Bibliography Alexander, M. Jaqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Allen, Paula Gunn. Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, BorderCrossing, Loose Canons. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007. Corrections Corporation of America. “CCA.” CCA. http://cca.com. Accessed March 29, 2014. Corrections Corporation of America. “The CCA Story: Our Company History.” CCA. http://cca.com/our-history. Accessed March 12, 2014. Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete?. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Davis, Angela Y. The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues. San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2012. Desmond, Jane C. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

41  Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Strategies of Erasure: U.S. Colonialism and Native Hawaiian Feminism,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 273.

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Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuna. Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawaiʻi and the Philippines. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Hall, Lisa Kahaleole. “Strategies of Erasure: U.S. Colonialism and Native Hawaiian Feminism.” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (June 2008): 273–280. Imada, Adria L. Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Jones, Alison, Phyllis Herda, and Tamasailau M. Suaalii. Bitter Sweet: Indigenous Women in the Pacific. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 2000. Kame’eleihiwa, Lilikalā. Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea Lā E Pono Ai?. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992. Kaplan, Amy. “Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Lyons, Paul and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan, eds., “Pacific Currents,” special issue, American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015). Merry, Sally Engle. Colonizing Hawaiʻi: The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Moraga, Cherie and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981. Ohnuma, Keiko. “ ‘Aloha Spirit’ and the Cultural Politics of Sentiment as National Belonging.” The Contemporary Pacific 20, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 365–394. Osorio, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo’ole. Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002. Shigematsu, Setsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds. Militarized Currents: Toward A Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. State of Hawaiʻi. “Honolulu International Airport, HNL 1950–1959.” State of Hawaiʻi, Department of Transportation, Airports Division. http://hawaii.gov/hnl/airportinformation/hnl-1950-1959. Accessed January 17, 2014. Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Teaiwa, Teresia K. “Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans.” In Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, 15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

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Tengan, Ty P. Kāwika. Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawaiʻi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Teves, Stephanie Nohelani. “Aloha State Apparatuses.” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015): 705–726. Trask, Haunani-Kay. “The Birth of the Modern Hawaiian Movement: Kalama Valley, O’ahu.” Hawaiian Journal of History 21 (1987): 126–153.

Part 3 Intimacies and Affect

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CHAPTER 9

The Sexualized Child and Mestizaje Colonial Tropes of the Filipina/o Gladys Nubla Abstract This chapter traces the ways that the trope of the Filipina/o as child circulated in colonial Philippines and America at the turn of the 20th century and how the child figure came to be sexualized. The depiction of Filipinas/os as children is pervasive in American colonial discourse, comprising travel literature, photography, official governmentsponsored reports, and ethnological studies produced by American colonials from the late 1880s through the first half of the 20th century. To justify colonial conquest, Filipinas/os were portrayed as a childlike people in need of tutelage. Even when ‘the child’ or ‘childhood’ is not mentioned in various colonial discourses about the Philippines, the image of the child is implicit in any consideration of the capacity of Filipinos for self-government, of their education and ‘progress,’ and of America’s paternal ‘duty’ towards the Philippines. However, concurrent with the representation of Filipinas/os as children was the representation of them as hypersexual natives, particularly women and girls. While this second stereotype also worked to justify the need for American colonialism to manage the development of the Philippines, it introduced the dangerous sexuality of the child that problematized the claims to virtuous intent of America’s stated mission of benevolent assimilation.

Keywords Philippines – United States – colonialism – racialization – hypersexualization – mestizaje – infantilization – Filipina/o-as-child

I had gone through such a series of rapid changes, and, during a comparatively short period of time, had seen so many unusual sights, that I believe my senses were partly dulled or partly paralyzed. The women sat weaving, throwing the shuttle back and forth through the warp; and, though their skirts were pulled up to their knees, exposing their brown

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nether limbs, finished off with brown-toed feet, it never once occurred to me that there was anything out of the way, or that modesty was being outraged. Although the weavers stopped occasionally to rest and to take a fresh bunch of betel-nut and lime, yanking up, at the same time, the single skirt just a little higher, it never once entered my head to think that these brown women were overstepping any rule of deportment. They were doing all right, of course; for they were brown children of the tropics. They were not overstepping any rules, and they would not have known modesty had they come face to face with her beneath a glaring noonday sun; so they could not very well do anything out of the way. Only the wonder is that I took it all so as a matter of course. Ralph Kent Buckland (1912)1

American schoolteacher Ralph Kent Buckland arrived in the Philippines in 1903, sailing on a vessel that stopped in China and Japan before heading into Manila Bay.2 He spent the better part of a decade in the Philippines. After returning to the United States, he published In the Land of the Filipino, the 1912 memoir about his experiences there. The epigraph above is his description of one of his first sights after arriving in the Visayas where his assignment was to teach native students and train some of the more promising ones for future teaching positions. As the epigraph shows, colonial contact could seem surprisingly intimate. The passage is striking for its series of contradictions and reversals that reveal the conflicted ways in which he encountered Filipinas upon his arrival. First, he starts out with a caveat: his senses were “partly paralyzed” due to the long travel through unfamiliar terrain, with unfamiliar faces surrounding him. Then he describes, in almost loving detail, the unconscious sexuality of the Filipina weavers – hiking up their skirts and exposing their legs and feet – thus evincing a sexual fascination with the women. Yet he generously (in his own mind, perhaps) refuses to judge the women’s behavior as immodest, given that they are mere “children.” At this point, we realize that his caveat includes the paralysis not only of his senses but also of his judgment, and this leads to an instance of 1  Ralph Kent Buckland, In the Land of the Filipino (New York: Every Where Publishing, 1912), 78–79. 2  Though not part of the first batch of American schoolteachers sent to the Philippines to teach in the public school system established by the American colonial government in the Islands, Buckland would still be called a Thomasite, a label derived from the ship, USS Thomas, that transported the first large wave of about 530 American schoolteachers to the Philippines in 1901.

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confusion: does he mean that he was wrong to not judge them negatively for their behavior? Or perhaps that he was wrong to be sexually attracted to those he ultimately saw as children?3 Let’s further unpack the assumptions embedded in Buckland’s observations. When he calls these women children, he implicitly calls himself an adult. The racialized and gendered aspect of this distinction is indicated by his attention to their skin color and the way he suggests that the climate of their homeland determines their character and intelligence rather than simply their behavior. Being brown, they are not white like him; being of the tropics, their remoteness from the United States is obvious; being both, they cannot possibly be in full possession of mature intelligence as are true adults, to be held to the rules of proper (Western) womanhood, specifically “modesty.”4 Moreover, the last sentence of the epigraph – “Only the wonder is that I took it all so as a matter of course” – evinces an ambiguity about how he should have perceived the women at all. He spends time detailing why they were not overstepping their bounds (“they were children”), almost as if to convince us that his failure to rebuke them for their dishabille and behavior was not a lapse of judgment on his part after all. The oscillation of judgment in this passage is inevitable when a group of people are infantilized and hypersexualized at the same time.

3  Indeed, he pushes away this fascination by saying that they are mere “children” who do not know the meaning of “modesty” and propriety (“rules” of comportment and civility), suggesting that because of this they cannot be objects of sexual fascination for him. Yet we know, from 19th-century portrayals of (white) middle-class femininity in the United States, that the female child in particular proved to be an erotic representation of innocent womanhood with an alluring sexual potential. See Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 79. 4  Buckland’s suggestion that the warm climate was a cause of the women’s immodest sexuality has a long history in imperialist discourse regarding travel to various locations in the Pacific, and goes as far back as Aristotle. See Patty O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). Buckland’s descriptions also evoke the history of the hypersexualization of female weavers, seamstresses, and domestic workers. The case of Hannah Cullwick, for instance, is brilliantly parsed by Anne McClintock, who argues that the laboring woman is the double of motherhood in the domestic space of middle-class households – the nursemaid or nanny who, unlike the mother, was paid for her domestic labor. McClintock makes an argument about how certain forms of fetishism during the Victorian era were an attempt to make sense of the contradiction of female labor in imperial capitalism. Class, gender, and race are all imbricated in the cultural iterations that try to make sense of colonial relations. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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The depiction of Filipinas/os as children is not unique to Buckland and is, in fact, quite pervasive in American colonial discourse, comprising travel literature, photography, official government-sponsored reports, ethnological studies, and political cartoons produced by American colonials from the late 1880s through the first half of the 20th century. For the most part, the primary motivation in colonial discourse is clear: to justify colonial conquest, Filipinas/ os were portrayed as a childlike people in a state of dependency and in need of tutelage. Even when ‘the child’ or ‘childhood’ is not mentioned in various colonial discourses about the Philippines, the image of the child is implicit in any consideration of the capacity of Filipinos for self-government, of their education and ‘progress,’ and of America’s paternal ‘duty’ towards the Philippines. However, concurrent with the representation of Filipinas/os as children was the representation of them as hypersexual natives, particularly the women and girls. While this second stereotype also worked to justify the need for American colonialism to manage the development of the Philippines, it introduced the dangerous sexuality of the child that problematized the claims to virtuous intent of America’s stated mission of ‘benevolent assimilation.’ The hypersexualization of natives-as-children transformed the tenor of colonial intimacy from the parental/familial one suggested by benevolent assimilation into something rather incestuous and paedophilic. Looking at three cultural sites – the representations of savagery from an evolutionary perspective, the colonial hypersexualization of the native (especially native girls and women), and the anxieties surrounding mestizaje or racemixing – the rest of this chapter focuses on how the trope of the Filipina/oas-child circulated in colonial Philippines and turn of the 20th-century America and how the child figure came to be sexualized. I argue that the Filipina/o-as-child and the hypersexual native were two important modalities through which Filipinas/os were racialized during the American colonial conquest of the Philippines. The sexually-precocious native child was an image common in 18th- and 19th-century ethnography. By tracing the figure of the Filipina/o-as-child and representations of Filipino children in colonialera materials, we find that the hypersexualization of colonized native bodies intersects with their infantilization, producing a particular kind of trope of the Filipina/o-as-child that proved vexing to the U.S. imperialist mission. The case of the American Guardian Association, a Philippine-based and American-led charity that worked with mestiza/o children, is important in this sense, for at the same time that the female mestiza child’s beauty provided sexual titillation for American colonizers, she was used to portray the dangers of sexual predation upon precious American blood in the Philippines, thus providing the perfect icon to call for the continued colonial ‘protection’ and education of the Philippines and its people.

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Modalities of Racialization: Portrayals of the Filipina/o-as-Child and the Hypersexualized Filipina in Colonial Texts and Photographs

In the early years of American colonial occupation of the Philippines, nonwhite ‘savages’ were culturally linked to children and vice-versa,5 and American views of Filipinos were firmly that they were childlike in both mental and moral faculties and in the grand scheme of world civilizations. Americans’ prevailing attitudes towards Filipinos during this historical period were that Filipinos – despite comprising a very diverse population across the islands of the Philippine archipelago – were not yet civilized enough for self-rule, and there was uncertainty over whether they ever would be that civilized as a people. In his testimony to the U.S. Senate in 1902, Admiral George Dewey claimed, “Aguinaldo and the Filipinos [. . .] were bothering me. I was very busy getting my squadron ready for battle, and these little men were coming on board my ship at Hong Kong and taking a good deal of my time, and I did not attach the slightest importance to anything that they could do, and they did nothing.”6 The utter dismissiveness of Admiral Dewey’s description of Emilio Aguinaldo, the head of the not-insignificant Filipino revolutionary movement, and his lieutenants relies heavily on the phrase “little men,” the use of which brings to mind children, pestering ones in this case, who distract the important American officer from preparing for a war. As American studies scholar Laura Wexler argues, during Dewey’s testimony to the U.S. Senate, which was trying to make sense of the bloodshed of the Philippine-American War, “Dewey’s point is that any military alliance that might have been mistakenly arranged between the ‘irresponsible’ General [E. Spencer] Pratt, and these ‘little men’ would obviously have been no consequence, just as one cannot make a contract with a minor.”7 This specific comparison between Filipinos and children was a political move, for it evacuated the force of any verbal or written covenant American officials may have made with Aguinaldo, pledging American support for the Filipinos’ 5  For scholarly texts that point out this historical linkage between the child and the savage, see especially Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Benito M. Vergara, Jr., Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995); and Nerissa Balce-Cortes, “Savagery and Docility: Filipinos and the Language of the American Empire after 1898” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002). 6  Quoted in Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 43. 7  Wexler, Tender Violence, 44.

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nationalist revolution in return for the Filipinos’ support of America’s war with Spain. From high-ranking officials like Dewey and Philippine Governor-General and future American president William Howard Taft, to political and cultural critics like Aldice Gould Eames, the representation of the Filipina/o-as-child was prevalent. Taft once described his colonial subjects as “nothing but grown up children.”8 Here is Eames’s commentary on Philippine theater in 1906: “If the English-speaking resident of Manila suffers from a drama famine, his little brown brother does not. The unfettered child of nature has his emotional needs as abundantly catered to by the native playwrights as his bodily necessities are by bounteous nature.”9 The phrase “child of nature” echoes Buckland’s “brown children of the tropics” and is here associated with lack of restraint or perhaps of rules. The Filipinos’ emotional needs for cultural productions such as theatrical dramas – the creation and broad consumption of which might reasonably be considered an indication of a thriving civil society – are described as equal to bodily needs such as, presumably, eating, drinking, and excreting. Eames claims that “the drama is the form of literary effort that appeals to the least civilized mind most forcibly, because it can be seen, heard and understood with the minimum of mental exertion.”10 Further, he seems to regard the Filipino plays as lowbrow “clap-trap” in part because every “muchacho” (house boy/ servant), “cochero” (driver), and “lavandera” (washerwoman) insists on seeing them constantly, and will even, as Eames accuses, steal from their American masters to pay for the tickets if the money cannot be borrowed.11 While the annoyance expressed by Dewey and Eames in their respective derogations of Filipinos takes on the tone of irritation with a pestering child, the cause for the annoyance is actually far more serious than they make it out to be. Aguinaldo was negotiating with the Americans for outright Philippine independence; and the natives of Manila were voraciously watching seditious plays. Eames writes:

8  Quoted in Glenn Anthony May, Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913 (Westport: Greenwood, 1980), 10. 9  Aldice Gould Eames, “The Filipino Drama,” Pacific Monthly 16, no. 3 (September 1906): 349, http://books.google.com/books?id=IcMUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA349&dq=Aldice+Gould+ Eames&hl=en&ei=7Nn7TISkMZPQsAP-1b33DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&r esnum=3&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Aldice%20Gould%20Eames&f=false (accessed April 8, 2014). 10  Ibid. 11  Ibid.

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“Independencia” is the keynote of these dramas, these bombastic phenomena that are so irresistible to the native Filipino [. . .]. Sedition is the simplest form of speech that infant lips can try – in the Philippines. If the population of the planet consisted of three Filipinos, two of them would plot an insurrection against the government, and their revolution would come to naught because of the leaders conspiring against each other. Thus the native mind is a rich culture bed for the propagation of sedition germs, which are scattered broadcast from the stage of the Tagalog theatre.12 This paranoid anxiety over Filipino sedition, insurrection, and revolution powered the uneven yet assiduous effort on the part of Americans to depict Filipinos as children during the late 1800s and early 1900s, an attempt to rhetorically defang the prospect and hope of Filipino self-determination, both to the Filipinos themselves and to the rest of the world watching America’s next steps in extraterritorial imperialism.13 In a way, America’s anxiety over its fledgling status as imperial power fed into its portrayals of Filipinos as an even younger and inexperienced people on the imagined scale of civilization. Philosopher and child studies scholar David Archard explains how the modern conception14 of childhood in the West began with the first serious psychological studies of children during the second half of the 19th century. This shift roughly coincided with the installation of a formal American empire in the Philippines. Archard claims that Darwin’s 1877 “A Biographical Sketch of the Infant” greatly influenced child theory by placing the child in “a broader evolutionary context,” which led others, like Ernst Haeckel, to formulate the theory of recapitulation, where the development of the species is reflected in the individual’s ‘development.’15 The idea of development became one of the primary scientific theoretical models by which children were understood and treated. In the developmental model, childhood is merely a stage that leads to adulthood, and so it is teleological. The model also assumes that development 12  Ibid. 13  Through the threat of military force, the United States had already gained imperialist extraterritorial rights in Japan in the 1850s, opening up the isolationist Japanese shogunate to trade with the West. 14  David Archard, Children: Rights and Childhood, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004). Archard makes a distinction between the terms concept and conception, where concept denotes a general idea that “has an uncontroversial and commonly agreed sense,” while conception refers to a “set of rules or principles” which defines the concept more specifically (27). 15  Ibid., 41.

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is necessary for all humans, irrespective of cultural variance, and that it is a function of genetic inheritance and is thus “biologically fixed.”16 The Western argument for the teleological character of the child’s development, in view of how it reflects humanity’s social development, heavily informs the American colonial representations of Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century. As Archard succinctly puts it, “[c]hildhood in relation to adulthood mirrors the primitive in relation to the civilised and the modern, the primate in relation to the properly human.”17 By constantly referring to Filipinos as children, American colonials were using a kind of shorthand to claim that Filipinos and their culture were uncivilized in comparison to the Western (white) world. Furthermore, when Americans called Filipinos ‘monkeys,’ or portrayed them as such in caricatures (many instances of which have been documented in various historiographies of Philippine-American relations18), they were also obliquely calling them children since primates represented the childhood of humanity in the recapitulative view of human evolution. Thus, when we study the meanings of ‘the child,’ we confront the troubling ways in which personhood is not seen to be an inalienable characteristic of human beings. At what point would the United States decide that Filipinos had finally come into their metaphorical adulthood as a civilization? When colonizers get to decide, how is it not an arbitrary decision? And is personhood something we can truly confer through mechanisms of the law? Historian David Healy, in his 1970 work on U.S. expansionism, discusses the roles of Spencerian social evolutionary theory and Social Darwinism in justifying racial hierarchies and empire in Europe, and the importation of such discourses to the United States in the late 19th century. Alongside Archard, among 16  Ibid., 43. 17  Ibid., 44. With respect to child sexuality and the sexuality of the colonized other as child, theoretical discourse of the sexual child is notable in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, and particularly helpful here is the convergence of the child and the “savage” in Freud’s work. For example, drawing on anthropological examples of the incest taboo in Totem and Taboo, he judges the energetic enforcement of the incest taboo in various savage societies as a consequence of primitive peoples’ susceptibility to incestuous behavior. For Freud, this sheds light on the importance in the nuclear complex of neurosis for a child, the Oedipus complex, in which love objects have an incestuous nature. In other words, the ‘infantile’ nature of these savages and their horror of incest illuminate the psychology of children in the modern, civilized societies in which Freud lives. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, the Standard Edition, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1950). 18  For a plethora of these caricatures, see Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio, The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons (San Francisco: T’Boli, 2004).

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other scholars, Healy notes that a significant aspect of such evolutionary theories was the image of the child: The evolutionary approach had multiple advantages: it not only established and explained the workings of progress, but it allowed for both the perfectibility and the inequality of man. The various human sub-groups, it developed, were at different stages in the universal process of evolution; some peoples were far ahead of the others. [. . .] The images of childhood and maturity came to symbolize the relation of the advanced to the backward peoples, and immediately suggested the operative function of the relationship: parental tutelage. [. . .] The conclusion was inescapable: it was not only possible for the civilized to lead the backward toward the light, it was actually their moral duty to do so.19 Through the language of evolutionary progress, Healy claims, the discourse of American colonialism establishes the necessity of a paternal/parental relationship with the Filipinos, given that colonial discourse has as its central trope the figure of the native as child. Thus, the image of the child is implicit, whether or not the words ‘the child’ or ‘childhood’ are mentioned, in any consideration of the capacity of Filipinos for self-government, of their education and ‘progress,’ and of America’s paternalistic ‘duty’ toward the Philippines. Compounding this representation of Filipinos as children is the concurrence of the racialized stereotype of the hypersexual native. I argue that the infantilization of Filipinos made them more easily hypersexualized via the stereotype of the female primitive or savage. While it is common to understand colonialism and imperialism as reconfiguring and solidifying racial or ethnic hierarchies, with the colonizers at the top of the heap, imperialism is as imbricated in ideologies of gender and sexuality as it is in racism. Indeed, the language of gender and sexuality, cross-hatched by class, was often the means by which the racial difference of colonized peoples was produced and secured, expressly in the moments of imperial discourses that link savagery and sexuality.20 In particular, in her tour de force essay, “The Filipina’s Breast,” 19  David Healy, US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 15. 20  On the colonial linkages made between savagery and sexuality, see also Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967); McClintock, Imperial Leather; Vicente L. Rafael, “Mimetic Subjects: Engendering Race at the Edge of the Empire,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 127–49; and T. Denean

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postcolonial and Filipina/o American studies scholar Nerissa Balce argues that the trope of the Filipina as savage was one of the icons of what she calls an “erotics of American Empire,” defined as “the play of earlier racialized and gendered discourses that constructed the Filipina as a new nonwhite other whose alterity incorporated the ideas, images, and vocabularies of the conquests of the New World, the frontier, and the legacies of slavery.”21 Balce calls for an intersectional approach to the study of Philippine colonization by the United States through its intersection with histories of Native American and African American subjugation, claiming that the photographing and circulation of images of the naked breasts of Filipina natives were indexical acts of American conquest. Borrowing from Anne McClintock’s term “porno-tropics” of colonialism to describe the discursive and visual “relationship between pornographic fantasies of the tropics and the brutal, often violent facts of conquest,” she moreover draws a parallel between, on the one hand, the European colonial tradition of representing “lubricious” black women in Africa and, on the other, American representations of equally “lubricious” black female slaves and “breast-baring brown women from indigenous cultures” in the United States and Hawai‘i.22 For Balce, the hypersexualization of the female ‘savage’ in imperial discourses is an act of colonial conquest. However, as Balce observes, America did not treat Cuba, another colonial holding won from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War, the same way that it did the Philippines. Could it have been partly because of the photographs of naked female breasts, circulated in the United States via postcards? There was something about the Philippines that made it easier to represent them as more backward, as Balce argues, having to do with the photos of the indigenous, naked and topless, that made them seem more like savages and children needing to be educated, to be brought up into both literal and metaphorical adulthood. She writes: “The Filipina’s naked body, like other native women’s bodies, ritualistically feminized the colonized land. [. . .] The ambivalent position of the Filipina body – as savage, as divine creature, as surly and ‘unlovely’ – was a stark contrast to the image of the properly dressed and attractive ‘Spanish maidens’ of Cuba and Puerto Rico.”23

Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 21  Nerissa S. Balce, “The Filipina’s Breast: Savagery, Docility, and the Erotics of the American Empire,” Social Text 24, no. 287 (Summer 2006): 92. 22  Ibid., 95. 23  Ibid., 99. It should be noted, however, that Puerto Rico, unlike Cuba and eventually the Philippines, was never granted independence.

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According to Jonathan Best, who curates a sample of colonial-era Philippine postcards in his book Philippine Picture Postcards, “[t]hese images of what Americans thought exotic or sensational were sometimes quite offensive and deliberate distortions of Filipino culture and values.”24 Imbricated in these distortions was an “over abundance of pictures of bare chested Ifugao girls or datus with their several wives.” Best claims they “were snickered at in ‘civilized’ parlors a century ago,”25 yet such postcards of bare-chested girls and presumed-to-be-submissive women were probably not so much “snickered at” as used to fuel the sexual (porno-tropic) fantasies of their viewers half a world away, thus also confirming for Americans the uncivilized, unrestrained savagery of Filipinos. These distortions bore political valence, in that they portrayed a country “in dire need of America’s ‘beneficent’ administration and technological progress” so as to justify American colonization of the Philippines.26 However, Best and Balce gloss over the implications of the representation of girls (as distinct from adult women) in such photographs. In much of the critical literature, an understanding of hypersexualized girls is subsumed into the hypersexualization of women. This almost-automatic critical move is what this chapter attempts to tease apart. The naked girls in the photographs were not simply understood as indexes of savagery that proved the need for colonial management; they were part and parcel of a discursive colonial system that conflated adult and child bodies, alongside and distinct from the conflation of the intellectual and moral capacities of Filipino adults and those of Filipino children. Other examples of physical conflation abound in colonial-era photographs taken by Americans of Filipino natives, particularly those in outlying, nonChristian areas. Dean C. Worcester, an American zoologist who became the Secretary of the Interior of the Philippine Islands from 1901 to 1913, wrote several ethnological studies on Philippine populations that were widely circulated. He also kept a collection of photographs that he organized and annotated himself. Historian Christopher Capozzola reproduces many of these photographs in his online essay on Worcester’s ethnographic images of Filipinos. In particular, there is a series of eroticized images of Filipino women and girls, “paired photographs of women that juxtaposed them with and without blouses.”27 24  Jonathan Best, Philippine Picture Postcards: 1900–1920 (Manila: Bookmark, 1994), 5. 25  Ibid. 26  Ibid. 27  Christopher Capozzola, “Photography and Power in the Colonial Philippines II: Dean Worcester’s Ethnographic Images of Filipinos (1898–1912),” MIT Visualizing Cultures, http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/photography_and_power_02/dw02_essay02.html (accessed April 30, 2014).

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“Three girls from Kapangan, types 5, 6, and 7. Full length front views” (1907).28

28 The caption was written by Dean C. Worcester (With permission, courtesy of The University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology).

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illustration 9.2

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“Three girls from Kapangan” (1907).29

29 The caption was written by Dean C. Worcester (With permission, courtesy of The University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology).

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Although Capozzola makes the uncritical conflation himself when he writes only “women,” Worcester captioned a set of paired photographs of the Benguet “types” as “Three girls from Kapangan” (emphasis added; see Illustrations 9.1 and 9.2). What do we make of the hypersexualized native child? Let’s recall Ralph Kent Buckland’s description of the weaving women as “brown children of the tropics.” As it turns out, that phrase is quite loaded with a long history of linking warm climates with excessive female sexuality, which fed the stereotype of female primitivism. According to colonial historian Patty O’Brien in her study of the stereotype of exotic native women in the Pacific, hotter climates were thought to advance the sexual maturity of females, to the point where pre-pubescent girls, as young as eight and nine, were believed to be sexually mature. Such beliefs were at work during 18th-century colonialism in the Pacific and had analogues in the urban centers of Western imperialist countries. O’Brien writes: Hot climates were the determining factor of the racialized (as opposed to the classed) version of female primitivism. The provenance of this belief that tropical climates magnified women’s sexual potency extends back to antiquity. Hot climates and weather, according to Aristotle, increased the wetness of women, thereby invigorating women’s sexual desire, while hot weather had the opposite effect on men, rendering them sexually incapacitated. [. . .] Hot weather was viewed as having a similar effect on women as on plants and animals: it caused them to thrive. Consistently warm weather had the effect of “ripening” girls like fruit. Menarche was accelerated and libido heightened. Hot weather, Aristotle argued, increased the animality of women, and once initiated in sex, these women reveled in it and did not possess the capacity of reason to stop. In this classical construction of women’s sexuality are the seeds for the later theories of black and indigenous women’s hypersexuality, as well as the justification of the ill treatment of non-Occidental women by their men, particularly in the practice of polygamy. [. . .] Heat arrested mental development thereby justifying rigid gradations of society and the exploitation of people [putatively] lower down on the human scale. Built into this idea was the justification of sexual exploitation of youthful girls and boys of the empire and the lower classes.30 30  O’Brien, The Pacific Muse, 54–55.

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Buckland’s and Worcester’s observations of native women have a genealogical link to the discourses that O’Brien discusses above. Indeed, Worcester also had a set of photographs that staged Filipinas in the same striking, highlyeroticized way that the Primitivist artist Paul Gauguin staged Tahitian women, who lay on their side while nude and posing for the painter or photographer. The fact that Worcester staged the photos rather than catching the women and girls in their natural element, as it were, suggests that a primitive hypersexuality was projected on to the bodies of Filipina native women. Capozzola notes that “[i]n contrast to his photographs of axe-wielding male warriors, Worcester’s images of women often feature an exoticism and danger of a different sort. For many American men, travel in the Philippines prompted fantasies of escape from the dictates of Victorian society.”31 The sexualized “exoticism and danger” that these men expected in the Philippines were produced for the camera. But if we look closely at the subjects themselves, we can see fissures in the orchestrated scenes that challenge the broad depiction of native girls’ precocious sexuality. For instance, in the topless version of the erotic paired photographs of the “Three girls of Kapangan” (see Illustration 9.2), the girls look more uncomfortable without their blouses – note the hunched shoulders. It is especially noticeable that one of the girls has rearranged her hair to cover her nipples and as much of her chest as possible. Yet the photographic and discursive representations of Filipinas did not only rely on bare breasts; and nude or partially nude photos were not the only types of postcard that pictured Filipino women and girls.32 There was a wide range of representations of the Philippines and its people in 20th-century postcards that circulated in the United States via American colonials. Best argues that the postcards “reflected the naive curiosity and the cultural and racial prejudices the Americans brought with them. Along with the many excellent images of traditional Philippine life, there were dozens of pictures of carabao, coconut trees, native ‘savages,’ and women and children smoking foot-long cigars.”33 There were images of girls and young women with naked breasts, yes, but there were also images of “elegantly dressed mestizo matrons” and girls

31  Capozzola, “Photography and Power in the Colonial Philippines II.” 32  See also Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) and Denise Cruz, Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012) on the varying representations of Filipina women during American occupation, particularly with regard to educated Filipinas. 33  Best, Philippine Picture Postcards, 5.

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and of simple “market vendors”: “Cards picturing pretty Filipinas were used as early advertisements for sewing machines, shampoo, and many other items.”34 Far from portraying the Philippines as a land of civility, however, such images of “pretty Filipinas” had a precursor both within other colonial contexts, as described by Balce and O’Brien, and within the United States in the form of mid-19th-century abolitionist cartes de visite portraying African American enslaved children. Young pale-skinned African American girls were particularly featured in these cards. Historian Mary Niall Mitchell argues that these cards also had pornographic associations, despite the abolitionist impetus: With the invention of the photograph, pornographers could use the bodies and the direct gazes of real women returning the stares of the male spectator rather than fictionalized or painted ones. Like pornographic photographs, images of white-looking slave girls did not replace fantasies of beautiful mulatto and octoroon women enslaved and violated but, rather, further encouraged them. Seeing the portrait of Rebecca [a paleskinned slave girl] kneeling in prayer, for instance, a white northern audience read in her white skin a history of “miscegenation,” generations of it, resulting from the sexual interaction of white masters with their female slaves [. . .]. And Rebecca’s girlish form raised the possibility of future violations (whereas the image of a woman might have represented virtue already lost) and further invited the exercise of viewers’ imaginations as they looked at her photograph.35 Furthermore, Mitchell maintains that the youth portrayed in cards in the Victorian period that featured white American girls reinforced the hypersexual character of the images because the “association of white girls with innocence and purity gave their images the allure of the forbidden, thus making them all the more enticing and seemingly sexually vulnerable” – a powerful combination that “sold by the thousands” in the second half of the 19th century in the form of mass-produced prints.36 The “allure of the forbidden” recalls the lure of “exoticism and danger” noted by Capozzola in the Philippine case, although Mitchell names the “forbidden” allure as a form of paedophilia. The chronological proximity of the Philippine postcards to the American cartes de visite in terms of their circulation within the U.S. presents the argument for reading the postcards in a similar light. 34  Ibid., 43. 35  Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child, 64. 36  Ibid., 79.

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These photographs of pretty Filipino women and girls circulated alongside other photographs that evidenced the dark side of America’s presence in the Philippines. According to Best, For each sensitive study of an Ifugao woman dressed in handwoven fabrics and beautifully designed jewelry or a Kalinga [Igorot] man in his elegant attire, there are numerous postcards which make disparaging cracks about the “uncivilized” habits of these “savages” and “headhunters.” In the case of the Muslims, pictures of dead and mutilated juramentados [suicidal Moro assassins] and datus with numerous wives appealed to those looking for the sensational. Even snapshots of American soldiers, posing with human skulls or inspecting the carnage after the massacre of Mount Bud-Dajo on Jolo, found their way onto postcards.37 Thus, an interest in the physical beauty and cultural arts of the Philippine people was underlaid by a disturbing and violent racism. The juxtaposition of images of beautiful native women and of the violent deaths of native men, women, and children indicates that they were two sides of the same coin. The large range of representations – depicting not only industriousness, technical and artistic skill, a civilized vanity, but also sexual excess (“numerous wives”) and sensationalized death – had to do with the fact that many different groups of people comprise the native population of the Philippines: Igorots, Negritos, Tagalogs, Visayans, Moros, and so on. Indeed, much of the imperial discourse produced in the late 1800s and early 1900s were ethnologies, or anthropological typologies of Filipino “tribes.” In the context of such ethnologies, the bodies of native males were not immune from erotic scrutiny either. Even more, infantilization could lead to hypersexualization in certain cases, as demonstrated by Mitchell’s example of the cartes de visite and O’Brien’s discussion of the stereotype of primitive sexuality. In this vein also consider the work of child studies scholar Claudia Castañeda, who, in tracing the marginal appearances of the child in American scientific discourse, found that racialized children were significant liminal as well as non-normative figures, imagined to be the outside limit of true maturity and adulthood with regard to intelligence and sexuality. In a conception similar to that found by O’Brien in the context of Pacific colonialism, some of the late 19th- and early 20th-century texts that Castañeda studied argued that during adolescent development of the “Negro child,” there was a struggle between intellectual and sexual development, with the sexual winning in the racialized body: 37  Best, Philippine Picture Postcards, 93–94.

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According to one account [. . .] the developing body also exhibited a Malthusian struggle for existence within itself between intellectual and sexual development. In keeping with a more general hypersexualization of blackness that continues today, this struggle, in the “Negro” child, was won by the sexual (defined in terms of passion as well as reproductive purpose), as the intellect succumbed to its own developmental limit.38 This view was put forth by Eugene S. Talbot, a physician and dentist who wrote an 1898 medical text, entitled Degeneracy, on abnormalities and hereditary disorders. Talbot further wrote: “The conflict for existence between brain growth and reproductive organ growth at puberty [led to] the triumph of the reproductive” for “full” and mixed-race black children.39 If such conceptions about black children and adults’ abnormal (hyper)sexuality were circulating around the same time as the American colonial presence in the Philippines, it is more than possible that similar views were applied to Filipinos’ “savage” sexuality as well.

Protecting (White) American Blood: The Work of the American Guardian Association

As the Talbot example suggests, racialized children and their sexuality were of crucial interest in modern studies of the child as they played contrastive and liminal roles for early theorists and researchers looking to understand normative (white) childhood. The mixed-race child, in particular, was an important figure in early 20th-century scientific studies of miscegenation in a race- and bloodline-obsessed America.40 Racial mixing, or mestizaje, in the Philippines was already quite common by the time Americans arrived because of previous Spanish colonization and the presence of a significant population of Chinese on the Islands, but it became a significant concern for the American colonial administration during the, approximately, forty years of its occupation. Not only were American colonial ethnologists determined to document 38  Claudia Castañeda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 36. 39  Quoted in ibid., 36. 40  See Warwick Anderson, “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States,” Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (April 2012): S95–S107, which details the intellectual history of the science of racial hybridity beginning in the 1920s, a science loaded with eugenicist overtones.

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and quantify the “blood”/racial admixture of the various Filipino populations of the archipelago that they were photographing and writing about, but there was also the fact that many children were born of American men and native Filipina women. Called mestizas and mestizos, these children came to be among the concerns of social welfare advocates in both the Philippines and the United States. There seems to have been a general consensus that mixing the blood of Filipinos with that of the Spanish, (white) American, or Chinese could only improve the Filipino “stock.” In the 1900 Report of the Philippine Commission, produced by American colonial officials studying the various laws and customs of the Philippines and making policy recommendations based on their observations, the section on marriage laws remarks that the marriages of the Chinese in the Philippines were relatively less regulated by the Catholic Church than those of Filipinos because Chinese mestizos were deemed the most industrious race.41 The report recommends that new civil policies be enacted immediately to encompass non-Catholic intermarriage between Americans and natives (presumably white Protestant American men and Filipino women).42 Moreover, the ethnological descriptions of Negritos evince a eugenicist belief in the improvement of certain races through miscegenation with other, supposedly more “developed,” races. Despite being compared to African Americans in physical characteristics, Negritos were portrayed more like Native Americans – as a vanishing race that was likely to die out within the next generation. Ethnologists studying the Philippines even earlier than the Americans, like the Frenchman Joseph Montano, claim that “their blood has been kept pure” because, as prey, they are weak, contrasting them with racially mixed Filipinos: “They [Negritos] are fatally destined to disappear. The half breeds, on the contrary, are very widely scattered, and there is no people in the Archipelago that does not reveal a mixture of their blood.”43 There was concern over what would happen to the mixed-race children born of interracial unions if the American father left the native mother (or died).44 By the early 1920s a shift seems to have taken place in thinking about 41   United States, Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission to the President, Vol. I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900), 138. 42  Ibid., 139. 43  Joseph Montano, “The Negritos: Being a translation made for the use of the former Division of Ethnology, of pp. 310–317 of Montano’s “Mission aux Philippines,” Negrito-Aeta Paper No. 4 (Paris, 1885, trans. 1902), 1. 44  Even in the early 1900s, there was anxiety over American soldiers’ abandonment of their Filipina wives. See David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and

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Philippine children, from Worcester’s porno-tropic photographs of anthropological specimens (see the 1907 Kapangan girls in Illustrations 9.1 and 9.2) to their portrayal as the political and civilizational future of the Islands. So many American/Filipina/o children were born then subsequently abandoned that, in late 1921, several affluent American colonials and military officials, including Governor-General Leonard Wood, formed a charity called the American Guardian Association45 to “guard and care for children wholly or partly of American blood in the Philippines who are without proper protectors.”46 By 1925 there were an estimated 18,000 American/Filipina/o mestizo children in the Philippines, with about 4,000 thought to be in need of the organization’s help. The notion of “benevolent assimilation” was the predominant paradigm for understanding the U.S.–Philippine colonial relationship for much of the 20th century, despite the fact that the Philippine-American War from 1899–190247 resulted in hundreds of thousands of Filipino deaths (due to both famine and disease and military violence). The so-called proof of American benevolence lay in the establishment of public schooling, the building of schools, roads, and other infrastructure, and the training of native and mestizo Filipinos in democratic self-government. By 1921 the outgoing U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, told Congress that the Filipino-led government was stable and thus met the primary condition set for Philippine independence from the United States. Yet the Republican-controlled Congress ignored this recommendation. Also, with the incoming Republican President came a new appointment for the post of Governor-General of the Philippines, Leonard Wood, a protégé of Theodore Roosevelt, who had been appointed as Military Governor of Cuba from 1899–1902 and governor of the Moro (Muslim) Province in the Philippines from 1903 to 1906.48 Imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 74–75. 45  It was originally called the American Mestizo Protective Association. 46   Lieut.-Col. Gordon Johnston, “American Guardian Association,” 1921, reprinted in American Oldtimer 559 (September 1939): 9. 47  The United States claimed victory in 1902, even though fighting continued in some regions for about a decade longer. 48  As governor of the Moro Province, Wood oversaw the violent and publicly-shocking Battle of Bud Dajo in 1906, during which American forces attacked a village located in a volcanic crater, Bud Dajo, where Muslim Moro rebels were gathering and mounting an uprising. During the battle, almost everyone in the village, including women and children, were killed, an estimated 800–900 Moros. In contrast, the Americans sustained between one and two dozen casualties or deaths. It was images of this massacre that Jonathan Best notes “found their way onto postcards” (Philippine Picture Postcards, 94).

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Helping to form the American Guardian Association was one of the first things Wood did as Governor-General. Although the Filipino-led legislature of the Philippines showed every sign of stable government and a burning desire for independence, for members of the Association, American mestiza/o children represented the promise of a future Philippines ruled by biracial (and, it was hoped, bicultural) Filipinos whose American, specifically Caucasian, blood supposedly afforded them “ ‘imagination and initiative wholly lacking in the native’ ” and who would thus most assuredly lead the Philippines with American interests in mind. The boys, in particular, were expected to become the next generation of leaders for the Filipino people. The girls, on the other hand, were to be raised to become “wives of ambitious and selfrespecting men.”49 In 1925 the Association held a fundraising drive to get an ambitious $2 million in charitable donations to put in a trust and use the annual interest for the day-to-day management of the Association. Several newspaper notices about the drive were published in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times between September and November 1925. The notion of “American blood” is prominent in the accounts of the children in these notices. Blood is at once a figurative (synecdochic) reference to the fact that the children were fathered by Americans and a broader reference to U.S. interest in the Philippines and America’s imperial aims. According to Wood, “Rather than a charity, this will be an investment in good American citizenship. We cannot as a people afford to have American blood on a lower social level than the blood of other nations. But such will be the inevitable result if we fail in this humanitarian and social obligation. Wherefore we shall not fail.”50 Rather than disowning the mixed-race offspring, these American colonial leaders urged their uplift, in part for appearance’s sake as the U.S. was in competition with “other nations.” The fact that the call for donations was issued by the head of the American colonial government (Wood) – and backed by other current and former American colonial top-ranking officials, such as former Governor-General Cameron Forbes – propped up the Association’s work as a government mandate that only needed the moral and monetary support of the American people to succeed. In these newspaper notices, the children are described as more America’s children than not. Perhaps this had something to do with a sense of ownership that Americans felt towards the Philippines in 1925. What the articles 49  Mary Frances Kern quoted in “Asks Fund to Help Mestizo Children,” New York Times, September 29, 1925, 27. 50  Wood quoted in ibid.

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emphasize, moreover, are the Caucasian features of the children. Several phrases recur, such as “light hair and blue eyes,” “high-spirited,” and “unusually bright,” probably indicating that the newspapers were given a set of talking points. Here are a couple of example passages: As a class they are unusually bright, the Malay characteristics being subordinate to the American in them. Physically they are more American than Malay, with light hair and blue eyes. The girls are nearly all good looking, and both they and the boys are nearly all energetic and highspirited. Educated and protected to maturity they promise a new and useful element in Filipino leadership.51 And: To the varied mixture of races in the Philippines, American occupation has added a new blend, not without promise of social and political value. [. . .] Qualified observers report that, like the Eurasians of India, they are “unusually bright.” In the life of the islands, Japanese and Chinese mestizos have taken a leading part – not always, as yet, a beneficial part. In the American mestizos, Caucasian predominate over Malay traits – light hair and blue eyes, comeliness among the girls and high-spirited energy among the boys. Governor Wood and former Governor Cameron Forbes are of the opinion that, when properly protected and educated, they are destined to form a stabilizing element in the native population, a means of introducing salutary ideas of self-rule and administrative efficiency. So long as our responsibilities continue, they will be an invaluable means of commending progress to the other natives. When it ceases, they will greatly increase the likelihood of carrying on effectively.52 51  M. E., “Homeless Philippine Children,” The Washington Post (October 11, 1925): S2. 52  “The American Mestizo,” New York Times, October 16, 1925, 20. The dismissive treatment of the Japanese and Chinese mestizas/os, “full” native Filipinos, and the Spanish mestizas/ os – among whom numbered many of the current Filipino leadership in government – strongly suggests that the Association was against the granting of independence to the Philippines, at least, not until their American mestiza/o charges were grown enough to take leadership positions in government. Indeed, there was a lot of friction between Wood and the Filipino legislative branch, who accused Wood of instituting military dictatorship given that his cabinet all consisted of members of the military. That Wood was able to push through policies despite the dysfunction between the legislative and executive branch suggests that the Filipinos’ political participation in the Insular Government was nominal at best. See Carmi A. Thompson, “Are the Filipinos Ready for Independence?”

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According to the articles, then, the children’s Caucasian looks indicate Caucasian personalities and character traits that show the potential of “stabilizing” the Philippines with “self-rule” and “administrative efficiency” so long as the children are “properly protected and educated.” The articles, not surprisingly, divide Filipinos and Americans along civilizational lines, with Filipinos falling on the wrong side, as was common in many American texts during the turn of the 20th century. Although the American Guardian Association actually did take in non-mestiza/o orphans at times, the charity is represented in these articles as the steward of white American children in need.53 The rhetoric in the newspaper notices focuses on the social implications of the children’s inherited physical, mental, and psychological qualities, as well as on their ability to pass on these same qualities to coming generations of Filipinos. The notion of white American blood, via genetic material, infusing the native population of the Philippines was meant to be a seductive lure for the readers of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times to get them to fill the coffers of the Association. The discussion of these children focused not only on the importance of their education and upbringing but also on their “protection.” In the attempt to garner donations, the newspaper notices inevitably tie discussion of the children’s needs to the sexuality of the children, particularly the sexual vulnerability of the girls. Repeatedly, in the newspaper notices, letters to the editor, journal articles, and other Association publications, mention is made of the dire circumstances of the children. The native mothers are characterized as incapable of caring for their children alone: Unable, by the hardest kind of drudgery, to earn more than 50 cents a day many of these abandoned or widowed women have taken other partners or, as is often the case, have drifted into immorality. In such cases, the boys are soon kicked out to shift for themselves, while the girls are farmed out or lent to friends or relatives. This latter has often been the first step toward immoral exploitation.54 The mothers, it is warned, either “drift into immorality” or “take other partners” (who presumably do not want to care for the children). Left to fend for Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 131, Supplement (May 1927): 6–8. 53  The focus on supposedly “American” features like “light hair and blue eyes” ignores the existence of mestiza/o children born from Filipina women and African American soldiers. 54  “Asks Fund to Help Mestizo Children,” 27.

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themselves, the children fall into exploitative hands, the girls particularly to being pimped out: “2,500 of the cases are urgent. In the case of the girls it is necessary to shield them from prostitution or sale into marriage not far removed from slavery.”55 Even when they end up in the care of relatives – the Filipino relatives of the mother as the American fathers were usually in the Philippines on their own – the children are still vulnerable to exploitation: “Many stories have been brought back to [the U.S.] about native guardians bartering for mestizo children, and in numerous cases young children have been rescued from degrading surroundings by members of the association.”56 This accusation against the “native guardians” of exploitation, even incestuous assault, suggests that Filipinos do not have appropriate notions of kinship ties, national loyalty, or civilized society.57 The insinuation that native Filipinas’ and Filipinos’ exploitation of the halfwhite American mestiza/o children stems from their lack of desire or, worse, genetic inability, to properly care for them is meant to raise the specter of unnameable horrors done to the children. Although a couple of the newspaper notices mention that the majority of mestiza/o children are being raised properly, many of the derogatory statements about native mothers and relatives are generalized to the whole native population. The specter of horrors perpetrated on the children may have proved particularly useful in convincing Americans to donate to the Association, reminding them not only of the panic a generation earlier that culminated in the passage of the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, but also of the more recent action by the League of Nations, which took up the issue of “white slavery” – or the forced prostitution and trafficking of white women and girls – as an international problem in 1921. Indeed, the newspaper descriptions of the mestiza girls hark back to the way early feminist reformers in the United States (and England) sought to address the sexuality of children during the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Their successful campaigns raised the age of consent (specifically for girls), reformed rape law, and inculcated children with ideas of “social 55  M. E. “Homeless Philippine Children,” S2. 56  “Our Mestizos Ask Help,” New York Times, October 18, 1925, XX4. 57  According to Ann Laura Stoler, Dutch colonial representatives in Indonesia also cited child neglect by impoverished native mothers as the cause of the children’s turn to immorality and crime. They even singled out the mixed-race girls, claiming that they were “no longer ‘safe’ in their parental homes,” particularly if their fathers were deceased. They were then more vulnerable to being “ ‘exploited for unfit practices’ by their mothers and native or Indo stepfathers at an early age.” Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 118.

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purity.”58 According to sociologists and gender and sexuality studies scholars R. Danielle Egan and Gail Hawkes, “purity discourses conceptualized the etiology of vice as the result of contagion within the life of the child. [. . .] Girls raised by prostitutes were believed to ‘catch’ the deviance of their mothers, which created defiant and bawdy behavior.”59 The language of contagion and mothers’ sexual deviance sounds similar to the description of Filipina mothers who “drift into immorality” and lead their daughters to “immoral exploitation.”60 The American Guardian Association saw and represented the children in their care in a remarkably similar vein to reformers a generation past, including their racialized vision. Although the rhetoric of the Progressive Era was universalist, according to law scholar Jane Larson, the claim by white women reformers to be the caretakers of social morality effectively included only women from dominant cultures, religions, and races. Poor women, immigrant women, and women of color were “corrupted by their culture,” or less moral in the eyes of their elite sisters. Characterized as more in need of maternal guidance than 58  These reformers also campaigned against prostitution and pornography (the social purity movement was based on Christian religious understandings of moral sexual conduct), which led to the abovementioned laws and policy action on “white slavery,” wherein it was exposed that young teenage girls were being lured, abducted, and sold into prostitution domestically and abroad. According to law scholar Jane Larson, a large part of the reason to raise the age of consent was that it was difficult to prosecute abductors and rapists who could claim that girls as young as ten (and seven in Delaware) had consented to sexual intercourse. The consent defense was so powerful that, according to 19th-century attorney Georgia Mark, “ ‘when [the defendant] is allowed to set up the plea of ‘consent’ his acquittal is almost certain. If he can prove the voluntary acquiescence of his victim, no matter how or when it was obtained, he need not make any attempt to deny the commission of the crime.” Quoted in Jane E. Larson, “ ‘Even a Worm Will Turn at Last’: Rape Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 9.1, article 1 (1997): 19, http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol9/iss1/1 (accessed July 27, 2016). At the same time, it was difficult to prove forcible rape in the courts and to punish the sexual abuse, exploitation, and seduction (through fraud) of children within families and by men in positions of authority, such as teachers and physicians (15). Thus, raising the age of consent was “a strategy for effectively ‘criminalizing’ categories of sexual acts that the existing law did not yet treat as sexual crimes, at least for a small group of especially vulnerable victims (girls and young women)” (19). 59  R. Danielle Egan and Gail Hawkes, “Producing the Prurient through the Pedagogy of Purity: Childhood Sexuality and the Social Purity Movement,” Journal of Historical Sociology 20, no. 4 (December 2007): 448. 60  “Asks Fund to Help Mestizo Children,” 27.

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competent to mother the world, these less privileged women were marginalized as “grateful recipients of the moral reform message,” never embraced as active agents of “organized womanhood.”61 Perhaps one reason why the American Guardian Association focused so assiduously on the whiteness of their charges in the newspaper notices was the belief that while anyone could be saved from vice and immorality, only white children in their innocence could be symbols of “hope for the future.”62 Yet the nurture argument that poor mothering and neglect were the cause of mixed-race children turning to immorality was problematized by the nature argument of eugenics and the focus on blood within the same newspaper notices about the American Guardian Association and their charges. The figure of the American mestiza girl was haunted by the stereotype of the hypersexual native, despite her being infused with white blood. Given that the mestiza child’s Filipino blood comes from the mother, the stereotype of hypersexual primitive woman (and girl) comes into play. Not only does the mestiza child’s beauty ‘invite’ a sexualized gaze, but her native blood might cause her to bloom early. Given the specter of slavery, once again we come face to face with the figure of the tragic mulatto. Mitchell’s study of white Northerners who were the recipients of the cartes de visite featuring African American slave children provides insight into another way these newspaper notices about the American Guardian Association might have been received by their readers: The idea of the woman within the child [. . .] was even more easily projected onto the bodies of white-looking slave girls from the South, since their sexuality, or at the very least their anticipated fertility, would have been part of their purchase price. Because they looked white, but had been slaves, and because they were female, their portraits no doubt summoned the familiar figure of the “tragic mulatto,” a woman noted for her beauty, her near whiteness, and her unspeakable violation by the white men of the South. From the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, abolitionist propaganda and rhetoric reflected an increasing preoccupation 61  Larson, “ ‘Even a Worm Will Turn at Last,’ ” 7. 62  Egan and Hawkes, “Producing the Prurient through the Pedagogy of Purity,” 449. Also see Allan Punzalan Isaac, American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) for more on the relationship between the Progressive movement, the colonial rhetoric of benevolent assimilation, and American domestic spaces.

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among middle-class white northerners, with sexuality and the unrestrained sexuality of southern slaveholders in particular.63 These slave girls – “tragic mulatto” figures on whom an adult sexuality was projected – that white middle-class readers of the Times and the Post might have already been familiar with, provided an analogue for the blue-eyed, lighthaired mestiza girls of the 1910s and 1920s. Mitchell further argues that the sentimentalization of white childhood in 19th-century America led to children becoming “ ‘priceless’ members of the middle-class family: innocent, unproductive, and the focus of nurture and attention,” cordoned off from “both the world of adults and the world of work.”64 While the mestiza/o children were not sentimentalized to the point of being cordoned off from the world of work, the protection of white American blood against sexual predation was the sensational hook of the fund notices. Recurring mentions of the specific plight of mestiza girls in the news notices encompass both prostitution and slavery, invoking the powerful discourses of both the purity and abolitionist movements of the 19th century: “In the case of the girls it is necessary to shield them from prostitution or sale into marriage not far removed from slavery”;65 and “It is urgently needful to shield the girls from a life of debasement or from sale into marriage not far removed from slavery.”66 The American Guardian Association’s rhetoric about mestizas/os is an example of how the child is a “wonderfully hollow category” that is easily filled, and of how “American society has so frequently employed children to give personal, emotional expression to social and institutional structures,”67 in this case American colonialism in the Philippines. The 1925 fundraising drive by the American Guardian Association amounted to a minor campaign against Philippine independence, one that focused on social and cultural milieus rather than a specifically political one. It raised the specter of unfit mothers, weak and immoral native Filipinos, and ineffective Filipino mestizo politicians of Spanish and Chinese blood. In their place, the rhetoric of the charity put forth the idea of strong, intelligent, active white American blood infusing through the whole of the Philippines, eventually raising a crop of American mestizo leaders who would take charge of the newly independent country 63  Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child, 80–81. 64  Ibid., 66. 65  “Homeless Philippine Children,” S2. 66  “The American Mestizo,” 20. 67  Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xix, xxiii.

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in a partnership with the United States that nevertheless would still be like a little brother willing to be guided by the wiser and more mature Uncle Sam. A Philippines ruled by American mestizos was a version of frontier hardiness with which many Americans liked to represent themselves, and it was a cynical vision of an ultimate American colonial conquest. This vision, however, was vexed by the very same figure that was deployed to justify it: the figure of the American mestiza girl. With “light hair and blue eyes” inherited from her American father, she was also haunted by the stereotype of the hypersexual native on her mother’s side. The Association made three claims: 1) motherly neglect and immorality caused the children to turn to immorality themselves; 2) the mestiza girl’s beauty induced immoral Filipinas/ os to take advantage of her; and 3) the American blood infusing the children needed the influence of American culture in order to win out, so to speak, over the Filipino blood. The underlying implication here is that there is a war within the mixed-race child, suggesting that there is an immoral, hypersexual side of the child that must be restrained by American influence. The eroticized notion of the child in sexual danger – the sensational hook – attracted donors to the Association, but such a notion could provoke not only feelings of protectiveness but also prurient interest and illicit desire, especially when the ‘innocence’ of the child is called into question by her assumed biological nature. We come back to the strange oscillation of judgment we found in Buckland’s eroticized description of native weavers, an oscillation that I argue is inevitable in the collusion of infantilization and hypersexualization. Given that the American colonial project in the Philippines was based on an evolutionary model of development, we find the notion of the child in any discourses about the capacity of Filipinos for self-government, about education and progress, and about America’s paternal ‘duty’ towards the Philippines – all premised on McKinley’s larger discourse of benevolent assimilation. However, what problematizes the virtuous discourse of benevolent assimilation is, ironically, the concurrent representation of Filipinas/os as hypersexual natives. This stereotype depicted Filipinas/os as primitive savages and thus also worked to justify the need for American colonialism to manage the development of the Philippines, but it introduced the dangerous sexuality of the child; dangerous because the colonial intimacy of the paternal/familial discourse of benevolent assimilation transformed into incestuous and paedophilic intimacies – the same types of deviant sexualities that the Progressive movement for social purity tried to eradicate. In other words, the United States as colonial power was implicated in the very same discourses that it used to justify colonizing the Philippines. Among some American colonials, there was worry over whether they would leave the Philippines in better hands than those of ‘full-blooded’

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natives. The mestiza/o child was to be the safeguard of American ideals in the country. But alongside this discourse was the anxiety over her precocious sexuality, which haunted the edges of the mestiza girl’s portrayal as an innocent in need of America’s protection, troubling the narrative of America’s ability to properly manage the Philippines in the first place. The figure of the sexualized Filipino child is thus a significant trope in the discourse of colonial conquest. One enduring legacy of this colonial collusion between the hypersexual native and the Filipina/o as child is the sexual predation of Filipino children up to the contemporary moment. At the same time, the conflation between Filipina/o adult bodies and Filipina/o child bodies, and the ascription of mature sexuality to the child, work in an unexpected way to lead us to consider the rights of the child. The colonial legacy of the ways in which we think of children – expressly, how children are used as a derogatory metaphor for whole groups of people that include adults because we think of children as not-yet-adults – needs to be interrogated and should lead us to imagine how we can see children as full human beings in their own right. Thinking about children in relation to mature or adult sexuality is uncomfortable precisely because it collides with the idea of children as preadults or non-adults and therefore as not quite persons. As a society, we need to confront the troubling ways in which personhood (and its attendant rights of self-determination) is not understood to be an inalienable characteristic of all human beings. References “The American Mestizo.” New York Times, October 16, 1925, 20. Anderson, Warwick. “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States.” Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (April 2012): S95–S107. Archard, David. Children: Rights and Childhood. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. “Asks Fund to Help Mestizo Children.” New York Times, September 29, 1925, 27. Balce, Nerissa S. “The Filipina’s Breast: Savagery, Docility, and the Erotics of the American Empire,” Social Text 24, no. 2, 87 (Summer 2006): 89–110. Balce-Cortes, Nerissa S. “Savagery and Docility: Filipinos and the Language of the American Empire after 1898.” Ph.D. diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2002. Best, Jonathan. Philippine Picture Postcards: 1900–1920. Makati, Metro Manila: Bookmark, 1994. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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Brody, David. Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Buckland, Ralph Kent. In the Land of the Filipino. New York: Every Where Publishing Co., 1912. Capozzola, Christopher. “Photography and Power in the Colonial Philippines II: Dean Worcester’s Ethnographic Images of Filipinos (1898–1912).” MIT Visualizing Cultures. URL: http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/photography_and_power_02/ dw02_essay02.html. Accessed April 30, 2014. Castañeda, Claudia. Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Cruz, Denise. Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Eames, Aldice Gould. “The Filipino Drama.” Pacific Monthly 16, no. 3 (September 1906): 349–351. URL: http://books.google.com/books?id=IcMUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA349& dq=Aldice+Gould+Eames&hl=en&ei=7Nn7TISkMZPQsAP-1b33DQ&sa=X&oi=b ook_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Aldice%20 Gould%20Eames&f=false. Accessed April 8, 2014. Egan, R. Danielle and Gail Hawkes. “Producing the Prurient through the Pedagogy of Purity: Childhood Sexuality and the Social Purity Movement.” Journal of Historical Sociology 20, no. 4 (December 2007): 443–461. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. [1952] Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. [1913] The Standard Edition. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1950. Healy, David. US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s. Madison, Milwaukee, and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. Ignacio, Abe, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio. The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons. San Francisco, CA: T’Boli, 2004. Isaac, Allan Punzalan. American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Johnston, Gordon. “American Guardian Association.” 1921. Rpt. in American Oldtimer 559 (September 1939): 9. Larson, Jane E. “ ‘Even a Worm Will Turn at Last’: Rape Reform in Late NineteenthCentury America.” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 9, no. 1, article 1 (1997): 1–71. URL: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol9/iss1/1. Accessed July 27, 2016.

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McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. M. E. “Homeless Philippine Children.” Washington Post, October 11, 1925, S2. May, Glenn Anthony. Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980. Mitchell, Mary Niall. Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery. New York and London: New York University Press, 2008. Montano, Joseph. “The Negritos: Being a translation made for the use of the former Division of Ethnology, of pp. 310–317 of Montano’s “Mission aux Philippines,” Paris, 1885. Negrito-Aeta Paper No. 4. Trans. 1902. O’Brien, Patty. The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. “Our Mestizos Ask Help.” New York Times, October 18, 1925, XX4. Rafael, Vicente L. “Mimetic Subjects: Engendering Race at the Edge of the Empire.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 127–149. Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995. Thompson, Carmi A. “Are the Filipinos Ready for Independence?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 131, Supplement (May 1927): 1–8. United States. Philippine Commission. Report of the Philippine Commission to the President. Vol. I. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900. Vergara, Benito M., Jr. Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995. Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

CHAPTER 10

“Ashamed of Certain Japanese”

The Politics of Affect in Japanese Women’s Immigration Exclusion, 1919–1924 Chrissy Yee Lau Abstract This chapter traces three interrelated affective economies developed around the role of Japanese immigrant women during the immigration and land debates between 1919 and 1924. First, anti-Japanese crusades developed an affective economy around the yellow peril, which bound whites with a common racialized fear around the productive and reproductive labor of Japanese immigrant women. In response, a pro-Japanese white liberal collective attempted to carve out an affective project of U.S.-Japan friendliness, in which they envisioned benevolently assimilating Japanese immigrant women. Between these two projects, Japanese immigrant elites attempted to uplift Japanese immigrant women through an economy of respectability. These affective projects reveal the central role of gender and family in the immigration and land debates, intra-ethnic class conflict, and the early formation of the model minority in the 1920s.

Keywords affective economy – yellow peril – white liberalism – respectability – picture bride – Gentlemen’s Agreement – Alien Land Law – 1924 Immigration Act

Susie Yamamoto grew up as the only Japanese girl in San Bernardino during the 1910s and 1920s. She became popular in her hometown, the mayor frequently stopped by to say Hi to her and the judge often called her in for assistance in translation. In fact, because Yamamoto “mingled freely” among white townspeople, she felt these relationships often separated her from other

* Thank you to Paul Spickard, Eileen Boris, Shelley Lee, Derek Chang, erin Khue Ninh, Lily Wong, Quynh Nhu Le, Catherine Ceniza Choy, and anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and suggestions in the writing and revisions of this chapter.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336100_011

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Japanese women. She explained, “I have been with the Americans so much that I have many times felt ashamed of certain Japanese.” She specified, “I have often taken rides through the country with American friends, when I have felt humiliated because we saw Japanese women working in the fields. I think they shouldn’t work in the fields on Sunday, at any rate I don’t blame the Americans for saying things about them.” Yamamoto recalled, “One day when I was driving in San Bernardino with some of my American friends, as we passed a Japanese vegetable stand, the woman in charge called to me. I was greatly embarrassed because her voice seemed so loud and then her child was so very dirty.” In this moment when the Japanese immigrant woman at the vegetable stand called to her, Yamamoto retreated because she did not want her white friends to lump her, a welleducated, American girl at heart, racially with the Japanese peddler who had been working unceremoniously on a Sunday afternoon. Yamamoto felt insecure, however, of her own understanding of women’s work. Having grown up on a Japanese immigrant farm, Yamamoto was unsure she could learn from her own Japanese mother about proper domesticity.1 When she moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California, she began to work in an American home against her mother’s wishes.2 Despite her pride in the ability to “mingle freely” with white friends in public places, she was insecure about her own racial and class difference: “I do not feel perfectly at ease at times and to get rid of any awkwardness I am at present working in an

1  Yuko Matsumoto also argues that the home is a central signifier of American belonging for Japanese immigrant women. See Yuko Matsumoto, “Gender and American Citizenship – The Construction of ‘Our Nation’ in the Early Twentieth Century,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 17 (2006): 143–162. 2  Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). Nakano Glenn cites that it was common for Issei women to serve as live-in domestic care and for young Nisei women to serve as schoolgirls – a term where the young girl would go to school and pay her bills by doing housework on the side. This helped many of them learn the workings of an American home. In this case, Yamamoto’s mother did not want her daughter to work in an American home, perhaps because Yamamoto was one of the eldest children and their farm (like many other immigrant family businesses) relied upon unpaid family labor. In African American women’s history, Victoria Wolcott argues that Black women took up domestic work to learn the respectability etiquette of the proper role of women’s work in the home. Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

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American home just to learn their ways and their etiquette: I want to be able to go any place and not make any breaks.”3 Yamamoto’s sense of shame may have been experienced as a private emotion, but her individual feeling derived from a particular set of affective economies around the national debates over the Japanese Woman Question in the early 20th century. From 1919 to 1924, anti-Japanese advocates and racial liberals debated the admission of Japanese immigrants to the United States, and specifically whether or not to admit Japanese women. In their debate, antiJapanese advocates and racial liberals built their own affective economies, what Sara Ahmed describes as the alignment of individuals through emotions, which creates the effect of a collective and binds constituents into their competing political imperatives.4 This chapter traces three affective economies around the Japanese Woman Question to highlight the central role that affect, or feelings like Yamamoto’s, play in gender, class, and race formation. First, Yamamoto’s embarrassment over Japanese women stemmed directly from the renewed anti-Japanese campaign that built an affective economy of fear around the yellow peril.5 Anti-Japanese agitators rallied their constituents around the newly perceived threat of Japanese immigrant women working in the fields to advance a renewed political agenda of land laws and exclusion aimed at Japanese immigrants. Second, Yamamoto’s ability to “mingle freely” with her white friends signaled another affective economy led by white liberals who envisioned U.S.-Japan friendliness.6 They built a case for the 3  “Interview with Susie Yamamoto,” Survey of Race Relations Records, Box 25, Hoover Institution Archives. 4  Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–139. Ahmed centralizes emotion in its ability to align individuals with communities or bind them together. This chapter builds upon Ahmed’s work to show how anti-Japanese, pro-Japanese, and Japanese American middle-class reformers used feelings to bind people together, but in doing so it enacts particular power dynamics by delineating value and reinforcing class hierarchy. A look at the history of the Japanese American middle class contributes to studies on affect by arguing for the significance of historical structures that give rise to, translate, and circulate these emotions. 5  The major historical monographs on anti-Japanese campaigns include Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (New York: Free Press, 1988), 173–175. See also Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). 6  Sarah Griffith, “ ‘ Where We Can Battle for the Lord and Japan’: The Development of Liberal Protestant Antiracism before World War II,” Journal of American History 100, no. 2 (September 2013): 429–453. Griffith identifies a growing racial liberalism led by white Protestant Christians in the fundraising and conducting of the Survey of Race Relations.

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naturalization of Japanese immigrants, dependent upon whether or not they could show they were truly American at heart or, in other words, capable of living up to white standards. Third, Yamamoto’s desire to distance or distinguish herself by class status and proper gender roles from members of her own race resembled the affective economy of respectability often negotiated by elite Japanese immigrant reformers in order to align themselves with racial liberals and combat anti-Japanese advocates.7 Middle-class reformers, such as the Japanese Associations of America, devised campaigns to uplift the Japanese working poor in the name of “protection.” In sum, Yamamoto’s feelings of shame signaled not only the anti-Japanese sentiment over women working in the fields, but also the precarious friendship being built with racial liberals and the respectability reforms. By foregrounding the three affective economies that shaped Yamamoto’s relationships with her white friends and other Japanese immigrant women, our understanding of the history of the Pacific, and specifically Japanese American history, changes in several ways. Scholars have argued that the Immigration Act of 1924 was the first comprehensive legislation to draw up new categories of racial and ethnic hierarchy and a new sense of territoriality that marked illegality.8 By analyzing various political groups’ anxieties about Japanese immigrant women, I show how gender and class played a decisive role in the debates over racial exclusion between 1919 and 1924. Moreover, the debates over women’s respectability illuminate two competing approaches towards Japanese immigration that resulted in Japanese women’s exclusion and subsequent inclusion. While the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act signaled the triumph of anti-Asian sentiment, an emerging alliance between white liberals and Japanese middle-class reformers can be argued to set the precedent for post-World War II Japanese women’s inclusion.9 Finally, while scholars have examined respectability as a form of ideology, this chapter analyzes 7  The leading scholar on Japanese American middle-class reforms is Eiichiro Azuma, who argues that Issei elite led moral reform campaigns among the farmers and laborers to achieve Japanese expansion. Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 8  Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 9  For histories on the model minority during the Cold War era, see Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

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respectability as a form of economy to highlight intra-ethnic divisions, alliances, and negotiations.10

“The Hard Work of Ladies”: The New Yellow Peril

At the close of World War I, with the dissipation of the wartime economic boom and the return of white male soldiers looking for jobs, anti-immigrant nativism surfaced again as anti-Japanese advocates began to scrutinize the expansion of agriculture among Japanese immigrant communities in California.11 Between 1919 and 1924, anti-Japanese advocates reformulated the yellow peril to advocate for stricter alien land laws, immigration exclusion, and restrictive citizenship. V. S. McClatchy, co-owner and journalist of the Sacramento Bee, led these anti-Japanese campaigns based on a new form of yellow peril that positioned Japanese immigrant women as the conduit of Japanese takeover. In June and July of 1919, McClatchy published a series of news articles entitled “Japan’s Peaceful Penetration.” He warned that the “picture bride plan” aimed “to increase as rapidly as possible the number of Japanese under our flag.” He explained that in this “picture bride plan” a Japanese immigrant sends his photograph back to Japan and “secures a complaisant bride who weds the picture.” After arriving in the United States, she “promptly fulfills her duty by bearing children, as many as one a year, and each child is registered as an American citizen, entitled to all the privileges as such, including the claimed right to possess land through a guardian.” Moreover, “the woman swells the labor market, for she works continually in the shop or store, or field, with her child near her.” With the arrival of Japanese immigrant women, he declared, “Our civilization 10  In African American history, scholars have examined how the African American elite oftentimes enforced racial uplift as a means of addressing racial inequality. See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The prevailing interpretation suggests that respectability politics undermined the scientific categories of race, but reinforced class distinctions within African American communities. 11  Yuji Ichioka, “Japanese Immigrant Response to the 1920 California Alien Land Law,” Agricultural History 58, no. 2 (April 1984): 157–178. During World War I, Japanese immigrant farmers had participated in the collective war effort for the high demand of agricultural commodities, which resulted in the rise of Japanese immigrant agricultural economies. In fact, Japanese immigrants increased their acreage of landholdings from 300,474 in 1914 to 458,056 in 1920.

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cannot exist beside theirs in the fact of economic competition and a birth rate per 1,000 five times or more as great as ours.” In 1920, McClatchy testified in front of Congress, declaring that the United States needed to safeguard “the American home” by canceling the Gentlemen’s Agreement, excluding Japanese picture brides, and adopting “absolute exclusion of Japanese as immigrants.”12 Earlier versions of the yellow peril had focused on the sexual deviance and economic competition of Asian men. As historian Gary Okihiro explains, these fears stemmed from the “despoiling threat posed by Asian men or an aggressive heathenism to European women or a pure Christianity or virtuous civilization.”13 In 1892 Dennis Kearney, the labor union leader of the Workingman’s Party who advocated for Japanese exclusion, pointed to Japanese immigrants as the next problem group (after the Chinese) because they posed a threat as economic competition and as sexual predators who threatened “to demoralize and debauch” their white daughters.14 The campaign had resulted in two new laws, including the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907–1908, which restricted Japanese labor immigration, and the 1913 Alien Land Law, which prohibited “aliens ineligible for citizenship” to own land.15 Although the passage of these laws quelled the anti-Japanese crusade temporarily, white farmers began complaining about the arrival of Japanese picture brides and their work in the fields as early as 1916. James A. B. Scherer believed his friend’s story captured the “crux of Japanese danger,” relaying his friend’s words, “Today, Sunday, I passed a truck farm on the Foothill Boulevard and saw three Japanese and their wives hoeing a large tract industriously. How can a white farmer compete with them and at the same time inform himself sufficiently to make a good and efficient citizen, and how could his wife rear good citizens?”16 According to anti-Japanese advocates, the arrival and work of Japanese immigrant women in the fields were problematic loopholes in existing exclusionary laws; Japanese immigrants used the family provision of the Gentlemen’s Agreement to bring over new wives, who served as both 12  V. S. McClatchy, “Japan’s Peaceful Penetration,” Sacramento Bee, June and July, 1919. Survey of Race Relations, Box 22, Hoover Institution Archives. 13  Gary Okihiro, Common Ground: Reimagining American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 105. 14   Sacramento Daily Record Union July 7, 1892, as quoted in Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 20. 15  Michael Patrick Cullinane, “The Gentlemen’s Agreement – Exclusion by Class,” Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration, and Diaspora 32, no. 2 (2014): 139– 161. Cullinane emphasizes that Roosevelt upheld an exclusion based on class. 16  James A. B. Scherer, The Japanese Crisis (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1916), 89.

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workers and child bearers. As laborers, Japanese picture brides violated the Gentlemen’s Agreement. From 1919 to 1924 anti-Japanese labor unions, public health officials, and politicians attempted to close these loopholes.17 In 1920, Senator Phelan exhorted, “White women will not and no woman should work in the fields. There is no necessity for it and if we allow the Japanese to come to this country, it will be very difficult for the white man alone to compete against the entire Japanese families, both men and women.”18 Relying on the middle-class ideal of a strict gendered division of labor and white nativist principles, Phelan reasoned that Japanese immigrants were biologically unassimilable, stating, “It is their misfortune they do not assimilate or blend with other peoples. It is biologically impossible. It means mongrelization and degeneracy.”19 He introduced several bills to prevent illegal Asian immigration and to deny citizenship to children of “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” Phelan based his reasoning for Japanese exclusion on a recent report made by the State Board of Control of California. The State Board justified fears of the yellow peril by marking Japanese and American differences through social scientific study.20 The report warned, “The working conditions and living conditions of the Japanese farmer and farm laborer make successful competition by American farmers almost impossible.” A key difference was that Japanese farmers worked “every member in the family, physically able to do so, including the wife and little children.” They worked in the field for “long hours, practically from daylight to dark, on Sundays and holidays.” Furthermore, the State 17  Historian Natalia Molina has charted the work of Dr. John Pomeroy, a public health official in the Los Angeles County Health Department, who argued that Japanese women posed a double threat by working in the fields and giving birth to children who were U.S. citizens eligible to purchase land, thus circumventing the 1913 Alien Land Law. Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 56–57. 18   Merced County Sun, September 24, 1920, in Valerie Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919–1982 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 46. 19   U.S. House of Representatives, Japanese Immigration, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Part 1, Hearings at San Francisco and Sacramento, July 12, 13, 14, 1920 (Washington, 1921), 25, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.334330047550 09;view=1up;seq=3 (accessed July 1, 2015). 20  In Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Nayan Shah documents the production of Chinese difference through state-sanctioned health regulations in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Similarly, the State Board outlined the production of Japanese difference and degeneracy through white understandings of health and regulation.

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Board observed that Japanese families “live in shacks or under conditions far below the standards required and desired by Americans.” They defined an American standard of living in opposition to Japanese immigrant conditions, characterizing an American standard of living as “clean and wholesome living quarters, reasonable working hours, the usual Sunday rest and holiday recreation and, above all, refraining from working the women and children in the fields.”21 Historian Marina Moskowitz astutely argues that an American “standard of living” had less to do with how one actually lived and more to do with measuring how one wanted to live. Moskowitz defines the standard of living as a “shared national culture that stemmed from both the proliferation of material culture and middle-class communities at the turn of the twentieth century.” The standard emphasized “the importance of etiquette and social codes, privacy and interiority, investment and careful management.”22 When the State Board noted Japanese immigrants’ low standards of living, this difference served as a rationale for exclusion. As the state report concluded, “American farmers cannot successfully compete with Japanese farmers if the Americans adhere to the American principles so universally approved in America.”23 The new yellow peril was not a simplistic, irrational fear, but rather an affective economy comprised of its own intrinsic set of emotions and values that bound the white working and middle classes against Japanese immigrants. It hinged upon the perceived Japanese threat to the values of white middle-class respectability by emphasizing the Japanese immigrants’ use of an improper gendered division of labor and their lower standards of domestic life. Thus, under an affective economy of fear, the anti-Japanese campaigns resolved to remove the threat of potential loss by restricting immigration and land ownership to whites only.

“On a Basis of Friendliness”: White Liberal Benevolence

The anti-Japanese campaign was also a reaction to the growth of white liberalism and increasing pro-Japanese sentiment in the United States. Sidney 21  California State Board of Control, California and the Oriental: Japanese, Chinese, and Hindus/Report of State Board of Control of California to Gov. Wm. D. Stephens, June 19, 1920 (Sacramento: California State Print, 1922). From HathiTrust Digital Library (accessed July 1, 2015). 22  Marina Moskowitz, Standard of Living: The Measure of Middle Class in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2008), 2. 23  California State Board of Control, California and the Oriental, 103.

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Gulick, a missionary who worked and taught in Japan for twenty-six years, shared the social and economic concerns of the anti-Japanese campaign, asking, “Will not Asia by her low standard of life put up an invincible industrial competition? Will she not pull us down to her level?” However, his approach to managing the growth of competition from Japanese immigrants differed from that of anti-Japanese advocates. He viewed the Japanese as a lower race that needed American tutelage to raise their standards.24 He suggested a benevolent approach, reasoning, “Now it is not hard to see that the best conditions under which to elevate the masses of Asia and bring them up to our level is on a basis of friendliness. Help them to learn.”25 During the immigration debates, Gulick proposed a program of education that “would seek by friendly instruction and helpfulness to show Japanese how Americans live, what our ideals and economic standards are and how earnestly we desire to have all foreigners who plan to stay permanently in America learn our language and adopt our good ways as rapidly as possible.”26 Unlike McClatchy and Phelan, who advocated for U.S. citizenship based on perceived biological and cultural similarities, Gulick advocated another form of citizenship based on shared social characteristics. Instead of denying U.S. naturalization rights based upon biological traits of whiteness, Gulick proposed to extend U.S. citizenship based on shared social and affective values. 24  Gulick’s plan of friendliness shares some of President William McKinley’s policy of benevolent assimilation, which included American education as an imperial policy for the Philippines in the late 1890s. See Dorothy B. Fujita Rony, American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 25  Sidney L. Gulick, Two Addresses by Professor Sidney L. Gulick on a New Immigration Policy and The American Japanese Problem (New York: February 18, 1914). From Harvard University Library Open Collections Program (accessed July 1, 2015). 26  Sidney L. Gulick, Should Congress Enact Special Laws Affecting Japanese! A Critical Examination of “Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, held in California by 1920” (New York: National Committee on American Japanese Relations, 1922), 93. From HathiTrust Digital Library (accessed July 1, 2015). Gulick’s vision of whiteness is also reflected in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Ozawa v. United States (1922). Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant, filed for naturalization on October 16, 1914, which was denied; he then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on May 31, 1917. Ozawa argued that he was classified as a free white person based upon his assimilation into the United States: he spoke English at home, he identified as a Christian, he received a college education at an American institution. In fact, Ozawa believed, “My honesty and industriousness are well known among my Japanese and American friends. In name Benedict Arnold was an American, but at heart he was a traitor. In name I am not an American, but at heart I am a true American.” See Ichioka, The Issei, 219–226. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the category of white did not include Asians.

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In outlining these values, his argument rejected biological assumptions about U.S. citizenship and emphasized individual responsibility, middle-class values, and affective qualities such as the “personal attitude of the heart,” he claimed, “Whether or not any given individual presently residing in the U.S. is fitted to be a citizen of the U.S. depends entirely upon his personal qualifications, on his character, his knowledge of English, his familiarity with our institutions, customs and form of Government and on his personal attitude of heart.”27 Alice Brown, a teacher and farmer in Florin County, California, who had received a college degree in sociology at Stanford University, served as Gulick’s main contact and resource in California.28 Brown believed that proper domesticity was evidence of the “personal attitude of the heart.” While living on her family ranch, where she employed and rented out land to Japanese immigrants, she “saw the need to help the Japanese” by offering training in American domesticity to the Japanese immigrant women. She explained, “I have gone among them and gone into their homes and tried to show the women how to make their homes American homes and how to take care of their children.” She gave them “lessons in English, taught them how to make simple clothes for their children, for instance, how to put up their lunches, and how to cut out clothes and fix them over the same.” She found that they were “most grateful” for her training and she was convinced that “a more appreciative people you could not find.” Thus, Brown believed, “they want to Americanize and the children want to be American and you may say what you please, but the children have the American spirit.” Since these Japanese immigrant women demonstrated desire and gratitude for their uplift, Brown utilized the argument of “fair play” for the Japanese immigrants, and supported their equal treatment under American laws. Like Gulick, Brown advocated for citizenship based on individual transformation and affective display, proclaiming that, “it isn’t a matter of color, it is just a matter of character and if they are going to lead good lives.”29 Other white liberal educators participated in the pro-Japanese campaign through social scientific study, such as the Survey of Race Relations conducted in the 1920s.30 Under the direction of Eliot G. Mears, a professor of 27  Gulick, Should Congress Enact Special Laws Affecting Japanese!, 86. 28  Bruce Adams, “A Muted Cry: White Opposition to the Japanese Exclusion Movement, 1911–1924” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1987). 29   U.S. House of Representatives, Japanese Immigration, Part 1, 195–205. See also Gulick, Should Congress Enact Special Laws Affecting Japanese!, 22. 30  Another sociologist that advocated for uplifting the Japanese standard of living included Ralph Burnight, who conducted a study of Japanese farmers in the Los Angeles County in 1920. Ralph Burnight, The Japanese in Los Angeles Rural County (Los Angeles, CA: Southern California Sociological Society, University of Southern California, 1920).

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economics at Stanford, sociologists, missionaries, university professors and students conducted oral history interviews with white and Japanese populations between 1921 and 1925. Historian Sarah Griffith argues that liberal Protestants utilized the survey to advocate for trans-Pacific internationalism, to promote liberal Protestant Christianity in Japan, and to challenge the anti-Japanese legislation.31 White liberal educators often showcased the desire of Japanese immigrant farmers to adopt American customs and standards.32 For example, when educator Constance Ricketts observed three Japanese American families in the Gardena farming area, she concluded that the father of the Machida family worked hard to build “a good home.” Ricketts came to this conclusion because “The Manchida [sic] family own their own home and little truck farm. The house is of fair size, and extremely neat. The furnishing is very good, and they are the proud possessors of a piano.”33 Thus, Ricketts declared, “Honesty, industry, appreciation, and desire to be Americanized seem to be the great elements of good in these people.”34 Yet white liberals’ best intentions belied their prejudice. For example, El Koempel believed the Japanese immigrants were generally “a silent people and only those who have gone to school and become partially Americanized talk.” She did not understand why “few [of her Americanized Japanese friends] talk freely of their own affairs even when they are sure of your friendship.” Yoshiko, for instance, was a classmate and friend who seldom spoke at great length with Koempel. Koempel regarded Yoshiko as a “distinct type,” explaining that “the fact that she was preparing herself to teach in Japan set her above the average, ordinary, truck-gardener.” Because Koempel and other classmates 31  See Sarah Griffith, “Conflicting Dialogues: The Survey of Race Relations in the TransPacific and the Fight for Racial Equality” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010). 32  Kevin Starr explains that “the intensive farmer, educated, middle class, capable of making a living on forty acres” came to embody good husbandry in the San Fernando Valley and Imperial Valley. Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York: The Modern Library, 2005), 150–151. 33  Craig Roell, Piano in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Even as mass production transformed the piano into an accessible player piano for all homes to carry, what Roell calls “a musical democracy,” the piano still retained its elite value across class lines. For Japanese immigrants, the piano symbolized racial inclusion, high-class status, and proper gender roles. As Roell puts it, “the glorification of the piano was no mere fad; it was a moral institution.” 34  “Some Japanese Families in Southern California by Constance Ricketts,” Survey of Race Relations, Box 38, Hoover Institution Archives. The spelling of the last name, Manchida, is taken directly from the document, but it is most likely that the family name was Machida.

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had considered Yoshiko to be “an Americanized individual,” they openly discussed the Japanese question. This open forum ostracized Yoshiko in ways that Koempel did not foresee, noting, “It seems to me as I look back, that her hardest time was when we Americans were discussing our attitude toward the Japanese before her in our classes . . . She felt that she was not wanted as a result and to this day I have never known in just what way she found herself grown away from her own people that she could not go back to them even while she did not feel at ease with us.”35 Although Koempel and her fellow white peers believed that they were welcoming and inclusive of their Japanese classmates, Yoshiko’s disassociation from other Japanese immigrants reveals the limits of their liberal embrace. This particular kind of liberal inclusion made for a precarious friendship with white liberals, with some Japanese finding themselves watching their words carefully and internalizing the criticism against other Japanese immigrants of the working class. Other pro-Japanese advocates, such as capitalist John P. Irish, held a stake in the uplift narrative of Japanese immigrants to foil union organizing. Irish founded the American Committee of Justice – a group made up of church leaders, educators, agribusiness owners and merchants – that criticized the Alien Land Law.36 In an address to the 52nd convention of California Fruit Growers and Farmers, Irish praised Japanese immigrants in order to undermine strikes led by the Industrial Workers of the World, a rank and file labor organization that brought together a coalition of whites, immigrants including the Japanese, and African Americans.37 He believed the strikes were destructive, resulting in “tons of food” rotting and the halting of business as usual. In contrast, Irish pointed to the hard work of the Japanese. He highlighted the domestic work of Japanese immigrant women: “The women are amiable, good wives, mothers and housekeepers. It is false that they work in the fields. Their children, admitted to our schools, will make good and useful Americans.”38

35  “Experience with Orientals,” Survey of Race Relations, Box 38, Hoover Institution Archives. 36  Eiichiro Azuma, “Dancing with the Rising Sun: Strategic Alliances Between Japanese Immigrants and their ‘Home’ Government,” in The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans, ed. Christian Collet and Pei-Te Lien (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). 37  For histories on the Industrial Workers of the World, see Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000) and Howard Kimeldorf, Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 38  John P. Irish, Japanese Farmers in California (Oakland, California: 1919), 6. From Hathi Trust Digital Library (accessed July 1, 2015).

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U.S.-Japan friendliness was a shared affective project of hierarchical friendships between white liberals and Japanese immigrants. Although white liberals challenged a racist conceptualization of U.S. citizenship by emphasizing shared social values, these values were often only legible to white liberals through expressed feelings, such as desire and gratitude, that affirmed white American benevolence and superiority. Finally, this affective project assumed that specific material possessions were evidence of Japanese immigrant women’s respectability. Thus, it was not enough to study social values. Japanese immigrant women were responsible for maintaining a middle-class home. The intra-ethnic conflict between Japanese immigrant elites, who could afford a middle-class lifestyle, and the Japanese immigrant working class, who could not, would come to the fore in the Japanese elite’s attempts to reform the working class.

“To Elevate the Character of Every Japanese”: Japanese Immigrant Women’s Respectability

In the early 20th century, the Japanese Associations of America (hereafter referred to as the Japanese Associations) navigated the affective economies of both fear and friendship by carving out an affective economy of respectability.39 To make their case for Japanese immigrant land ownership and naturalization rights, the Japanese Associations developed an uplift campaign “to elevate the character of every Japanese residing in America, to protect their rights and privileges, to promote their happiness and prosperity.”40 Although they presented themselves as an umbrella organization that worked in favor of all Japanese immigrants, their institution created a hierarchy between Japanese American middle-class reformers and their working-class constituents.41 39  Assembled shortly after the disintegration of the Japanese Deliberate Council, the Japanese Associations took charge of the official work that had been done previously by the Japanese consulate. After its establishment in 1905, Japanese Associations grew steadily along the Pacific Coast in 1914 with the rise of smaller local associations. The Japanese Associations organized conferences that brought different local associations together. Michinari Fujita, “The History of the Japanese Associations in America” (master’s thesis, Northwestern University, 1928). 40  Kiichi Kanzaki, California and the Japanese (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1921). 41  Paul Spickard, Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformation of an Ethnic Group (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 5. Spickard introduced ethnicity as “kinship writ large” where the ethnicities grouped together based on “shared interests, institutions, and

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Members of the Japanese Associations often made legislative appeals that promoted the potential of uplift amongst Japanese immigrants, but assumed the inferiority of working-class laborers. In their letter to President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, the Japanese Associations attempted to halt the passage of the 1920 Alien Land Law. They criticized anti-Japanese charges of biological incompatibility, offering an alternative explanation of the conflict that emphasized working-class inferiority and the need for uplift. They characterized Japanese farmers as “handicapped” because of “their ignorance of American methods of disposing their produce.” Their letter explained that Japanese farmers “lack the commercial ability possessed by Americans . . . they think they must produce more than their American neighbors.” The Japanese Associations agreed with both anti-Japanese and pro-Japanese advocates that the Japanese immigrants were indeed working too hard: “Of course, this is not altogether wise, and we are trying to point out to them that they, too must develop.” They aligned with white liberals by claiming, “We are advising them as best we know how, not to work so hard as to cause their neighbors to criticize them and to create some leisure for self-development.”42 The Japanese Associations believed that the problem was not due to biological incompatibility and that class-based racial uplift was the solution. The Japanese Associations devised several uplift projects that targeted newly-arrived Japanese immigrant women. In their Protection of Newcomers project, the Japanese Associations distributed pamphlets such as “The Guide for Newcoming Women,” which promoted “American customs and manners, mode of living and dress, etiquette, American social structure and prevailing traditions.”43 They organized women’s meetings and lectures, “whose chief purpose is to call attention of Japanese women in America to their social position and the education of their children.” The Japanese Associations worked with Japanese schools, churches, the YMCA, the YWCA, clubs, newspapers, and magazines in an educational campaign to galvanize Japanese immigrant women’s respectability.44 cultures.” Based on his definition, through the example of the Japanese Associations of America, this chapter examines the political imperative and affective economy under their definition of “shared interests” and interrogates whether or not their sharing of interests was an equal one. 42  The Japanese Associations of America, “Memorial Presented to the President While at San Francisco on September 18, 1919” in California State Board of Control, California and the Oriental, 203–215. 43  Kanzaki, California and the Japanese, 3. 44  Ibid., 5; also in “Memorial Presented to the President” in California State Board of Control, California and the Oriental, 203–215.

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The Japanese Associations’ uplift projects of Americanization in the United States paralleled Japanese officials’ moral reform efforts to westernize Japanese emigrants in Japan. Historian Sidney Lu explains that Japanese officials made efforts to transform picture brides – a derogatory term used by the Japanese Protestant bourgeoisie to signify poor or working-class women who were obsessed with the idea of a good life abroad and who would obtain a steamship ticket to marry men they had only seen through pictures – into “good women” to help establish the Japanese empire abroad.45 Historian Eiichiro Azuma explores how organizational leaders, such as Shibusawa Eiichi of the Japanese Emigration Society and Kawai Michi of Japan’s YWCA, worked with the Japanese Associations to implement educational programs to help instill Western values among Japanese female emigrants.46 For example, Shibusawa Eiichi established an intensive program for Japanese women bound for the United States that included: learning basic Western etiquette values (six hours); practical English (six hours); living conditions in a foreign land (six hours); vital domestic skills (six hours); household management (six hours); public sanitation and feminine hygiene (three hours); and child rearing (two hours). Kawai Michi partnered with white American churchwomen to distribute instructional handbooks at the port of Yokohama and upon arrival in the United States. White reform workers, such as Sarah Ellis and Helen Topping, also assisted picture brides at Angel Island and throughout California. Despite these trans-Pacific efforts, the Japanese Associations failed to attract Japanese immigrant women to their projects because of their own ignorance of these women’s backgrounds and the socio-economic challenges they faced upon arrival in the United States, as well as their myopic approach to improving their conditions. Many of these reformers assumed that the new brides were uneducated women from rural areas in Japan who required training in middle-class domesticity. However, oral histories of Issei women show that some of them were educated and led relatively privileged lives in Japan, but then experienced drastic downward mobility in the United States. For example, Kiyo Miyake, had grown up in a house with electricity and a gas stove in Japan, but when she immigrated to the United States she worked on 45  Sydney Lu, “Good Women for Empire: Educating Overseas Female Immigrants in Imperial Japan, 1900–45,” Journal of Global History 8 (2013): 436–460. Lu argues that class and race interacted with nation-building for this disciplining project of Japanese women in the 1920s. A project which, alongside anti-prostitution, influenced the educational project in Manchuria in the 1930s. 46  Azuma, Between Two Empires, 52–57.

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a farm in the Imperial Valley and her new living quarters had no such conveniences. Having come from a family where her mother had graduated from a women’s high school and her father had graduated from Waseda University with a degree in literature, Kiyo herself had attended a women’s college taught by white instructors and studied English, music and other subjects. After marrying a farmer in California, she recalled, “Since I was his wife, I had to follow him. When I was told to hoe for the first time, tears rolled down my cheeks because I had never even seen a hoe before in my life, and I didn’t know how to use one.” She believed that she had to do this labor or else her husband would have said, “You are no good, because you were educated in a such a way that no matter what the task, as long as you pray for it, it will be done for you.”47 New brides like Kiyo had years of vocational training in middle-class domesticity, yet this training did not serve them well in the context of working-class life. Kiyo was one of many educated Issei women. According to one study, the average educational level of Issei women was about eight years, the same as men’s.48 Because elite reformers assumed these women were “low-class” and uneducated, they believed that “modern womanhood” was a matter of social instruction and not of unequal U.S. socioeconomic structures. For example, in Japan, the Japanese Emigration Society passed out a woman’s guide that taught them how to behave like a “modern woman” by wearing Western dresses, walking in Western shoes, using Western-style toilets and bathtubs, and preparing meals with Western kitchen utensils.49 However, this vision of respectability presumed a specific lifestyle and access to socio-economic resources, such as a nuclear family setting, a single-family home, a husband with a well-paid job, and a social network of Christian churches or business relations. Much of the reformers’ vision of modern womanhood was of little use to immigrant women who encountered a predominantly Japanese male bachelor setting, in multi-family and single living quarters, temporary and seasonal agricultural labor, and very limited interaction with whites. In this context, Japanese immigrant women had to learn how to wear work clothes, how to hoe and farm, and how to prepare Japanese meals and baths for twenty or more male laborers.50

47  Eileen Sunada Sarasohn, Issei Women: Echoes from Another Frontier (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1998), 105. 48  Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride, 43. She cites Edward K. Strong, Jr., The SecondGeneration Japanese Problem (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934). 49  Azuma, Between Two Empires, 54–55. 50  Sarasohn, Issei Women, 93–94. For example, Satsuyo Hironaka cooked and cleaned for twenty to thirty field hands.

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Thus, the elite reformers’ social instruction overlooked immigrant women’s social realities as well as modern womanhood’s class privilege. Elite reformers attempted to create interracial women’s networks through education.51 For example, white female teachers offered instruction on food preparation and dining and entertainment etiquette to Japanese immigrant women at the Japanese YWCA in San Francisco. Although the objective of these classes was to have Japanese immigrant women apply what they learned to the upkeep of their own homes, many women used these skills as domestic workers in white families’ homes. Scholar Evelyn Nakano Glenn shows that by 1920, when 5,289 Issei women workers were listed, 1,409 were in domestic service.52 Furthermore, elite reformers were unaware of the strength of Japanese immigrant male working-class culture. A culture that shamed women for not helping their husbands in the fields. For example, when Iyo Tsutsui left for the United States, she believed that her, soon to be, husband, Taro Tsutsui, was well off. Iyo and her family had heard from a family friend that Japanese wives did not work in America. Iyo was an educated young woman who had received twelve years of schooling in Japan, which included the study of sewing, flower arranging, tea ceremony, and other arts. But upon her arrival in the United States, Iyo was compelled to adjust to life in a farming camp in Holland, California, where she lived in a shack and worked in the fields. Her husband explained, “In America, women work in the fields. If you stay in the house like a rich man’s wife, people will laugh at you.”53 Japanese immigrant women often carried the double burden of productive and reproductive labor. However, elite reformers like Kawai Michi of the Japanese YWCA often viewed these women as neglectful and ignorant of proper motherhood. They attempted to instruct immigrant women on middle-class practices of childrearing and pregnancy. For instance, before women left for the United States, the Japanese Emigration Society instructed them not to leave their children unattended and not to breastfeed in public.54 Once the women arrived, the Japanese Associations distributed a guide entitled Ikuji-oyobi-Sampu-no-Shiori (Guide to Childrearing and Pregnancy) with instructions for the birth and care of babies, and Japanese translations of books such as “Mother’s Guide.”55 However, most of these instructions 51  Kanzaki, California and the Japanese, 37. 52  Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride, 104. 53  Sarasohn, Issei Women, 133–139. 54  Azuma, Between Two Empires, 54. 55  The American colonial project of educating women about health and sanitation has a long history, particularly in the Philippines in the late 19th century. See Catherine Ceniza

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were impractical. As scholar Yukiko Hanawa points out, without mothers-inlaw or other family members to look after the children, immigrant women were compelled to care for their children and work outside the home.56 On a farm, especially during harvest, many of the women either had to leave their children unattended or bring their children with them. Mikiye Kawai explains, “I remember Mama going back to work on the farm, carrying my sister on her back only a few days after she was born.”57 When working in the fields with their babies, women would have to breastfeed in public.58 In oral histories, immigrant women acknowledge that they were at times neglectful of their children because of work. However, elite reformers interpreted this neglect as a sign of working-class immorality and narrow-mindedness. In doing so, they failed to see the limited reach of their cultural world and the depth of class inequality. In addition to educational campaigns, the Japanese Associations attempted to restrict Japanese immigrant labor. Initially, the Central Association ratified a decree that ended “all Sunday field labor, except at critical harvest times.” Following suit, the Los Angeles Japanese Association moved, in November 1919, to reduce what was for many whites the most striking manifestation of the Japanese immigrant tendency to work too hard: “woman’s labor on Sundays in the outdoors.”59 By the 1920 Immigration Hearings, the Japanese Associations announced that they had published a series of decrees for the Japanese immigrant community in order to curtail work on Sundays. One of these decrees focused on women’s work: “Adopt a policy of doing away with female labor Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Some of the earliest Japanese immigrant women in the United States were trained in childrearing as midwives. See Susan Smith, Japanese American Midwives: Culture, Community, Politics, 1880–1950 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 56  Yukiko Hanawa, “Several Worlds of Issei Women” (master’s thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 1982). 57  Taylor Sakamoto, “The Triumph and Tragedies of Japanese Women in America: A View Across Four Generations,” The History Teacher 41, no. 1 (November 2007): 97–122. Taylor interviewed her great aunt Tsukimi Aoki on October 28, 2006. 58  Only when some of the children were older could they begin looking after the younger children. Mitsuye Nakai, for instance, cooked and cleaned for her young sisters and brothers while both of her parents farmed. Hanawa, “Several Worlds of Issei Women,” 65. Hanawa conducted a personal interview for the Terminal Island Oral History Project in 1979. 59  Chotoku Toyama, “The Japanese Community in Los Angeles” (master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1926).

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as far as possible.”60 After enacting these policies, General Secretary Kiichi Kanzaki appealed for U.S. naturalization rights for Japanese immigrants.61 When Japanese immigrant laborers flouted the ban on women’s work, the San Francisco Japanese Association went one step further to ban the admission of picture brides to the United States. In a speech at the America-Japan Society banquet in 1919, an American politician, Charles Sherrill, opined that the Japanese elite should pass a Ladies Agreement since “these ‘picture brides’ are being imported by Japanese laborers, they assist their husbands thus becoming laborers themselves, and therefore offsetting the loyalty to your government to the Gentlemen’s Agreement.”62 In response, George Shima, the president of the Japanese Associations, agreed with Sherrill. Yet, he asked that American politicians also reconsider the passage of the Alien Land Law for the sake of those Japanese immigrants already in the states.63 K. K. Kawakami, a member of the Executive Committee of the Japanese Associations, went to Washington at the request of Shima to speak with the Ambassador about restricting the immigration of picture brides.64 On March 1, 1920, the Japanese government passed the Ladies Agreement and ceased issuing passports to picture brides.65 To advance the case for U.S. naturalization, secretaries of the Japanese Associations testified about the success of their women’s reform campaigns and emphasized Japanese immigrant women’s desire to become American at the 1920 Immigration Hearings. One female reformer, Tayo Sakamoto, secretary for the Japanese Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Los Angeles, worked with the Japanese Associations in San Francisco and Los Angeles to establish a night school for “newcomers” and to organize visits with Japanese farmers’ wives to teach them American standards.66 She believed 60   U.S. House of Representatives, Japanese Immigration, Part I, 28. 61  Kanzaki, California and the Japanese, 16. 62  Charles H. Sherill, Speech at the American-Japan Society Banquet, November 19, 1919 reprinted in “An American’s Plain Speaking in Japan.” Harvey’s Weekly, 1919. See also, “General Sherill Urges Ladies Agreement with Japan as well as Gentlemen’s,” Ellensburg Daily Record, December, 24, 1919. 63  George Shima, “An Appeal to Justice: The Injustice of the Proposed Initiative Measure,” 1920. Online Archive of California. Accessed July 1, 2015. 64  Gulick, Should Congress Enact Special Laws Affecting Japanese!, 47. 65  Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 132. The passports were good for six months, so the picture bride system officially came to an end on September 1, 1920. 66   U.S. House of Representatives, Japanese Immigration, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Part III, Hearings at San Francisco and Sacramento, July 19, 20, 21, 1920 (Washington, 1921), 1006–1008, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1

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that these women had every intention of “adopting American methods of living,” although they were “slow” in doing so. She further stated that the second-generation girls were thoroughly Americanized and oftentimes became “the go-between to interpret the American ideals and ideas to their mother.”67

A Different Outcome

Despite the efforts of white liberals and the Japanese Associations, the Alien Land Law was successfully passed in California in 1920 and the Immigration Act of 1924 became national law. As many scholars have argued, the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act signaled the triumph of racial exclusion of all Asian groups, with the exception of Filipinos. However, the roles played by affect and respectability marked an important component of racial exclusion. AntiJapanese advocates feared the work of women would bring too much competition and a lower standard of living. The pro-Japanese advocates believed that Japanese immigrants could learn proper domesticity under their instruction. Thus, the 1924 Immigration Act reaffirmed the prevailing middle-class ideology around women’s work in the home and proper gender roles. Although the Japanese Associations failed to prevent the passage of the 1920 Alien Land Law and the 1924 Immigration Act, they planted the seeds of a different outcome – one that without an analysis of affect is easily missed. A growing collective of racial liberals, in alliance with the immigrant elite, had already begun to establish a particular kind of friendship that would set the precedent for Asian inclusion. The work of the Japanese Associations had won the approval of many white friends who supported excluding immigrant laborers, but defended the rights of Japanese already present in the United States, especially those who abided by the code of respectability. This alliance would later come to fruition in domestic and foreign policy when the United States embraced the concept of the model minority, ended Asian exclusion

.c065522062;view=1up;seq=7 (accessed July 1, 2015). Also see Gulick, Should Congress Enact Special Laws Affecting Japanese!, 55. 67   U.S. House of Representatives, Japanese Immigration, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Part IV, Hearings at San Francisco and Sacramento, July 26, 27, 28, 29 and August 2 and 3, 1920 (Washington, 1921), 1193–1195, http://babel .hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c065522071;view=1up;seq=7 (accessed July 1, 2015). Also see Gulick, Should Congress Enact Special Laws Affecting Japanese!, 55.

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in immigration, and accepted Japanese naturalization during the Cold War period.68 The currencies of fear, friendliness, and respectability that had circulated around the California debates on the Japanese Woman Question structured the everyday relations between Japanese immigrants and whites, as with Susie Yamamoto and her white friends. For young women like Yamamoto, the emotional turmoil that she experienced in order to gain social acceptance was bound up in race, class, and gender politics. Yamamoto expressed pleasure over her usefulness to white officials in her town and her ability to “mingle freely.” Scared to lose her precarious belonging, however, Yamamoto internalized the denigration of the “dirty” Japanese immigrant women and feared what her white friends might say of her. Concerned that she might not receive the proper domestic training that she needed from her own Japanese mother, Yamamoto decided to work in an American home against her mother’s wishes. Not only did Yamamoto choose to differentiate herself from other Japanese women, she also distanced herself from her own mother whose teachings she felt she must abandon. In choosing respectability, she may have earned the approval of her white friends, but she also sacrificed other familiar relationships and carried the emotional burden of having to sustain unequal friendships. Bibliography Adams, Bruce. “A Muted Cry: White Opposition to the Japanese Exclusion Movement, 1911–1924.” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1987. Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–139. “Amendment, California Alien Land Law, Adopted November, 2, 1920,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 98, Present-Day Immigration with Special Reference to the Japanese (Jan., 1921): 13–16.

68  Jane Hong, “Immigration Act of 1952,” Densho Encyclopedia http://encyclopedia.den sho.org/Immigration%20Act%20of%201952/ (accessed July 1, 2015). The 1952 McCarranWalter Act implemented immigration quotas from Asian countries and allowed Asian immigrants to become naturalized as U.S. citizens. The Act greatly benefited Japanese immigrants in particular, offering the largest immigration quota to Japan, and the Issei population made up 90 percent of the “aliens” eligible for citizenship. See Jane Hong’s forthcoming manuscript that situates the trans-Pacific movement to repeal Asian exclusion laws in the context of Black civil rights struggles in the U.S. and U.S. military intervention in decolonizing Asia.

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American Committee of Justice. California and the Japanese: A Compilation of Arguments Advertised in Newspapers by the American Committee of Justice, in Opposition to the Alien Land Law, Together with the Memorial Addressed to Congress by the Said Committee. Oakland, California: The American Committee of Justice, 1920. Accessed July 1, 2015. HathiTrust Digital Library. “An American’s Plain Speaking in Japan.” Harvey’s Weekly, 1919. Azuma, Eiichiro. Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Azuma, Eiichiro. “Dancing with the Rising Sun: Strategic Alliances Between Japanese Immigrants and their ‘Home’ Government.” In The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans, ed. Christian Collet and Pei-Te Lien, 25–37. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. Brooks, Charlotte. Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Burnight, Ralph. The Japanese in Los Angeles Rural County. Los Angeles: Southern California Sociological Society, University of Southern California, 1920. California State Board of Control, California and the Oriental: Japanese, Chinese, and Hindus/Report of State Board of Control of California to Gov. Wm. D. Stephens, June 19, 1920. Sacramento: California State Print, 1922. Accessed July 1, 2015. HathiTrust Digital Library. Cheng, Cindy I-Fen. Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Cullinane, Michael Patrick. “The Gentlemen’s Agreement – Exclusion by Class.” Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration, and Diaspora 32, no. 2 (2014): 139–161. Daniels, Roger. The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. “Experience with Orientals.” Survey of Race Relations, Box 38, Hoover Institution Archives. Fujita, Michinari. “The History of the Japanese Associations in America.” Master’s thesis, Northwestern University, 1928. Fujita Rony, Dorothy B. American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919–1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Gaines, Kevin. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. .

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“General Sherill Urges Ladies Agreement with Japan as well as Gentlemen’s.” Ellensburg Daily Record, December 24, 1919. Griffith, Sarah. “Conflicting Dialogues: The Survey of Race Relations in the TransPacific and the Fight for Racial Equality.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010. Griffith, Sarah. “ ‘Where We Can Battle for the Lord and Japan’: The Development of Liberal Protestant Antiracism before World War II.” Journal of American History 100, no. 2 (September 2013): 429–453. Gulick, Sidney. Should Congress Enact Special Laws Affecting Japanese! A Critical Examination of “Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, held in California by 1920.” New York: National Committee on American Japanese Relations, 1922. Accessed July 1, 2015. HathiTrust Digital Library. Gulick, Sidney. Two Addresses by Professor Sidney L. Gulick on a New Immigration Policy and The American Japanese Problem. New York: February 18, 1914. Accessed July 1, 2015. Harvard University Library Open Collections Program. Hanawa, Yukiko. “Several Worlds of Issei Women.” Master’s thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 1982. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1994. Hong, Jane. “Immigration Act of 1952.” Densho Encyclopedia. Accessed July 1, 2015. Ichioka, Yuji. “Japanese Immigrant Response to the 1920 California Alien Land Law” Agricultural History 58, no. 2 (April 1984): 157–178. Ichioka, Yuji. The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885– 1924. New York: Free Press, 1988. “Interview with Susie Yamamoto.” Survey of Race Relations Records, Box 25, Hoover Institution Archives. Irish, John P. Japanese Farmers in California. Oakland, California: 1919. Accessed July 1, 2015. HathiTrust Digital Library. “Japs Fight for Picture Brides.” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1919: I5. Kanzaki, Kiichi. California and the Japanese. San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1921. Kimeldorf, Howard. Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Lee, Erika and Judy Yung. Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Lu, Sydney. “Good Women for Empire: Educating Overseas Female Immigrants in Imperial Japan, 1900–45.” Journal of Global History 8 (2013): 436–460. Matsumoto, Valerie. Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919–1982. New York: Cornell University Press, 1993.

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Matsumoto, Yuko. “Gender and American Citizenship – The Construction of ‘Our Nation’ in the Early Twentieth Century.” Japanese Journal of American Studies 17 (2006): 143–162. McClatchy, V. S. “Japan’s Peaceful Penetration.” Sacramento Bee, June and July, 1919. Survey of Race Relations, Box 22, Hoover Institution Archives. Molina, Natalia. Fit to be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Moskowitz, Marina. Standard of Living: The Measure of Middle Class in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2008. Nakano Glenn, Evelyn. Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Ngai, Mae. “History as Law and Life: Tape V. Hurley and the Origins of the Chinese American Middle Class.” In Chinese Americans Politics of Race and Culture, ed. Sucheng Chan and Madeline Y. Hsu. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Okihiro, Gary. Common Ground: Reimagining American History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Roell, Craig. Piano in America, 1890–1940. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978. Sakamoto, Taylor. “The Triumph and Tragedies of Japanese Women in America: A View Across Four Generations.” The History Teacher 41, no. 1 (November 2007): 97–122. Sunada Sarasohn, Eileen. The Issei: Portrait of a Pioneer, An Oral History. Palo Alto: Pacific Books Publishers, 1983. Scherer, James A. B. The Japanese Crisis. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1916. Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Shima, George. “An Appeal to Justice: The Injustice of the Proposed Initiative Measure,” 1920. Accessed July 1, 2015. Online Archive of California. Smith, Susan. Japanese American Midwives: Culture, Community, Politics, 1880–1950. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. “Some Japanese Families in Southern California by Constance Ricketts.” Survey of Race Relations, Box 38, Hoover Institution Archives. Spickard, Paul. Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformation of an Ethnic Group. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Starr, Kevin. California: A History. New York: The Modern Library, 2005. Strong, Jr., Edward K. The Second-Generation Japanese Problem. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934.

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Toyama, Chotoku. “The Japanese Community in Los Angeles.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1926. “Translation from Japanese New World and Japanese-American News.” Survey of Race Relations, Box 28, Hoover Institution Archives. Tsu, Cecilia. “Sex, Lies and Agriculture: Reconstructing Japanese Immigrant Relations in California, 1900–1913.” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 2 (May 2009): 171–209. U.S. House of Representatives. Japanese Immigration, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Part I, Hearings at San Francisco and Sacramento, July 12, 13, 14, 1920. Washington, 1921. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433 004755009;view=1up;seq=3. Accessed July 1, 2015. U.S. House of Representatives, Japanese Immigration, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Part III, Hearings at San Francisco and Sacramento, July 19, 20, 21, 1920. Washington, 1921. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=uc1.c065522062;view=1up;seq=7. Accessed July 1, 2015. U.S. House of Representatives, Japanese Immigration, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Part IV, Hearings at San Francisco and Sacramento, July 26, 27, 28, 29 and August 2 and 3, 1920. Washington, 1921. http://babel.hathitrust .org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c065522071;view=1up;seq=7. Accessed July 1, 2015. Wolcott, Victoria. Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Wu, Ellen. The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 11

Gendered Adoptee Identities

Performing Trans-Pacific Masculinity in the 21st Century Kimberly McKee Abstract Transnational adoption from South Korea became a worldwide practice as a result of militaristic, humanitarian, and consumptive relationships between Asia and the West. In particular, the trans-Pacific route between South Korea and the United States created a sustained pipeline of child migrants from the post-Korean War period into the 21st century. Adoptees were supposed to embark on a one-way journey across the Pacific Ocean. Constructed as the better option, adoption was believed to be their ticket to success. Yet the voices of adult adoptees in contemporary society trouble this widely held belief. In addition, adoptees have been returning to South Korea in search of biological family, cultural ties, and belonging. To better understand the racialized and gendered experience of adoptees, this chapter explores male Korean adoptees performances of masculinity in the United States and South Korea. It focuses on Dan Matthews and his docu-series akaDan (2014), which features his return journey to South Korea and reunion with his biological parents. A textual reading of the docu-series locates male Asian adoptees within broader examinations of Asian American masculinity. This analysis exposes Matthews’ performance of soft masculinity, which is simultaneously hypermasculine and emotionally vulnerable, and represents a fusion of multiple and competing masculinities. Matthews’ gendered performance is situated in a trans-Pacific context to examine his legibility as an Asian American man in the United States and the deployment of hyper/sensitive masculinity in South Korea.

Keywords Korean adoption – international adoption – masculinity – Asian American popular culture – social media – virtual community

On March 6, 2014, Internet celebrity and hip-hop artist Dan Matthews premiered akaDan (2014) on the ISAtv (International Secret Agents television)

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YouTube channel, on which he hosts a variety of programming.1 The multi-part docu-series presents his personal journey to South Korea to meet his biological family. Matthews is one of more than 130,000 children born in South Korea and adopted transnationally. Intercountry adoption became a systematic practice between Asia and the West from the mid-20th century onwards.2 South Korea is the largest sending country, with the earliest adoptions beginning at the end of the Korean War (1950–1953). The nation continues to engage in the practice. The United States is the largest receiving country of adoptees worldwide. These American adoptive families are also transracial, as three-quarters of Korean adoptees enter white families. This chapter elucidates male adoptees’ negotiation with racialized masculinity in an examination of Matthews’ docuseries akaDan (2014). Transnational and transracial adoption discourse has been particularly fraught. South Korea’s involvement in adoption exemplifies the impact of militarism on the peninsula, a societal preference for mono-racial children, and the state’s unwillingness to invest in a robust welfare system for single mothers. The initial adoptees after the Korean War were mixed-race children, the products of interracial liaisons between Korean women and U.N. or U.S. soldiers. Two decades later, in the 1970s, the export of full-blooded Korean children became profitable as transnational adoption pumped money into the national economy. The demand for children in some instances outstripped supply. Some adoption agencies even falsified records in order to depict children with surviving biological parents as ‘orphans,’ available for adoption. Adoption became the one-size fits all model to boost the economy and allow the nation to be reactive in its welfare provisions. In fact, South Korea’s adoption relationship with the United States resulted in the emergence of what can be described as the transnational adoption industrial complex. This complex reflects the mechanical nature of international adoption processes, which created a multimillion dollar, neocolonial industry that commodifies children’s bodies.3

1  Founded by the Far East Movement and Wong Fu Productions, ISAtv celebrates Asian American culture. 2  Catherine Ceniza Choy, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 3  Kimberly McKee, “Monetary Flows and the Movements of Children: The Transnational Adoption Industrial Complex,” Journal of Korean Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 137–178. Participating as a sending country in transnational adoption absolved South Korea from creating a strong social welfare state to care for low-income families or single mothers who wished to parent their children, but lacked the financial resources.

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As South Korean orphanages sent children abroad, prospective U.S. and mostly white parents eagerly adopted children as acts of humanitarian rescue. Americans understood themselves as promoting democracy and saving children from Communism in the Cold War era.4 Even with South Korea emerging as a major economy, white Americans still regard themselves as saving children from poverty. This politics of rescue was gendered. Prior to the 1980s, an estimated 70 percent of all adoptees were girls. Parents in the West believed that they were saving female adoptees from “a more putatively pernicious Asian patriarchy.”5 Consequently, a common adoption savior narrative has emerged: if not for transnational adoption, Korean children, particularly girls, would languish in orphanages with no one to care for them. Given the prevalence of the savior narrative, adoptees who openly discuss their experiences are often slotted into a reductive binary. Either they perform happiness and gratitude for the (alleged) opportunities offered by adoption, or they are malcontents for failing to adhere to the scripts of child rescue.6 The trope of the ungrateful and unhappy adoptee emerged in response to adopteeauthored memoirs and films that proliferated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, critiquing international adoption practices and exposing the failure of colorblind love. Due to the preponderance of women articulating critiques of the adoption industry, they became associated with the malcontent label. Two of the most publicly prominent female adoptees are memoirist Jane Jeong Trenka and filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem. Their work complicates narratives of adoption as a mode of placing parentless children into Western families.7 Recently, the 4  Arissa H. Oh and SooJin Pate trace the origins of Korean adoption to this particular moment when images of war waifs and orphans penetrated and circulated the American imaginary through newsreel clips and sponsorship advertisements; Arissa H. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015); and SooJin Pate, From Orphan to Adoptee: U.S. Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). These images operated in conjunction with Christian American beliefs concerning saving the most needy. Unlike their mothers, the vulnerability of Korean children was marketable to an American public invested in upholding the idealized American Dream. 5  Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critiques and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 169; Tobias Hübinette, “Comforting an Orphaned Nation: Representations of International Adoption and Adopted Koreans in Korean Popular Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Stockholm University, 2005). 6  Kimberly McKee, Beyond Grateful: The Transnational Politics of Adoption, 2015, MS. 7  First Person Plural, dir. Deann Borshay Liem (San Francisco: Center for Asian American Media, 2000), DVD; Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood: A Memoir (St. Paul: Graywolf

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one-woman performances of Sun Mee Chomet (How to be a Korean Woman) and Marissa Lichwick (Yellow Dress) found acclaim with audiences for their interrogations of their respective adoptions. Women are also making inroads in adoption activist circles, as seen in the work of Andrea Kim Cavicchi, Tammy Chu, and Laura Klunder in South Korea and the United States.8 The emergence of these female adoptee artists and intellectuals shaped scholarship on adoption. Korean adoption studies and Asian American studies research primarily focus on female adoptees’ articulations of their racial, ethnic, and cultural identities.9 This body of scholarship risks eliding the male adoptee experience. Male children represented only one-third of all transnational adoptees prior to the 1980s. However, by the late 20th century, more boys were sent abroad for adoption than girls. Today, male adoptees serve in leadership roles in international, national, and local adoption communities, including the International Korean Adoption Association (IKAA). They also are active in circles critiquing adoption and advocating for adoptees’ and birth mothers’ rights in South Korea (e.g. Kyle DiMaggio, Tobias Hübinette, Dae-won Kim, and Kevin Vollmers). Additionally, male adoptees are making influential films about transnational adoption. Nathan Adolfson was one of the earliest adoptee filmmakers to share his experiences in Passing Through (1998).

Press, 2003); and Jane Jeong Trenka, Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2009); and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, dir. Deann Borshay Liem (Berkeley: Mu Films, 2010), DVD. 8  Klunder and Cavicchi have led adoption critiques in South Korea and the United States; Maggie Jones, “Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to South Korea.” The New York Times, January 17, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/magazine/why-a-generationof-adoptees-is-returning-to-south-korea.html (accessed July 6, 2015). For example, Cavicchi was part of the Adoptee Solidarity Korea – Los Angeles (ASK – LA) teach-in concerning the misinformation contained in the documentary The Drop Box (2014). Chu is best known for her documentary examining reunion from the perspective of birth mothers in Resilience (2009). See Kimberly McKee, “Rewriting History: Adoptee Documentaries as a Site of Truthtelling,” in The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media, ed. Lori K. Lopez and Vincent Pham (Routledge, Forthcoming). 9  See David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Jodi Kim, “‘The Ending Is Not an Ending at All’: On the Militarized and Gendered Diasporas of Korean Transnational Adoption and the Korean War.” positions: east asia cultures critique 23, no. 4 (2015): 807–835; and Kim Park Nelson, “‘Loss Is More than Sadness’: Reading Dissent in Transracial Adoption Melodrama in The Language of Blood and First Person Plural,” Adoption & Culture 1, no. 1 (2007): 101–128.

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A decade later, John Sanvidge and Alex Myung released their adoption movies, Finding Seoul (2011) and Arrival (2016). To better understand the racialized and gendered experience of Korean male adoptees, this chapter centers on the experiences of Dan Matthews’ journey to South Korea in akaDan (2014). His docu-series presents a palatable understanding of adoption for adoptees and non-adoptees alike.10 Released in eight parts spanning on average ten to fifteen minutes per episode, akaDan (2014) chronicles Matthews as he journeys to South Korea to meet his biological family. A ninth episode includes behind the scenes footage. This chapter offers a textual reading of the docu-series and also situates male Asian adoptees within broader examinations of Asian American masculinity. It then discusses the complexities of a trans-Pacific existence in the 21st century through an examination of Matthews’ reunion with his biological family. For adoptees, returning to the motherland does not necessarily mean to go home; rather it is to venture towards a mythical place of the unknown. As part of this analysis, of particular interest is Matthews’ emotional disclosures concerning the myriad of feelings he experiences as part of the reunion. It suggests that the freedom with which he openly and readily shares his raw emotions reflects a particular security in his gender identity. His ability to be emotionally vulnerable is inextricably linked to his status as a hip-hop artist, a music form that tends to celebrate hypermasculinity. Secure in this association, Matthews is able to produce a sense of intimacy between his persona as a documentary character and his viewers. Establishing how he is gendered as an Asian American man, Matthews’ gendered performance is situated in a trans-Pacific context and the chapter then concludes with a discussion of the legibility of his hyper/sensitive masculinity in South Korea.

Asian American Men and Soft Masculinity

Historically, Asian American men have been relegated to a racially subordinated masculinity. They were not the kind of men who were sexual, threatening, or powerful.11 And even when they had power or were perceived to be powerful, 10  Produced with Mayrok Media and Arirang TV, akaDan (2014) was also distributed on online platforms Hulu and Drama Fever, a channel traditionally is known for its Korean drama programming. 11  Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan provide a male visual to mainstream society, creating a barrier for Asian American men. Created in 1913 by British author Sax Rohmer, Fu Manchu became the archetype of the yellow peril; Sheng-Mei Ma, The Dealthy Embrace:

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Orientalism routinely positioned them as an amusing foe or as a foible on the verge of demise. They are, according to Celine Parreñas Shimizu, either “racialized as asexual and effeminate,” or as exceptions like Bruce Lee, who serve as a dangerous role model that valorizes “gender hierarchy and heteronormativity.”12 Nevertheless, at the end of the 20th century, Asian American cinema offered these men opportunities to finally become viable protagonists on screen. Characters in these films positioned Asian American men as romantic partners, friends, and allies. Such roles allowed “audiences to experience the struggles, missteps, and resolutions of Asian American characters.”13 These multi-dimensional depictions of Asian American masculinity emerged in greater circulation as a result of the insertion of Asian American characters in 21st-century, primetime television. Actors offering these threedimensional depictions of masculinity include Kal Penn (House, M.D., 2007– 2012), Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead, 2010–2016), Daniel Dae Kim (Hawaii Five-0, 2010–present), Aziz Ansari (Parks and Recreation, 2009–2015; Master of None, 2015), Ken Jeong (Dr. Ken, 2015–present), John Cho (Go On, 2012–2013; Selfie, 2014), and Randall Park (Fresh off the Boat, 2015–present). Affable and funny, these actors signal a progressive understanding of Asian American men and counter depictions of them in more constrained, stereotypical roles. Addressing this broadened conceptualization of masculinity, Peter Chua and Diane C. Fujino write: “Asian-American men hold the view that maleness can contain elements of masculinity and femininity. This construction of AsianAmerican masculinity suggests a new formation, a more flexible masculinity.”14 Dan Matthews embodies the new 21st-century understanding of Asian/ American masculinity that transcends national borders. The evolving definitions of Asian American manhood inform adoptees’ negotiations with society’s racialized presumptions of what Asian men are as well as their own understanding of self as transracially adopted individuals raised in white families and primarily white environments. Matthews articulates a ‘soft masculinity,’ legible both in South Korea and the United States, which is simultaneously Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Unlike his adult counterpart, Charlie Chan is diminutive and a devoted sidekick who embodies the model minority; Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 143. Earl Derr Biggers created Chan in 1925. 12  Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), 80. 13  Ibid., 132. 14   Peter Chua and Diane C. Fujino, “Negotiating New Asian-American Masculinities: Attitudes and Gender Expectations,” Journal of Men’s Studies 7, no. 3 (2007): 407.

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hypermasculine and emotionally vulnerable. In what follows, I discuss how this nuanced form of Asian/American masculinity allows for emotional vulnerability without being tied to stereotypes that presume sensitivity as effeminate or weak. The circulation of soft masculinity internationally stems from the transnational transmission of both U.S. and Asian popular culture. Discussing Korean television star Bae Yong-Joon, best known for his performance in Winter Sonata (2002), Sun Jung defines soft masculinity as: “a hybrid product constructed through the transcultural amalgamation of South Korea’s traditional seonbi masculinity (which is heavily influenced by Chinese Confucian wen masculinity), Japan’s bishōn (pretty boy) masculinity, and global metrosexual masculinity.”15 This particular form of masculinity is a transnational product “as a result of the inter-Asian transcultural flows of various masculine forms.”16 Soft masculinity captures both a male individual’s “manly charisma” and “feminine tenderness.”17 Colby Miyose and Erika Engstrom argue that this new tender masculinity emerged in the late 1990s to challenge hegemonic Korean masculinity. Korean men remained “protectors of women” and the nation visà-vis the compulsory male military service, yet they also expressed sensitivity.18 South Korean popular culture both absorbs and reinterprets western and other Asian conceptions of masculinity. In addition, Korean popular culture circulates worldwide, particularly through the Korean diaspora, which includes adoptees. The Hallyu (Korean Wave) means that non-Korean nationals find themselves exposed to characters in Korean dramas enacting soft masculinity, as well as Korean pop (K-Pop) stars whose gender performances are more fluid than pop stars in the United States. More importantly, not all Korean pop stars are Korean nationals. SM Entertainment K-Pop supergroup Exo is composed of both South Korean and Chinese, performing songs in both Korean 15  Sun Jung, Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-Pop Idols (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 39. Jung offers a deeper examination of soft masculinity in “The Shared Imagination of Bishōnen, Pan-East Asian Soft Masculinity: Reading DBSK, Youtube.com and Transcultural New Media Consumption,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, no. 20 (April 2009). 16  Jung, Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption, 71. 17  Ibid., 47. 18  Colby Miyose and Erika Engstrom, “Boys Over Flowers: Korean Soap Opera and the Blossoming of a New Masculinity,” Popular Culture Review 26, no. 2 (2015). For further reading on Korean masculinity, please see: Seungsook Moon, “The Production and Subversion of Hegemonic Masculinity: Refiguring Gender Hierarchy in Contemporary South Korea,” in Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, ed. Laurel Kendall (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002).

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and Mandarin. Other examples include Thai-Chinese American Nickchun Horvejkul from 2PM, Hong Kong-Taiwanese Canadian Henry Lau from Super Junior-M, and Daniel Day from DMTN (previously known as Dalmation). Popular culture’s conflation of Asian and Asian Americans as interchangeable populations (e.g. non-Korean nationals as K-Pop idols) influences how Asian and Asian American masculinity are linked. Thus, although Jung, Miyose and Engstrom write in a South Korean and East Asian context, their articulations of new forms of masculinity also inform Asian American men’s performances. Whether they are Asian nationals, Asian immigrants, or Asian Americans, societal perceptions of their masculinity are the same – it does not matter where they came from or where they were born, what matters is that they lack access to white, hegemonic masculinity.19 The analyses by Jung, Miyose, and Engstrom account for how patriarchal ideology and heteronormativity underpin masculinity in both South Korea and the U.S. These scripts – patriarchal ideology and heternormativity – inspire how all American men, including Asian American men, perform their racialized masculinities. To divorce patriarchy and heteronormativity from gender socialization practices allows for the invisibility of the relationships between systems of gendering, racialization, and creation of appropriate sexuality. U.S. soft masculinity is exemplified by the widely popular Hey, Girl meme series starring Hollywood actor Ryan Gosling. The series originated on the Tumblr site “Feminist Ryan Gosling.”20 Within these memes, images of Gosling from films (e.g. Lars and the Real Girl and The Notebook) and photoshoots where the actor appears affable and brooding are juxtaposed with quotes that emphasize his emotional sensitivity. One caption expressed: “Hey girl, my perfect Saturday is a hot cup of tea at sunrise, a trip to the Farmer’s Market, and curling up on the couch to figure out bell books’ theory that feminism is a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture with you.”21 This redefinition of hegemonic masculinity now includes 19  To this end, in his analysis of the Rush Hour film franchise, Murali Balaji notes, “Asian men – regardless of their ethnic or national backgrounds – can somehow be lumped in together as a homogenous and emasculated whole.” Murali Balaji, “Beyond Jackie Chan,” in Global Masculinities and Manhood, ed. Ronald L. Jackson, Murali Balaji, and Molefi Asante (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 194. 20  Danielle Henderson, “Feminist Ryan Gosling,” Feminist Ryan Gosling, 2015, accessed December 27, 2015, http://feministryangosling.tumblr.com); and Know Your Meme, “Ryan Gosling,” Know Your Meme News, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/ryangosling 2015 (accessed December 27, 2015). 21  Danielle Henderson, “Feministryangosling,” Feminist Ryan Gosling, 2011 http://feministryangosling.tumblr.com/post/11181651198 (accessed December 27, 2015).

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softness, emotional vulnerability, and support for women’s romanticism and empowerment. Soft masculinity emerged from changing understandings of hegemonic masculinity during the late 1990s and early 2000s. For example, the meterosexual modeled the appropriateness of embodying complex mixes of masculinity and femininity for straight men in the United States and the rest of the Western world. Doing so nevertheless evokes the fear of failing to completely adhere to white, American norms of masculinity. In fact, because of hegemonic masculinity’s intrinsic links to whiteness in the United States, Asian American men always failed to perform this masculinity correctly. The rise of soft masculinity in the United States allows Asian American men, and others from marginalized communities, the opportunity to create a more nuanced understanding of self. These men gain new visibility. Chua and Fujino write: “[W]e suggest that Asian-American men today are at a critical site for redefining their masculinity, because of their own experience with subordination and because the women’s movement has created the consciousness to challenge patriarchy.”22 Similarly, Jachinson Chan contends that this reconceptualization of masculinity “incorporates both feminine and masculine roles without perpetuating or naturalizing gender and sexual hierarchies.”23 Soft masculinity represents a transnational fusion of multiple and different masculinities. This form of masculinity arose in different cultural contexts, but inserted itself into popular culture in both South Korea and the U.S. as a result of shifts in how masculinity is interpreted and packaged within mainstream society. The script of soft masculinity allows Matthews ample opportunity to express emotion throughout the docu-series with impunity. In fact, emotionality and vulnerability are often expected of adoptees. Their birth search and reunion experiences are already over-determined as emotive experiences as adoptees reflect on what it means to re-enter their biological families and nation of birth. Matthews’ self-reflexivity as he negotiates fraught experiences fulfills the expectations of soft masculinity and adoptee affect. Matthews’ successful deployment of soft masculinity and his performance of racial identity are aided by his positioning within hip-hop culture. When Matthews was coming of age in the 1990s, hip-hop was synonymous with resistant Black hypermasculinity and produced counternarratives to pathological

22  Chua and Fujino, “Negotiating New Asian-American Masculinities”: 408. 23  Jachinson Chan, Chinese American Masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee (New York: Routledge, 2001), 20.

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tropes of African American inferiority.24 Being a hip-hop cultural producer allows Matthews to perform resistant hypermasculinity and provides a platform for Matthews to assert himself as an atypical Asian American man. He enacts a gender performance separate from assumptions of what it means to be Asian. Oliver Wang notes: “For the past twenty years, hip-hop has been a dominant cultural and musical force for Asian American youth. Even in other areas of Asian American cultural expression, from car racing to spoken-word poetry and filmmaking, the aesthetics of hip-hop have become a common influence and theme.”25 Matthews becomes legible as someone who is neither effeminate nor weak. This creates space for soft masculinity. This affective performance of racialized masculinity in the U.S. context transfers readily to Asia. Miyose and Engstrom argue that the characters in the successful Korean drama Boys Over Flowers (2009) could express emotion and vulnerability because they engaged in hypermasculine hobbies such as rugby, boxing, race car driving, and playboy behaviors with women. Not only is there a congruence of masculinities across the trans-Pacific, but also the hiphop genre has become a tool for marginalized peoples across the world to find agency and voice. Ironically, the transnational spread of hip-hop’s racialized and masculine politics has been assisted by the global commodification of the music genre. Hip-hop’s popularity in South Korea creates a ready stage for Matthews to perform a racialized, soft and hyper, masculinity.26

Articulating Soft Masculinity in akaDan (2014)

akaDan (2014) provides Korean adoptees, adoptive parents, biological parents, and the broader Asian American community with a lens to deepen their understanding of what it means to be in an adoptee community. Social media facilitates 24  Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, That’s the Joint!: The Hiphop Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Miles White, From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). 25  Oliver Wang, “Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity, and the Asian American MC,” in That’s the Joint!: The Hip-hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2011), 217. 26  See Ela Greenberg, “ ‘The King of the Streets’: Hip Hop and the Reclaiming of Masculinity in Jerusalem’s Shu’afat Refugee Camp,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2, no. 2 (2009): 231–250; and Hae-Kyung Um, “The Poetics of Resistance and the Politics of Crossing Borders: Korean Hip-hop and ‘cultural Reterritorialisation’,” Popular Music 32, no. 1 (2013): 51–64.

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these connections without requiring adoptees to leave their homes and provides an immediate sense of interaction and intimacy. Through a virtual community, the docu-series exposes adoptees and non-adoptees alike to what it means to negotiate multiple identities – Korean, American, Asian American. The access to alternative media and representations is critical for transnational Korean adoptees, as members of predominantly white American families, to share their experiences and explore their identities. This deployment of new media reflects how dominant discourse is no longer the only site where gender socialization occurs. In their discussion of Asian American men in the media, Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham contend the goal should be “to challenge the traditional way dominant media culture has constructed gender of both Asian and Asian American men and women.”27 Online engagement contributes to the deconstruction and reconstruction of gender norms as marginalized communities actively engage with how they are represented. Asian Americans are part of a broader movement speaking back against racist and sexist media depictions of their racial and ethnic groups. Lori K. Lopez argues: Within the online world, these particular Asian Americans [participating in YouTube] have become highly visible and they now have the opportunity to articulate their own perspectives and realities. This cultural work is arguably political because it renders Asian American identities legible and disseminates Asian American narratives and voices.28 Matthews’ utilization of YouTube reflects a broader cultural shift in how Asian Americans engage with popular culture. This dissemination method reflects how the site provides Asian Americans, including adoptees, the opportunity to create and carve out a space for themselves to be seen and heard.29 The docu-series offers a three-dimensional portrayal of adoptees, as it follows Matthews’ journey from someone with little engagement with the adoptee community to one that positions himself within a growing collection of 27  Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham, Asian Americans and the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 73. 28  Ibid., 152. 29  Austin Considine, “For Asian-American Stars, Many Web Fans,” The New York Times, July 30, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/fashion/for-asian-stars-many-web-fans .html?r=0 (accessed July 06, 2015); and James Kim and Cameron Kell, “Asian-American YouTube Celebrities Aim to Change Perceptions,” Southern California Public Radio, April 24, 2015, http://www.scpr.org/programs/the-frame/2015/04/24/42564/asian-americanyoutube-celebrities-aim-to-change-p/ (accessed July 6, 2015).

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adoptee-authored search and reunion documentaries. His decision to conduct a birth search coincided with a request from the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA) to perform at the triennial IKAA Gathering held in Seoul, South Korea, from July 29 to August 4, 2013.30 When the IKAA Events Coordinator, Jackie Holm, first contacted him, Matthews was not aware of the conference, neither had he engaged in the broader transnational adult adoptee community.31 Matthews began to familiarize himself with the experiences of other adoptees only after learning about IKAA. For him, this trip meant that it “could be [his] only-shot at finding [his] blood relatives.”32 As a newcomer to IKAA, Matthews provides one of the more complex firsthand accounts of Gathering activities, and his series shares these insights with non-adoptees and adoptees unable to attend the Gathering. Over the course of the docuseries, viewers witness Matthews engaging in the evening activities attended by IKAA Gathering participants, including clubbing in the Kangnam neighborhood of Seoul, participating in Adoptee Amazing Race (a get-to-know-Seoul scavenger hunt), and performing at the closing party. Matthews experiences a complex wave of emotions as he negotiates what it means to be in a reunion after he is notified that his biological family has been located. When discussing search and reunion with other Korean adoptees, Matthews comments that most have negative experiences.33 He is concerned that perhaps his family may want money from him or that his siblings, a brother and sister, will hate him. His financial concerns stem from multiple reasons. His family experienced poverty, which contributed to his adoption, and other adoptees had shared that their biological families directly requested money. Although South Korea is a developed nation, it continuously finds itself rendered as developing in the minds of adoptees. Adoptive parents often fuel this perception by emphasizing poverty as a reason for giving up their children for adoption. This rhetoric reflects how biological families tended to be the more financially constrained members of South Korean society (e.g. 30  The triennial gatherings began with the first Gathering of Adult Korean Adoptees in Washington D.C. in 1999. The second International Gathering of Adult Korean Adoptees was held in Oslo, Norway, in 2001. Since 2004 the gatherings have been held in Seoul, South Korea, with the gatherings falling under the IKAA umbrella since 2007. 31  While not an adoptee herself, Jackie Holm embodies the legacies of adoption, as she is the daughter of an adoptee, Tim Holm. 32  Korean Adoptee Story – “aka DAN” KOREAN ADOPTEE DOC Pt. 1, prod. Mayrok Media, Arirang TV, and ISAtv, dir. Jon Maxwell, perf. Dan Matthews, YouTube, March 6, 2014, https://youtu.be/OzGHY6enzDs?list=PL2T8s i7PmAEYOiss64MnSQwsv6EwlymD (accessed June 7, 2015). 33  Ibid.

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low-income families and unwed mothers). Children often found themselves relinquished for adoption because orphanages and adoption agencies promised better economic futures for these ‘orphans’ in adoptive families. As a result, many adoptees, including Matthews, are primed to believe that their biological families are always less wealthy than their Western counterparts. The notion that South Koreans only participate in transnational adoption due to economic inequalities between the nation and the West elides the monetary benefits adoption participation offers the South Korean government, orphanages, and social service agencies. Monetary exchange is at the heart of international adoption. Children are commodified as transnational adoptees, and returning adult adoptees are potential sources of financial gifting for their biological families. Precarity precedes the reunion process. Even after DNA results confirm Matthews’ biological ties to his Korean family, he is in disbelief until he reviews the paperwork himself. This skepticism and, perhaps, even apprehension is rooted in the fact that adoptees fear being reunited with the wrong family. Some adoptees find themselves engaging in reunions with Korean families with whom they lack genetic ties.34 These false reunions result from the variable veracity of information found within adoption files. Adoptees often discover that their Korean names and birth dates, provided by Korean orphanages, were altered to facilitate transnational adoption. Orphanages considered adoptees as interchangeable objects. If one child was suddenly unavailable, a different child was sent instead.35 While Matthews ponders whether his reunion is fraudulent, he also fears rejection from his biological parents, sister, and twin brother. His siblings may have only learned fairly recently about his existence. Although he does not disclose whether or not additional anxiety is created by the fact that he was separated from his twin brother, I suggest his concerns about reunion are rooted in fears of a second abandonment. There is no guarantee that after the initial meeting, either party will want to pursue continued contact. Addressing this fear, Matthews asserts: “They don’t need to embrace me . . . Emotionally it’s just going to be very, very heavy.”36 His preemptive statement suggests that Matthews desires to protect himself from rejection. Yet, he also reveals the rawness of his emotions and his vulnerability. Matthews’ response 34  See Melissa L. Jones, “Portland’s Korean Adoptees Help Others Uncover Old Roots and New,” The Oregonian, February 7, 2014, http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index .ssf/2014/02/portlands_korean_adoptees_help.html (accessed February 18, 2014). 35  McKee, “Monetary Flows and the Movements of Children.” 36  Korean Adoptee Story – “aka DAN” KOREAN ADOPTEE DOC Pt. 1.

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Figure 11.1 Matthews shares his arrival at Incheon International Airport in South Korea with his Instagram followers. Courtesy of Dan Matthews.

Figure 11.2 Matthews documents his arrival at the International Korean Adoptee Association Gathering at the Lotte Hotel, Myeongdong, Seoul, South Korea, on Instagram. Courtesy of Dan Matthews

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reveals his need, along with other adoptees, to manage expectations and the ‘what ifs’ associated with reunion.37 He is apprehensive about what the impending reunion will mean for him. Matthews is uncertain as to how to behave upon meeting one’s biological family and forging relationships with them. What makes Matthews’ reunion experience unique in comparison to other documentaries is that he discloses his feelings in real time. He uses a variety of social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. Earlier documentaries lack the interactiveness provided by Matthews. Also, as a YouTube personality and hip-hop artist who maintains a high level of social media engagement with his followers, Matthews draws a large audience. For example, in the period immediately following his 2013 visit to Korea, Matthews had over 4,000 Twitter followers.38 In a series of tweets Matthews (@DANakaDAN) shares the news of his reunion and impending trip to Korea on July 25, 2013:

• • • • •

“Been excited to share this news for a long time” “So. My mind is about ready to blow. One month ago i found out that i had been reunited with my biological family.” “Tonight i leave for korea and will meet them for the first time ever on Monday along with a TWIN brother i never knew i had.” “I’ve been blessed to be supported by a group of filmmakers that will be coming to korea to document the entire experience.” “it will be the most personal journey i’ve taken and i’m honored to share it with all of you.”39 Once in South Korea, Matthews continues to update his followers on Twitter and Instagram, sharing photos and messages on both sites. On July 27, 2013 Matthews tweets, “Landed” and shares a link to a photo he posted of himself outside Incheon International Airport on Instagram (Illustration 11.1).40 He received 250 likes on Instagram, his followers wished him luck and 37  My Adoption Story – “aka DAN” KOREAN ADOPTEE DOC Pt. 2, prod. Mayrok Media, Arirang TV, and ISAtv, dir. Jon Maxwell, perf. Dan Matthews, YouTube, March 6, 2014, https://youtu.be/ Z HYARY-1c (accessed July 7, 2015). 38  Dan Matthews, “@DANakaDAN Twitter Account,” The Wayback Machine, August 28, 2013,  https://web.archive.org/web/20140103061442/https://twitter.com/DANakaDAN (accessed March 21, 2016). 39  “Twitter Search, From:DANakaDAN Since:2013–07–22 Until:2013–08–10,” Twitter, 2013, https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3ADANakaDAN since%3A2013–07–22 until%3A20 13–08–10&src=typd&lang=en (accessed March 21, 2016). 40   Dan Matthews, Landed! #koreapalooza, 2013, Incheon, https://instagram.com/p/ cQsI9FqCzq/.

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c­ ongratulations on his impending reunion. A subsequent Instagram post outside the Lotte Hotel in Seoul, South Korea, on July 28, 2013 elicited a similar response from his followers (Illustration 11.2).41 This engagement with his followers from across the globe results in Matthews’ literal participation in trans-Pacific flows in communication. More importantly, the geographic and logistical boundaries that mediated trans-Pacific communication are absent when considering the digital world. His followers are not waiting to see him reflecting on his experiences post-occurrence; rather, the instantaneous nature of social media allows for direct engagement and conversation as users may send him direct messages on Twitter and Instagram. Yet the sharing of his emotions concerning his first trip to South Korea and reunion is not limited to the two social media sites. In a longer post on the media curation site Tumblr, Matthews openly shares startling news; his actual birthdate is different from the one he thought was his.42 Learning about falsified birthdates profoundly impacts adoptees. Birthdays mark biological beginnings and are significant rituals of social identity. Individuals ‘celebrate’ birthdays and are ‘celebrated’ through an annual passage of time. Such revelations concerning one’s date of birth raise profound questions and doubts for adoptees who already tend to lack information about their biological families and their medical histories. The instantaneous nature of social media and the vulnerability displayed by Matthews solidifies his embodiment of Asian American soft masculinity. He is secure enough in his manhood to display a range of emotions, not just an overly aggressive sense of self. Matthews’ engagement with social media also raises questions concerning the curated, performance of self and emotions in the digital world. He is hyperaware of how social media can be interpreted or misinterpreted by his followers. For example, traveling to Eastern Social Welfare Services in Seoul for the first meeting with his biological family, Matthews glances to the camera and states, “I feel like I’m turning this into a huge carnival. And I feel like guilt towards like the other adoptees. I feel like, that they’re like, that I’m not being respectful towards the process.”43 Matthews’ statement reveals that he is aware of how he is potentially turning this emotional, private experience into a public spectacle. Social media upends societal norms regarding privacy, in that what once was private becomes public vis-à-vis a single Tweet or photo. 41  Dan Matthews, Adoptees Goin Ham in Korea! Made It!, 2013, Seoul, https://instagram .com/p/cS7GisqCxJ/. 42  Dan Matthews, “Korea Update!,” DanAKAdan Tumblr, 2013, http://danakadan.tumblr .com/post/56836640150/korea-update (accessed November 6, 2015). 43  Korean Adoptee Story – “aka DAN” KOREAN ADOPTEE DOC Pt. 1.

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Yet, what may be seen as a spectacle actually reflects adoptees’ participation in the deterritorialized adoptee community. His Tweets, Instagram photos, and Tumblr posts make clear that reunion and one’s first trip back to the metaphorical motherland are not only profound individual experiences but that they also need to be collectively processed. Matthews makes his journey a community experience vis-à-vis social media. By doing so, he demonstrates how these platforms define adoptees’ return experiences in the 21st century. The asynchronous, instantaneous nature of social media provides adoptees with an immediacy and connectivity with others in similar positions around the world. I suggest that his sentiments concerning what it means to be “respectful” are probably compounded by the fact that he is surrounded by hundreds of adoptees as part of the IKAA Gathering. These moments of selfreflexivity further humanize him to his followers. Displaying emotion runs counter to American hegemonic masculinity; however, within the context of search and reunion and in the context of social media, this frailty is permissible. Matthews’ sensitive demeanor is acceptable because this situational framework and the social media platform invite viewers to walk side by side with him. Instead of being viewed as weak, he is humanized. The familiarity and ease with which Matthews interacts with viewers are what ultimately separates him from adoptees critical of the transnational adoption industrial complex. Matthews’ uncritical perspectives about the structural processes that enable transnational adoption reflect his lack of exposure to activist adoptee circles. Matthews is innocent of the politics of adoption, which include the debates and controversies concerning adoptee and birth parent rights in South Korea, retroactive citizenship of undocumented adoptees in the US, racial alienation and melancholia among adoptees raised in transracial families, and so on. Nevertheless, Matthews’ naïveté allows his journey to become anyone’s journey. He creates a persona that reminds the audience of their brothers, boyfriends, sons, or best friends – someone to root for during times of success and failure.

akaDan (2014) in South Korea

As a social media phenomenon, akaDan (2014) circulated globally, including in South Korea. The series was released on the Korean online video streaming site Dramafever and the South Korean television station Arirang TV.44 The 44  To view the interview please see Episode 3 of the docu-series: I Just Met My Identical Twin Brother For the First Time!? – “aka DAN” KOREAN ADOPTEE DOC Pt. 3. Produced

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docu-series’ lack of Korean subtitles on Dramafever, as well as Matthews’ lack of Korean language proficiency, suggests that a broader non-native Englishspeaking audience may not have been reached. However, South Korean corporations sponsored the docu-series. The episodes were presented by the online Asian fashion retailer, YesStyle, and produced in association with Arirang TV.45 Additionally, during the production of the docu-series in Summer 2013, Matthews was featured on the South Korean television show, Arirang Today. Conducted in English, the interview with Matthews highlighted both the transformative nature of his birth search and reunion and the docuseries.46 This special-interest segment reflects how adoptee birth search and reunion stories are being normalized in South Korean society. Since the 1990s a remarkable number of adoptee-centered programs concerning birth family search and reunion have aired in South Korea.47 The incorporation of adoptees’ returns to South Korea in popular culture coincided with President Kim Dae Jung’s acknowledgement of adoptees, a significant portion of the Korean diaspora, as “overseas Koreans.”48 Matthews’ gendered performance in akaDan (2014) seamlessly fits within the new articulation of South Korean masculinity. Boyishly youthful in looks, Matthews conforms to the soft masculinity enacted by South Korean men during the 21st century. He performs a particular South Korean aesthetic that captures what is commonly referred to in South Korean popular culture as

by Mayrok Media, Arirang TV, and ISAtv. Directed by Jon Maxwell. Performed by Dan Matthews. YouTube. March 31, 2014, https://youtu.be/sWPcPbzlOLk (accessed July 6, 2015). 45  Cheryl Fuerte, “YesStyle Presents “aka DAN” Documentary Series Premiering Worldwide in March 2014,” PR Newswire, March 12, 2014, http://www.prnewswire.com/newsreleases/yesstyle-presents-aka-dan-documentary-series-premiering-worldwide-inmarch-2014-249700021.html./ (accessed February 15, 2016). 46  Korea Today – YouTube Musician Daniel Matthews, 입양아 출신 유투브 뮤지션 다 니엘 매튜스 Directed by Arirang Today. YouTube. August 7, 2013, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=CbkP306K8-U (accessed February 15, 2016). 47  Hosu Kim, “Television Mothers: Lost & Found in Search and Reunion Narratives,” in Proceedings of the First International Korean Adoption Studies Research Symposium, Seoul (Seoul: Dongguk University, 2007): 125–145; and Elise Prébin, Meeting Once More: The Korean Side of Transnational Adoption (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 48  Rosemary C. Sarri, Yenoak Baik, and Marti Bombyk. “Goal Displacement and Dependency in South Korean-United States Intercountry Adoption.” Children and Youth Services Review 20, nos. 1–2 (1998): 87–114. doi:10.1016/S0190–7409(97)00068–6.

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kkonminam (kkot = flower; minam = handsome man).49 Miyose and Engstrom note: “Qualities of the kkonminam are frequently linked to characters in Japanese manga stories of teenage schoolgirls and their romantic relationships with their bishonen (‘beautiful boy’) boyfriends.”50 Kkonminam attributes include effeminate beauty and vulnerability.51 Yet, even as the kkonminam exhibits a range of emotional depth, he maintains a sense of masculine toughness, as seen in the earlier discussion of Korean hegemonic masculinity. The South Korean understanding of binary gender roles, even as these blur for men, has a deep impact on Korean adoptees. Their general lack of familiarity with enactments of Korean hegemonic masculinity, including soft masculinity, and femininity impacts how they are called into a subject position. For example, while South Korean men may exhibit homosocial behaviors and perform a more feminine notion of masculinity in comparison to their Western peers (e.g. wearing make-up), homophobia persists in South Korean culture.52 49  Roald Maliangkay, “The Effeminacy of Male Beauty in Korea,” IIAS Newsletter 55 (2010), http://www.iias.asia/sites/default/files/IIAS_NL55_0607.pdf (accessed February 15, 2016). 50  Miyose and Engstrom, “Boys Over Flowers,” 2. 51  Ibid., 4. 52  Kathy Novak, “Why South Korea’s Men Are Buying Tons of Cosmetics,” CNNMoney, October 4, 2015, http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/04/news/south-korea-men-cosmetics/ (accessed November 06, 2015); and Lucy Williamson, “South Korean Men Get the Make-up Habit – BBC News,” BBC News, December 3, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20522028 (accessed November 06, 2015). There are non-binary and gender non-conforming people in South Korea as well as LGBT South Koreans. However, their experiences, identities, and communities have yet to be fully acknowledged. Gender non-conforming and LGBT South Koreans traditionally were relegated to the margins of mainstream society even though the first Seoul Queer Films and Videos Festival began in 1998 and the Korean Queer Culture Festival has been held annually since 2010; See Jeongmin Kim, “Queer Cultural Movements and Local Counterpublics of Sexuality: A Case of Seoul Queer Films and Videos Festival,” trans. Sunghee Hong, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, no. 4 (2007): 617–633; and Dong-Yeon Koh, “Globalizing Korean Queers? Project L(esbian), the First Exhibition of Lesbian Arts in South Korea,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2013). For information concerning LGTQ adoptees’ negotiation of gender in South Korea, see Andy Marra, “The Beautiful Daughter: How My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition,” The Huffington Post, November 6, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ andy-marra/the-beautiful-daughter-how-my-korean-mother-gave-me-the-courage-totransition b 2139956.html (accessed November 6, 2015); and Pauline Park, “Coming Full Circle: The Journey of a Transgendered Korean Adoptee,” Pauline Park, November 17, 2015, http://www.paulinepark.com/2015/11/coming-full-circle-the-journey-of-a-transgen dered-korean-adoptee-11-7-15/ (accessed December 14, 2015).

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Hegemonic, heteronormative constructions of sexuality, implicitly and explicitly shape the construction of an evolving gender binary. As noted earlier in this chapter, even as soft masculinity or a kkonminam identity is celebrated and practiced, these men engage aggressive masculine behavior. This performance of toughness is, in fact, mandated through military conscription for all South Korean men. Matthews embodies a trans-Pacific existence. He will always be read as someone torn between South Korea and the United States, living at the interstices of what it means to be a member of a diaspora in which one did not elect to participate. Thus, the fact that his masculine gendered performance is legible in South Korea cannot go unnoticed. I suggest that his performance gives Matthews access to a particular type of South Korean identity that remains inaccessible to those adoptees who cannot seamlessly perform a sense of Koreanness with ease. Other male adoptees have entered Korean society in film (e.g. Brent Beesley in Resilience, 2009), but they do not employ an affect that lends itself to Korean cultural norms. Rather, these other male adoptees’ gendered performances reflect Western, hegemonic norms and values concerning masculinity. Conclusion The soft masculinity performed by Matthews allows him to travel between two cultures – South Korean and American. It is not necessarily a seamless transition across the trans-Pacific, given Matthews’ U.S. upbringing and his lack of Korean cultural competency and language proficiency. Nevertheless, I argue that his gendered construction of a soft masculine, kkonminam-like persona shapes his legibility in his country of birth. His aesthetic and gendered performance also reveals how soft masculinity allowed Asian American men, more broadly, the opportunity to challenge confining and reductive notions of what it means to be Asian in the United States. This positioning is important, as adoptees continue to seek recognition as Asian Americans. Too often their (nearly always white) adoptive families only see them as “just like one of their own.” Conversations of racial difference, including the microaggressions that racialized men experience, may be overlooked or dismissed in favor of assimilationist colorblind discourse. For adoptee viewers watching the docu-series, this may be one of the first avenues in which they see themselves reflected back in Asian American media. akaDan (2014) demonstrates how popular culture’s social media allows adoptees to integrate their perspectives into broader

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narratives of what it means to be Korean and American in South Korea and the United States. Bibliography Arrival: A Short Film. Directed by Alex Myung. Lemonfish Studios, 2016. Balaji, Murali. “Beyond Jackie Chan.” In Global Masculinities and Manhood, ed. Ronald L. Jackson, Murali Balaji, and Molefi Asante, 186–201. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Chan, Jachinson. Chinese American Masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee. New York: Routledge, 2001. Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Chua, Peter, and Diane C. Fujino. “Negotiating New Asian-American Masculinities: Attitudes and Gender Expectations.” Journal of Men’s Studies 7, no. 3 (2007): 391–413. doi:10.3149/jms.0703.391. Considine, Austin. “For Asian-American Stars, Many Web Fans.” The New York Times. July 30, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/fashion/for-asian-stars-manyweb-fans.html? r=0. Accessed July 06, 2015. The Drop Box. Directed by Brian Ivie. Arbella Studios, 2014. Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Eng, David L. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Finding Seoul. Directed by John Sanvidge. Red Shiba Media, 2014. First Person Plural. Directed by Deann Borshay Liem. San Francisco: Center for Asian American Media, 2000. DVD. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal. That’s the Joint!: The Hip-hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2011. Fuerte, Cheryl. “YesStyle Presents aka DAN Documentary Series Premiering Worldwide in March 2014.” PR Newswire. March 12, 2014. http://www.prnewswire.com/newsreleases/yesstyle-presents-aka-dan-documentary-series-premiering-worldwide-inmarch-2014-249700021.html. Accessed February 15, 2016. Greenberg, Ela. “ ‘The King of the Streets’: Hip Hop and the Reclaiming of Masculinity in Jerusalem’s Shu’afat Refugee Camp.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2, no. 2 (2009): 231–250. doi:10.1163/187398509x12476683126428. Henderson, Danielle. “Feministryangosling.” Feminist Ryan Gosling. 2011. Accessed December 27, 2015. http://feministryangosling.tumblr.com/post/11181651198.

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Henderson, Danielle. “Feminist Ryan Gosling.” Feminist Ryan Gosling. 2015. http:// feministryangosling.tumblr.com/. Accessed December 27, 2015. Herek, Gregory M. “On Heterosexual Masculinity: Some Psychical Consequences of the Social Construction of Gender and Sexuality.” American Behavioral Scientist 29, no. 5 (1986): 563–577. doi:10.1177/000276486029005005. Hübinette, Tobias. “Comforting an Orphaned Nation: Representations of International Adoption and Adopted Koreans in Korean Popular Culture.” Ph.D. diss., Stockholm University, 2005. I Just Met My Identical Twin Brother For the First Time!? – “aka DAN” KOREAN ADOPTEE DOC Pt. 3. Produced by Mayrok Media, Arirang TV, and ISAtv. Directed by Jon Maxwell. Performed by Dan Matthews. YouTube. March 31, 2014. Accessed July 6, 2015. https://youtu.be/sWPcPbzlOLk. In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee. Directed by Deann Borshay Liem. Berkeley: Mu Films, 2010. DVD. Jones, Maggie. “Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to South Korea.” The New York Times. January 17, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/magazine/why-ageneration-of-adoptees-is-returning-to-south-korea.html. Accessed July 06, 2015. Jones, Melissa L. “Portland’s Korean Adoptees Help Others Uncover Old Roots and New.” The Oregonian. February 7, 2014. http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index .ssf/2014/02/portlandskoreanadopteeshelp.html. Accessed July 6, 2015. Jung, Sun. “The Shared Imagination of Bishōnen, Pan-East Asian Soft Masculinity: Reading DBSK, Youtube.com and Transcultural New Media Consumption.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, no. 20 (April 2009). http:// intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20/jung.htm. Accessed February 15, 2016. Jung, Sun. Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-Pop Idols. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010. Kim, Eleana J. Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Kim, Hosu. “Television Mothers: Lost & Found in Search and Reunion Narratives.” In Proceedings of the First International Korean Adoption Studies Research Symposium, 125–145. Seoul. Seoul: Dongguk University, 2007. Kim, James, and Cameron Kell. “Asian-American YouTube Celebrities Aim to Change Perceptions.” Southern California Public Radio. April 24, 2015. http://www.scpr.org/ programs/the-frame/2015/04/24/42564/asian-american-youtube-celebrities-aimto-change-p/. Accessed July 06, 2015. Kim, Jeongmin. “Queer Cultural Movements and Local Counterpublics of Sexuality: A Case of Seoul Queer Films and Videos Festival.” Translated by Sunghee Hong. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, no. 4 (2007): 617–633. doi:10.1080/14649370701568086. Kim, Jodi. “ ‘The Ending Is Not an Ending at All’: On the Militarized and Gendered Diasporas of Korean Transnational Adoption and the Korean War.” positions: east asia cultures critique 23, no. 4 (2015): 807–835.

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Kim, Jodi. Ends Of Empire: Asian American Critiques and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Know Your Meme. “Ryan Gosling.” Know Your Meme News. 2015. http://knowyour meme.com/memes/people/ryan-gosling. Accessed December 27, 2015. Koh, Dong-Yeon. “Globalizing Korean Queers? Project L(esbian), the First Exhibition of Lesbian Arts in South Korea.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2013): 378–400. doi:10.1080/14649373.2013.802416. Korea Today – YouTube Musician Daniel Matthews, 입양아 출신 유투브 뮤지션 다 니엘 매튜스. Directed by Arirang Today. YouTube. August 7, 2013. https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=CbkP306K8-U. Accessed February 15, 2016 Korean Adoptee Story – “aka DAN” KOREAN ADOPTEE DOC Pt. 1. Produced by Mayrok Media, Arirang TV, and ISAtv. Directed by Jon Maxwell. Performed by Dan Matthews. YouTube. March 6, 2014. https://youtu.be/OzGHY6enzDs?list=PL2T8s i7PmAEYOiss64MnSQwsv6EwlymD. Accessed June 7, 2015. Lars and the Real Girl. Directed by Craig Gillespie. Produced by Sidney Kimmel, John Cameron, and Sarah Aubrey. By Nancy Oliver. Performed by Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, and Paul Schneider. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2007. DVD. Lopez, Lori Kido. Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Ma, Sheng-Mei. The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. McKee, Kimberly. Beyond Grateful: The Transnational Politics of Adoption. 2015. MS. McKee, Kimberly. “Claiming Ourselves as ‘Korean’: Accounting for Adoptees within the Korean Diaspora in the United States.” In Click and Kin: Transnational Identity and Quick Media, ed. Silvia Schultermandl and May Friedman, pp. 159–179. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. McKee, Kimberly. “Monetary Flows and the Movements of Children: The Transnational Adoption Industrial Complex.” Journal of Korean Studies, 21, No. 1 (Spring 2016): 137–178. McKee, Kimberly. “Rewriting History: Adoptee Documentaries as a Site of Truthtelling.” In The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media, ed. Lori K. Lopez and Vincent Pham. Routledge, Forthcoming. Maliangkay, Roald. “The Effeminacy of Male Beauty in Korea.” IIAS Newsletter 55 (2010): 6–7. Accessed February 15, 2016. http://www.iias.asia/sites/default/files/ IIAS_NL55_0607.pdf. Marra, Andy. “The Beautiful Daughter: How My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition.” The Huffington Post. November 6, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost .com/andy-marra/the-beautiful-daughter-how-my-korean-mother-gave-me-thecourage-to-transition b 2139956.html. Accessed November 06, 2015. Matthews, Dan. Adoptees Goin Ham in Korea! Made It! 2013. Seoul. https://instagram .com/p/cS7GisqCxJ/.

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Matthews, Dan. “Korea Update!” DanAKAdan Tumblr. 2013. http://danakadan.tumblr .com/post/56836640150/korea-update. Accessed November 06, 2015. Matthews, Dan. Landed! #koreapalooza. 2013. Incheon. https://instagram.com/p/ cQsI9FqCzq/. Matthews, Dan. “@DANakaDAN Twitter Account.” The Wayback Machine. N.p., 28 Aug. 2013. Web. 21 Mar. 2016. Miyose, Colby, and Erika Engstrom. “Boys Over Flowers: Korean Soap Opera and the Blossoming of a New Masculinity.” Popular Culture Review 26, no. 2 (2015): 2–13. doi:10.18278/pcr.26.2.1. Accessed February 15, 2016. Moon, Seungsook. “The Production and Subversion of Hegemonic Masculinity: Refiguring Gender Hierarchy in Contemporary South Korea.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, ed. Laurel Kendall, 79–114. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002. My Adoption Story – “aka DAN” KOREAN ADOPTEE DOC Pt. 2. Produced by Mayrok Media, Arirang TV, and ISAtv. Directed by Jon Maxwell. Performed by Dan Matthews. YouTube. March 6, 2014. https://youtu.be/ZHYARY-1c. Accessed July 7, 2015. The Notebook. Directed by Nick Cassavetes. Screenplay by Jeremy Leven. Adapt. Jan Sardi. By Nicholas Sparks. New Line Cinema, 2004. DVD. Novak, Kathy. “Why South Korea’s Men Are Buying Tons of Cosmetics.” CNNMoney. October 4, 2015. http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/04/news/south-korea-men-cosmet ics/. Accessed November 6, 2015. Oh, Arissa H. To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015. Okihiro, Gary Y. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. Ono, Kent A. and Vincent N. Pham. Asian Americans and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Park, Pauline. “Coming Full Circle: The Journey of a Transgendered Korean Adoptee.” Pauline Park. November 17, 2015. http://www.paulinepark.com/2015/11/coming-fullcircle-the-journey-of-a-transgendered-korean-adoptee-11-7-15/. Accessed December 14, 2015. Park Nelson, Kim. “ ‘Loss Is More than Sadness’: Reading Dissent in Transracial Adoption Melodrama in The Language of Blood and First Person Plural.” Adoption & Culture 1, no. 1 (2007): 101–128. Passing Through. Dir. Nathan Adolfson. Center for Asian American Media, 1998. DVD. Pate, SooJin. From Orphan to Adoptee: U.S. Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

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Prébin, Elise. Meeting Once More: The Korean Side of Transnational Adoption. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Resilience. Directed by Tammy Chu. KoRoot, 2009. Sarri, Rosemary C., Yenoak Baik, and Marti Bombyk. “Goal Displacement and Dependency in South Korean-United States Intercountry Adoption.” Children and Youth Services Review 20, nos. 1–2 (1998): 87–114. doi:10.1016/S0190–7409(97)00068–6. Shek, Yen Ling. “Asian American Masculinity: A Review of the Literature.” Journal of Men’s Studies 14, no. 3 (2006): 379–391. doi:10.3149/jms.1403.379. Shimizu, Celine Parreñas. Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012. Trenka, Jane Jeong. Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2009. Trenka, Jane Jeong. The Language of Blood: A Memoir. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2003. “Twitter Search, From: DANakaDAN Since:2013–07–22 Until:2013–08–10.” Twitter. 2013. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3ADANakaDAN since%3A2013–07–22 until%3A2013–08–10&src=typd&lang=en. Accessed March 21, 2016. Um, Hae-Kyung. “The Poetics of Resistance and the Politics of Crossing Borders: Korean Hip-hop and ‘cultural Reterritorialisation’.” Popular Music 32, no. 1 (2013): 51–64. doi:10.1017/s0261143012000542. Wang, Oliver. “Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity, and the Asian American MC.” In That’s the Joint!: The Hip-hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, 199–223. New York: Routledge, 2011. White, Miles. From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Williamson, Lucy. “South Korean Men Get the Make-up Habit – BBC News.” BBC News. December 3, 2012. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20522028. Accessed November 6, 2015.

CHAPTER 12

Up in the Air

Circuits of Transnational Asian and Asian American Mothering Miliann Kang Abstract Asian and Asian American mothering have emerged as contested sites of racialized reproductive politics. Trans-Pacific feminist critiques reveal that mothering is not simply a product of a fixed Asian culture, but reflects highly contingent global forces, such as state policies, economic development, and migration patterns. Drawing on personal narrative and on interview data, this ‘thought piece’ maps out questions and directions for further research regarding the intimate and affective registers of mothering as transPacific subjects.

Keywords reproductive politics – transnational families – fertility – pronatalism – mothering

The flight cabin is almost completely dark, except for the two small movie screens glowing on the adjacent seat backs in front of us. My sixteen-yearold daughter, Sangha, and I find a film we want to watch together, and synch the screens so we are watching simultaneously, but through our own separate devices, which seems like an apt metaphor for this stage of parenting. We have perfected the technique of getting the two screens to match exactly over many transcontinental trips, but on this thirteen-hour trans-Pacific trip, we are maxing out on our third movie. Still hours from our scheduled arrival time in Seoul, we are tired but unable to sleep. We have been planning this summer trip for months, our first extended trip to the land where my parents were born. In addition to visiting cousins and aunts whom my daughter has never met, my husband and I are teaching courses at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and Sangha is participating in a junior Fulbright intern program. I am feeling immensely fortunate and also nervous, as I have heard mixed reviews from friends and colleagues who have similarly ventured on these extended homeland visits. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336100_013

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Suddenly, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I look up to see the flight attendant (I’ll call her Jia) speaking to me, and I take off my headphones. She points to the back of the plane and whispers so as not to wake my husband and the other sleeping passengers around us, “There is an empty row of seats back there. Your daughter can go and lie down.” I tap Sangha’s shoulder and ask her if she wants to go stretch out, and she declines. Jia looks miffed and walks away, but in less than a minute, she is back. This time her message, while still spoken softly, is delivered with more authority and urgency, in rapid fire Korean, “You are her mother. You need to tell her that she needs to sleep. The mother shouldn’t keep the daughter awake to watch a movie.” I sigh and say to my daughter, “Sangha, please, even if you’re not tired, can you go back and lie down? We can finish the movie later.” She acquiesces, but her curiosity piqued by her ability to understand some but not all of the conversation, asks, “Why did she keep saying, ‘omma, omma’?” I explain that the flight attendant is telling me I’m a bad omma for letting my child stay up late watching trashy movies. We laugh, and Sangha takes her blanket and pillow and goes and lies down. Jia tucks her in, and my daughter actually does get some sleep. Later, I share this story with a group of friends, provoking a range of responses. My Asian and Asian American friends mostly think it’s funny, and relate similar interactions. One jokes, “Did she make those guttural clucking noises while scolding you?” But my non-Asian friends seem confused and even offended, “That’s so obnoxious, why didn’t you tell her to just mind her own business?” So was the flight attendant overstepping her bounds and overriding my own mothering? Was she acting as an agent of social control, joining the chorus that always seems at the ready to judge and police a woman’s mothering? Or was she helping me fulfill my mothering responsibilities by invoking a communal sense of responsibility for the care of children? What kind of transnational connections enabled this conversation: the imposed intimacy of a flight cabin; the blurring of boundaries of service work and interpersonal communication; the presumption of common mothering values and affective ties based on shared ethnicity as Korean diasporic subjects? Maybe Jia is a mother herself, whose job imposes long periods of transnational separation from her own children, and she is enacting her own maternal longings. Or she could be one of many young Asian women who has decided to forego motherhood, feeling that the demands of paid work are at odds with inflexible family and gender relations, and she has instead folded a sense of caregiving into her job. Perhaps Jia, and flight attendants like her, have become accustomed to taking on these pseudo-parental responsibilities in response to the increasing numbers of

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kirogi (wild geese) children, a term referring to South Korean students sent at a young age to study in the U.S., who often traverse the friendly trans-Pacific skies unaccompanied. This vignette of my own travels across the Pacific hopefully serves as a productive takeoff to explore this volume’s questions about what it means to do trans-Pacific research. Specifically, how can a trans-Pacific feminist framework inform the study of mothering, and reproductive politics more broadly? What new theoretical approaches and empirical questions are emerging through conversations among Asian and Asian American feminist scholars? How can this scholarship respond to increasingly dense transnational linkages in the Asia-Pacific region without reinforcing Orientalist discourses that treat Asia as monolithic? What are the dangers of eliding the distinctions between Asia and Asian America, given the long history of conflating the two, and the resultant perceptions of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners? How do these tensions play out in the fraught arena that I refer to as the global mommy wars, epitomized by the publication of Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,1 and the heated debates it has provoked about Eastern versus Western styles of parenting? What kind of research questions and projects can intervene productively in these debates, and what are the challenges of producing engaged public scholarship that cannot be easily reduced to soundbites and stereotypes? What are the transPacific subjectivities that we bring to these questions, and how do they simultaneously illuminate and erase, clarify and distort, expand and limit our understandings? The invitation to contribute to this volume has allowed me to gnaw on these questions, pose some preliminary responses and propose directions for further research. It has nudged me to examine the ways my own current research on mothering and reproductive politics engages with the trans-Pacific, and how it can do so more deeply. While recognizing the many contributions and aligning myself strongly with the intellectual project of Asian American Studies, I am aware of its U.S.-centric biases. I am excited by and aim to contribute to the growing transnational scholarship which bridges Asia and the Americas, while at the same time I am wary of reproducing the colonial and imperialist legacies of area studies. Despite increasing engagement, the intellectual and disciplinary boundaries between Asian American Studies and Asian Studies remain firm. These questions have scholarly, political and emotional significance for me, as I struggle to situate myself and my research in a transnational 1  Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin, 2011).

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field while owning both the limitations and privileges of my positionality as a U.S. citizen and academic. During my summer teaching in Seoul, the manuscript that I have been trying to complete on the racial politics of Asian American mothering would gel, then fall apart, then come back together in new iterations, as I found myself questioning how the framework of racialized mothering that I was theorizing applied to the South Korean, and broader Asian, context. As my points of reference shifted, I could no longer assume the primacy of race, or at least not the racial categories and hierarchies that are often taken for granted in the U.S. Whereas my research project centered issues of racial exclusion and belonging for Asian American mothers, the most pressing questions related to South Korean motherhood stem from the pressures of rapid industrial development, economic insecurity and class divisions, lack of social welfare policies, ongoing geo-political and military conflict, and the persistence of patriarchal structures in families, workplaces, and society. A trans-Pacific framework does not invalidate or privilege one set of concerns over another, but it does demand attention to the particularities of historical and national contexts and vigilance against false universalisms. With regard to the study of reproductive politics, these particularities are what make a trans-Pacific approach both exciting and daunting, as they pose complex questions in multiple areas of inquiry. Although negotiations of family, employment, and community ties are often framed as personal or cultural struggles, they reflect much larger contexts of gendered transnational politics in the Asian diaspora. Transnational Asian and Asian American feminist critiques have highlighted intimate relations, particularly those within the family, as invisible but crucial dimensions of racial and nationalist projects.2 Constructions of mothering are often hidden within discourses and practices characterized as private choices rather than as sites of political, economic, and cultural conflict. Contestations regarding Asian and Asian American 2  Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency (New York: Routledge, 1994); Lynn Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Rhacel Salazar Parrenas and Winnie Tam, “The Derivative Status of Asian American Women,” in The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization, ed. Rhacel Salazar Parrenas (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 110–133; Emiko Ochiai and Barbara Molony, Asia’s New Mothers: Crafting Gender Roles and Childcare Networks in East and Southeast Asian Societies (Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2008); Aihwa Ong, Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, and the New America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

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mothering reflect historical and contemporary racial discourses, such as the yellow peril and model minority, and position mothers as agents of assimilation, mobility, and racialized citizenship within contexts of globalization and neoliberalism. These global forces also shape the inability to form stable families, as unstable employment undermines the ability of men to support households. At the same time, the lack of support and acceptance for single mothers shapes persistent high rates of adoption from Asian countries.3 Examples abound from news articles, popular culture and scholarship that show the importance of trans-Pacific feminist analyses in exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, nation, citizenship, class, and reproductive politics. Headlines such as “Number of Newborns Hits All-Time Low”4 and “Declining Birth Rates Raising Concerns in Asia”5 have provoked nationalist debates about low fertility throughout Asia. According to the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the five countries with the lowest fertility rates in 2015 were all in Asia: Singapore (.81), Macau (.94), Taiwan (1.12), Hong Kong (1.18), and South Korea (1.19).6 States have responded with various pronatalist policies, ranging from tax incentives, to childcare subsidies, to expansion of day care and after-school programs, to conservative ideological appeals to women to prioritize service to family and nation. In response, transnational feminist movements have challenged patriarchal family norms, demanded more flexible work arrangements, called for more open immigration policies, sought greater support and acceptance for single, working-class and queer mothers and their children, and protested massive military expenditures and the gutting of social welfare programs.7 3  Catherine Ceniza Choy, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America. (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Eleana J. Kim, Adopted territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 4  Chosun Ilbo, “Number of Newborns Hits All-Time Low,” accessed March 19, 2016 http://eng lish.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/02/02/2015020200759.html. 5  East-West Center, “Declining Birth Rates Raising Concerns in Asia,” http://www.eastwestcen ter.org/news-center/east-west-wire/declining-birth-rates-raising-concerns-in-asia (accessed March 19, 2016). 6  United States Central Intelligence Agency, “World Factbook,” https://www.cia.gov/library/ publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html (accessed March 19, 2016). For comparison, the United States ranks 142nd at 1.87. Niger has the highest fertility rate at 6.76. The replacement birthrate is estimated at 2.1 per woman, although this rate varies by country depending on the rate of infant mortality. 7   Miriam Ching and Yoon Louie, “Minjung feminism: Korean Women’s Movement for Gender and Class Liberation,” Women’s Studies International Forum 18, no. 4 (1995): 417–430; Sueng-sook Moon, “Carving Out Space: Civil Society and the Women’s Movement in South

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In contrast to these countries concerns with low fertility, China’s birthrate, currently at 1.6, is projected to increase even more rapidly with the announcement in 2015 that it will end its one child policy. This has escalated already ramped-up fears of economic, military, and cultural competition between the U.S. and China. Against this backdrop, the public debate regarding Chua’s tiger mothering uncovered seething domestic anxieties about economic decline and educational inferiority, and their projection onto Asians and Asian Americans. Chua’s form of pressurized, resource-intensive parenting reinforces the neoliberal doctrine that children (especially those of immigrants and non-whites) are the private responsibility of families rather than the collective responsibility of societies and states. These debates about competitive, resource-intensive, ‘Asian’ parenting obscure underlying neoliberal discourses, which increasingly regard childrearing as the privatized activities of individual families rather than the collective responsibility of societies and states. Expanding the U.S.-based scholarship on studies of the family, which have concentrated on the gender, race and class dimensions of “intensive mothering,”8 transnational frameworks of family and neoliberal citizenship reveal deeply embedded constructions of Asian and Asian American mothers as global reproductive threats. A trans-Pacific framework illuminates how constructions of family, work, and motherhood emerge as highly contested sites of gendered transnational politics in the Asian diaspora. Ideologies and practices of mothering both respond to and reproduce market-oriented strategies of survival in a hyper competitive global market. State policies of both sending and receiving countries are deeply implicated in the ways that migration shapes commitments to family and work, even into the second generation. By unsettling U.S.-centric frameworks, transnational Asian feminist critiques have much to contribute to these debates, and they have reshaped my own research questions. Fast-forward five weeks later, on the return flight from Seoul, my daughter and I recall the earlier interaction with Jia. After many similar encounters in the intervening time – a taxi driver scolding me because my daughter cannot speak Korean, an aunt complaining that I didn’t bring her at a younger Korea,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (2002): 473–500; Kwon In-Sook “How Identities and Movement Cultures Became Deeply Saturated with Militarism: Lessons from the Prodemocracy Movement of South Korea,” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 11, no. 2 (2005): 7–40; Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 8  Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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age to meet her extended family, a waitress telling us that we aren’t eating a traditional dish correctly – our flight attendant’s intervention does not strike us now as particularly odd or inappropriate. I comment that it is a good thing for children to spend time with people who are roughly the same age and cultural background as their parents – as it helps them realize that their own parents’ quirks are not just individual but collective, situated, and historical. Sangha humors me, “Yeah, now I understand it’s not just you; it’s your people.” We laugh, but our own family adventure across the trans-Pacific has opened our eyes to the ways that we are products of forces beyond our control and beneath our conscious awareness. That even our highly individual relationship as mother and daughter is conditioned by our environment, and shifts as we travel between Asia and Asian America. We are becoming Aihwa Ong’s “flexible citizens,”9 mobile subjects who traverse national boundaries with ease in search of economic opportunity and cultural fit. This shift is bittersweet, as Ong’s metaphor of the multiple-passport holder symbolizes both movement and displacement, desire and loss. These affects permeate our departure and re-entry, like jet lag, disorienting and tiring us, but also stamping us as crossers of borders and time zones. My research agenda has also shifted, as I bring a stronger trans-Pacific focus to my current project and explore collaborations for new research on how South Korean mothers negotiate work and family and how their patterns of employment compare to other Asian countries and the U.S. Already I have transitioned from citing U.S. census data to referencing OECD studies for background statistics. The interview questions I ask no longer assume common understandings of race or its significance, but address multiple social and historical forces which shape the intimate and affective ties of mothers, children, and families, including my own. We scroll through the movie list and synch our screens for the flight home. References Ching, Miriam, and Yoon Louie. “Minjung feminism: Korean women’s movement for gender and class liberation.” Women’s Studies International Forum 18, no. 4 (1995): 417–430. Chosun Ilbo. “Number of Newborns Hits All-Time Low.” http://english.chosun.com/ site/data/html_dir/2015/02/02/2015020200759.html. Accessed March 19, 2016. 9  Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

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Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: Penguin, 2011. East-West Center. “Declining Birth Rates Raising Concerns in Asia.” http://www.east westcenter.org/news-center/east-west-wire/declining-birth-rates-raising-con cerns-in-asia. Accessed March 19, 2016. Fujiwara, Lynn. Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. In-Sook, Kwon. “How Identities and Movement Cultures Became Deeply Saturated with Militarism: Lessons from the Pro-democracy Movement of South Korea.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 11, no. 2 (2005): 7–40. Kim, Eleana J. Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Moon, Sueng-sook. “Carving out Space: Civil Society and the Women’s Movement in South Korea,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (2002): 473–500. Nakano Glenn, Evelyn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey. Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency. New York: Routledge, 1994. Ochiai, Emiko and Barbara Molony. Asia’s New Mothers: Crafting Gender Roles and Childcare Networks in East and Southeast Asian Societies. Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2008. Ong, Aihwa. Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, and the New America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar and Winnie Tam. “The Derivative Status of Asian American Women.” In The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization, ed. Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, 110–133. New York: New York University Press, 2008. United States Central Intelligence Agency. “World Factbook: Country Comparison: Total Fertility Rate.” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ rankorder/2127rank.html. Accessed March 19, 2016. Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Part 4 Beauty and the Body

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CHAPTER 13

Pageant Politics

Tensions of Power, Empire, and Nationalism in Manila Carnival Queen Contests Genevieve Clutario Abstract This chapter historicizes the development of Filipina beauty pageants during the first few decades of the 20th century. The emergence of modern beauty pageants during the early 1900s marked a huge shift from Spanish to U.S. colonial gendered expectations and standards concerning Filipinas. Whereas in the Spanish period, ideal Filipino women remained within the private domestic space, during the American regime, the public spectacle became a venue for women to display the “best” Filipina qualities. While participating in beauty pageants, they presented their beauty, modern-ness, social class, and “respectability” to a mass audience and negotiated new gender roles within the context of the larger colonial and anti-colonial political and economic power struggles. Participants navigated within the confluence of these infrastructures, not only negotiating and solidifying social and political status through pageantry and titles, but also producing specific markers of feminine beauty along shifting hierarchies of difference through their spectacular self-presentations. Ideologies of race, gender, ethnicity, and class fundamentally informed the ways in which the infrastructures of nationalism and empire attempted to construct the figure of the beauty queen in colonial Philippines.

Keywords Filipino women – beauty – beauty pageants – Philippines – U.S. empire – nationalism – colonialism – Manila carnival

The 2015 Miss Universe contest ignited a flurry of social media attention. At the end of the night, the pageant’s host, Steve Harvey, mistakenly named Miss Colombia, Ariadna Gutierrez, the 2015 Miss Universe only to retract his statement a few minutes later and crown Miss Philippines, Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, as the winner. The awkward few minutes of this mistake and debacle recorded on live television immediately went viral, inciting dramatic reactions from

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news outlets and individual audience members who posted on various social media platforms. However, another controversial moment from earlier in the contest also garnered attention and much debate. During the pageant’s critical question and answer portion of the contest, Wurtzbach was asked if she thought the United States should have a military presence in the Philippines. She answered, “I think the United States and the Philippines have always had a good relationship with each other. We were colonized by the Americans, we have their culture in our traditions even up to this day and I think we’re very welcoming with the Americans. And I don’t see any problem with that at all.”1 For critics, the question and the time-restricted (thirty-seconds) answer glossed over current debates around the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, which would grant the United States military rotational access to a number of military bases across the Philippines, including Clark and Subic air force bases, and potentially threaten Philippine sovereignty. Furthermore, Wurtzbach’s emphasis on the “good relationship” between the Philippines and the United States echoed U.S. exceptionalist discourse that sanitized a long and fraught colonial history. Some of the same critics argued that Wurtzbach’s answer reflected the “colonial mentality” of Filipinos. Others countered the backlash against Wurtzbach arguing that such political debate should be left to politicians and not beauty queens. And others still took issue with the amount of attention paid to beauty pageantry, claiming that other more important and serious issues should take precedence over Miss Universe.2 In the Philippine/Filipino context, beauty and politics cannot be so easily separated. Filipina beauty pageantry cannot simply be regarded as frivolous and void of political consequence, nor can it be defined as a residual effect of colonialism and an internalized colonialism. In fact, U.S. colonial officials created modern Filipina beauty pageants in the early 20th century to function as a crucial political, economic, and cultural component that would support colonial endeavors. Beauty pageants did not just emerge because of U.S. influence, they were deliberately created as a system that had crucial implications and functions within the larger structures of U.S. imperialism. 1  Richard Heydarian, “Beauty Queens and Geopolitics: Debating American Bases in the Philippines,” The Huffington Post, December 23, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-javad-heydarian/beauty-queens-and-geopoli_b_8872122.html (accessed December 27, 2015). 2  Charles Lam, “The Other Reason Why Everyone Is Talking About Miss Philippines,” NBC News, December 22, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/other-reason-whyeveryone-talking-about-miss-philippines-n484606 (accessed December 27, 2015).

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This chapter uses the Manila Carnival Queen Contest as a point of entry to understanding the complex histories and entanglements of Philippine nationalism and U.S. imperialism during the early 20th century. The spectacle of beauty as a manifestation of U.S. colonial and Philippine nationalist tensions and negotiations demands an exploration of different considerations of where we locate colonial power and politics. The era of the Manila Carnival Queen Contest produced a particular type of large-scale spectacle in which its public celebration of Filipina beauty defined beauty as part of defining a Philippine nation and its ideals within the context of American colonial subjugation. Indeed, the Manila Carnival Queen Contest and pageant, held annually from 1908 to 1939, provided a platform for Filipinos and Americans both to negotiate power and identity and to display fantasies of power.3 A closer look at these pageants reveals how U.S. colonial officials and Filipino elite nationalists used the annual contest, coronation, and celebration of Manila Carnival Queens to further their own projects. Following Sarah Banet-Weiser’s work on beauty, this chapter approaches the Manila Carnival contest as part of a “vast and varied infrastructure that supports, sustains, and simultaneously reinvents it.”4 In the Philippine context, beauty pageants developed into public spectacles that emerged from Filipino nationalist as well as U.S. colonial projects. The ideologies of race, gender, ethnicity, and class fundamentally informed the ways in which the infrastructures of nationalism and empire attempted to construct the figure of the beauty queen in colonial Philippines. 3  Similarly, Judy Wu argues that ethnic beauty pageants and the idealization of womanhood reflect the intersections between culture and power in Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “ ‘Loveliest Daughter of Our Ancient Cathay!’: Representations of Ethnic and Gender Identity in the Miss Chinatown USA Beauty Pageant,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 5–31. For more on ethnic beauty pageants in the United States see Christine Reiko Yano, Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawaii’s Cherry Blossom Festival (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006) and Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Arleen De Vera and Dawn Mabalon have written on the importance of beauty contests in forming Filipino communities in California, articulating the performance of nationalism within the diasporic context. Arleen De Vera, “Rizal Day Queen Contests, Filipino Nationalism, and Femininity.” Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity: 67–82; Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, “Beauty Queens, Bomber Pilots, and Basketball Players: SecondGeneration Filipina Americans in Stockton California, 1930s to 1950s, in Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory: Theorizing the Filipina/American, ed. Melinda L. de Jesus (New York: Routledge, 2005), 117 – 135. 4  Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 6.

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Just as important, participants navigated within the confluence of these infrastructures, not only negotiating and solidifying social and political status through pageantry and titles, but also producing specific markers of feminine beauty along shifting hierarchies of difference through their spectacular self-presentations.

The First Manila Carnival: A Spectacle of Colonial Racism

The development of modern Filipina beauty pageants can be traced back to the annual large-scale colonial spectacle known as the Manila Carnival. In 1907 U.S. colonial officials and businessmen organized the Manila Carnival Association and planned a two-week event modeled after world exhibitions and fairs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in order to project a positive image of the American empire.5 From their vantage point, grand spectacles and entertainments provided a local and global visual representation of the United States–Philippine colonial relationship as one of widely accepted “benevolent assimilation.”6 In this light, the Carnival would serve two purposes. First, it would draw attention to the natural resources and industry of the Philippines, enticing both local and foreign investors.7 At a promotional banquet for the first Manila Carnival, held in September 1907, attended by 150 Filipino, American, and European businessmen and officials, the GovernorGeneral James Francis Smith stated that “though the Carnival would look like it was for pleasure, it was really for business.”8 Captain George T. Langhorne, who served as President of the Manila Carnival Association, echoed similar 5  The majority of the members of the first Manila Carnival Association were white Americans. As the planning of the event became more complex, the Association created subcommittees, which began to include Filipino businessmen and political leaders. However, the executive committee remained majority white American. It was only in subsequent years, as Filipinos sought more active participation that they found themselves in Carnival leadership roles. For example, Arsenio Luz took the position of Director General of the Manila Carnival in 1921 and one popular magazine referred to Luz as the Manila Carnival’s “lord and master.” See “The Carnival is Coming,” Graphic, November 10, 1928, 16. 6  “True Carnival Spirit Now Prevails,” The Manila Times, February 1, 1907. For more on American “exceptionalism” and “benevolence” see Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 7  “True Carnival Spirit Now Prevails.” 8  No Title, El Renacimiento, September 10, 1907, n.p., reprinted and translated in Maria Kalaw Katigbak, Legacy, Pura Villanueva Kalaw: Her Times, Life, and Works, 1886–1954 (Manila: Filipinas Foundation, 1983), 87.

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sentiments, claiming “the Carnival would be good for the country, for its common interests, and would make the world take note of our prosperity and good opportunities for business.” Second, the revelry of a carnival would draw attention away from the violence of the Philippine-American War, which began in 1899 and lasted almost a decade.9 The Carnival Association sought to portray the Manila Carnival as a jubilant celebration that would build friendship between Filipinos and Americans.10 Such a large-scale production, of course, required capital. Instead of asking the newly formed Philippine Assembly to fully fund the two-week long carnival, Cameron Forbes, then Commissioner of Commerce and Police, as well as a leader of the Manila Carnival Association, requested half of the total cost from the government and planned to fundraise additional monies through subscription campaigns, like the Manila Carnival Queen contest.11 Forbes set up a system that made the pageant both a way to raise money and a popularity contest to gain public interest. To gain the privilege of casting a vote for the candidate of his or her choice, one had to obtain a coupon by purchasing one of the following Association-approved newspapers: Cablenews-American, Manila Times, Philippine Free Press, Daily Bulletin, Manila Opinion, Philipppines Gossip, El Comercio, El Mercantil, El Renacimiento, Libertas, La Democracia, Mercurio, Asemblea Filipina, Lipag Calabaw, or Vida Filipina.12 With an eye to guaranteeing monetary support for the Carnival, organizers encouraged the wealthiest Filipino, American, and Spanish families to enter the contest.13 Those with the most money and influence could campaign and gain support from their family, friends, and business associates to vote for their selected candidate. Thus, Forbes and other Manila Carnival Association members did not organize the pageant simply to celebrate feminine beauty. Instead, one can see its politicization as beauty contestants were chosen not just for their physical appeal, but also for their economic and social class status. Carnival organizers hoped that these young Filipinas’ family and societal connections would make the task of raising money easier. Perhaps even more important, the process of selecting 9  Katigbak, Legacy, 132. 10  Harry Debnam, “The Philippine Carnival: Being an Official Report of its Organization, Purpose and Success,” 2, May 19, 1908, RG 350–5453–9, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (hereafter cited as NARA). 11  Alfred W. McCoy and Alfredo R. Roces, Philippine Cartoons: Political Caricature of the American Era, 1900–1941 (Quezon City, Philippines: Vera Reyes, 1985), 24. 12  No Title, Muling Pagsilang, December 9, 1907, n.p., reprinted and translated in Katigbak, Legacy, 88; “For Queen of the Carnival,” The Manila Times, December 5, 1907, 5. 13  McCoy and Roces, Philippine Cartoons, 25.

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Carnival Queen candidates and winners showed American dependence on the Filipino elite. The Manila Carnival Association declared that the selection of the Manila Carnival Queen would be determined by a “popularity contest” so that the “lady receiving the highest number of votes, be she American, Filipina, or European, will be proclaimed Queen.”14 Following the logic of benevolent assimilation, the language used here portrayed the contest as a fair and democratic process, open to all the women living in the Philippines, regardless of race, ethnicity, or nationality. However, the discrepancies and tensions that emerged during the first Carnival Queen competition belied the deliberate marketing of it as a democratic and friendly process. The counting of ballots took place every week starting on December 7, 1907 until January 15, 1908. During the first few weeks of the competition, three women would take a notable lead over their competitors: Mrs. Henry M. Jones, Maria de la Cruz Baldasano, and Mrs. Israel Beck.15 In just the second week of the competition Jones obtained 4,169 votes, followed by Baldasano with 1,978 votes, Beck with 1,110 votes in third place, and Leonarda Limjap with 779 votes in fourth place. The large gap between the top three candidates and their fellow competitors would remain steady during the following weeks of the competition. In fact, disparities were so great that the integrity and fairness of the campaign and voting process were called into question. Members of the press who were also involved in the counting of the votes discovered irregularities with the ballots, including the printing of four coupons rather than the allowed one in certain American publications.16 The Association identified the publication of coupons in an unapproved tabloid, The Sentinel. Also, a significant number of coupons in favor of one or two candidates were found in the Carnival Association’s office and there were allegations that some members of the Carnival executive committee aligned themselves with these specific 14  “Queen of the Carnival,” The Manila Times, December 13, 1907, 3. 15  The documents pertaining to the first Manila Carnival Queen competition only use the married names of Jones and Beck. The way the articles address the contestants deliberately highlighted their social status and influence as their married or family names clearly indicated their background. For example, Baldasano was the daughter of the Spanish consul and Mrs. Israel Beck’s husband was a wealthy American businessman. Moreover, the participation of these women reflected the Carnival Association’s need for the support and capital of wealthy and influential families to ensure the success of the first Manila Carnival. 16  “Cosas del Carnaval: La Prensa Diaria Retira Los Cupones – Se Suspende le Eleción de la Reina – Noble Actitud de las Candidates – ¿Que Pasa?,” El Renacimiento, January 4, 1908, n.p.

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candidates.17 As a result, Carnival officials suspended voting and left the selection of the Manila Carnival Queen to members of the executive committee. Candidates like, Beck, who once held the lead, withdrew from the competition, citing, “As the contest is admittedly no longer one of popularity or genuine balloting by one’s friends, she has today requested the committee to withdraw her name and cancel votes in her favor.”18 The debate and dissatisfaction associated with the contest also brought to light the reality of racial tensions that the Carnival had sought to assuage with the message of “friendship” between Westerners and Filipinos. Early on in the contest, voting patterns for candidates brought to light the racial divisions operating during the American colonial period. According to a Filipino publication, Muling Pagsilang (the Tagalog portion of the newspaper El Renacimiento), the “American and Spanish communities each [had] candidates. The Filipinos [had] several.”19 Aware of the racial divisions, the Filipino press and supporters of Filipina candidates also criticized the wide gap between white Western and Filipina candidates. For example, another Muling Pagsilang article published several weeks later pointed out, “the first (Jones) is an American, the second (Baldasano) is a Spaniard. Only the fourth is a Filipina.”20 Discourse in the Filipino press regarded the development in votes for the Carnival Queen as a manifestation of white American racist attitudes towards Filipinos. Furthermore, Filipino critics of racism in the contest used patriotic and nationalist rhetoric to disparage the election of non-Filipinos. The Union in the Election for a Filipina Queen sent a letter to El Renacimiento expressing their awareness of the racist undertones in the competition’s development. The letter, which was reprinted in The Manila Times, argued, “To elect a foreigner would tacitly admit the absolute lack of Filipina women capable of carrying off such a position with distinction.”21 In response to criticisms and growing strains associated with the Manila Carnival Queen contest, the executive committee not only suspended voting but also changed the number of titles to be given during the festivities. In addition to the position of Manila Carnival Queen, which was to be determined by popular vote, the executive committee also created two auxiliary titles: the Queen of the Orient and the Queen of the Occident. Carnival organizers 17  Ibid. 18  “Mrs. Beck Withdraws – Is No Longer a Candidate for the Queen of the Carnival,” The Manila Times, January 2, 1908, 1. 19  No Title, Muling Pagsilang, December 9, 1907, published in Katigbak, Legacy, 88. 20  “The Results of the Second Balloting,” Muling Pagsilang, December 23, 1908, n.p. 21  “For the Filipina Queen,” The Manila Times, December 12, 1907, 3.

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regarded the creation of these titles as a way to satisfy the racially divided communities vying for their candidates.22 However, given the scandal associated with the popular vote, officials decided to avoid the naming of the Manila Carnival Queen and held a closed vote among the executive committee for the queens of the Orient and the Occident. Eventually Pura Villanueva took the title Queen of the Orient and Marjorie Colton became the Queen of the Occident.23 Although Carnival officials made these changes to assuage tensions and appear “fair,” the creation of two separate titles for a Filipina and an American woman used racialized segregationist logic. The need to have two separate titles negated the message of equality, unity, and friendship between Filipinos and Americans. Public spectacles like the Manila Carnival institutionalized the exhibition of the feminine body not only as a visually consumable object of beauty, but as a symbol of two distinct national and racial identities: White American and Filipina. The same segregationist racism carried on during the early years of the Carnival as Filipino participants were treated as racially inferior to their American counterparts. Belying the rhetoric of equality between Americans and Filipinos, an official Association report revealed the favoritism granted to the American King and Queen of the Occident over the monarchs of the Orient. In the hippodrome, a structure specifically constructed to hold mass gatherings and celebrations during the Manila Carnival, a masked figure, purportedly on behalf of the King and Queen of the Orient, announced that the American King and Queen of the Occident would be crowned rulers of the entire Manila Carnival.24 This coronation ceremony provided a performative metaphor for the U.S. colonial logic of benevolent assimilation in the Philippines. The monarchs of the Occident represented the United States Empire while the monarchs of the Orient represented the Filipino people. Through these figures the coronation revealed how U.S. colonial administrators saw themselves as racially superior and therefore better fit to rule the ‘kingdom,’ or rather, the Philippine Islands. The spectacle of the Manila Carnival sought to put on display, on a global scale, the ‘friendly’ conceding of

22  No title, El Renacimiento, December 14, 1907, published in Katigbak, Legacy, 89. 23  The procedure of selecting Manila Carnival Queens changed several times, the methods ranging from public balloting across the Philippines to the closed selection of young women from prominent families by the Manila Carnival Association. In 1929, the regulations changed again and Carnival Queen candidates were chosen to represent their college or university. 24  Debnam, “The Philippine Carnival”, 23.

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power by Filipinos to American colonizers and the upholding of the myth of American exceptionalism. The discrepancies between the white Queen of the Occident, Marjorie Colton, and the Filipina Queen of the Orient, Pura Villanueva, during the public presentations of the 1908 Manila Carnival most effectively revealed the problems of racism and racial hierarchies between white Americans and Filipinos. The Filipino press conveyed stories of unequal treatment between the two queens. When Villanueva and her entourage did not enter the carnival grounds and failed to attend one of the major balls, a short news piece in Muling Pagsilang, asked if “Queen[s] and their court go on strike?”25 In other words, were Villanueva’s actions deliberate forms of protest? And if so, protest against what? Another piece from El Renacimiento suggested that Villanueva and her consort reacted because “the King and Queen of the Orient, as owners of this land, were not given their due honors.”26 In contrast to the arrangement for Colton, Carnival organizers made no pre-arranged transportation for Villanueva to take her from the first day’s parade to the presentation at the grandstand, leaving the King and Queen of the Orient scrambling to find transportation to their assigned places. When the couple tried to pass through the entrance gates, the guard demanded that they pay 20 pesetas and refused them entrance stating, “aunque fueran los Reyes y el mismo Cristo, no podian pasar antes de pagar una peseta” [whether royalty or Christ himself, you cannot pass through these gates without a penny].27 In direct contrast to the carefully coordinated performance of Filipinos ceding power to Americans during the coronation ceremony, the Filipino press presented these developments as the manifestations of racial tensions and struggles over power. El Renacimiento claimed that the Carnival revealed the “raza antónicas que luchan por la supremacia en Oriente” or the antagonistic race to claim supremacy in the East. The reality of racist foundations of imperialism could not be contained by choreographed public displays of revelry. Regardless of the fact that Villanueva came from a powerful family of the landed class in the province of Iloilo and an Hispanic mestiza heritage that afforded her privilege based on the Spanish racial paradigm, within U.S. white racial hierarchy, she still remained inferior to her white American counterpart. Villanueva’s poor treatment in comparison to that of Colton’s mirrored and reinforced the hierarchy between the colonized Filipinos and their 25  “Life in Manila,” Muling Pagsilang, February 29, 1908, reprinted and translated in Katigbak, Legacy, 125. 26  “Pequeños Lunares,” El Renacimiento, February 29, 1908, n.p. 27  Ibid.

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white American colonizers. The racial differences highlighted between the two queens reflect the general sentiment of white superiority felt by white American women in the Philippines. Indeed, the deliberate juxtaposition of white American and Filipina women during the Manila Carnival festivities were intended to highlight white women’s “construction of themselves as civilized women.”28 The unequal treatment and presentation between the white and Filipina carnival queens and their retinues continued the “American racial tradition and a concern with ‘white racial purity’ [that] was at the heart of America’s domestic and overseas colonial territories.”29 As demonstrated by the first Manila Carnival pageants, the beauty and value of the white American Carnival queen, according to Manila Carnival organizers, superseded that of the Filipina queen. Pura Villanueva never directly addressed the treatment she received during the first Manila Carnival. However, in an interview given in 1934, she criticized the 1908 Manila Carnival. Unlike the 1931 Manila Carnival, in which her own daughter Maria Kalaw was crowned queen, the first Manila Carnival was not truly Filipino but American. Villanueva revealed, “Para mí, el carnaval más actractivo fue aquél en el que mi hija, Maria, fue elegida reina, porque era un carnaval que propiamente podía llamarse de [F]ilipinos” [For me, the most attractive carnival was that in which my daughter, Maria, was elected queen, because it was a Carnival that could properly be called Filipino].30 She went on to say that although 1908 witnessed a carnivalistic spirit, “en aquel novenario de alegria los quemás se divertieron y también aprovecharon, fueron los extranjeros” [in that period of joy, those who most enjoyed themselves and also made the most (of the Carnival), were the foreigners].31

28  Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. 29  Hazel McFerson, “Filipino Identity and Self-Image in Historical Perspective,” in Mixed Blessing: The Impact of the American Colonial Experience on Politics and Society in the Philippines, ed. Hazel McFerson (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002) 13. 30  Marina, Interview with Pura Villanueva on September 10, 1934, Lo Que Ellas Dicen: Recopilación de Entrevistas Publicadas en La Vanguardia Durante los Años 1934–1935–1936– 1937 (Manila, Philippines: Carmelo & Bauermann, 1938), 34. 31  Ibid.

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Filipina Beauty Queens and the Performance of Nationalism

Although Villanueva described the first Manila Carnival as an event organized by and for Americans, Filipinos had already begun to use the Manila Carnival Queen contest as a platform to create counter-hegemonic discourses of modern womanhood, while also serving as a vehicle to express and perform a unified and modern national identity, challenging criticisms that Filipinos and the Philippines were unfit to be an independent modern nation. While under colonial rule, Filipinos could still rally together and express patriotism vis-à-vis the Manila Carnival Queen contest. Indeed, they had a motivation to invest in productions of nationalism as the U.S. colonial government and Filipino political leaders presented the U.S. colonial regime as a training period to modernize Filipinos. For example, when the voting began in December 1907, letters campaigning for Filipina candidates urged fellow “countrymen” to vote as part of their “patriotic duty.”32 The campaign rhetoric also used nationalistic language to describe the Filipina candidates. These letters highlighted candidates’ “tapatnaloob” [loyalty]33 and “patriotism”34 as virtues that would call upon a nationalistic spirit and garner support from Filipinos. In supporting a Filipina candidate, these Filipinos also presented an image of a unified Filipino national community, challenging U.S. colonial criticisms that the Philippines and Filipinos had yet to reach their full potential because of the religious, ethnic, and linguistic divisions that prevented them from being a modernized cohesive Filipino people. Efforts to reshape the Manila Carnival Queen contest into a Filipina beauty pageant eventually worked. From 1912 onwards Filipinas held the title of Manila Carnival Queen with only a few exceptions.35 In 1926 Manila Carnival officials created a new title, “Miss Philippines,” and the winner was crowned alongside the Manila Carnival Queen. The following year, the Miss Philippines pageant replaced the Manila Carnival Queen contest completely. 32  Letter published in El Abalid, Iloilo, December 19, 1907, reprinted and translated in Katigbak, Legacy, 91. 33  No Title, Muling Pagsilang, December 18, 1907, reprinted and translated in ibid. 34  No Title, El Renacimiento, December 19, 1907, reprinted and translated in ibid. 35  The 1912 Carnival crowned Paz Marquez as Manila Carnival Queen. The Colonial and The Philippines Monthly Review 3, no. 3 (January 1912): 24. The 1908 Manila Carnival crowned two queens, an American Queen of the Occident and a Filipina Queen of the Orient. In 1920, Manila Carnival officials crowned then Governor-General Francis Burton Harrison’s daughter, Virginia Harrison, Manila Carnival Queen.

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Filipino elite nationalists, particularly those of the mestizo landed class, regarded the annual coronation of a Filipina Carnival Queen as an opportunity to exhibit the positive and ideal characteristics of an emerging and “imagined” Filipino national community.36 The idea that such a public figure in a largescale spectacle could represent a Filipino nation took root during the first Manila Carnival. For example, an article in the Iloilo-based newspaper praised Pura Villanueva and declared, “If she can occupy the throne of a Carnival, she can also that of a nation.”37 The article directly tied the title Manila Carnival Queen to a Filipino nation that had yet to be realized. Thus, the figure of the beauty pageant queen played an important role in embodying and actualizing nationalist sentiment and identities. The question remains, what qualities did the Manila Carnival Queen, as a symbol of ideal Filipina femininity, embody? And what did she stand for? Analyzing the production of the Manila Carnival Queen and the discourses around these women reveals how the Carnival Queen came to symbolize the ideal modern Filipina during the American colonial period. An analysis of the Manila Carnival Queen as a specific type of beauty queen, one that emerges in a time of rapid change that deeply impacted Filipino women economically, politically, and culturally, underscores what ‘beauty’ entailed and who these characteristics privileged and benefited. The term beauty, in the context of Philippine beauty pageants, embodied a set of complex meanings that included and at the same time went beyond values of aesthetic pleasure. To unpack the social constructions attached to Filipina femininity, beauty must be understood as having multiple facets in conjunction with judgments on phenotypic or aesthetic features. Beauty referred to desirable qualities used to judge the value of women in colonial Philippine society. Markers of these admirable characteristics were performed and embodied by Filipina beauty queens. These are all markers that define status in the colonial Philippine social hierarchy. White Americans aimed to control definitions of feminine beauty as a way to crystallize white supremacist hierarchies and legitimize white American superiority and control over the Philippines. Conversely, elite Filipino nationalists regarded constructions of Filipina beauty as a means to solidify their privileged status afforded by mestizo identities. In her work on gender politics in the Philippines, Mina Roces argues that the “Tagalog word maganda does not simply mean beautiful” but is “also 36  The concept of nationalism as a process of community and identity formation is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s seminal work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 37  No Title, El Tiempo, March 3, 1908, n.p. reprinted and translated in Katigbak, Legacy, 129.

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connected with what society considers good or virtuous.”38 Thus, to be considered beautiful also means to “exude the virtues of her gender.”39 Roces’ definition of maganda is extended here, and it is argued that these “virtues” entailed wealth, an elite family background (particularly for those who could claim a European heritage), individual achievements (e.g. education), and involvement in society and civic groups. Beauty, then, must be considered as complex and dynamic. Martin Manalansan also complicates notions of beauty, instead deploying the term biyuti, which he describes as a “self-conscious notion of performance” that extends into multiple realms of personal and everyday life.40 This concept of biyuti is useful in thinking about how performances of beauty in the Manila Carnival Queen contests embodied not only physical markers of attractiveness but also signs of a Filipina’s desirability or worth in other social, economic, and political categories. Therefore, the contests served as a way of managing and solidifying particular notions of what constituted Filipina beauty. According to newspaper sources, the Filipino public did not immediately accept the implementation of the Manila Carnival Queen contest. Even political cartoons published in Philippine newspapers conveyed a sense of skepticism and discomfort with the pageantry of the Manila Carnival. One cartoon in particular shows white men searching with lanterns, presumably at night, for the Carnival Queens in Manila’s brothels. The cartoon expressed apprehension against putting young Filipinas on public display, particularly for fundraising purposes, fearing that doing so would “cheapen” the image of the Filipina. At the time that the Manila Carnival first began, gendered morality equated the public space as occupied only by immoral women. Critics of a potential Filipina Manila Carnival Queen feared that displaying an elite Filipina in a public spectacle would move away from already established ideals of Filipina womanhood and thus would liken the Carnival Queen to a prostitute. The figure of the prostitute in the culture of early 20th century Philippines stood for the epitome of immorality and vice.41 Perhaps such reservations towards the public display of elite Filipinas contributed to Leonarda Limjap’s abrupt retreat from the first Manila Carnival Queen competition. Beauty pageants disrupted 38  Mina Roces, “Woman in Philippine Society and Politics,” in McFerson, ed., Mixed Blessing, 172. 39  Ibid. 40  Martin Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 15. 41  Luis Drery, “Prostitution in Colonial Manila,” Philippine Studies 39, no. 4 (Fourth Quarter 1991): 475–89.

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Filipino elites’ gender norms, which upheld Spanish notions that women of the elite class should remain protected in the home.42 Despite initial reservations on the part of Filipinos, the Manila Carnival Queen became the most popular annual event. The popularity of beauty pageants spread throughout the archipelago and various Philippine provinces, cities, and towns began to organize their own local pageants. Popular news publications sponsored both beauty and popularity contests. These structures connected with the pageant world normalized standards and the spectacular display of Filipina beauty. When analyzing the presentation of Filipina beauty queens through photographs and descriptions in newspaper articles, definite patterns of symbols signifying beauty emerged. These codes specifically signified physical attraction and beauty. As feminine public spaces were transformed and redefined, the performance by individual Filipinas and the discourse about how these women looked or should look developed into agents of socialization. Cultural signifiers associated with beauty queens’ appearances, including their fashion, accessories, hair, and makeup, sought to define feminine attractiveness, while also indicating a woman’s social and political significance in Filipino society during the early 20th century. An examination follows of public discourse concerning Filipina beauty queens and candidates, the performances of the Carnival Queen themselves, and the ways in which these women presented their bodies. Each of these arenas worked together to forge an ideal Filipina femininity. The patterns in selecting and publicly presenting Filipina beauty queens strategically used racial paradigms, ideologies of gender, and class to construct and promote a specific vision of an ideal Filipina. This chapter specifically focuses on three categories used to construct the ideal modern Filipina: physical markers of beauty; dress; and feminine virtues. These signifiers identified who did and did not belong in visions of ideal Filipina womanhood. The exhibition of Filipina pageant queens often appropriated racial taxonomies that classified ethnic and racial groups according to notions of civilization in their performances. Beauty pageants, then, simultaneously reified Spanish racial hierarchies and constructions of mestizaje and co-opted the U.S. racial system that divided Christian Filipinos from 42  Manila newspapers stated that Leonarda Limjap renounced the title of the first Manila Carnival Queen of the Orient because of a previously scheduled trip to Japan. However, historians Alfred McCoy and Alfredo Roces claim that Leonarda Limjap’s father, Mariano Limjap, pulled her out of the competition. According to McCoy and Roces, Mariano Limjap, a powerful Chinese mestizo businessman and politician, found that the public display of his daughter threatened their social standing in colonial Philippine society. Roces and McCoy, Philippine Cartoons, 24.

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non-Christians groups in the outlying provinces of the northern and southern regions of the archipelago.43 Perhaps the most intuitive and obvious visual signifiers present in beauty pageantry were Filipinas’ actual physical and phenotypic features. Beauty functioned as an important marker of difference and articulated complex, distinct, and yet intertwined racial logics in the colonial Philippines.44 The selection of beauty contestants reveals a distinct pattern in their physical appearance, rendering a limited definition of beauty to a particular type of mestiza, that of Western and, more specifically, Hispanic heritage, and in some cases of a Chinese mestiza, a woman of indigenous and Chinese heritage. Photographs of Filipina beauty contestants and their female entourage made obvious their European-like features, such as light skin, a small straight nose, large eyes, and a tall and slender frame. Textual descriptions also highlight mestiza features by including visual details like a contestant’s “lovely delicate face” or a “queen’s fair cheek.”45 These images directly contrasted other photographs of ‘native’ Filipinas that appeared most often in American travel literature and anthropological texts written by Western researchers about the Philippines.46 Unlike the formal portraits taken of the beauty queens, photographs of women from ethnic groups of the outlying provinces emphasized their non-whiteness, often by placing native and white subjects side by side. Such photographs sought to highlight otherness by focusing on indigenous women’s brown skin, small stature and the differences in hair and facial features.47 Thus, Manila Carnival Queen contests solidified mestiza features as an idealized Filipina type, crystallizing racial and ethnic hierarchical differences that simultaneously accounted for U.S. ideologies of white supremacy and racial difference as well variegated forms of racial and ethnic mixings. The demarcation of this mestiza identity from other ethnic and racial groups as a means to construct a modern Filipina identity can also be seen in the modes 43  Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 5–6. 44  In her work on contemporary beauty pageants in Venezuela, Marcia Ochoa argues that such contests serve as important sites for articulating both race and class. However, she raises the important point that she was careful to not simply impose North American racial concepts onto the Venezuelan context. Marcia Ochoa, Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Misses and Mass Media in Venezuela (Stanford University, 2005). 45  “Carnival Beauty Chaperons Tell Their Story,” Graphic, January 28, 1931, 7; “A Queen is Crowned,” Graphic, February 24, 1938, 8. 46  Teodoro Kalaw, Aide-de-camp to Freedom, trans. Maria Kalaw Katigbak (Manila: Teodoro M. Kalaw Society, 1965). 47  Kramer, Blood of Government, 123.

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of dress worn during beauty pageants and subsequent events. Throughout the run of the Manila Carnival pageants, beauty queens and their entourage often attired themselves in clothing of different Filipino ethnic groups. Rather than considering ethnic dress as equally part of a Filipino heritage as the mestiza dress, these pageants and the mass media rendered ethnic garb as a symbol of Filipino heritage.48 Wearing ethnic attire as an exotic costume set up a distinct juxtaposition between the mestiza body and the native, or indio, dress. Rather than attributing such clothing as part of the Filipino landscape and therefore a sartorial exhibition of Filipino identity, this common practice was regarded by popular discourse as a method of costuming an exotic other, much in the same way that other Manila Carnival Courts would don ancient Roman or Grecian costumes.49 At the same time, identifying native dress as exotic costume also classified these groups as uncivilized, pre-modern groups that remained frozen in time. As a result, the popular imagination rendered ethnic costumes as signifiers of a native past. Thus, the costume served as a cultural artifact of an ethnic and cultural other, that did not fit into the contemporary imaginings of national modern Filipino identity by the mestizo elite. By excluding ethnic groups that were considered ‘primitive’ from identity formations of modern Filipina identities vis-à-vis feminine attire, mestizo elites distinguished themselves from these ‘savage others,’ and therefore could make the case that they contrastingly embodied a modern Filipino identity. In direct contrast to alien or exotic costumes, beauty queens and contestants most often wore the traje de mestiza, also referred to as the terno, as a symbol of true and ideal Filipina womanhood. In doing so, they visually made the statement that mestiza Filipinas embodied the ideal qualities of modern women in the nascent Filipino nation. Although the terno was a derivation of Spanish colonial dress, the media described them as wearing Filipiniana, or Filipino heritage dress, and lauded them for wearing the traditional dress of their national heritage. In analyzing the genealogies of Filipiniana modes of dress, we can get a better sense of just how this style came to stand for the Filipino nation. The terno combined Spanish and local indigenous components that resulted in a distinct hybridized style that signified a newly formed Filipino identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This dress worn by the 48  The Evangelina Lewis Postcard Collection contains a number of photographs of the first Manila Carnival Queen Contest. One photo in particular captures the Queen of the Orient and her entourage from the 1908 Manila Carnival, Evangelina Lewis Postcard Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. 49  Doris G. Nuyda and Pablo Reyes, The Beauty Book (Manila, Mr. & Mrs. Pub. Co, 1980).

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Filipino elite adopted silhouettes and cuts from Spanish apparel but used a combination of foreign and local fabrics. For example, the flaring train of the skirt, or saya, emulated European style. However, the materials used for the skirt usually combined several panels of velvet, silk, brocade, abaca, piña, and jusi. Jusi, which consisted of delicate threads extracted from pineapple leaves, was considered the most valuable of local fabrics. The sloping shoulders and bell sleeves of the traje de mestiza imitated Victorian fashions. However, local designs reinterpreted European lace, with intricate hand sewn embroidery on the jusi fabric that mirrored images from the local landscape, such as palm leaves, butterflies, or sampaguitas.50 The use of jusi or piña rather than silk chiffon or other European fabrics, naturally altered the design of the dress. These materials moved and flowed differently, so that even if the design or cut of the Maria Clara train followed the specifications of a European dress, the stiffness of the piña would naturally flare more widely. The production and materiality of the dresses demonstrated a process of negotiation between European colonial influences and indigenous materials and images. Although promoted as an inclusive Filipino national dress, the terno nonetheless signified an exclusive Filipina identity that privileged mestiza elites and underscored their connections to a Western heritage. As Alicia Arrizón argues, the mestiza body “[through the clothing] is linked with privilege, affirming the identity constructed by adopting the Hispanic legacy.”51 The design and the very materiality of the terno signify this privilege. The adaptation of patterns and dress designs can also be regarded as visual evidence of claims to a Hispanic heritage that mestizo Filipino elites reserved for themselves and that excluded Filipinos from other ethnic groupings and the peasant class. This class privilege was also made evident in the actual fabrics worn by the mestiza Filipina beauty queens. Fine materials like piña and jusi, although native, were regarded as rich expensive fabrics designated for formal occasions. Filipina beauty queens’ access to enough capital to purchase the expected formal dress, in turn, was evidence of their mestizo elite class status. Fashion proved to be an important component in beauty pageants, not just for its potential to provide aesthetic pleasure, but also because the details of the beauty pageant contestant’s dress exhibited her ability to afford custom-made elaborate gowns. By reaffirming their privileged status, Filipina beauty queens promoted

50  Alfredo Roces, Filipino Heritage: The Making of a Nation, Volume 10 (Manila: Lahing Pilipino Publishing, 1979), 116. 51  Alicia Arrizon, Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 146.

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their civilized nature and modernity, and further distanced themselves from the native and under-classes. The accessories adorning Carnival Queens’ bodies also revealed the connection between class privilege and ideal Filipina womanhood. The attention paid to the costly jewels and crafted accessories adorning Filipina beauty queens’ bodies reaffirmed the privilege signified by the terno. Photographs of Pura Villanueva from the first Manila Carnival showed that, like Colton her American counterpart, she donned an extravagant gown and a massive amount of precious jewelry. Villanueva wore a traje de mestiza, which included elaborate hand embroidery all along the white baro (bodice) and saya (skirt), and a long train also adorned with embroidery and beading. Adding to the extravagance of her gown, Villanueva wore over eight layered strings of pearls and diamonds around her neck, a matching crown that draped three rows of pearls across her forehead, and additional gold bangles and rings. Displaying wealth and glamour continued throughout the Manila Carnival’s run. Popular media and photographs of Manila Carnival queens emphasized their fashion choices and accessories. An inscription on the back of a photograph of Manolita Barretto, the 1916 Manila Carnival Queen, revealed that she wore $100,000 worth of diamonds during the Carnival pageant.52 Similarly, the 1921 Manila Carnival Queen, Carmen Pietro, wore jewels that were so valuable that she allegedly needed personal guards to protect her.53 Her crown also elicited attention as the Carnival Director, Jorge Vargas, designed the ornament especially for her with a solitaire diamond on the center star that was “something short of sensational.”54 In addition to visual markers of beauty, a contestant’s background and ‘character’ played just as significant roles in the construction of the ideal Filipina beauty. The first Carnival Queen pageant established the practice of selecting young women from well-regarded, wealthy, and powerful families that ensuing pageants and contests continued to follow.55 Filipina beauty pageants prior to World War II sought to reward women who could not only claim individual 52  “Queen Manolita I,” Evangelina E. Lewis Collection of Postcards, Newberry Library. 53  Nuyda and Reyes, The Beauty Book, 28. 54  Ibid. 55  Philippine high society can be traced back to the ilustrado class of the Spanish period. For more on ilustrados see Renato Constantino, “The Society Page,” in Renato Constantino, The Filipinos in the Philippines, And Other Essays (Quezon City, Philippines: Filipino Signatures, 1966), 24; Alfred W. McCoy, An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993).

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beauty and achievement, but also valued her family connections and membership in the privileged class. Selecting Filipina beauty queens from mestizo high society remained a strong institution throughout the American colonial period. Descriptions of pageant participants and winners consistently highlighted their family background. The pamphlet for the 1912 Manila Carnival highlighted that Paz Marquez, the crowned Empress of Filipino Day, “[came] from a very distinguished and influential family of Lucena, Tayabas, where her father [was] a wealthy hacendero (landowner).”56 In one edition of the Manila-based magazine Graphic, the society pages told its readers, Miss Altavas who is a well-known Capiz beauty having been Miss Capiz (1926) and queen of the Capiz Carnivals, is perhaps one of the few of her sex holding responsible government positions and performing credible work. She is secretary to her father, Representative Altavas of Capiz. ‘Lily’, as she is better known among her friends, is popular in both Manila and Southern Societies.57 Along similar lines, an article on the close race between Filipina beauty queens vying for Miss Pearl of the Orient, 1936, describes one candidate by her family connections. The article states, “Another candidate who received a big batch of votes was Miss Laulmati Jose, daughter of Assemblyman Felipe Jose of Baguio Province.”58 Another article attributes the success of the 1936 Miss Pearl of the Orient festivities to the contributions of “Don Felipe Lorenzana, prominent Tagudinuan owner of the Manila firm Lorenzana and Sons, the proud father of Miss Lolita Lorenzana” – the crowned Miss Pearl of the Orient. These descriptions underscored that these women were indeed from mestizo high society. The emphasis on such details exposed the centrality of beauty contestants’ family backgrounds to their success in beauty pageants. At the same time, popular discourse rendered Filipinas’ individual achievements as not only markers of good character but also as demonstrations of modernity through self-improvement and the advancement of society. Descriptions of beauty queens’ backgrounds published in popular magazines, newspapers, and Manila Carnival brochures listed in detail their various educational achievements, social and civic involvement, and extra-curricular activities. For example, an article written to give readers further insight into 56  “The Majesty Empress,” The Philippines Monthly III: 3 (January 1912), 24. 57  No Title for the Section, Graphic, August 20, 1927, 11. 58  “Miss Lorenzana Leaps to First Place,” Graphic, July 9, 1936, n.p.

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the lives of the 1931 Carnival contestants provided an extensive catalogue of the accomplishments of Maria Kalaw, winner of the 1931 Miss Philippines title: [Maria Kalaw] is at present a Junior in the General Course, College of Liberal Arts, U.P. Miss Kalaw’s social activities, if enumerated in full, would cover numberless pages. It is, however, not unknown that at present she is the Treasurer of the U.P. Writers Club, the . . . Vice President of the U.P. Women’s Club, the Secretary of the U.P. Student Council, the Secretary of the U.P. Junior Council, the Muse of the Law Bachelor’s Club, the Fourth Noble of the Rizal Center Sorority, the Coed Section Editor of the Philippine Collegian, and the “Maria Clara” in the U.P. Rizal day participation. Aside from being a writer, Miss Kalaw sings like a nightingale. And to hear her play the piano is a boon all must well crave.59 The praise of certain types of achievements and skills, as seen with the Maria Kalaw example, also illustrated the value placed on institutions designed for the ‘advancement’ of society. Major beauty pageants, like that of the Manila Carnival, created a pattern of selecting young women from newly established yet prestigious colleges and universities in the Manila area. Influential college clubs and organizations would endorse and promote particular candidates. Such connections between beauty pageant participants and Manila colleges highlighted the changes in spaces considered legitimate for women. Building on U.S. discourses of modernization, Filipino nationalists regarded the expansion of educational opportunities for Filipino women as evidence of Filipino modernity and progress. During the first decade of American colonial rule, colonial officials pointed to the Spanish regime’s exclusion of Filipino girls and women from education institutions as evidence of Spanish oppression and backwardness. In contrast, the United States established a public school system that would be open to both male and female students, in which U.S. colonial agents actively promoted as a symbol of U.S. benevolence. While this education system had both positive and negative effects for Filipinas, and despite criticisms of the Filipina co-ed potential to be too modern and therefore lacking proper feminine morals, Filipinas increasingly attended schools from primary to higher education.60 By the 1920s, the major59  Enriqueta David, “Carnival Beauties Talk: Intimate Glimpses of Seven of the Carnival Beauty Contestants are Revealed in Interviews Had with a Charming Yong Newspaper Woman Enriqueta David,” Graphic January 14, 1931, 6. 60  Carolyn Israel Sobritchea, “American Colonial Education and Its Impact on the Status of Filipino Women,” Asian Studies 27 (1989), 70.

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ity of Filipino nationalists and education officials portrayed universities as a site where one could reach one’s full potential as a modern Filipino citizen who would use their education to uplift and ready the Philippines for independence. By selecting and celebrating contestants’ educational achievements, beauty pageants became another platform to display how Filipinas, and thus the Philippines, attained all the trappings of modernity. The new system for the Manila Carnival Queen Contest, whereby universities and university clubs would select Filipina beauty pageant participants who attended and excelled in such institutions, embodied signs of progress in the early 20th century.

Conclusion: The Investment in Beauty Pageantry

While the title of beauty queen became the “ultimate status marker” for Filipinas, the cultural capital gained vis-à-vis pageant titles must be looked at through the lens of patriarchy.61 If Filipinas wanted to step down from these pedestals, why did women consistently participate in beauty contests? What was in it for these Filipinas? What motivated them to participate in beauty pageants? Principally, those pageant winners who received the titles of Manila Carnival Queen or Miss Philippines, gained public attention beyond the pageant stage. Local print media catapulted Filipina beauty contest winners into celebrity status.62 Although society pages in publications intended for American and Filipino audiences consistently exhibited pictures of popular women and the events that they hosted or attended, these women did not garner the same level of attention paid to Manila Carnival Queens and Miss Philippines winners.63 Beginning with the first Manila Carnival Queen competition, finalists for the Manila Carnival appeared on the front pages of major 61  Mina Roces argues that the Filipina beauty queen starting from the early 20th century up until the present offers an image of female power. Roces, “Woman in Philippine Society and Politics,” 172. 62  The proliferation of print media as a result of newly available technologies in the early 1900s allowed for the mass production and distribution of information. These developments enabled the construction of Filipina celebrities even prior to having a star system connected to a film industry. For more on the connection between industrialization, new technologies, and the mass distribution of information see, Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2008). 63  During the early 20th century, The Manila Times readership consisted mostly of white Americans living in Manila. El Renacimiento, which later became La Vanguardia, targeted a Fillipino audience, in particular those of the Spanish-speaking, educated class.

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news publications. The practice continued every year for each Manila Carnival. The winner(s) of the Manila Carnival Queen title earned entire feature stories that exhibited their portraits to a public readership, in addition to detailed descriptions of their personal background, what type of gowns they wore, and how they carried themselves during the carnival festivities. The interest in beauty queens’ lives outside the competition crystallized their celebrity status. Detailed information, often labeled as intimate, that would give the public an insight into the private lives of these women became an important news commodity.64 Interviews revealed their private lives, values, and personal thoughts to fans and readers at large.65 Moreover, their celebrity status made them arbiters of style. For example, an article on the impending marriage of Anita Noble, Miss Philippines 1926, described her as “[having] long reigned as the unbeatable beauty to the extent that the 1927 beauties were said to have imitated her even to the way of dressing her hair.”66 However, these seemingly positive benefits of pageant titles and celebrity status must be examined through the lens of gender norms under patriarchal structures. Although the spectacle of large-scale beauty contests troubled normative gender values that expected Filipinas of the elite class to remain protected and even hidden within the home, these patriarchal norms continued to limit the reach of such ‘opportunities.’ Beauty queens’ cultural capital more concretely materialized in the ‘success’ they achieved after their reign. Indeed, the majority of the Manila Carnival Queens came from privileged backgrounds that allowed them to attend colleges and universities. After earning their degrees, many winners embarked on careers newly opened to women. Pacita de los Reyes, Miss Philippines 1929, was placed in the top ten of the 1934 bar exams and subsequently practiced and taught law. The aforementioned Paz Benitez (née Marquez), later became a teacher at the University of the Philippines and perhaps is most known for becoming one of the most influential English language writers with her feminist text Dead Stars.67 While many women earned degrees and pursued careers, a women’s real success was determined by her Later, English language publications like Graphic provided pictorials and articles to an American, educated Filipino readership. 64  Rodrigo C. Lim, “Carnival Queens of By-Gone Days,” Graphic, December 8, 1928, 33. 65  David, “Carnival Beauties Talk”; “Carnival Beauty Chaperons (sic),” Graphic, January 28, 1931. 66  “Miss Philippines 1926 is December Bride,” Graphic, November 26, 1927, 25. 67  At the time of her coronation, Paz Marquez was a single young woman. By the time she wrote her poem “Dead Stars” she had married and changed her name to Paz Marquez Benitez. Benitez, Paz Marquez. “Dead stars.” Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English (1993): 3–12.

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ability not only to get married, but also to make it a good match. The beauty queens’ celebrated beauty, family connections, wealth, and accomplishments rendered them the most desirable women. As wives, they had physical appeal and, at the same time, brought their monetary and cultural capital to the marriage. The title of beauty queen served as a trophy not only for the contestants themselves but also for the men who secured marriages with these women. Pageants thus rendered Filipino women objects of admiration as well as commodities to be procured in the marriage market. When beauty queens married, the news of their nuptials made headlines. Former beauty queens continued to receive accolades and public adoration if they married well. Articles, such as “Miss Philippines 1926 is December Bride” and “Carnival Queens of By-Gone Days,” sought to answer the public’s questions about which Filipina beauty queens married and whether or not they had children.68 While it is not stated overtly here, the consistent pattern of beauty queens making marital alliances with wealthy or politically powerful men suggests that fulfilling gendered and classed expectations of marriage was another motivator behind entering contests. The question of motivation also points to the issue of continued investments in beauty pageants in more recent times. In 1994, Tourism Secretary Vicente Carlos claimed, “They say if you want anything to succeed in the Philippines, hold a beauty pageant or a cockfight.” This statement suggests that beauty and beauty pageants serve as intrinsic and natural features of Filipino national identity and culture. But what Carlos evades in his naturalization of beauty pageant culture among Filipinos is the reality that beauty pageants proliferated and sustained their popularity among Filipinos for more than a century precisely because they were presented as a viable arena in which emotional, physical, temporal, and monetary investment would pay off. Not only do beauty title holders find their status catapulted in terms of economic and cultural capital, the system of beauty pageants itself continues to be a lucrative business. Current mass and social media labels the Philippines as the “Queen Maker” as it ranks just behind Venezuela and Colombia in numbers of international beauty pageant titles. Just like these nations, and many others that regularly participate in international pageants, the Philippines possess boot camps to shape and produce a continuous stream of pageant contestants.69 Moreover, the methods of ensuring success in beauty pageants continue to be a matter 68  “Miss Philippines 1926 is December Bride,” Graphic, November 26. 1927, 25; Rodrigo C. Lim, “Carnival Queens of By-Gone Days,” Graphic, December 8, 1928, 33. 69  The four major international beauty pageant titles, often referred to as the Big Four, are Miss World, Miss Universe, Miss International, and Miss Earth.

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of national attention. Just recently, in reaction to Miss Philippines Mary Jean Lastimosa’s failure to make the Top Five in the 2015 Miss Universe pageant, many Filipino pageant fans blamed the loss on the fact that her national costume dress was not made by a Filipino designer, but by a Colombian designer. Public outcry and a deep disappointment in the loss compelled Parañaque City Representative Eric Olivarez to file the Under House Bill 5691, otherwise known as the Filipino Designers for Filipino Beauty Pageants Act of 2015, in which only Filipino designers could create gowns for Filipino beauty pageant contestants. The bill was not passed, but the uproar over the possible causes of the loss remains. What this ‘scandal’ reveals is the continued national investment in beauty pageants and that high political and cultural stakes in these contests persist. But why exactly was this loss so deeply felt? This has much to do with the very same reason that the top performers are located in the Global South. Sociological work in the 1990s, particularly the work of Sarah Banet-Weiser, illuminated that nations excluded from the North, or the First World, often invested in beauty pageant infrastructures as a way to display their progress towards modernization and development and therefore to earn global respectability. In other words, to have their national beauty queens included in these international contests and to have them crowned as the most beautiful women in the world represented their rise in a global world order.70 Just as it is important to recognize Filipina beauty pageants as a socio-historical construction and not as an epiphenomena that sprouted from nature, it is of equal importance to connect the contemporary investments to longer histories of race, gender, class, colonialism, and nationalism. As demonstrated in this chapter, the notion of gaining Philippine national respectability through global recognition of beauty did not emerge in the current age of globalization, but was directly linked to the early-20th-century Manila Carnival Queen contest. Showcasing modernity and success through the exhibition of ideal beauty became an important tool for both U.S. colonial and Philippine nationalist projects. The continued use of displaying beauty as evidence of modernity shows the powerful role which beauty plays in the tense negotiations of power on both national and global fronts. Beauty pageants, then, are not merely sites of frivolity. Even the pleasure and pain that pageantry can evoke must be regarded as political. Filipina beauty pageantry was, and continues to be, shaped by longstanding hierarchies of racial and gendered differences, 70  Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, 200.

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first solidified by modern colonialism and its tensions with anti-colonial nationalism. Thus, this close examination of the Manila Carnival and creation of the Manila Carnival Queen reveals the significance of cultural productions in defining and defending national identities, particularly in the colonial context. It becomes clear that Philippine and American nation building did not happen in isolation but took place in constant contact, conflict, and negotiation with one another. Finally, the Manila Carnival Queen’s prominence in public discourse demonstrated how defining the nation was inherently a gendered process. Bibliography

Primary Sources

“A Queen is Crowned.” Graphic, February 24, 1938, 8. Carnival. Evangelina Lewis Postcard Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. “Carnival Beauty Chaperons Tell Their Story.” Graphic, January 28, 1931, 7. “Cosas Del Carnaval: La Prensa Diaria Retira Los Cupones – Se Suspende Le Eleción De La Reina – Noble Actitud De Las Candidates – ¿Que Pasa?” El Renacimiento (Manila), January 4, 1908. “For the Filipina Queen.” The Manila Times, December 12, 1907, 3. “For Queen of the Carnival.” The Manila Times, December 5, 1907, 5. “Miss Lorenzana Leaps to First Place.” Graphic, July 9, 1936. “Miss Philippines 1926 is December Bride,” Graphic, November 26, 1927, 25. “Mrs. Beck Withdraws – Is No Longer a Candidate for the Queen of the Carnival.” The Manila Times, January 2, 1908. No Title for the Section, Graphic, August 20, 1927, 11. No Title for the Section, Muling Pagsilang, December 9, 1907, n.p. “Pequeños Lunares.” El Renacimiento (Manila), February 29, 1908, n.p. “Queen Manolita I,” Evangelina E. Lewis Collection of Postcards, Newberry Library. “The Carnival Is Coming.” Graphic, November 10, 1928, 16. “True Carnival Spirit Now Prevails.” The Manila Times, February 1, 1907. The Colonial and The Philippines Monthly Review, January 1912, Volume III, No. 3, 24. “The Majesty Empress.” The Philippines Monthly III: 3, January 1912, 24. “The Results of the Second Balloting,” Muling Pagsilang, December 23, 1908, n.p. Benitez, Paz Marquez. “Dead stars.” Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English (1993): 3–12. Rodrigo C. Lim, “Carnival Queens of By-Gone Days,” Graphic, December 8, 1928, 33.

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Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Arrizon, Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J. A. Underwood. London: Penguin, 2008. Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Constantino, Renato. “The Society Page.” In The Filipinos in the Philippines, and Other Essays, ed. Renato Constantino, 22–36. Quezon City: Filipino Signatures, 1966. David, Enriqueta. “Carnival Beauties Talk: Intimate Glimpses of Seven of the Carnival Beauty Contestants Are Revealed in Interviews Had with a Charming Young Newspaper Woman Enriqueta David.” Graphic, January 14, 1931, 6. De Vera, Arleen. “Rizal Day Queen Contests, Filipino Nationalism, and Femininity.” In Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity and Ethnicity, ed. Jennifer Lee. New York: Routledge, 2004. Debnam, Harry. “The Philippine Carnival: Being an Official Report of its Organization, Purpose and Success,” 2, May 19, 1908, RG 350–5453–9, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. Drery, Luis. “Prostitution in Colonial Manila.” Philippine Studies 39, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 475–489. Heydarian, Richard. “Beauty Queens and Geopolitics: Debating American Bases in the Philippines.” The Huffington Post, December 23, 2015, http://www.huffington post.com/richard-javad-heydarian/beauty-queens-and-geopoli_b_8872122.html. Accessed December 27, 2015. Kalaw, Teodoro. Aide-de-camp to Freedom. Trans. Maria Kalaw Katigbak. Manila: Teodoro M. Kalaw Society, 1965. Katigbak, Maria Kalaw. Legacy, Pura Villanueva Kalaw: Her Times, Life, and Works, 1886–1954. Manila: Filipinas Foundation, 1983. King-O’Riain, Rebecca Chiyoko. Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Lam, Charles. “The Other Reason Why Everyone Is Talking About Miss Philippines,” NBC News, December 22, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asianamerica/other-reason-why-everyone-talking-about-miss-philippines-n484606. Accessed December 27, 2015.

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Lim, Rodrigo C. “Carnival Queens of By-Gone Days.” Graphic, December 8, 1928, 33. Mabalon, Dawn Bohulano. “Beauty Queens, Bomber Pilots, and Basketball Players: Second-Generation Filipina Americans in Stockton California, 1930s to 1950s.” In Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory: Theorizing the Filipina/American, ed. Melinda L. De Jesus, 117–135. New York: Routledge, 2004. McCoy, Alfred W. An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines. Madison: University of Wisconsin, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993. McCoy, Alfred W., and Alfredo R. Roces. Philippine Cartoons: Political Caricature of the American Era, 1900–1941. Quezon City, Philippines: Vera-Reyes, 1985. McFerson, Hazel. “Filipino Identity and Self-Image in Historical Perspective.” In Mixed Blessing: The Impact of the American Colonial Experience on Politics and Society in the Philippines, ed. Hazel McFerson, 13–42. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. Manalansan, Martin F. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Marina. “Interview with Pura Villanueva on September 10, 1934.” In Lo Que Ellas Dicen: Recopilación de Entrevistas Publicadas en La Vanguardia Durante los Años 1934–1935– 1936–1937 (Manila, Philippines: Carmelo & Bauermann, 1938), 34. Miller, Stuart Creighton. “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Nuyda, Doris G., and Pablo Reyes. The Beauty Book. Manila, Philippines: Mr. & Ms. Pub., 1980. Ochoa, Marcia. Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Roces. Alfredo. Filipino Heritage: The Making of a Nation, Vol. 10. Manila: Lahing Pilipino Publishing, 1979. Roces, Mina “Woman in Philippine Society and Politics.” In Mixed Blessing: The Impact of the American Colonial Experience on Politics and Society in the Philippines, ed. Hazel McFerson, 159–190. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. Sobritchea, Carolyn Israel. “American Colonial Education and Its Impact on the Status of Filipino Women.” Asian Studies 27 (1989): 70–91. Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. “ ‘Loveliest Daughter of Our Ancient Cathay!’: Representations of Ethnic and Gender Identity in the Miss Chinatown USA Beauty Pageant.” Journal of Social History 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 5–31. Yano, Christine Reiko. Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawaii’s Cherry Blossom Festival. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006.

CHAPTER 14

“Golden Lilies” across the Pacific

Footbinding and the American Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion Laws Fang He Abstract In the United States, the ‘otherness’ of China appeared most vividly in the custom of footbinding. Paradoxically, however, American immigration officials perceived bound feet as a sign of better morals and higher class. Thus, bound feet became a means to obtain exemption from American laws against Chinese immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This chapter explains what made inclusion of ‘the other’ possible on this basis. Its purpose is two-fold: first, to describe the varied meanings of footbinding that emerged on the both sides of the Pacific; second, to demonstrate the ways in which those perceptions, interpretations, and stereotypes of bound feet affected American immigration officials’ enforcement of Chinese exclusion laws.

Keywords footbinding – immigration – female body – Chinese women – Chinese exclusion laws

Introduction ‘Golden lilies’ is a euphonious English term widely used to refer to bound feet or bound-foot Chinese women. During the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), footbinding had become a widespread practice among all social classes in China. In the United States, the ‘otherness’ of China appeared most vividly in the custom of footbinding. Paradoxically, however, American immigration officials perceived bound feet as a sign of better morals and higher class. Thus, bound feet became a means to obtain exemption from American laws against Chinese immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What made inclusion of ‘the other’ possible on this basis?

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In 1882 the U.S. government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the immigration of Chinese laborers. Chinese merchants, diplomats, students, teachers, and travelers, however, were exempt. A series of amendments and acts strengthened and extended the original act until its repeal in 1943. The Chinese in the United States, however, successfully secured the rights of merchants and American-born citizens to seek admission for their wives during this time. Thus, although writing about the history of footbinding has been largely confined to China, the footprints of golden lilies were never confined to China’s soil. Few scholars, however, have looked at the history of footbinding and footbound Chinese women in Chinese people’s migration to other parts of the world, including the United States. How Chinese immigration to the United States complicated the meaning of bound feet, and how gender, class and, racial ideologies in the United States impacted the social significance of Chinese female bodies have received little attention. This chapter explains how footbinding moved across national boundaries and shifted in different social, political, and cultural settings by locating it within the late 19th- and early 20th-century trans-Pacific world. Its purpose is two-fold: first, to describe the varied meanings of footbinding that emerged on the both sides of the Pacific; second, to demonstrate the ways in which those perceptions, interpretations, and stereotypes of bound feet affected American immigration officials’ enforcement of Chinese exclusion laws. As a rising imperial power, the United States had become increasingly involved in the Pacific world since the mid-19th century. Transnational Americans, such as missionaries, travelers, diplomats, and journalists moving back and forth between both sides of the Pacific, produced and distributed a great deal of information about China and its people. Some of the accounts, however, misinterpreted what they observed. With the influx of Chinese after the Gold Rush in 1848, Americans confronted golden lilies at home. The increasing interaction with Chinese people, both in China and in the United States, enlarged the canvas upon which the multiple meanings of footbinding were painted. Based on an examination of Chinese and English language source materials – such as newspapers, periodicals, magazines, missionary records, and immigration case records – this chapter argues that American interpretations of footbinding and footbound women were not entirely American products. Rather, the Chinese female body became a contested site where racial thinking, gender ideas, class ideologies, and Western and Eastern cultures intersected. Chinese immigrants’ redeployment of the dominant perception of bound feet in America in relation to the construction of their class, admissibility, and

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identity played important roles in the process of reinventing bound feet and, in turn, strengthening the misperceptions of bound feet among the American public and immigration bureaucracy. American interpretations of Chinese footbinding were also part of a process of shaping self-identity. Americans constructed a modern and civilized self by reinforcing the differences of the other through the discourse of footbinding, which was filled with either racial condemnation or Orientalist admiration. However, these imagined racial and cultural differences, and their colonial mindset, prevented them from acknowledging the similarities in gender ideologies, and specifically beauty ideals, between themselves and the other. This chapter documents Chinese immigrants’ influence on the American perception of footbinding and examines what made possible the Chinese deployment of bound feet to enter the gates of America. Historiographies In U.S. immigration historiography, restriction and exclusion are prominent themes, especially in relation to the history of Chinese immigration. The history of the Chinese laboring class accordingly became a major focus, although several new books have featured Chinese elite immigrants who were granted entry.1 To engage with this scholarship, this chapter examines one way that Chinese immigrants gained admission to the United States. This strategy reveals not only who was admitted and the standards of admissibility during the Exclusion Era, but also the larger social milieu that granted validity to these rationales and their logic. Those Chinese immigrants who gained entry through exemption were not necessarily real Chinese elites. Rather, they knew how to ‘perform’ elite identities during inspection by U.S. immigration officials. To foreground Chinese immigrants’ agency and their impact on American immigration laws, bureaucracy, and nation-building, scholars have uncovered various strategies that the Chinese utilized as American immigration personnel 1  Mae Ngai traces the story of the Tapes, an Americanized Chinese middle-class family, during the Exclusion Era. Mae M. Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Madeline Hsu’s The Good Immigrants focuses on Chinese elites, especially students, to reveal how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from American immigration policies that selected people based on economic considerations and international politics. Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

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developed, expanded, or refined burdens of proof to achieve their exclusionist objectives.2 However, historians have rarely paid close attention to the connection between Americans’ perceptions of the Chinese, especially Chinese women, and American immigration officials’ interpretation and enforcement of U.S. immigration laws based on these perceptions in a trans-Pacific context. Furthermore, few have questioned how Chinese people, and specifically Chinese women, successfully manipulated American ideas about the other and U.S. immigration procedures. Footbinding in relation to Chinese immigration restriction is a familiar topic in Asian American historical studies. However, although scholars in the field of Chinese history were well aware that footbinding was practiced by both well-to-do families and commoners in Qing China, Asian American historians have yet to underscore that footbinding was not limited to upperclass Chinese females. Judy Yung and Erika Lee both discuss the role of bound feet in the rigorous enforcement of the Chinese exclusion acts.3 Yung correctly notes that “only women such as my great-grandmother who had bound feet and a modest demeanor were considered upper-class women with ‘moral integrity.’ ”4 However, her view of the situation in China is contradictory. At one point, she writes that “in practice, only the scholar-gentry, merchant, and landowner classes could afford to bind their daughters’ feet and keep their women cloistered and idle,”5 while in another book she notes that footbinding was widespread in China.6 U.S. immigration officials misunderstood the actual relationship between bound feet and women’s class in China, which was much more flexible. Yet, Asian American historians have not given enough attention to this misunderstanding and its implications for the implementation of U.S. immigration policy.

2  Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law, Studies in Legal History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Kitty Calavita, “The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and ‘Passing’: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882–1910,” Law and Social Inquiry 25, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 1–40; Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island : Immigrant Gateway to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3  Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Lee, At America’s Gates, 2003. 4  Ibid., 24. 5  Ibid., 19. 6  Yung, Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 99; 275, Note 2.

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Although the history of footbinding in China has captured the attention of both Chinese and American scholars, few works have studied the phenomenon among Chinese people who migrated to other parts of the world, including the United States.7 In general, American scholarship emphasizes the custom’s origin, spread, and demise over centuries from social and cultural perspectives.8 Scholars in China, however, tend to focus on its abolition, probably because “from its inception, the study of the Chinese women’s history was integral to the nationalistic program of China’s modernization,”9 which seeks to overcome the stigma associated with China’s semi-colonial past.10 By tracing the movement of ideas about footbinding along with the migration of people in the Pacific world, this chapter aims to put Chinese, Chinese 7  Dorothy Ko is the only scholar who mentions that in the second half of the 19th century footbinding, as an overseas Chinese practice, experienced various fates. She notes that after Chinese merchant wives migrated to the Philippines, their bound feet were seen as markers of elite status. But since this is not the focus of her research, she understandably neither pays particular attention to how local people perceived these women nor explores how bound feet related to the enforcement of American immigration laws. Dorothy Ko, Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 140–141. 8  The historiography in China and the United States has reflected conceptual turns and distinct feminist concerns. From Howard S. Levy’s Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom published in the 1960s, to more recent books by Dorothy Ko, there was a shift from seeing footbinding as evidence of women’s subordination to its opposite, women’s agency. Anthropologists have studied the economic motivation behind Chinese footbinding. C. Fred Blake examines the economic forces that made this practice popular even among poor families in China. Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1967); Fan Hong, Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom: The Liberation of Women’s Bodies in Modern China (Portland, Or: Frank Cass, 1997); Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (New York: Routledge, 2015); C. Fred Blake, “Foot-Binding in Neo-Confucian China and the Appropriation of Female Labor,” in Feminism and the Body, ed. Londa Schiebinger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Melissa J. Brown et al., “Marriage Mobility and Footbinding in Pre-1949 Rural China: A Reconsideration of Gender, Economics, and Meaning in Social Causation,” Journal of Asian Studies 71 (2012): 1035–1067; Hill Gates, Footbinding and Women’s Labor in Sichuan (New York: Routledge, 2015). 9  Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1. 10  In the Chinese historiography, there are only two book-length academic works on footbinding: Hongxing Gao, Chan zu shi (The History of Footbinding) (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi Press, 2007); and Yang Xingmei, Shen ti zhi zheng: jin dai Zhongguo fan chan zu de li cheng (The Contested Body: The Anti-footbinding movement in modern China) (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2012).

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American, and American histories in conversation with each other. It also moves beyond the framework of women’s subjugation and agency by looking at how the Chinese female body manifested a gendered aspect of U.S. immigration enforcement.

Footbinding in China

In China footbinding was originally practiced among palace dancers and royal families. The most popular story about the practice may be the myth of Yaoniang, a dancer during the Southern Tang dynasty under the rule of Li Yu (reign 961–975). Li Yu made lotus-shaped shoes out of gold for her.11 Most scholars agree that footbinding started to spread during the Song Dynasty (960– 1279). The practice was gradually adopted by ordinary people and reached its peak in the Qing, from the north to the south. Although it began to spread centuries earlier, it was primarily a fashion symbol that marked the leisurely life of upper-class women until the early Qing. In the late Qing, the number of lower-class women who practiced it grew tremendously. The majority ethnic group, Han Chinese, practiced footbinding. However, there were also exceptions among the Han women. The Hakka women in Guangdong and Fujian Provinces seldom practiced footbinding. The Tanka women of Guangdong Province, who worked and lived on boats all their lives, were also natural footed.12 Manchus, the rulers of the Qing Dynasty, were an ethnic minority who strove to prohibit it during their reign. Their efforts were unsuccessful throughout most of the Qing Dynasty. So popular was footbinding that Manchu ladies attempted to emulate it by making a style of footwear that gave an illusion of smallness. They wore a two-inch high small white support at the bottom of their regular shoes. This support was the only thing that was visible when a dress concealed the shoes.13 Ethnic groups such as the Mongols, Tibetans, Hakka, and Miao did not bind feet. Different regions practiced it somewhat differently, and the size of bound feet varied. 11  “He had Yaoning wrap her feet with silk (yibo raojiao); he had them rendered slender and small (xianxiao), curving upward like the new moon. In plain socks (suwa) she danced to the music ‘In the Clouds,’ her posture was as though she were soaring into the clouds . . . Later people imitated her, finding arched and slender feet (gongxian) wonderful. Thus is the origin of footbinding.” Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters, 114, Note 19. 12  Ping Wang, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000), 34. 13  Ibid., 67–68.

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illustration 14.1

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X-ray of bound feet, China. Library of Congress Collection.

illustration 14.2 Yang Jinge revealed her feet to British photographer Jo Farrell. Courtesy of Jo Farrell Photography.

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illustration 14.3 A ‘Lily footed’ woman of China. Library of Congress Collection.

The ideal time to bind girls’ feet was between four and nine years old before their feet fully developed. The procedure of binding entailed soaking the feet either in hot water or in a concoction of herbal ingredients, breaking and folding the girls’ toes (except the big one) underneath the sole and using very long silk or cotton cloth to wrap their feet all the way to the ankle. Gradually the arches were broken and forced upward (Illustrations 14.1 and 14.2). The ideal was three-inch feet, euphemistically called golden lilies, or Jin Lian, meaning gold lotuses in Chinese (Illustration 14.3).

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Traveler accounts from the mid-19th century note that some lower-class people did have bound feet. Robert Fortune observed that “in the central and eastern provinces . . . [foot-binding] is almost universal – the fine ladies who ride in sedan-chairs, and the poorer classes who toil from morning till evening in the fields, are all deformed in the same manner.”14 He also documented that one traveler in Henan and Shanxi during the Qing noted that even female beggars and water carriers “had tiny and regular feet which pointed upwards like water chestnuts.”15 A booklet, published by Tianzu Hui (Heavenly Foot Society or Natural Foot Society) in 1906, that aimed to promote reforms in Chinese society challenged the popular belief that bound feet signified dignity. It pointed out that some Chinese prostitutes had “gold lotuses.”16 Footbinding had a myriad of meanings for women of all social classes in that era. Bound feet served as a gendering tool and marked a woman’s beauty and sensuality. It demonstrated women’s aspiration for upward mobility and their claim to dignity and femininity, which were intimately related to their marriage prospects. In practice, when footbinding as a fashion reached the poorer women, they never stopped working either in their household or in the field. Although bound feet symbolized the upper-class status to which people from all walks of life aspired, some privileged people initiated anti-footbinding movements. In the face of Western invasion, Chinese intellectuals and republican reformers such as Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929), stimulated by the larger movement for political reform, modernization, and gender equality in China, launched an anti-footbinding propaganda campaign. They perceived footbinding as a sign of national humiliation and the declining health of the race. They believed that eliminating footbinding was one of the most important ways to revitalize China. For the well-educated urban elites who actively participated in antifootbinding campaigns, natural feet symbolized modernity, liberation, and good marriage prospects. Many Western-oriented students, officials, and intellectuals wanted to present a new ideal of beauty in their pursuit of a new and 14  “Women of the poorer classes, such as those who worked in the fields, were often barefooted; in areas such as Kwangtung and Kweichow, meticulous footbinding was associated with families of wealth and eminence. A tiny-footed concubine in Kwangtung was politely referred to as ‘aunt,’ but if natural-footed she was derisively called ‘bare foot’ and was not allowed to wear socks and slippers until after one of her sons married . . . There were both tiny and natural-footed Cantonese prostitutes; the large-footed came from poor village families.” Levy, Chinese Footbinding, 53–54; Blake, “Foot-Binding in NeoConfucian China,” 456. 15  Levy, Chinese Footbinding, 54. 16   Jiubi liangyan (Words to Remedy the Society), Tianzu Hui, 1906, 1–2.

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strong China. A report in Shen Bao (Shanghai News), one of the most influential newspapers in early 20th-century China, recounted that “the three governmental officials with most distinguished and respectable status in Wuchang did not bind their daughters’ feet.”17 This was not an unusual piece of news in China at that time. Many Shen Bao news articles published from the 1890s to the 1930s promoted anti-footbinding campaigns and discussed the damage that resulted from the tradition. The elites in Guangdong, where most of the pioneering Chinese immigrants were from, actively supported the campaigns of Tianzu Hui and publicized governmental decrees and booklets on how to regulate and eradicate this practice.18 Although anti-footbinding action was mainly a male operation, a handful of Chinese women did join the Tianzu Hui. Some elite women took on the responsibility of facilitating missions for letting feet out.19 As is the case with many social movements that aimed to terminate traditional practices, the actual transformation from bound feet to natural feet lagged behind the pace of political change. It took time for individuals to digest and negotiate shifting values. The bandaging had been deeply inscribed on women’s bodies, so a reversal was physically and emotionally painful, and sometimes impossible. Conventions still dominated among poorer, less educated, and rural people who resisted the encroachment of the elites’ ideology and believed that unbound feet were detrimental to marriageability. Some educated men found it hard to perceive any beauty in a big-footed woman. Furthermore, in some regions people’s preference for small feet persisted because reformers focused on transforming feet instead of advancing women and changing the social climate. It is hard to specify exactly when the practice of footbinding ended in China considering the vast territory and the unevenness of anti-footbinding campaigns, but, according to Yang Xingmei, the anti-footbinding movement lasted in Yunnan Province until the mid-1960s.20 Therefore, from this brief history of footbinding in China, we see that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the social and cultural implications of bound feet were far more complicated than being a symbol of elite status.

17   Shen Bao, January 8, 1900. 18   Jie chanzu wenchao (Selection of Anti-footbinding Works), Shunde gurong shuwu. 19  “In Fanshi county, the magistrate’s wife and daughter traveled from village to village inspecting and persuading women to unbind.” Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters, 59. 20  Yang, Shen ti zhi zheng, 315.

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Footbinding in the United States

While Western missionaries passionately promoted the anti-footbinding movement in China, how did the American people on the other side of the Pacific understand footbinding and the foot-bound Chinese? To what extent did their views differ from or resemble the ideas of people in China? Situating bound feet in a trans-Pacific context creates a lens for us to view how racial thinking, exotic fantasies, Orientalist sentiments, and gender and class ideologies intersected with each other. To some extent, stories in U.S. newspapers tell us more about America than China. The stereotypical images of bound-foot Chinese women provided a space in which Americans imagined and defined themselves. Some Americans condemned bound feet as the symbol of China’s backwardness and its opposition to the modernity embraced by the United States. The racially charged rhetoric in newspaper articles presented a self-portrait of the United States as a superior culture. According to a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1902, “The present news is that an agitation has been started to protest against the barbarous custom of bandaging the feet of Celestial girl babies and thus making artificial cripples of the mothers of the Chinese race. There are many absurd and idiotic fashions and customs in the world, but this is perhaps the most idiotic of all.”21 Journalists attributed early 20th-century social advancement among women in China to the influence of enlightened Americans and Europeans. In 1927, a New York Times reporter wrote It is the natural beginning of the long struggle of Chinese women for the sex equality in family and community life which the women of the West have already so largely won. To a great extent it is the first successful effort of Chinese women to express in an organized form ideals of womanhood that America has taught to young China.22 Following a similar logic, missionary magazines and newspapers exaggerated the effectiveness of missionary efforts to end footbinding. In 1902, one author described the Qing anti-footbinding decree as a “wake up” call and ascribed it to the influence of missionaries: “The custom which has been followed for centuries by Chinese women of the better classes has been so vigorously attacked 21  “No More Small Feet for Chinese Women,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1903, 6. 22  Paul Blanshard, “Women of the New China Lose Their Age-old Shackles,” New York Times, November 6, 1927, SM11.

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by native societies and the influence of the missionaries has been so powerful that the Dowager at last is said to be awake to the welfare of her women subjects.”23 Although Western missionaries played a role in accelerating the anti-footbinding movement, their influence on both the Chinese elites and the broader populace was limited. Mrs. Archibald Little, the leader of the missionary anti-footbinding movement in China, was in fact not a missionary but the wife of a British merchant. In a conference on “Home Life of Chinese Woman in Shanghai,” she pointed out: There was a Chinese society, not Christian, of 300,000 men, heads of families, mostly in good position, who were opposed to foot-binding. Many husbands get their wives to unbind their feet, and do not allow their daughters’ feet to be bound. There is an enormous movement in this direction among the people not reached by Christian influence. Many are not aware of what is being done by the Chinese themselves to free women from this cruel custom.24 Nonetheless, Mrs. Little’s insights and the missionaries’ frustration with their limited impact on local people were rarely publicized in the United States.25 In contrast to the discourse of condemnation, some Americans admired Chinese women with bound feet. As journalist Genevieve L. Browne observed upon her visit to a merchant’s home in San Francisco’s Chinatown, “The sole of the foot was shaped perfectly, though the heel and instep were lumped and elongated, and the ankle was extremely small and delicate.” She expressed her fascination with “Oriental” cultures and alluded to the class connotation associated with Chinese women’s bound feet: “It is impossible to remain insensible to her charms, particularly when she has been seen surrounded by the

23  “To Reform China’s Feet: Empress Dowager Proposes A Daring Undertaking,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 3, 1902, 2. 24   Home Life of Chinese Women: Records of Women’s Conference in China (Shanghai: Women’s Conference, 1900), 51. 25  In this conference, the missionaries were frustrated with the limited impact of their protest against footbinding, “Many instances, I am sorry to have to say, I could bring in by way of substantiating this sad fact, but it is only too true, as the missionaries present know only too well. I acknowledge with shame and regret that in my eagerness to see souls saved I have, to a large degree, lost sight of the sin of the cruel custom, and I do not doubt that others present would say the same.” Home Life of Chinese Women, 48–49.

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refinements of her home and among settings that make her the center of an oriental picture.”26 In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white Americans perceived Chinatowns in the United States as exotic and mysterious tourist sites. Some Chinese exploited these ideas for profit, thereby reinforcing the appeal of bound feet: “Some of the poorer class, who bandage the feet of their girls, make more money by exhibiting these feet than they lose from the inability of the girls to work. Anyone with a morbid curiosity can see a stunted foot for 25 cents, and in the tourist season business is lively.”27 Thus, while anti-footbinding efforts were underway in China, ironically, in the United States, people’s fascination with Oriental traditions presented an economic opportunity to maintain and display the ‘backward’ custom. However, American tourists regarded the Chinese female body as fascinating not because of its association with respectability, but rather because of its display of Chinese women’s supposed childishness, passivity, and lack of sophistication. Browne continued that, “she always retains a certain childish simplicity of mien and appearance, which is perceptible even in women of advanced age, for she has little intellectual development.”28 She stated that “the ‘Golden Lilies’ have particularly refined features, which coupled with their innocence and childlike simplicity of expression produce an effect at once naive and charming.”29 Browne claimed that “each nation has its own standard of feminine beauty and is unable to fairly judge the beauty of women of other nations, but it is safe to say that some of the Chinese women whom the writer has had the pleasure of seeing would probably be considered beautiful by connoisseurs of any nationality.”30 One cannot help but wonder what provided the basis for the author’s claim that small-footed Chinese women were beautiful in the eyes of people around the world. In fact, at the turn of the 20th century, small feet were also a standard of beauty among Americans and Europeans. For instance, the New York Times reprinted one article from The London Truth that expressed admiration of small feet and revulsion toward large feet:

26  Genevieve L. Browne, “Fair Chinese Ladies: Visits to Our Local Golden Lilies,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 1893. 27  J. M. Scanland, “Foot-Binding in Chinatown: Late Edict of the Empress Will Have No Effect,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 1903, 5. 28  Browne, “Fair Chinese Ladies,” 1. 29  Ibid. 30  Ibid.

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My saleswoman says that the Madrid ladies have the smallest feet she knows of. Peruvians and Chileans come next. American ladies from the United States are also remarkable for their small feet. The Russians have heavy splay feet . . . The best-shaped feet in Northern Europe are in Sweden. German ladies coming from Germany are generally neatly shod . . . The Belgian ladies are better off in their shoemakers; but they have large feet.31 In 1923, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that a woman had “won a prize in a Paris contest for having the smallest and most shapely feet in the French capital.”32 Even though this kind of fascination was not carried to its Chinese extreme, smallness as a sign of beauty, femininity, and refinement was also a Western beauty ideal. Like the Manchu women who donned a special style of shoes to create an illusion of small feet, Western women also desired shoes that projected the image of having small feet. As one shoe merchant stated in a Washington Post news story: “Now, the average size of the ladies’ feet of San Francisco require a No. 3 shoe, which by having the heel in the middle of the foot, makes the deception that conveys the idea of a small foot.” This merchant also commented on the popularity of French shoes in San Francisco, saying, “Popular? Oh, yes, though they are the most absurd thing imaginable, and for cramping ladies’ feet into all conceivable shapes of deformity they surpass those worn by the Mongolians.”33 Another report revealed that the Western preoccupation with small and narrow feet at times resulted in surgery: Already two operations have taken place in exclusive London private sanitariums, and the fad is spreading. Only the little toe of each foot is sacrificed on the altar of vanity, for the purpose of the toe operation is not to shorten the foot, but merely to enable it to fit comfortably into the extremely long and narrow “toothpick” shoe which originated in America and has now become swagger in the British Isles.34

31  “Women and Small Feet,” New York Times, November 5, 1895, 2. 32  “Small Feet,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 29, 1923, 17. 33  “Deceptions in Feet: How the California Ladies Compress Their Pedal Extremities,” The Washington Post, January 21, 1883, 2. 34  “Now Women Cut Off Toes to Force on ‘Toothpick’ Shoes,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 25, 1922.

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Given these distinct interpretations of bound feet and Chinese women, what happened to these golden lilies when they encountered immigration officials at America’s gates?

‘Golden Lilies’ at America’s Gates

In the context of immigration inspection, bound feet played a different role. During the Exclusion Era, American immigration officials had to confront the challenge of determining whether a Chinese applicant was admissible. Chinese merchants and their wives comprised a primary category of the exempt class. By the turn of the 20th century immigration authorities considered bound feet as “overwhelming evidence of a women’s exempt-class status.”35 As one official documented in his report, “there has never come to this port, I believe, a bound footed woman who was found to be an immoral character, this condition of affairs being due, it is stated, to the fact that such women, and especially those in the interior, are necessarily confined to their homes and seldom frequent the city districts.” Furthermore, he wrote, “the present applicant No.14418 is a very modest appearing woman whose evident sincerity, frankness of expression and generally favorable demeanor is very convincing.”36 In a hearing of a Chinese merchant wife’s case, W. D. Heitmann, a member of the Board of Special Inquiry reported that in “the case of the alien before the board she comes as the wife of a merchant, having bound feet there is no doubt she is of a respectable class.” The chairman and the other board members reaffirmed his conclusion.37 Even in cases in which Chinese immigrants presented contradictory testimony, bound feet served to impress immigration officials and improved the chance of admission. In 1914, when Chin She applied as the wife of a merchant, the inspector found that her testimony about her birthplace differed from that mentioned by her husband. Inspector G. H. Mangel commented that “although the testimony is not as strong as it might be on the point of relationship I believe the case is bona fide, and I recommend admission of the applicant. The matter was submitted to Mr. Monroe who joined me in believing that the woman should be admitted.” Mangels’s rationale for his decision 35  Ibid., 95. 36  Yung, Unbound Feet, 24. 37   U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. File 10434/22–11, Arrival Investigation Case Files, Record Group 85, National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, San Francisco (hereafter NARA-PR, SF).

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was that “this applicant is a woman forty-two years old, and of the bound-foot class. Her appearance and manner impress Interpreter Quan Foy and me very favorably.”38 In another immigrant inspector’s report that involved conflicting testimony, the inspector discredited the woman with unbound feet. “This applicant is a natural-footed women 21 years of age and her appearance and manner of testifying do not strike me favorably.”39 Immigration records reveal that if the case involved Chinese women, officials would question whether the women had bound feet and document the response during the interrogation. In 1910 officials asked Chang Shee, the wife of a merchant, about her foot size and that of her mother, sister, and her husband’s brother’s wife.40 In another case during the same year, an American-born Chinese tried to bring his wife Chew Shee and daughter Leong Sen Toy to the United States. The official posed the following question to Chew Shee: “You are a little or bound-footed woman?” Their neighbor’s foot size was also recorded during the interview with the daughter. After Leong Sen Toy mentioned that Leong Duk Wai’s family lived near her house, the official continued to ask how many children Leong Duk Wai had, his wife’s name and the size of his wife’s feet. Leong Sen Toy specified that his wife had “bound feet.”41 In 1913, another American-born Chinese who attempted to gain admission for his Chinese wife was asked not only about his wife’s feet, but also the feet of other female family members in China, including his stepmother, birth mother and two deceased grandmothers. When the inspector asked him to give the name, age, type of feet, and present whereabouts of his first wife, he stated, “Soo Hoo Shee, died S. T. 3–12–1 when she was 29 years old, bound feet.”42 Questions about foot size also emerged in Chinese labor migrant cases. To verify his right to return, Lee Jung Sing, a farm hand, offered his debtor’s statement. His debtor, Ng Yen (Yick) Hock, was the owner of a cigar factory in San Francisco. In response to the inspector’s questions about their wives’ names, ages, and feet, they offered the following answers: “Ng Shee, 24 yrs old, bound feet, still living in China, only one wife,” and “Hom Shee, 46 yrs old, bound feet, still living in China, only one wife.”43 Although Lee Jung Sing 38   U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. File 32278, Chinese Exclusion Case Files, Record Group 85, National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Alaska Region, Seattle (hereafter NARA-PAR, Seattle). 39  File 29438/4–5, NARA-PR, SF. 40  File 10433/2852, NARA-PR, SF. 41  File 10433/2850, NARA-PR, SF. 42  File 29438/4–5, NARA-PR, SF. 43  File 10434/297, NARA-PR, SF.

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was not a merchant but a farmer, the question on his wife’s feet indicates how the examination of female feet had become routinized in the immigration inspection. In addition to the high social status that bound feet symbolized, U.S. immigration inspectors asked about women’s foot size for more practical reasons. Typically each case required multiple people, including the applicants, their sponsors, and the witnesses in the United States, to undergo interrogation. Bound feet became a means to cross-examine each person’s testimony. For instance, in the 1910 case of Chew Shee and Leong Sen Toy mentioned above, the alleged husband and father referred to the bound feet of his uncle’s wife during interrogation. Immigration officials subsequently asked about this woman’s feet when they interviewed Chew Shee and Leong Sen Toy even though this relative had little to do with this case. The mother, Chew Shee, was asked to name “any other families living around you that your daughter knows” and to specify the person’s whereabouts, marital status and foot type. The same information was required in the process of the daughter’s interrogation. Her response matched her mother’s answers.44 In short, immigration officials utilized the highly visible physical mark of bound feet in their interrogations in order to ascertain the veracity of immigrants’ identities. Chinese and Chinese Americans utilized immigration officials’ assumptions about bound feet in their attempts to gain entry to the United States. For example, they would refer to the size of women’s feet even if the immigration inspector did not ask. In a case involving the arrival of a Chinese merchant’s wife on September 27, 1907, when the immigrant inspector asked the husband for the name of his wife, the merchant answered: “Hom Shee, bound feet.”45 He drew attention to his wife’s bound feet without being asked. Later he also mentioned that his wife’s mother had bound feet even when no one inquired.46 In the 1910 case of Chew Shee and Leong Sen Toy, when the immigration official asked their sponsor, a citizen of Chinese ancestry, if his uncle was married, his response was “yes, his wife has bound feet.”47 Another case featured Lum Goon, a laborer who lost his previous merchant status after selling his interest in the Quong Him Wah Co. and applied for a return certificate before leaving for China. When the inspector asked him to state his “wife’s name, age, birthplace” and where they got married, he replied “Jew She, bound-feet, 45, years of 44  File 10433/2850, NARA-PR, SF. 45  File 10209/587, NARA-PR, SF. 46  “Q What was the name of her mother? A Lum Shee, bound feet.” File 10209/587, NARA-PR, SF. 47  File 10433/2850, NARA-PR, SF.

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age, born in Hah Loo village, S. W. D., and I married her in K. S. 16 in my home village.” Such responses revealed that Chinese immigrants had learned about how the immigration system worked.48 Immigrants’ references to bound feet were not limited to Chinese wives’ cases. For example, when a boy and girl sought admission as children of a Chinese merchant, the inspector interviewed their father’s business partner to prove his merchant status. When asked about whether the father was married or not, this witness answered, “Yes, his wife’s name is Wong Shee, a bound footed woman.”49 When the inspector then asked who would take care of the girl since this merchant’s wife was not in the United States, the business partner replied, “She will live with Lee Yoke Suey’s family – he has a bound feet wife and two children here.”50 These examples of Chinese immigrants’ deployment of female bound feet illustrate that bound feet was also a symbol of Chinese men’s status. Chinese men’s merchant status was a prerequisite for many Chinese in the United States to gain their family members’ admission. This in part explains why Chinese applicants referred to bound feet in their testimony even in cases not directly involving women. Chinese women and their attorneys also learned to take advantage of immigration officials’ favorable stance toward bound-foot women. One of the earliest examples of this strategy was the case of Jow Ah Yeong and Chun Ah Ngon, a merchant’s wife and daughter who arrived in San Francisco in 1885. As Erika Lee notes, “Because immigration officials expected merchant families to possess fine clothing, a respectable manner, and, especially, bound feet, Chinese women and their attorneys learned to highlight these traits in order to achieve their goal of entering the country.”51 In 1893 Leong Shee, a merchant’s wife who had not been to the United States before, attempted to bring her mui tsai (domestic servant in Cantonese) to the United States as her U.S. nativeborn daughter. Leong falsely claimed that she had resided in San Francisco. When asked about her memory of the city, she replied, “I do not know the city excepting the names of a few streets, as I have small feet and never went out.”52 In 1915 the attorneys for Lam Yin Shee, a merchant’s wife, pointed out her bound feet to the immigration officials and characterized her background 48  File 33577, NARA-PAR, Seattle. 49  File 10209/598, NARA-PR, SF. 50  File 10209/598, NARA-PR, SF. 51  Erika Lee, “Exclusion Acts: Chinese Women during the Chinese Exclusion Era, 1882–1943,” in Asian/Pacific Islander Women: A Historical Anthology, eds. Shirley Hune and Gail Nomura (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 82. 52  Yung, Unbound Feet, 15; Yung, Unbound Voices, 13.

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as “undoubtedly a woman of the better class; that there can be no question to her respectability in any way.”53 To cope with these rigorous interrogation procedures, some Chinese created coaching books for would-be immigrants that listed potential interrogation questions. Such services later developed into a highly systematic and profitable business.54 Coaching documents further illustrate that Chinese immigrants were fully aware of the importance of highlighting Chinese women’s foot type during interrogation. According to these documents, references to bound feet improved the chance of admission. During a 1917 Department of Labor raid in San Francisco and Berkeley, government agents seized letters from the stores and residences of a Chinese leader of an international smuggling organization. This man had written letters to his employees – “Chinese graduates from the smuggling ring’s school in Hong Kong” – who were being held in U.S. immigration detention. Excerpts from some of the letters reveal the significance of references to bound feet in immigrant testimony: Please look after this landing. The coaching does not say whether the women in the village have bound feet or natural feet – nor containing which direction the village is faring. I taught them to tell the inspector that all the women in the village had bound feet. Some have natural feet and the village faces to the south. Please tell the father to give the same answers.55 Another coaching document featured a map of houses that included detailed notes to identify each inhabitant: “Moy Park, forty years old, wife Chin Shee, bound feet, one son Ah Wee, twenty odd years, not married,” lived in the last house in the eleventh alley of the village. “Mow Sing, age forty, wife Chin Shee, bound feet, two sons, attending school somewhere else,” lived in the thirteenth alley.56 Even if the bound-feet women included in the map were not the applicants for admission, information about bound feet helped to facilitate the interrogation process. Coaching books created in the 1920s show that, by then, Chinese immigrants mentioned natural feet more frequently during interrogation. This was probably a response to American immigration authorities’ growing awareness 53  Lee, At America’s Gates, 135. 54  For more information about coaching books, see Zhang Guoxiong, Kou gong zhi (Coaching Books) (Beijing: Zhongguo hua qiao chu ban she, 2007). 55  “Two Additional Suspensions in Smuggling Case,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 1917, 8. 56  Lee, At America’s Gates, 197.

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of immigrants’ exploitation of stereotypes to claim their admissibility, as well as the effect of anti-footbinding movements in China.57 Thus, in the context of U.S. immigration inspection, the social construction of bound feet was not solely an American product. Chinese immigrants’ manipulation of the U.S. immigration system, and their refashioning of their class, admissibility, and identity, as well as immigration officials’ perceptions and decisions, played significant roles in the process. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the association of Chinese female feet with their eligibility for admission objectified and codified the female body in the enforcement of Chinese exclusion acts. It also contributed to Chinese immigrants’ performance of female morality and class through the actual display of, as well as discursive references to, the female body in these encounters. Although this kind of performance demonstrated these immigrants’ resilience in the context of the exclusion laws, it also reinforced gendered stereotypes about China and its culture. Conclusion Contextualizing bound feet in a trans-Pacific world opens up a new chapter in the history of footbinding. The female immigrant body was a contested terrain that involved both American and Chinese ideologies about gender, class, race, and identity. Bound feet functioned as a lens through which we can see how cultural misunderstandings occurred and how they were channeled, perpetuated, and routinized in transnational processes such as migration. By conceptualizing footbinding as a barbaric, exotic, naive, and charming cultural practice, Americans imagined and constructed intrinsic differences between the Chinese and themselves. These seemingly insurmountable differences reinforced and idealized American identity as a civilized race and an emerging power in the Pacific world. Yet most Americans glossed over the extent to which the male domination and female dependence that they saw as inherent in Chinese culture also characterized their own society. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Chinese elites launched modernization projects in China that included anti-footbinding campaigns, ironically, many ‘modern’ Americans perpetuated a fascination with small feet and a more traditional understanding of footbinding.

57  These coaching books can be found in Jiangmen Museum, Taishan County Museum, and Zhang Guoxiong, Kou gong zhi (Coaching Books) (Beijing: Zhongguo hua qiao chu ban she, 2007), 35–47.

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Secondary Sources

Angel Island Oral History Project. Chicago Daily Tribune (1872–1922). Cable, Emma R. Little Ah Yee of the Opium Dens. Occidental Board of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church, 1886. Home Life of Chinese Woman, Records of Women’s Conference in China, November, 1900. www.hathitrust.org. Meng, Chunjuan. Jie chanzu wenchao (Selection of Anti-footbinding Works), Shunde gurong shuwu, 1901. Jiubi liangyan (Words to Remedy the Society), Tianzu Hui, 1906. Little, Mrs. Archibald. Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them. The Project of Gutenberg Ebook, 2013. Los Angeles Times (1886–1922). New York Times (1851–1922). Richmond Times-Dispatch 1922. San Francisco Call (1895–1913). San Francisco Chronicle (1869–Current File). Shen bao (Shanghai News) (1872–1927). The Independent (1848–1921). The Washington Post (1923–1954). U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Records of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Arrival Investigation Case Files, Record Group 85, National Archives, Pacific Region, San Francisco, California. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Records of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Chinese Exclusion Case Files, Record Group 85, National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, Seattle, Washington. Women’s Missionary Friend (1896–1922).

Blake, C. Fred. “Foot-Binding in Neo-Confucian China and the Appropriation of Female Labor.” In Feminism and the Body, ed. Londa Schiebinger, 429–464. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Brown, Melissa J., Laurel Bossen, Hill Gates and Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips. “Marriage Mobility and Footbinding in Pre-1949 Rural China: A Reconsideration of Gender, Economics, and Meaning in Social Causation.” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4 (2012): 1035–1106. Calavita, Kitty. “The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and ‘Passing’: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882–1910.” Law and Social Inquiry 25, no. 1 (2000): 1–40.

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Epstein, Barbara. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981. Gao, Hongxing. Chan zu shi (The History of Footbinding). Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi Press, 2007. Gates, Hill. Footbinding and Women’s Labor in Sichuan. New York: Routledge, 2015. Hill, Patricia R. The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Hong, Fan. Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom: The Liberation of Women’s Bodies in Modern China. London: Frank Cass, 1997. Hsu, Madeline Yuan-yin. The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Hunter, Jane. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the Century China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Jeffreys, Sheila. Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. New York: Routledge, 2015. Ko, Dorothy. Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Ko, Dorothy. Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in SeventeenthCentury China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Lee, Erika. “Exclusion Acts: Chinese Women during the Chinese Exclusion Era, 1882– 1943.” In Asian/Pacific Islander Women: A Historical Anthology, edited by Shirley Hune and Gail Nomura, 77–89. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Lee, Erika, and Judy Yung. Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Levy, Howard S. Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom. New York: Bell, 1967. Ngai, Mae M. The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Peffer, George Anthony. If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion, The Asian American Experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Salyer, Lucy E. Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law, Studies in Legal History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

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CHAPTER 15

Traces of Empires in Breast Cancer in South Korea and the Trans-Pacific Laura C. Nelson Abstract Increases in the incidence of breast cancer in Oceania and East Asia signal a curious link among women in the trans-Pacific region. This chapter discusses the context for and responses to rapidly rising rates of breast cancer in South Korea to illuminate forms of power and critique around this disturbing phenomenon. Western epidemiological analyses and biomedical treatments frame individual encounters with breast cancer in South Korea, and the South Korean medical industry reproduces knowledge-power through its embrace of superior treatment efficacy in a global medical marketplace. Yet, while South Korean women are held responsible for the lifestyle changes associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, patients themselves point to societal stress and patriarchy as the cause of their particular illness. The chapter suggests the benefits of greater knowledge sharing and connections among breast cancer activists across the trans-Pacific region.

Keywords breast cancer – South Korea – stress – toxicity – activism

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates worldwide expenditures on medical care in 2010 totaled U.S. $6.5 trillion.1 The medical treatment of people who are ill or injured, and the maintenance of health, are simultaneously intimate ethical practices and a colossal global enterprise. It is a domain where biopolitics, technological expertise, privilege, and meaning-making intersect. Global flows of medical personnel, technologies, pharmaceuticals, 1  “Spending on Health: A Global Overview, Fact Sheet No. 319,” World Health Organization, April 2012, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs319/en/ (accessed January 20, 2016).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336100_016

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information, and patients are thick strands knitting the world together. While any one person’s health is a product of multiple genetic, environmental, and social factors, increasingly it is apparent that even the element of luck reflects histories of power and social difference, and that responses to illness engage existing and ascendant cultural strands and structures. For the past eight years I have been exploring these transnational connections through research on breast cancer in South Korea. Breast cancer may at first seem an odd lens through which to consider issues of empire, gender, and race. After all, breast cancer is not contagious; it is not an effect of war; it does not seem to be triggered by poverty. What is more, the highest incidence of breast cancer is found in the most privileged regions of the world, in North America and Northern and Western Europe, and within those regions incidence rates are generally highest among more affluent, white women. Yet breast cancer is a serious and growing problem throughout the trans-Pacific world. While it may not be surprising that Australia and New Zealand have incidence levels approaching those of Northern Europe, given their population history and economic and cultural practices, the World Cancer Research Fund has also listed French Polynesia and New Caledonia among the top twenty nations in the world in terms of age-standardized rates of breast cancer incidence in 2012, and has pointed to Oceania alongside North America as the world’s highest incidence regions. A 2010 report stated point blank, “Breast cancer is common in all of the communities of the Pacific, without exception.”2 While incidence levels across northern East Asia may be relatively low by world standards, they are rising alarmingly quickly. For example, the incidence of breast cancer in South Korea has nearly doubled in eleven years, increasing from 20.9 to 39.8 cases per 100,000 women (age-standardized) between 1999 and 2010.3 What can we learn from looking at breast cancer in the trans-Pacific region? This chapter focuses on three issues drawn from the South Korean situation: How do the global networks of health and medicine engage with and reproduce historical colonial legacies? How does the experience of breast cancer 2  Quote from M. A. Moore, F. Baumann, S. Foliaki et al., “Cancer Epidemiology in the Pacific Islands – Past, Present and Future,” Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 11 no. 2 (2010): 99–106. Age-standardized breast cancer incidence per 100,000 population was 92.2 in French Polynesia and 87.6 in New Caledonia. Statistics drawn from “Breast Cancer Statistics, World Cancer Research Fund International, http://www.wcrf.org/int/cancer-facts-figures/data -specific-cancers/breast-cancer-statistics (accessed January 20, 2016). 3  K. W. Jun, Won Y. J., Kong H. J., Oh C. M., Seo H. G., Lee J. S. “Cancer statistics in Korea: incidence, mortality, survival and prevalence in 2010,” Cancer Research and Treatment 45 no. 1 (2013): 1–14.

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illuminate hidden aspects of gendered structures of social relations and medical care, locally and regionally? What is obscured in these frameworks that shared inquiry might help us to understand? South Korea plays an unusual role in the trans-Pacific world. It shares with many other nations a history of Japanese colonial occupation, and, like the Philippines and several other trans-Pacific nations, it has been a long-term host for outposts of the U.S. military. But South Korea’s ambitions have landed it membership in the club of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. It is frequently lauded as a success story of economic development, having undergone a breathtaking transformation from widespread destitution to broad-based prosperity in a single generation. This success has led to dense regional connections: South Korean corporations have established manufacturing facilities across Southeast Asia; South Korean pop music, television, and film dramas are popular throughout the region; South Korean ideals of beauty have been branded (in, for example, the Sephora advertising campaign of “K-Beauty” and in the international marketing of South Korean style and skill in cosmetic surgery); South Korean travelers flock to Asian and Oceanic tourist sites, and – often drawn by the images of South Korea produced by popular media – Asian travelers come to Seoul in increasing numbers. In recent years, South Korea has shifted from a nearly exclusive internal marriage market to the active recruitment of foreign brides from neighboring nations (Vietnam, China, Japan, the Philippines, and Cambodia top the list).4 All of this has led to significant changes in South Korea: greater diversity, prosperity, urban concentration, leisure, cosmopolitanism, democracy, increased longevity – and higher rates of cancer. In 1983 cancer became the leading cause of death in South Korea, outstripping heart disease, communicable illnesses, and accidents. This shift coincided with and has continued to track improvements in medical care and cancer surveillance, as well as the implementation and expansion of national health insurance coverage.5 As life expectancy increased, greater numbers of elderly South Koreans were diagnosed with cancer, and the social and moral stigma 4  Rising from 1.2 percent in 1990 of all marriages in South Korea (and the majority of those were between South Korean women and foreign men, often members of the U.S. military), by 2005 more than 13 percent of South Korean marriages were contracted between a citizen and a foreign partner. Since then, the share of marriages in South Korea that are international has fallen to 8 percent. “International Migration Statistics,” Statistics Korea, http://kostat.go.kr/ portal/eng/pressReleases/8/5/index.board (accessed January 20, 2016). 5  For information on South Korean health insurance, see J. C. Lee, “Health care reform in Korea: success or failure?” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 1 (2003): 48–51.

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previously associated with cancer slowly faded.6 The cancers of these elderly people were primarily cancers of the lung, liver, colon, and stomach, and their increase was attributed to longer life spans (and smoking). In contrast, experts point to a number of lifestyle factors to account for the rise in the incidence of breast cancer in South Korea. These factors include earlier onset of menarche, later menopause, fattier diets and higher rates of obesity, later birth of first child, fewer pregnancies, and feeding babies formula rather than breastfeeding.7 Together, these risk factors are frequently characterized as aspects of Westernization in both the scientific and popular media. This couches widespread transformations of social patterns of behavior in terms of choices individual women have made, through which they have placed themselves at risk of mortal illness. It both tars women with the charge of abandoning implicitly healthier Korean traditions for foreign practices, and focuses the question of causality on individual behaviors. Moreover, it ignores one of the most disturbing characteristics of the South Korean caseload: while the median age of breast cancer diagnosis in South Korea has been rising slowly over the past twenty years, today half the South Korean women diagnosed with breast cancer are still younger than fifty.8 Although the younger age of the caseload (compared with the U.S. and Europe) is often noted, there is no expression of perplexity regarding the fact that the same risk factors manifest in cancer a full decade earlier, on average, in South Korean women than in Americans. The basic epidemiological framework for understanding breast cancer rates has traveled across the Pacific, but although local data has populated the model, the misfit between risk factors and the age distribution of the caseload has not yet sparked significant inquiry.9 Indeed, the fact that most South Korean women have experienced an increase in their estrogen exposure, factors that are well-captured in the imported model, obscures rather than illuminates the 6  For more discussion on the biopolitics of the caring nation as it relates to breast cancer, see Laura Nelson, “Cancer, Stress, and Ironies of Cancer Understanding in South Korea,” Medical Anthropology 35 (2016), accessed January 26, 2016, doi: 10.1080/01459740.2015.1137914. 7  These behaviors increase life-long exposure to estrogen, and greater exposure to estrogen is associated with a higher risk of breast cancer. Between one- and two-thirds of breast cancer cases are dependent upon estrogen for their growth. 8  Zisun Kim, Sun Young Min, Chan Seok Yun, et al., “The Basic Facts of Korean Breast Cancer in 2011: Results of a Nationwide Survey and Breast Cancer Registry Database,” Journal of Breast Cancer 17, no. 2 (2014): 99–106. The median age at diagnosis in the United States is 61. 9  See, however, Boyoung Park, Seung Hyun Ma, Aesun Shin, et al., “Korean Risk Assessment Model for Breast Cancer Risk Prediction,” PLOS ONE 8 no.10 (2013) e76736. Doi: 10.1371/ journal.pone.0076736 for a discussion of fitting “Western” risk models to South Korean age distribution data.

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disconcerting problem of the time-to-cancer differential as health researchers focus on the risk factors, not on how these factors operate in specific bodies. Treatment of breast cancer in South Korea also reflects international standards. The treatment protocols were developed by a select committee of South Korean physicians to reflect cutting-edge medical knowledge in the context of national health insurance priorities of cost-effective care. Medical professionals in South Korea have access to up-do-date machinery and medications, and many participate in international research programs. For several years South Korea has attracted international oncological and surgical specialists to their Global Breast Cancer Conference (GBCC), where local and regional medical professionals engage with the world “celebrities” of breast cancer research. GBCC functions as both a convention for the transnational formal and informal transmission of medical expertise, and as a marketplace for new technologies; it is also an opportunity to demonstrate South Korea’s advanced circumstances to the foreign invitees, and attendance generates prestige for the doctors and researchers from South Korea and elsewhere in the trans-Pacific region who attend. South Korea also markets this expertise to potential foreign consumers. The webpage of the medical tourism department of the Korean Tourism Organization lists the low cost, high survival rate of South Korean cancer care to attract foreign patients to the country for cancer treatment.10 This globalized high-tech, high-skill medical environment indeed offers South Korean breast cancer patients access to efficacious treatment, but simultaneously produces local submission to the superior knowledge of medical personnel and institutions. Compliance has been further encouraged by the adoption of Western models of breast cancer publicity and activism. Public awareness of the rising rates of breast cancer and its association with Westernized lifestyles in South Korea has been fueled by newspaper and magazine coverage, storylines featuring breast cancer in television dramas, and by the annual pink events during Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October. Since 2000 the South Korean cosmetics company Amore Pacific, along with the Korean Breast Cancer Foundation, has been sponsoring breast cancer awareness events, including star-studded marathon races and elaborate pink decoration of sites in Seoul, including the illumination, in pink, of the iconic Namsan Tower. This approach is explicitly modeled upon the American campaigns led by Susan G. Komen and the Estée 10  The KTO medical tourism website, Visit Medical Korea, proclaims that the five-year survival for cancer patients in South Korea exceeds that of patients in the U.S., Japan, and Canada, and that South Korean medical staff have greater clinical trial experience in researching and treating breast cancer. “Severe Disease Cure,” Visit Medical Korea, http:// english.visitmedicalkorea.com/ (accessed August 15, 2016).

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Lauder Companies. The goals of the campaigns in the U.S. and in South Korea are essentially the same: spreading awareness of breast cancer; educating women about breast health; facilitating early detection of tumors; and funding treatment research. The effects are also similar. They have raised impressive sums for research and treatment, but they have also generated a rising fear of breast cancer while simultaneously offering corporate caring as the salvation.11 South Korea’s adoption and adaptation of epidemiological models, biomedical expertise, and corporate campaigns of caring have shaped the experience of South Korean breast cancer patients in particular ways. Further, specific aspects of South Korean contemporary culture also intersect in patient experiences. In South Korea, the rising incidence of breast cancer hits many women in the middle years of adulthood. South Korean women with breast cancer often face their treatment with children at home and a full load of family and work responsibilities, in a context in which domestic “women’s work” is rigidly gender-defined as well as time- and energy-intensive. Unlike elderly South Koreans with cancer, who generally benefit from the care of adult sons and daughters and daughters-in-law, many mid-life breast cancer patients struggle to secure family support in a context where they are, by definition, the family’s care provider. They also often hide their diagnosis to avoid any harm to the reputation of their children in a tight marriage market that values health. Although survival rates are high in South Korea, even women treated for earlystage breast cancer are frightened about recurrence and ask themselves what they might have done, or experienced, that caused a malignancy to develop in their breast. In response to this nearly all the South Korean women I have spoken with have drawn on a Korean traditional knowledge of health and illness to identify what they see as the fundamental cause, beyond simple biomedical understandings, of their own specific breast cancers. In all their accounts, breast cancer is due to stress. Many women listed all the epidemiological risk factors applicable to their own cases, and, without dismissing them, have then said, “But my cancer was caused by stress.” By identifying stress as the ultimate cause of their cancer, they assert their right to avoid stress in an attempt to reduce the chance of the cancer metastasizing or recurring. In few other circumstances in South Korea do women feel entitled to destress their lives, which are widely recognized as burdened by heavy demands from family members and highly gender-stratified social and economic opportunities. Many of the women spoken with have taken steps to demand greater family 11  For critiques of American corporate breast cancer campaigns, see (among others), Maren Klawiter, The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

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participation in domestic care and maintenance, and have begun new hobbies and social activities. For them, breast cancer has facilitated a re-evaluation of the unfair stress distribution in their lives, and has opened the way to a kind of self-liberation that exposes the degree to which women are expected to shoulder a truly unhealthy burden of responsibilities in South Korean society. A final issue of trans-Pacific relevance is the question of what has led to the unexpectedly high rates of breast cancer in the Pacific region, and the specific profile of cases. While corporate caring has traveled from North America to South Korea, other, more confrontational, forms of breast cancer activism have not. Only one small eco-feminist organization in Seoul consistently seems to be raising the question of possible environmental and chemical causes of breast cancer in South Korea, and there are no organizations publicly challenging the “pinkwashing” of South Korean corporations. South Korea’s high levels of environmental pollution from decades of military utilization and unregulated industrial development are not considered in the search for what underlies rising rates of breast cancer. Similarly, South Korea’s beauty culture, characterized by the high utilization of cosmetics products, has escaped scrutiny. Solid research to connect environmental factors with breast cancer cases is difficult to carry out. But military and industrial toxicity is widespread across the Pacific region. Weapons testing is part of the history of many sites in the trans-Pacific region, with unknown carcinogenic effects.12 While South Koreans have increasingly sought out “well-being” products and natural cosmetics, their multi-billion dollar beauty-focused export branding further encourages high exposure to estrogenic and endocrine-disrupting chemicals, with the Asia Pacific market their principal target. There are strong political and commercial interests against investigating possible connections between military, industrial, and cosmetic chemical exposures and the unexpectedly high rates of breast cancer in the Pacific region, but perhaps an awareness of shared environmental factors may raise questions. Clearly there are important cultural and political differences in how women in various parts of the trans-Pacific region deal with a breast cancer diagnosis. Preconceptions about national status may shape how patients access care. From an epidemiological point of view it is less remarkable that breast cancer rates are rising in East Asia than that they are already so high in the Pacific regions. Public health has tended to chart expected population health transitions as correlated with economic, environmental, and social transformations. 12  See S. Lochlann Jain for a brief discussion of nuclear bomb testing and increased risk of cancers: S. Lochlann Jain, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

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In this model certain cancers, including breast cancer, are considered to be characteristic of modern, industrial lifestyles, which are not commonly associated with people living in the Pacific. Yet, as Julie Livingston has shown in her study of an oncological ward in Botswana, the presumed correlations of particular cancers with stages in developmentalist narratives contribute to global unevenness in knowledge and care, and feed back into images of economic and public health teleologies.13 Ironically, South Korea is positioned to benefit from unevenness in medical resources in the treatment of breast cancer both materially, through medical tourism, and ideologically, in the supply of international aid to neighbors with less-developed capabilities in breast cancer treatment. Breast cancer rates are predicted to continue to climb in both South Korea and in other parts of this trans-Pacific region. As patterns of behavior change, and as people are exposed to environments and substances that are carcinogenic, increasing numbers of women in their 50s, 40s, and even 30s will be diagnosed with breast cancer. These changes reflect cultural influences and material flows (including militarization and its toxic ecological impacts) inflected with history. Where the breast cancer patients have access to treatment, they will be processed through surgery, chemotherapy, pharmaceutical treatments, and radiation, within the context of medical authorities of the region. These experiences will shape the women and their families in various ways, and the demographics of the caseload will generate new forms of medical and bio-governmental institutions and practices. While breast cancer is not contagious, medical and social responses are transmitted from place to place through media, research, travel, prestige, and activism. These need not be one-way flows, but transmission and adoption is always uneven. Will greater numbers of women who have lived through treatment communicate across distances and demand environmental and cultural changes? Will their experiences lead to insights into cultural social factors leading to illness? Perhaps there is a potential for a trans-Pacific flow of critical discourse, not just incorporating North American breast cancer activism, but also originating from the responses generated in each part of the region to what is specific and what is shared in the cultural and political environment in which breast cancer is experienced. Of course one hopes cancer treatments will continue to improve; perhaps, also, questions about the causes of breast cancer, and the ethics and practices of treatment and care, may generate positive change throughout the trans-Pacific world. 13  Julie Livingston, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

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References “Breast Cancer Statistics.” World Cancer Research Fund International. http://www .wcrf.org/int/cancer-facts-figures/data-specific-cancers/breast-cancer-statistics. Accessed January 20, 2016. “International Migration Statistics.” Statistics Korea. http://kostat.go.kr/portal/eng/ pressReleases/8/5/index.board. Accessed January 20, 2016. Jain, S. Lochlann. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Jun, K. W., Won Y. J., Kong H. J., Oh C. M., Seo H. G., Lee J. S. “Cancer statistics in Korea: incidence, mortality, survival and prevalence in 2010.” Cancer Research and Treatment 45, no. 1 (2013): 1–14. Kim, Zisun, Sun Young Min, Chan Seok Yun, et al. “The Basic Facts of Korean Breast Cancer in 2011: Results of a Nationwide Survey and Breast Cancer Registry Database.” Journal of Breast Cancer 17, no. 2 (2014): 99–106. Klawiter, Maren. The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Lee, J. C. “Health care reform in Korea: success or failure?” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 1 (2003): 48–51. Livingston, Julie. Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Moore, M. A., F. Baumann, S. Foliaki et al. “Cancer Epidemiology in the Pacific Islands – Past, Present and Future.” Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 11, no. 2 (2010): 99–106. Nelson, Laura C. “Cancer, Stress, and Ironies of Cancer Understanding in South Korea.” Medical Anthropology 35 (2016). DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2015.1137914. Park, B, Hyun M, Shin A, Chang M-C, Choi J-Y, Kim S, et al., “Korean Risk Assessment Model for Breast Cancer Risk Prediction,” PLoS ONE 8, no.10 (2013) e76736. Doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0076736 “Severe Disease Cure,” Visit Medical Korea. http://english.visitmedicalkorea.com/. Accessed August 15, 2016. “Spending on Health: A Global Overview, Fact Sheet No. 319.” World Health Organization. April 2012. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs319/en/.

CHAPTER 16

Graphical and Ethical Spectatorship

Human Trafficking in Stanford Graphic Novel Project’s From Busan to San Francisco and Mark Kalesniko’s Mail Order Bride Stella Oh Abstract The comic architectures of From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride consider ways in which visual and textual narratives can represent the emotional landscape of trauma and displacement. In these works, transnationalism is artistically embedded in consumptive practices of reading and seeing that reinforce or challenge Orientalist cultural assumptions about the Asian female body. These graphic narratives interrogate modes of visibility and provide a form of ethical optics that allow us to reconsider narratives of trauma and commodification.

Keywords mail-order brides – human trafficking – graphic narrative – globalism – female body

Introduction The growth of contemporary graphic narratives that focus on women and bodily trauma suggests an increasing awareness and support of discussions on gendered violence. Recently we have seen an increase in the publication of graphic narratives dealing with human trafficking, such as: Audrey: A Story of Child Sex Trafficking (2013) published by H.E.A.T. (Human Exploitation and Trafficking) Watch Series, administered by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office; and Kickwatcher: Graphic Journalism on Human Trafficking in Nepal (2012), created by Dan Archer after having interviewed trafficked victims in Nepal. Graphic narratives have become important media in advancing dialogue on this important issue in new and innovative ways. Marianne Hirsch suggests that the comic form offers an important mode of “visual-verbal

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l­ iteracy” that can narrate trauma.1 Reflecting on ways in which the “rich visualverbal form of comics” is an ideal way to “represent trauma productively and ethically,” this chapter focuses on two specific graphic narratives, From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride.2 Both graphic narratives shed light on the exploitative commercial industry of sex trafficking, which represents the third largest criminal enterprise in the world.3 Published in 2001, Mail Order Bride is the earliest full-length graphic novel that addresses the transnational movement of female bodies in the mail-order industry. Differing from Mark Kalesniko’s single authored work, From Busan to San Francisco is a collective graphic narrative produced and published in 2012 by twenty-one students at Stanford University’s Graphic Novel Project. Under the art direction of Dan Archer, the creator of Kickwatcher: Graphic Journalism on Human Trafficking in Nepal, the Stanford Graphic Novel Project offers pedagogically innovative ways to think about the ethical representation, production, and circulation of graphic narratives. Although From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride diverge in the process of production, they overlap in their focus on the commodification and trafficking of Korean women to countries in North America. These two works narrate the stories of young women from South Korea who are trafficked as sex workers and mail-order brides to the U.S. and Canada respectively. According to the International Labor Organization, forced labor and sex trafficking are higher in the Asia-Pacific region than anywhere else in the world, and individuals trafficked from Asia are sent to a very wide range of destinations within their own countries of origin and across the globe.4 These narratives depict women who are traumatized, displaced, and caught up in transnational circuits of capitalism and misogynistic ideologies. Commenting on the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, Heidi Hartman writes, patriarchy is “not simply a psychic, but also a social and economic structure” that produces and perpetuates female subordination that 1  Marianne Hirsch, “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage,” PMLA 119, no. 5 (2004): 1212. 2  Hillary Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 3. 3  Steward Chang, “Feminism in Yellowface,” Harvard Gender and Law Journal 38 (2015): 317. 4  The Asia-Pacific region accounts for the largest number of forced laborers in the world, approximately 11.7 million (56 percent) of the global total. The ILO estimates that 79 percent of trafficking victims are women and girls. “Statistics and Indicators on Forced Labor and Trafficking,” International Labor Organization, last modified September 2016. http://www.ilo .org/global/topics/forced-labour/policy-areas/statistics/lang--en/index.html.

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has a material base in women’s labor.5 From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride both focus on depicting the complex economic and political forces that construct bodies of Korean women as commodities for Western male consumption. Imperial fantasies about Asian women coincide in various ways with global capital’s production and consumption of female bodies. Transnational corporate capitalism perpetuates ongoing feminization and racialization of Asian women as submissive low-wage laborers and hypersexualized commodities that symbolize fantasies of sexual and racial submissiveness.6 Critiquing imperialist and gendered constructs of Western consumptive practices that have marketed and commodified Asian women, From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride suggest ways in which practices of representation challenge such Orientalist assumptions and fantasies about the Asian female body. Such reading practices necessarily involve what Immanuel Levinas calls “ethical optics” that engage with a racialized and sexualized other.

Optical Responsibility

The ethical optics in both From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride address an optical responsibility and optical demand of the face that is a “relation without relation.”7 Levinas’ ethics provide an important framework for our discussion because of the emphasis he places on the other and on the visual investment of ethics. Through multiple lenses of spectatorship From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride demonstrate how comic architecture can enable a form of ethical spectatorship that wrestles with the task of seeing and critiquing the power relations in observation, representation, and identification. According to Levinas, the mutual engagement between the visualizing self and the visualized other is central to ethical relationships. For Levinas, consciousness is produced by the appearance of the third party other. Reciprocity is what makes this visual investment ethical and yet such processes of 5  Heidi Hartman, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” Capital and Class 3 (1979), 2. Also see Martha Gimenez, “Global Capitalism and Women,” in Globalization and Third World Women: Exploitation, Coping and Resistance, ed. Ligaya Lindio-McGovern and Isidor Wallimann (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009). 6  See Linda Trinh Võ and Marian Sciachitano, “Introduction: Moving beyond ‘Exotics, Whores, and Nimble Fingers:’ Asian American Women in a New Era of Globalization and Resistance,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 21, no. 1 (2000): 1–19. 7  Immanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 3.

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visualization and identification are complex. How can the audience identify with the Korean female protagonist in these works? Challenging Orientalist cultural assumptions about the Asian female body, both graphic narratives prompt us to reflect critically on our consumptive practices of looking, engaging us in a form of ethical optics that urges us to reevaluate existing narratives around gender, race, and human trafficking. Mido, the protagonist of From Busan to San Francisco is a student at Busan University in South Korea who responds to a job advertisement for a hostess position in a bar in the United States. In an attempt to pay for her credit card debts, Mido falls victim to false promises of riches and is trafficked. The dedication page of the narrative states that “From Busan to San Francisco was inspired by the feature story ‘Diary of a Sex Slave’ ” by Meredith May.”8 May’s story of You Mi Kim was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006 after ten months of investigative interviews with You Mi Kim, other sex trafficking victims, U.S. border patrol agents, South Korean government officials, owners of brothels, and those who provided legal and social support to victims, such as the Asian Pacific Legal Outreach center in San Francisco. The journalistic and creative adaptations of Kim’s experience as a trafficked individual by May and the members of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project speak to the contemporary moment of transpacific cultural productions around sex trafficking. By basing the graphic novel project on a true story, students engaged in critical reflection and a graphic interpretation of the global phenomenon of human trafficking. While it is difficult to fathom the experiences of those millions who are trafficked, it is strategically much easier to identify with the story of a single person and her plight. Adam Johnson, who heads the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, notes “you have a duty to tell the story of others who for whatever reason can’t tell a story” since “people who have been through traumatic experiences in their lives are often the least able to speak of their experiences, and they’re the ones we need to hear from the most.”9 In “speaking for the subaltern,” the students at the Stanford Graphic Novel Project address the “invisible international division of labor” in global capitalism that feminizes low-wage labor.10 Ethical implications are not merely about “exposing and challenging the virulent machinations of official histories” but more about critically 8  Meredith May, “Diary of a Sex Slave,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 9, 2006. 9  John Seven, “Passion, Ideas and Teamwork: the Stanford Graphic Novel Project,” Publishers Weekly, August 24, 2010, http://www.publishersweekly.com/id44241/. 10  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 275.

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examining and “bearing witness to the intertwining of the everyday and the historical.”11 As such, this process of witnessing through the graphic narrative prompts identification and creates empathy leading to feelings of solidarity. Rather than seeing through the eyes of those who are trafficked, we witness and acknowledge that which the other has seen. In this acknowledgment we recognize our collective responsibility as well as our inevitable distance from what the other has seen and experienced. Our relation to the experience of the trafficked victim is “a relation without relation.”12 Inscribed on the front cover of From Busan to San Francisco is a quote from Eddie Byun, lead pastor at Onnuri English Ministry in Seoul, South Korea. He writes, “I hope this graphic novel will not only open the eyes of this generation to the realities of trafficking in our day, but also save the lives of many young women before it is too late.” This quote echoes tropes of rescue and redemption that naturalize and reaffirm problematic notions of racialized and sexualized hierarchies entrenched in histories of colonialism and imperialism. Byun’s commentary frames an image of Mido, the female protagonist, lying half-naked on a bed. Such textual framing of the image reinforces a certain narrative of victimization and rescue in which the audience looks voyeuristically at Mido in the intimate setting of her bed. The decision by the members of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project to include this quote from Pastor Byun on its cover illustrates the complex ways in which we bear witness to the story of You Mi Kim and draws attention to the context of the audience’s own spectatorship. Negotiating the complex relationship between giving voice and appropriating voice, seeing and acknowledging what the other has seen, the student authors of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project struggle to “represent trauma productively and ethically” for the female protagonist who is both an “object of looking and a creator of looking and sight.”13 Engaging in a critique of the global economy that trades in female bodies, the authors of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project produce a work that provokes ethical questions about their roles as producers and spectators of imagees in a media-saturated landscape.

11  Chute, Graphic Women, 156. 12  Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 23. 13  Chute, Graphic Women, 3.

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Surveillance of Asian Female Bodies

Both From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride emphasize ways in which the global economy circulates and commodifies the bodies of Asian women. The trafficking of Asian women as commodities in the global market persists due to a number of factors, including the proliferation of mail-order bride businesses and sex tourism industries that prey on young women who are trying to escape dire economic conditions, often caused by rapid capital expansion in Asia. The ongoing U.S. military presence in Asia, notably in South Korea and Japan, contributes to the persistence of Asian prostitution catering to military personnel and to representations of Asian women as hypersexualized and racially subordinate. In South Korea sex work accounts for approximately 4 percent of its domestic product. Mido, the protagonist of From Busan to San Francisco, is from Busan, a South Korean city where Japan first established brothels when they invaded the Korean peninsula in 1904. Busan is also in close proximity to Chinhae, the only U.S. naval base in South Korea.14 Critiquing imperialist imaginations that have historically depicted Asian women as exotic lotus blossoms, china dolls, submissive mail-order brides, dragon ladies, and prostitutes, Eddy Meng points out the commonalities between the trafficking of mail-order brides and other forms of sexual exploitation.15 Challenging us to think more broadly about human trafficking, Grace Chang and Kathleen Kim define human trafficking “within a broader framework of labor migration, human rights, women’s rights, sexual and reproductive health rights, and globalization” including service work, servile marriage, and sex work.16 Imperial fantasies about Asian women coincide in various ways with global capital’s production and consumption of female bodies. In Kalesniko’s novel, Monty Wheeler is a middle-aged, white, Canadian man who brings his mail-order bride, Kyung Rin Seo from South Korea. In her essay, “Male-Order Brides: Immigrant Women, Domestic Violence and Immigration Law,” Uma Narayan notes that typically the husbands are “older, politically 14  There are an estimated 514,000 to 1.2 million sex workers and 80,000 brothels in South Korea. While women from Korea migrate to countries in North America as mail-order brides, approximately 2,000 to 3,500 mail-order brides come to South Korea each year. See Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 15  Eddy Meng, “Mail-Order Brides: Gilded Prostitution and the Legal Response,” University of Michigan J. L. REFORM 28 (1994): 197–249. 16  Grace Chang and Kathleeen Kim, “Reconceptualizing Approaches to Human Trafficking: New Directions and Perspectives from the Field(s),” Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 3, no. 2 (2007): 6.

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conservative, college-educated, white, with higher than average income, who have had bitter experiences with divorce or breakups,” while the wives are usually young women from poorer countries in Asia or Eastern Europe.17 Economic imbalances are commercialized through emotional and sexual relations between men from wealthier countries and women from poorer countries.18 Monty’s shop – in which he sells comics, dolls, and other knickknacks – attests to global capital’s effect on modern consumption habits. The commercialization and commodification of Asian women are echoed in Monty’s perception of Kyung as “my little ornamental” and “the prettiest doll in the store,” that is a part of his larger toy inventory.19 Kyung’s “ornamental” and oriental commodification are visually illustrated through the composition of the narrative. The graphic narrative’s visual grammar composed of colors, lines, panel configurations, and shading creates an interconnected comic composition.20 The paneling in Mail Order Bride often exceeds the usual six-panel grid used in graphic narratives and has fourteen to twenty panels on a single page, creating a sense of claustrophobia. Multiple panels on the page are crowded with various trinkets and dolls and shaded in different textures and lines to create a stifled sense of space. The suffocating sensation that is created by the excessive number of panels and the heavy cross hatching and shading of the images mirrors the stifling lack of mobility for mail-order brides who are often isolated in a new foreign country. Here, the comic architecture creates an affective experience of claustrophobic anxiety, allowing the reader to empathize with Kyung’s restricted mobility and isolation. In an interview with Bessel van der Kolk, a prominent psychiatrist and researcher on the treatment of trauma, Caruth notes that emotional memory is a key factor in etching memories of trauma in the brain. Traumatic memories emerge not in the “distorted fashion of ordinary recall, but as affects, states, somatic sensation or visual images.”21 The excess of visual stimuli in Mail Order Bride creates a besieged state very similar to that felt by victims of trauma, who are so overwhelmed by the experience 17   Uma Narayan, “Male-Order Brides: Immigrant Women, Domestic Violence and Immigration Law,” Hypatia 10, no. 1 (1995): 107. 18  Ursula Biemann, “Writing Desire,” Feminist Media Studies 1 (2001): 253. 19  Mark Kalesniko, Mail Order Bride (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2001), 41. 20  See Thierry Groensteen, Comics and Narration (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013). 21  Cathy Caruth, “The Body Keeps the Score: An Interview with Bessel van der Kolk,” in Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 159.

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that “you cannot put it together” and “you see images, you have sensations, you have emotions” but it “doesn’t get put together and remains fragmented.”22 The compositional placement of images –such as dolls, mannequins, ads for mailorder brides, and close-up shots of women’s body parts such as breasts and vaginas – speak to a highly sexualized and fragmented experience. Kyung’s identity is mediated through the desires, fantasies, and projections of white men. Entrenched in an orientalist economy of sexual power and fantasy, bodies of Asian women serve as sites where the “spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”23 Responding to the transformation of modern life by capitalism’s industrial technology, Debord suggests that as consumers we do not merely purchase the product but also the illusion and image associated with the product. The spectacle of the oriental female body has a long tradition in American cultural production, namely as lotus blossoms (China dolls, geishas, mail-order brides) and dragon ladies (prostitutes). “Asian Sex Secrets,” a magazine ad in Monty’s pornography collection appeals to the spectacle of a purchasable “Pink Lotus” bride. Highlighting the sexualization and commodification of Asian female bodies as spectacles within the circuits of global capitalism, the ad urges the reader to “send for brochure.”24 Under this caption are close-up images of two Asian women who, we can assume, are purchasable through the “Asian Sex Secrets” brochure. A close-up shot of Kyung’s face is juxtaposed with images of these women, which render the Asian female body as spectacle, one that stimulates the sexual voyeurism of White men and the global capital of the trafficking industries. Pegler-Gordon argues that photography shaped the development of immigration policy in the United States. As instruments of documentation and representation, photographs were used to help reinforce popular sentiments and develop official policies toward different immigrant groups, particularly Asian female immigrants.25 During the 19th century full body photographs were required of Chinese women immigrating to the U.S. These photographs were used to document their economic status, as well as their sexual morality. Throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries the Asian female immigrant was an object of scrutiny and surveillance by immigration officials. It was 22  Ibid., 154. 23   Debord as quoted in Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 45. 24  Ibid., 8. 25  See Ann Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

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Mail Order Bride, 8. © 2016 Mark Kalesniko. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.

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ILLUSTRATION 16.2 Mail Order Bride, 9. © 2016 Mark Kalesniko. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.

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not until the War Brides Act of 1945 that the Asian female transitioned from being a racial and sexual threat to the fabric of American life, to a “sexual model minority for consumption, study, and emulation.”26 In contrast to 19th-century policies of excluding Asian women from national borders, in the 20th century “the alien prostitute evolved into the sympathetic subject of rescue, inclusion, and assimilation,” who can be redeemed through the T-visa under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000.27 Stewart Chang notes that in this narrative of rescue the figure of the Asian woman serves to police the proper conduct of all women as a “new sexual model minority against which all women are normatively measured.”28 Used to condemn independent women as feminists, the narrative of the Asian female as a sexual model minority promoted conservative norms regarding female sexuality and domesticity. The characters of Mido and Kyung embody the sexual model minority stereotype that emphasizes marriage and Western assimilation and domestication. Like Kyung, who marries Monty to escape a life of poverty in Korea and stays with him despite her unhappiness, Mido lives with Phil, one of her regular customers who pays off Mido’s debt to her pimp. Although Mido is no longer a prostitute and works as a waitress, she realizes that “maybe I’m not as free as I think I am.”29 The panel, which depicts Mido riding a bus to work, overlaps smaller rectangular shaped city blocks of downtown San Francisco. In the bottom right corner of the same page, Mido’s body is trapped behind prison-like bars that are produced from the gutter spaces of the rectangular city scape. Such visual composition alludes to Mido’s troubling rescue by an “ethical john” who boyfriends her and affirms a “good sex” that is uncommodified and seen as innocenet when in fact the “ethical john is also complicit in the purchasing of sex.”30 Trafficking of Asian women represents a global exchange that reasserts patriarchy and the imperial legacy and dominance of countries in the global north. In many ways Western dominance and the narrative of Orientalism rely on images of superior white masculinity juxtaposed with an inferior emasculation of Asian men. In Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in 26  Chang, “Feminism in Yellowface,” 331. 27  Ibid., 304. 28  Ibid., 331. 29  Stanford Graphic Novel Project. From Busan to San Francisco (Palo Alto: Stanford University, 2012), 134. 30  Julietta Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 56.

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ILLUSTRATION 16.3 From Busan to San Francisco, 134. © 2012 Courtesy of Stanford Graphic Novel Project.

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Asian America, David Eng critically examines histories that fashioned Asian American masculinity. During the 19th and 20th centuries, Asian male immigrants were, as Eng suggests, “racially castrated.”31 Their economic and political disenfranchisement was secured through “a technology of gendering not adjunct but centrally linked to processes of Asian American racial formation.”32 Orientalist ideology historically shaped, and continues to shape, the ways in which Asian American racial identity is constructed through mechanisms of gendering.33 Complicating this image of Orientalism and the emasculation of Asian men, Kalesniko depicts the white male protagonist Monty Wheeler as asexual and effeminate. Monty is ascribed several feminine traits and performs a gendered and sexualized role in the novel. The reader is made painfully aware that Monty is a thirty-nine-year-old virgin at the time of his marriage. Monty’s lips are described as “very full. Very feminine. To show his weak side.”34 We also see Monty in full frontal nude, a pose commonly reserved for women. Women are more often depicted in full frontal nude in photography, film, and art than men, motioning to the power of the male voyeur who has historically been at the commanding end of the gaze.35 In “Foucault, Femininity, and Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Sandra Bartky comments on the panoptic power of the patriarchal gaze that trains a woman to “abandon [her] claim to the sovereign status of seer” and subject herself to the “disciplinary project of bodily perfection” to be looked upon.36 Under male scrutiny, the female body is disciplined and displayed. However, the sexualized body in this scene is not a female body but Monty’s naked white male body with an Asian mask. Racialization and sexualization work in tandem as Monty performs yellowface in the nude, underscoring the ways in which racial identity is constructed through modes of gendering. Monty’s full frontal disrupts normally accepted perceptions of how and what types of bodies are sexualized. Unsettling our perceptions, this scene allows us to challenge and re-imagine preconceived visual understandings of race and gender. It problematizes our 31  David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 2. 32  Ibid., 17. 33  See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Book, 1978). 34  Kalesniko, Mail Order Bride, 131. 35  See Sahar R. Phillips, Modeling Life: Art Models Speak about Nudity, Sexuality, and the Creative Process (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). 36  Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 66.

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ILLUSTRATION 16.4 Mail Order Bride, 117. © 2016 Mark Kalesniko. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.

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reliance on those visually constructed categories of race and gender that normalize social behavior and expectations. In contrast, Kyung is depicted nude only in photographs taken by her girlfriend, Eve. Photographed against the scenery of cold hard machinery, Kyung is portrayed as fierce and strong. Her bold bare body contrasts with images of naked vulnerable Asian female bodies that we have seen throughout Mail Order Bride in various sex ads and pornography magazines. Rejecting the pornographic voyeurism of our culture that looks at women and their bodies as objects of pleasure for male vision, Kyung’s nude photos challenge disciplinary practices of displaying the female body. In contrast to the photograph of Kyung Monty holds in his hand as he prepares to meet her at the airport, this photograph of Kyung is seen through the lens of her female friend and photographer. Whereas the earlier photograph of Kyung’s headshot is juxtaposed with women in the “Asian Sex Secrets” advertisement, this photograph of Kyung connects her with a real woman who is rebellious and loud, has permed hair, wears revealing clothes, and seems to possess traits opposite to those of Asian women in the ad who are marketed as “Hardworking, Loyal, Obedient, Cute, Exotic, Domestic Simple Girls.”37 Eve’s Western clothes, especially her leather jacket with the inscription “Born to Fight,”38 sharply contrasts with Kyung’s hanbok, the traditional Korean dress, which Monty asks her to wear whenever they have sex in traditional missionary style. Adorned with the hanbok, Kyung’s body is circumscribed within the boundaries of Monty’s fantasies as “my cute, exotic, loyal, hardworking, traditional Asian wife.”39 Kyung sheds the hanbok that Monty has sexualized as a cultural artifact and poses nude for her female friend. Admiring the sense of freedom Eve represents, Kyung resolves to leave Monty and freely travel with Eve. As a visual demonstration of her resolve, Kyung goes, not to a beauty salon, but to a barber and cuts her long hair “short, very short.”40 Signaling her rebellion, Kyung brings her cut strands of hair in a bag and dumps it on the table in front of Monty, who is shocked. However, Kyung’s fantasies of freedom and travel are abruptly halted when Eve tells Kyung she is engaged to her white boyfriend and embraces the role of the “traditional Asian wife.”41 Deeply disappointed and traumatized, Kyung angrily tosses a crumbled photograph of the two women at Eve as she speeds 37  Kalesniko, Mail Order Bride, 8. 38  Ibid., 197. 39  Ibid., 247. 40  Ibid., 201. 41  Ibid.

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away in her car. This is the only photograph in the entire narrative that is of two individuals signaling a promise of a real relationship. Yet that relationship ends in isolation for Kyung.

ILLUSTRATION 16.5 Mail Order Bride, 224. © 2016 Mark Kalesniko. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.

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Fracture and Traumatic Ruptures

What follows Eve’s betrayal is by far the most striking and traumatically violent series of scenes in the novel. Abandoned by her girlfriend, Kyung reluctantly returns to Monty’s shop. There she begins violently destroying various dolls and toys, symbolically attempting to break free from her own commodification as one of his sex dolls. The images of Kyung engaged in the act of destruction are repeated over and over again in long vertical panels. Similar to a film reel in which sequenced images move quickly, allowing the audience to experience the event visually, here vertical comic paneling prompts the reader to move sequentially from frame to frame as images of smashing, hitting, and throwing objects crowd the page. However, the ability to override a linear approach distinguishes the medium of comics from film. In film, the audience pieces together scenes to construct a whole but cannot control the flow of images, such as returning to an earlier scene or moving forward. The audience is restricted to viewing images in continuous linear succession. In contrast, the medium of comics enables the reader to navigate images and narratives in non-linear structures. Comic architecture allows for the interpretive option of going back and forth in time, essential in narrating trauma.42 Conducive to fragmentation and the disjointed flow of time, comic structure, with its use of blank spaces and gaps provided by the gutter spaces in between the panels, resonates the fragmented nature of the traumatized protagonist’s experience and her memories. This scene gestures to racist stereotypes and gender-linked vulnerabilities that cause mail-order brides to be highly susceptible to violence and domestic abuse. Frequently, such violence is exacerbated by the bride’s social isolation and her economic and legal dependency on her husband. Women with dependent immigration status “are often more economically, psychologically and linguistically dependent on their spouses than wives in general.”43 Interestingly, the protagonist of Kalesniko’s novel does not fit this stereotype. Kyung speaks decent English, earns money posing as a model, and finds an artist community outside her husband’s social circle. It is Monty, the white husband, who is anti-social, isolated, and socially awkward. Yet, the ending of the novel offers a bleak reality in which Kyung is rendered helpless.

42  Caruth notes, “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.” Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4–5. 43  Narayan, “Male-Order Brides,” 106.

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Mail Order Bride violently displays scenes in which Monty and Kyung physically attack each other, punching, kicking, and throwing each other to the floor. Visually shocking and crude, these panels expose the excessive rates of violence and domestic abuse that mail-order brides encounter. Mail-order brides are three to six times more likely to be victims of domestic abuse than their American counterparts.44 At the end of the novel Kyung is relegated to perform the gendered role of the coward kopjangi, the label that had been applied to Monty throughout the narrative.45 Paralyzed by the fear that she will not be able to support herself financially, Kyung decides to stay with Monty. Although Kyung exercises agency in her ability to make friends and plans to leave Monty, her rebellion is crushed and stopped short of actualization. Comic scholar Jared Gardner remarks on comic’s “unique ability to represent the impossible demands of trauma, memory and narration.”46 Vacillating back and forth in time and prompting the reader to work through fragments, gaps, and gutters, From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride offer productive means in which ruptures in the comic form serve to witness trauma. Trauma ushers in moments of missing spaces and ruptures rather than cohesive and linear remembrances. As such, trauma presents fractured memories of subjects whose voices have been relegated to the margins. In From Busan to San Francisco, Mido’s traumatic realization that she has been sold to traffickers is demonstrated through overcrowded panels that create a stifling and claustrophobic effect. After a twelve-hour flight from South Korea, Mido is imprisoned in a tiny motel room in Tijuana while waiting to be smuggled into the U.S. While all eighteen panels on this page depict some part of the motel room where Mido is confined, the last eight panels repeatedly display Mido lying on the bed in different positions. These images also resemble shots taken from the angle of a surveillance camera, motioning to a “masculinization of the spectatorial position” that exerts a powerful voyeuristic and scopophilic gaze over Mido.47 Such surveillance also subtly alludes to the “big-brother” relationship between South Korea’s postcolonial past and its

44  Daniel Epstein, “Romance is Dead: Mail Order Brides as Surrogate Corpses,” Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law, and Social Policy 17 (2009): 61. 45  Kalesniko, Mail Order Bride, 248. 46  Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 145. 47  Mary Anne Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” in Writing on the Body: Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Kate Conboy, Nadia Medina, Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 188.

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current political, economic, and military ties with the U.S. that impact human trafficking.48 This scene not only represents Mido’s traumatic experience, but the representation of that experience as seen by others. These panels signal to a witnessing of the subaltern’s trauma from the vantage point of a spectator. From Busan to San Francisco critically asks “what it means to transmit and theorize a crisis that is marked, not by simple knowledge, but by the way it simultaneously defies and demands our witness.”49 Such witnessing relates, and yet fails to truly relate, with the figure of the subaltern in what Levinas calls a “relation without relation.”50 Through its multiple lenses of spectatorship, From Busan to San Francisco shows how the configuration of panels, space, and gutters functions as a form of ethical spectatorship that provides ways to rethink the processes and power relations involved in observation and representation. In From Busan to San Francisco, there are several pages where the gutter space is blackened and darkness bleeds through to the other panels. When Mido is arrested in a raid, she is jailed and questioned. The page in which she “told them [the police] everything” is completely black.51 The dark void depicted here alludes to the re-traumatization many trafficked victims feel from law enforcement, whose focus on anti-prostitution policies limits the rights of trafficked individuals who engage in sex work. Rather than merely focusing on prosecutorial approaches to trafficking Kathleen Kim, in her article “Reconceptualizing Approaches to Human Trafficking: New Directions and Perspectives from the Field,” advocates for facilitating a rights-based approach that provides agency for trafficked persons. Mido notes that the “arrest set me back two months” and learns not to trust “a man with a badge.”52 One of the most visually traumatic scenes occurs midway through the novel. The clock ticks on the top left corner of the page as we witness in motion-to-motion panels a John slowly strangling Mido. Time is painfully drawn-out here as Mido is raped and strangled by the John. This scene culminates in a full-page shot of 48  The relationship between big brother and little brother, the U.S. and South Korea was both fraternal as well as heterosexual, particularly between American GIs and Korean women. See Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.–Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) and Saundra Pollack Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: New Press, 1993). 49  Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5. 50  Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 23. 51  Stanford Graphic Novel Project, From Busan to San Francisco, 81. 52  Ibid., 82.

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ILLUSTRATION 16.6 From Busan to San Francisco, 101. © 2016 Courtesy of Stanford Graphic Novel Project.

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ILLUSTRATION 16.7 From Busan to San Francisco, 102. © 2016 Courtesy of Stanford Graphic Novel Project.

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Mido’s face as she screams in panic.53 Exploring visual representations and power relations inherent in such images, From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride employ spatial and panel arrangements that produce feelings of entrapment and powerlessness. Hannah Miodrag claims that what is unique to the graphic narrative is that “spatial arrangement informs the way text reads, assisting in creating literary effects.”54 Trapped by the weight of gendered expectations, racial stereotypes, and panel frames that enclose them, the female protagonists of these novels are unable to truly be free from the traumatic effects of trafficking. In Mail Order Bride, the narrative is framed by images of white noise. In both the beginning and ending scenes or the novel, Kyung and Monty sit stoically looking at white noise on a television screen. The image of white noise is repeated in several close-up panels, which draws our attention to them. Often described as having a flat power spectral density, white noise has the potential to mask obtrusive noises and also has been proven to help those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The multiplicity of black and white dots on the television screen conveys a sense that noise, image, and memory have somehow been stifled. The audience is reminded that what we are witnessing is the fractured hum of the white noise of trauma, fear, and numbness. Creating innovative forms of witnessing traumatic events, the comic form plays with temporality, spatiality, and fragmentation to address the ruptures of trauma and urges the audience to listen and respond. Conclusion Challenging our existing perceptions and stereotypes, these works asks us to listen and acknowledge what the racialized, sexualized, and trafficked other has seen, rather than our own existing visions of these women. Critically reflecting back on the context of our spectatorship and cautious of a predatory appropriation of the other’s trauma, the audience engages with new ways of thinking on how identities transform and transgress to produce affective dimensions. The comic medium has the potential to represent trauma as a fractured trope of rupture, subjection, and subjectivity. Trauma is thus experienced as something fragmented, desiring but resisting closure, a “relation without 53  Ibid., 101–102. 54  Hannah Miodrag, Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form (Mississippi: University of Mississippi, 2013), 66.

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relation.”55 Interrogating the interdependence of image, text, memory, and cultural politics, From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride provide opportunities to rethink social and political history and its various traumatic ruptures. Our acts of reading and responding to trauma is “art, an activity that lends face to things” that allows us to strive to respond to the face of the other.56 Bibliography Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, 61–86, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Biemann, Ursula. “Writing Desire.” In Feminist Media Studies 1 (2001): 251–258. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Caruth, Cathy. Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Chang, Grace and Kathleeen Kim. “Reconceptualizing Approaches to Human Trafficking: New Directions and Perspectives from the Field(s).” Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 3, no. 2 (2007): 1–28. Chang, Stewart. “Feminism in Yellowface.” Harvard Gender and Law Journal 38 (2015): 301–334. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Doane, Mary Anne. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” In Writing on the Body: Embodiment and Feminist Theory, 176–194, ed. Kate Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Epstein, Daniel. “Romance is Dead: Mail Order Brides as Surrogate Corpses.” Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law, and Social Policy 17 (2009): 61–103. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.

55  Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 23. 56  Ibid., 10.

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Gimenez, Martha. “Global Capitalism and Women.” In Globalization and Third World Women: Exploitation, Coping and Resistance, 35–48, ed. Ligaya Lindio-McGovern and Isidor Wallimann. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013. Hartman, Heidi. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” Capital and Class 3 (1979): 1–33. Hirsch, Marianne. “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage.” PMLA 119, no. 5 (2004): 1209–1215. Hua, Julietta. Trafficking Women’s Human Rights. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Kalesniko, Mark. Mail Order Bride: A Graphic Novel. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2001. Levinas, Immanuel. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Ling, L.H.M. “Sex Machine: Global Hypermasculinity and Images of the Asian Women in Modernity.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 7 (1999): 277–306. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. May, Meredith. “Diary of a Sex Slave.” San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco. October 9, 2006. Meng, Eddy. “Mail-Order Brides: Gilded Prostitution and the Legal Response.” University of Michigan J. L. REFORM 28 (1994): 197–249. Miodrag, Hannah. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form. Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2013. Moon, Katharine H. S. Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.–Korea Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Narayan, Uma. “Male-Order Brides: Immigrant Women, Domestic Violence and Immigration Law.” Hypatia 10, no. 1 (1995): 104–119. Paparone, Lesley. “Art and Identity in Mark Kesniko’s Mail Order Bride.” MELUS 32, no. 3 (2007): 201–219. Pegler-Gordon, Ann. In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Phillips, Sahar R. Modeling Life: Art Models Speak about Nudity, Sexuality, and the Creative Process. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Book, 1978. Seven, John. “Passion, Ideas and Teamwork: the Stanford Graphic Novel Project.” Publishers Weekly, August 24, 2010. http://www.publishersweekly.com/id44241/. Accessed September 10, 2016. Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271–316, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Stanford Graphic Novel Project. From Busan to San Francisco. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012. “Statistics and Indicators on Forced Labor and Trafficking.” International Labor Organization. http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/policy-areas/statistics/ lang--en/index.htm. Accessed September 26, 2016. Sturdevant, Saundra Pollack and Brenda Stoltzfus. Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia. New York: New Press, 1993. The World of Suzie Wong. Film. Directed by Richard Quine. 1960. Los Angeles: Paramount Picture. Võ, Linda Trinh and Marian Sciachitano. “Introduction: Moving beyond ‘Exotics, Whores, and Nimble Fingers:’ Asian American Women in a New Era of Globalization and Resistance.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 21, no. 1 (2000): 1–19. Yamamoto, Traise. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Yuh, Ji-Yeon. Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

Part 5 Culture and Circulation

⸪

CHAPTER 17

Performing between Two Empires

Colonial Modernity and the Racialized Politics of Filipino Masculinity in Okinawa and Japan Nobue Suzuki Abstract This chapter explores Filipino male athletic and musical entertainers’ engagements with American popular culture in the trans-Pacific world, with a focus on those in mainland Japan and Okinawa. These entertainers and their performances have, in effect, served as a conduit for the imperial influence of the United States. Through their entertainments Filipino performers have disseminated colonial modernity to mainland Japan and Okinawa. Drawing on examples of the articulations of global forces and the local/national reception of cultural forms, this chapter expands the spatial scope of analysis of colonial modernity beyond East Asia vis-à-vis the United States. I suggest that, in the iteration of colonial modernity over time, regional scenes are continuously made and remade. This perspective allows us to analyze the varied trajectories of the interlacing of colonization, imperialism, and modernity. In investigating the circulation of modernity, I also heed the little-explored racial and masculine politics in which Filipino male entertainers have been situated. In doing so, this chapter theoretically complicates the discussions of empire, colonial modernity, and the circulation of culture in the trans-Pacific world.

Keywords empire – colonial modernity – entertainment – race – masculinity – Filipinos – Okinawa – Japan – the United States of America

*  The research on which this chapter is based was partially supported by receipt of a Grantin-Aid for Scientific Research fund (#15K03063). I thank the support of Anthony Jenkins, Susumu Kumada, and the Filipino and Okinawan people whose names I cannot disclose for the protection of privacy.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336100_018

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“My mother died, putting her head here [tapping his right shoulder], while we were all sleeping on a roadside in Manila. But we had to leave there right away for a safer place.” Totong’s ghastly look conveyed emotions that he had kept suppressed since the Battle of Manila in 1945.1 Having already lost his father earlier in World War II, Totong, the eldest child among his siblings, was urged to support the younger ones amidst the ruins of war. After the war, as the United States transformed Okinawa2 into its military “keystone of the Pacific,” musicians who could cater to the needs of rest and recreation programs for the Americans were in high demand. Due to their cultural and linguistic ties to the United States, Filipinos were recruited to fill important entertainment (and other) positions in the U.S.-occupied Okinawa (1945–1972). Although Totong had been studying engineering in college, in the late 1950s he filled one such position in Okinawa as a versatile performer, similar to many other Filipino musicians. Prior to telling us of his mother, Totong talked to my American research collaborator and me at a restaurant over a nearly two-hour interview. During this time, he serenely told us his story as a musician and a Filipino in Okinawa under U.S. rule. Towards the end of our interview, Totong expressed his desire to write his biography and soon afterwards left for home. Ten minutes or so later, however, he came back, wearing a chilling expression on his face. He had decided to tell his memory of the war to us, citizens of the two nations that had fought on his native land more than seventy years ago and without mercy had killed his parents and numerous other Filipinos. As a former U.S. colonial subject who had lived under Japanese occupation of the Philippines (1942–1945) and as a “third-country national” at the time of his employment in Okinawa,3 1  Totong is a pseudonym. 2  In this chapter, Okinawa primarily refers to the main island of Okinawa Prefecture, which holds over 70 percent of U.S. military facilities in Japan, on 0.6 percent of the land area of Japan. As the following discussion shows, the status of “Okinawa(ns)” in relation to Filipinos, Japanese, and Americans, also shifts over time with the varying ways in which “American” and Japanese influences have penetrated the prefecture and the people. 3  “Third-country nationals” refers to individuals who are contract workers and are neither citizens of the United States nor the country (Japan) to which they are assigned in the area of U.S. military(-related) operations. Before legal categories and terms were established in 1954, they had also been called “foreign nationals” and “non-Ryūkyūans.” Although these categories applied to all people who were neither occupational personnel nor Okinawans without proof based on the family registry, including Japanese living outside U.S. jurisdiction (north of twenty-nine degrees north latitude), in the case of Filipinos this categorization allowed the United States to both defend its domination in the region and repatriate those who remained in its “keystone” island after the expiration of their contracts. The distinction

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A Filipino band on a U.S. base in Okinawa, ca. 1950s. Photo: courtesy of Totong.

Totong’s musical services on and around U.S. bases have deeper implications for our understanding of empires. One way for us to arrive at those understandings is to investigate popular culture since colonial officials and other elites have mobilized it as a “tool of rule on the ground”4 both to discipline the also served as a way of dividing “local” and “foreign” residents in Okinawa under U.S. rule. This strategy foreshadowed the local and foreign musicians’ differential employment from the 1960s until 1972. For more details about the legal division, see Tomoyoshi Doi, “One Aspect of the System to Control ‘Foreigners’ (Non-Ryukyuans) in the Ryukyu Islands under the U.S. Military Administration” (in Japanese), Okinawa Prefectural Archives Bulletin of Study 15 (2013): 33–50; Gekkan Okinawa Sha, Laws and Regulations during the U.S. Administration of Okinawa I, II, III, IV (Naha, Okinawa: Ikemiya Shōten, 1983); and other the United States Civil Administration of the Ryūkyū Islands (USCAR) documents. 4  Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5. See also Lisa E. Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (Jackson, MS:

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colonized and to cultivate their cooperation with the colonizers. Conversely, performers of popular culture may embody and enact the empire’s power and influence in the eyes of their audiences, altering the latter’s perspectives on the world. This chapter explores several examples of Filipino male entertainers’ engagements with American popular culture in the trans-Pacific world with a focus on those in mainland Japan and Okinawa. These entertainers and their performances have, in effect, served as a conduit for disseminating the imperial influence of the United States. Through their entertainments, Filipino performers have facilitated the circulation of cultural forms and of colonial modernity to mainland Japan, Okinawa, and beyond. Colonial modernity refers to modernity with an emphasis on the undeniable presence, in the process of its formation, of global forces such as colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.5 These forces have historically played important roles in transforming our senses of and desires for, or habitus regarding, new consumable objects as well as of/for progressive lifestyles. Such power also modifies our living structures, including institutions, technologies, culture, social/personal lives, experiences, ideologies, and so on.6 Modernity as used in this chapter does not refer to a static state of being; rather, it is conceived as emergent in cultural, linguistic, racial, gendered, and other transactions conducted within unequal and hierarchized relations of people present in a particular time and place. An examination of practices conducted in relation to colonial modernity in the trans-Pacific world takes us into global terrain and enables us to capture at local/national levels the dynamic cultural connections of differential power among people across national borders. Accordingly, the concept of colonial modernity compels us to forsake methodological nationalism, which limits the boundaries of research to those of nation-states or to binary relations such as the colonizer and colonized. It simultaneously leads us to formulate multi-axis analyses of peoples’ experiences and cultural expressions spread across the uneven yet interconnected world. Drawing on examples of the articulations of global forces and the local/national reception of athletic University Press of Mississippi, 2009); and Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 5  Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 6  Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Hyungjung Lee and Younghan Cho, “Introduction: Colonial Modernity and Beyond: the East Asian Context,” Cultural Studies 26, no. 5 (2012): 601–616.

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and musical cultural forms, this chapter expands the spatial scope of analysis in the existing literature on colonial modernity, which has tended, despite claims to be rejecting a dichotomist framework, to remain focused on a particular region, such as East, notably Northeast, Asia, vis-à-vis the United States (the West).7 Heeding emerging discussions of colonial modernity, this chapter proposes that we should not use the concept as a temporal category referring only to phenomena within a particular era, such as the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s.8 Instead, it proposes the iteration, not the simple replication, of colonial modernity over time, wherein regional scenes are continuously made and remade.9 This perspective allows us to analyze the trajectories of interlaced colonialization, imperialism, and modernity in a particular cultural space.10 This theoretically complicates discussions of empire, colonial modernity, and the circulation of culture in the trans-Pacific world. As is shown below, Filipinos have played a crucial role in circulating “American” culture and its modernity, and, like Totong, they have come to live complex and often ironic lives in and across the trans-Pacific world. Their performances have taken place within the contexts of shifting imperial, military, and national relationships as, for over a century, the United States (and Japan) has differentially subjected (Japan), Okinawa, and the Philippines. In an attempt to understand the circulations of modernity, I focus especially on the little explored masculine and racial experiences of Filipino male entertainers. In so doing, I situate the opening ethnographic vignette in a contemporary academic context in an attempt to explore important research areas that deserve much more serious scholarly inquiry. Before moving on, a brief historical glimpse will help us better see the entanglements of the four parties discussed in this chapter.

7  For example, Barlow, Formations; Jones, Yellow Music; Cultural Studies Special Issue: Colonial Modernity in East Asia and Beyond 26, no. 5 (2012): 601–781. 8  For instance, The Modern Girl around the World Research Group, ed., The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 9  See Lee and Cho, “Introduction.” 10   Cultural Studies 26, no. 5 (2012); see also Leo Ching, “ ‘Give Me Japan, Nothing Else!’: Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of Colonialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (2000): 763–788; C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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History Since the mid-19th century a U.S. imperial and military presence has linked nation-states across the Pacific in complex ways. After the arrival of Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853, Japan struggled to retain its political independence. To establish a nation-state on a par with Western imperial powers, Japan massively incorporated Euro-American state machineries and eventually joined the West in the “race for empire.”11 During the 1870s the country intensified its control over Okinawa as a stepping stone to its southward advancement12 and, after having annexed various areas in Northeast Asia, invaded the Philippines in 1941. While Japan was militarily expanding, it also needed to culturally “modernize” its own nation so as to resist Euro-American colonization. For this, the Japanese again eagerly embraced things Western, including sports and music. After 1952, when the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect to settle Japan’s defeat in World War II, Japan managed to achieve independence but agreed to the continuing occupation of Okinawa by the United States,13 which since the time of Perry had eyed the islands as the military “keystone of the Pacific.” Even though Okinawa was finally “reverted” to Japan in 1972, the United States and Japan have continued to make Okinawa a strategic outpost of the United States, and to an increasing extent of Japan. In this process, Filipinos, being U.S. subjects (1898–1946), came to serve, intentionally or not, as purveyors of American (“Western”) modernity and power. Reflecting this history, in Japan, Okinawa, and many other parts of the Pacific Asian region both locals and foreign visitors have sometimes seen Filipinos, who are otherwise regarded as dark-skinned members of the “Third World,” as embodying “American” modernity and have treated them as surrogate or “real” Americans.14 Hence, located between the fluctuating power of 11  Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 12  For more details, see for example George H. Kerr, Okinawa: The History of an Island People revised edition (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2000). 13  Under the Treaty, Japan kept “residual sovereignty” over Okinawa between 1952 and 1972, although the United States continued to exercise domination and control. As a result, for example, travel between Okinawa and Japan required a passport. And, while the Okinawan government was allowed to exercise all powers, it was subject to the proclamations, ordinances, and directives of USCAR. Gekkan Okinawa Sha, Laws and Regulations I, 112. 14  Nobue Suzuki, “Love Triangles: Filipinos, Japanese, and the Locations of American Power,” in ed. Fujiwara, Kiichi and Yoshiko Nagano, The Philippines and Japan in America’s Shadow (Singapore: University of Singapore Press, 2011), 259–281. See also notes 18 and 37.

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the Japanese and U.S. empires, the equivocal statuses of both Okinawa(ns) and Filipinos have come to generate complex senses of modernity among Japanese and Okinawans. These situations have also led Japanese, Okinawans, and Filipinos to experience multifaceted politics and struggles, which may be characterized as involving the negotiation of the different “amphibious” qualities of “not-white, not-quite, yet alike” East and Southeast Asians in their relations to the United States.15 Having briefly laid out the historical complexity, I now turn to a discussion of gender, especially masculinity, and popular culture in Philippine Studies.

Filipinos “Civilized”

Akin to other fields in the social sciences and humanities, in Philippine Studies the concept of gender has predominantly referred to heterosexual women and their experiences. Inquiries into non-gay masculinities have thus far been very limited, and Linda España-Maram’s and Steve McKay’s research on Filipino men’s gendered and racialized working lives are among the few scholarly works available at present.16 Although they are both insightful, EspañaMaram’s work is spatially and temporarily limited and situates Filipino men only within Philippine-American colonial relations between the 1920s and 1950s. McKay, on the other hand, does not explicitly engage the effects of (multiple) empire(s) in his analyses. In studies of popular culture, while scholars have produced much work on Filipino and Filipino American performance in the contexts of the Spanish 15  This phrase was originally proposed by Leo Ching, who, drawing on Homi Bhabha’s notion of “not-white, not-quite,” has argued that contemporary Taiwanese subject formation takes place in reference to both Japan and mainland China. I have elaborated on Ching’s term and analyzed the shifting relationship between Filipinos and Japanese in the shadow of the U.S. They can be conceptualized as being amphibious because of their attributes: Filipinos being the “South” but carrying cultural tools of the “West” and Japanese being members of the “East” but also of the “North” with their economic power. See Ching, “ ‘Give Me Japan’ ”; Suzuki, “Love Triangles.” 16  Linda España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s–1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Steve McKay, “Filipino Sea Men: Constructing Masculinities in an Ethnic Labour Niche,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 4 (2007): 617–633 and “ ‘So They Remember Me When I’m Gone’: Remittances, Fatherhood, and Gender Relations of Filipino Migrant Men,” in Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances, and the Changing Family in Asia, ed. Lan Anh Hoang and Brenda S. A. Yeoh (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 111–135.

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and American empires,17 the experiences of Filipino entertainers outside their homeland or the United States have not yet received sufficient attention.18 This is rather curious for a culture where music and other forms of entertainment are part and parcel of everyday life and identity, including among people living overseas. For ethnic minorities and those marginalized by class positions and various other statuses both at home and in diaspora, entertainment is, in general, one of the few areas in which they try to make a living, if not achieve mobility.19 Philippine labor export statistics show that since the late 20th century the Philippine government has consistently deployed abroad Filipino entertainment-related workers, such as composers, musicians, singers, dancers, choreographers, and athletes.20 However, these entertainers’ flows go back further in Philippine history, and for over a century Filipino entertainers have performed all over the world. Their performances reflect the histories of Spanish and U.S. colonialisms and military rationale and aggression.21 When Filipinos 17  For instance, Doreen G. Fernandez, Palabas: Essays on Philippine Theater History (Quezon City, Metro Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1997); Theodore S. Gonzalves, The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010); Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 18   A few exceptions include MeLê Yamomo, “Brokering Sonic Modernities: Migrant Manila Musicians in the Asia Pacific, 1881–1948,” Popular Entertainment Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 22–37; Lydia N. Yu-Jose, “Why Are Most Filipino Workers in Japan Entertainers?: Perspectives from History and Law,” Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies 22, no. 2 (2007): 61–84; Stephanie Sooklyn Ng, “Filipino Bands Performing in Hotels, Clubs, and Restaurants in Asia: Purveyors of Transnational Culture in a Global Arena” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2006); Lee William Watkins, “Minstrelsy in the Margin: Re-covering the Memories and Lives of Filipino Musicians in Hong Kong” (Ph.D. diss., University of Hong Kong, 2004); see also passim Taylor E. Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); and Jones, Yellow Music. For Filipino musicians of national and global stature, see Richie Quirino, Pinoy Jazz Tradition (Pasig City, Metro Manila: Anvil, 2004). 19  For example, Loïc Wacquant, “A Fishpeddler at Work: Power, Pain, and Profit in the Prizefighting Economy,” Theory and Society 27, no. 1 (1998): 1–42. 20  Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, “Deployment per Skill per Country,” (1992–2010), http://www.poea.gov.ph/stats/statistics.html., accessed December 19, 2015. 21  D. R. M. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Michiyo Yoneno-Reyes, “Singing of Modernity and US Shadow: Bodily Aesthetics and Ideology in Salidummay and Shoka,” in The Philippines and Japan in America’s Shadow, ed. Fujiwara, Kiichi and Yoshiko Nagano (Singapore: University of Singapore Press, 2011), 227–258.

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are deployed overseas, as shown in the cases below, these historical entanglements become further complicated by conditions in the receiving societies. Around the turn of the 20th century, Filipinos, who had directly acquired certain “civilizing” skills from the Americans, introduced two forms of “American” culture to Japan: boxing and jazz. Explorations of entertainment performances through racialized and gendered colonial, political, and military connections and currents expose the larger social worlds in which people like Totong struggle to live and negotiate various forms and components of power. Furthermore, these entertainers have served in their respective fields as stylish forerunners of the time. Below, I start with the case of boxing, in which I underscore the ways that a racial politics of masculinity has played out between Filipino and Japanese pugilists in the shadow of U.S. imperial and cultural domination.

Sport and Modernity

Professional pugilism as developed between the United States and the Philippines makes visible shifting global positions that have been played out through fistic competitions and organized displays of masculine power.22 Boxing, of course, did not originate in the United States; however, both Filipinos and Japanese learned to box through contacts with Americans around the turn of the 20th century and the sport thus tends to be associated, at least historically, with the United States. In the Philippines, Filipinos learned the sport as part of the Americans’ “civilizing” mission that instilled Western characteristics of “manliness,” “fair play,” and “courage” in Filipino men.23 In Japan, on the other hand, a much smaller number of Japanese men trained in the sport outside the country. And, an earlier generation of Japanese pugilists hardly aspired to world titles, while deferentially and frightfully observing the fights of Filipino boxers, who were from an “advanced country” in the fistic trade.24 A match between Filipino Fighting Yaba and Japanese Tōru Noda that took place 22  This section is adopted from: Nobue Suzuki, “Filipino Boxers and Hosts in Japan: The Feminization of Male Labor and Transnational Class Subjection,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 5, no. 4 (2007): n.p. 23  España-Maram, Creating Masculinity, 73–104. 24  Mitsuru Jōjima, Kobushi no Hyōryū: “Kamisama” to Yobareta Otoko, Baby Gustillo no Shōgai (The Trajectory of Fists: The Life of Baby Gustillo, a Man Called “God”) (Tokyo: Baseball Magazinesha, 1976), 73–78. All Japanese terms and titles used in this chapter are translated by the author.

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in Japan in 1932 symbolizes this hierarchy. Noda, who was frightened by Yaba’s deadly punches, could only circle around Yaba. When the bell announced the end of the bout and Noda was still standing in the ring, the Japanese spectators exultantly exclaimed, “Banzai! Banzai!”25 Through such bouts, Filipino pugilists have, wittingly or not, reshaped the gendered experiences and racialized hierarchies constructed among these different national groups in a transPacific cultural space. In prewar Japan, many Japanese viewed Filipino boxers with awe and admired them for being “divine technicians” and “gods.” During World War II, however, boxing became a site in which Japanese could express their nationalism by knocking down enemy-associated contestants. Even Filipino “gods” in Japan felt that they could not crush their local opponents if they wished to return home alive. After the war, the situation returned to that of admiration for Filipino boxers among the Japanese. At a time when starving Japanese were delightfully eating “leftover stew,” made of items scavenged from trash bins at local U.S. military headquarters (which were thus often mixed with things like maggots and used condoms),26 Baby Gustillo, the “god,” exploited his colonial connection with the United States. Not only was he eating real meat acquired at the PX on the U.S. base but he also appeared at matches wearing trunks, as well as leather gloves, which the vast majority of Japanese could not even imagine owning.27 As part of his masculine display, empowered by such nutritional support and stunning paraphernalia, Gustillo typically jumped over the ropes to enter his battleground. He became the Japan Featherweight Champion for two and a half consecutive years from 1947 to 1950. Hence, Japan’s transformation from an imperial power in Asia to a defeated nation-state made the postwar Gustillo a boxer to be awed for his athletic-masculine prowess and simultaneously to be envied for the material and stylistic modernity he displayed to the audience. From the mid-1980s to the 2000s, however, after Japan had again risen to become a world power, Filipino boxers were invited to Japan in order to lose to local pugilists, thus symbolically boosting the latter’s athletic, masculine, and international prestige.28 As such, Filipino male athletes’ experiences bring to

25  Nobuo Gunji, Bokushingu 100-nen (Boxing 100 Years) (Tokyo: Baseball Magazinesha, 1976), 127. 26  Kōta Ishii, Furōji 1945– (Homeless Waifs 1945–) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2014), 65–67. 27  Jōjima, Kobushi no Hyōryū. 28  Suzuki, “Filipino Boxers.” Other Asian nationals include Koreans (in the 1980s–mid 2000s) and Thais (in the late 1990s–mid 2000s). See also Tomonori Ishioka, Local Boxer to

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the surface Japan’s century-long power struggles not only with the Philippines but also with the United States.

Music and Modernity

In the music scene in Japan, the conceptualization of Filipinos as “American” has been even more significant. The case of Filipino musicians in Okinawa during and after the U.S. occupation demonstrates the effects of not only Japanese but also American imperial power, and reveals the racial and national politics between the parties concerned. The prominent Japanese composer/arranger Ryōichi Hattori described the impact of Filipino performers on Japan’s music scene after the turn of the 20th century as follows: The Philippines at that time [in the 1920s] was a U.S. colony and so Filipinos got jazz directly from the United States. They were weak readers of notes, but their musical senses and performing techniques were superb. They were, as it were, foster parents for Japanese jazzmen [sic].29 Throughout the 20th century, Filipinos have, in fact, served as performers of American music par excellence – in major cities in the Pacific Asian region during the 1920s and 1930s, in Okinawa while under U.S. occupation, at ritzy hotels, clubs, and restaurants in postwar Japan through the 1970s, and in contemporary China and Southeast Asia.30 However, Japan’s association of Filipinos with Western music, and culture more broadly, actually began in the late 19th century. At the dawn of Japan’s opening up to the Euro-American dominated world in the late 1880s, Filipino musicians, who had been exposed to Spanish musical traditions during the Spanish colonization of the archipelago (1521–1898), were performing in orchestras in Japan.31 A Japanese newspaper in English, Hinkon Sekai: Manila no Boxing Gym ni Miru Shintai Bunka (Local Boxers and the World of Poverty: Body Culture at a Boxing Gym in Manila) (Kyoto: Sekai Shisōsha, 2012), 129–216. 29  Ryōichi Hattori, Boku no Ongaku Jinsei: Episodes de Tsuzuru Wasei Jazz Song Shi (My Music Life: An Episodic History of Japanese Jazz Songs) (Tokyo: Nihon Bungeisha, 1982), 72. 30  See Lydia N. Yu-Jose, Filipinos in Japan and Okinawa: 1880s – 1972 (Tokyo: Research Institute for the Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 1992). See also note 19. 31  Japan was also host to numerous other Filipinos of different occupations and class backgrounds, such as revolutionaries, elite, students, manual workers, tourists, and others. See Yu-Jose, Filipinos in Japan and Okinawa. Currently, Japan is also one of the largest employers of Filipino seafarers. See Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism

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published in 1918, characterized their music as: “Filipino music is very different from other Oriental music. It has the pathos of Italian notes and the gaiety of the Spanish airs” and conversely in slow music they delivered “the warm soul of the tropics.”32 As such, in the early 20th century, “Filipinos were so much ahead of the Japanese in demonstrating the dynamic bodily senses and jazzy feelings called ‘swing’ ” while “Japanese musicians had just begun to make ‘pee pee’ like noises” (using wind instruments).33 As such, the Filipinos’ darker complexions were somewhat “bleached,” to borrow from a Brazilian saying, by their ability to perform Western music in styles suited for white, upper- and middleclass tastes, thus also enabling the Japanese to enjoy a “modern” lifestyle. At the same time, it should be noted that however highly regarded, Japanese also slighted and racialized Filipinos’ abilities by generalizing their inability to read notes and their bringing with them “warm souls of the tropics.”34 MeLê Yamomo used the term “sonic modernity”35 to describe the modern ambience that Filipino musicians have historically circulated in Asia. Indeed, Filipinos’ performances of Western music in Japan contributed to the rise of Japan’s modernity. However, it is not just sonic modernity that Filipino musicians brought with them to Meiji Japan (1868–1912). In addition to music, the presence of Filipino musicians, wearing the “civilized” attire of modern Western suits with ties, kerchiefs, and polished shoes, and thus of a “civilized masculinity,”36 allowed the Japanese of this time to make desperate claims of (Japan), “Gaikokujin Sen’in no Kakuho Ikuseisaku ni Tsuite” (On Securing and Training Foreign Seafarers), MILT (2008), www.mlit.go.jp/common/000044423.pdf, accessed November 3, 2015. 32  Yu-Jose, “Why Are Most Filipino Workers in Japan Entertainers?,” 72. 33  Gen Hirai, “Filipino-tachi no Daitōa Bōryaku Jazz” (Filipinos’ Jazz Machination against the Greater East Asia) in ed., Kazuo Nishikawa, Dai Nippon Teikoku no Sensō II (Imperial Japan’s War II) (Tokyo: the Mainichi Newspaper, 1999), 221; Masato Mōri, Nippon Swing Time (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2010), 103. 34  Filipinos themselves use the Spanish-derived term oido (sense of hearing) to talk about learning music through listening and many have actually done so. However, as noted, there were musicians who played in orchestras and so one would imagine that they were able to read music, and some of my Filipino informants in Okinawa are also able to read notes and compose music. Moreover, what locals say about each other (using oido) and what outsiders say about others do not carry the same meaning. For oido, see Quirino, Pinoy Jazz Tradition, 32. 35  Yamomo, “Brokering Sonic Modernities,” 22–37. 36  Dorinne Kondo, “Fabricating Masculinity: Gender, Race, and Nation in a Transnational Frame,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 296–319.

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being culturally on a level with the West and so deflect Western criticism of Japan as an “uncivilized” nation-state and concomitant threats of colonization. Since the turn of the 20th century, Japan has continued to host Filipino musicians and other entertainers across several different periods, notably the 1920s–1930s, 1960s–1970s, and late-1970s–mid-2000s. By the late 20th century Filipino women, who commonly worked in nightclubs and related establishments, comprised the majority of Filipino entertainers in Japan. Due to their female gender, the manners and meanings of their entertainment differ from those of male Filipino musicians. For example, while the women may, like the men, also be desired as embodiments of an Americanized modernity,37 they have been much more overtly sexualized than Filipino men. Moreover, Japan’s status as a global economic power by this time had also become different. Although the focus of this chapter is on Filipino male entertainers, several scholars, including myself, have written about these women’s experiences.38 As reflected in Japanese composer Hattori’s memories from the 1920s, male Filipino musicians had an enormous impact on the music scene in Japan. With jazz that they “got directly from the United States” and that was thus “ ‘real’ American jazz,”39 Filipinos explored newly established routes on ocean liners that sailed across the Pacific, connecting major port cities in East and Southeast Asia – Manila, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe, and Yokohama – with Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and beyond. In the major port cities of Japan, luxurious hotels advertised the performances of Filipino bands in order to attract customers.40 At the height of the dance culture in the interwar era, Filipino jazz musicians completed the scene in posh hotels and dance halls. After arriving in Japan, some Filipino musicians moved to the United States, while others sought better opportunities in booming Shanghai and elsewhere.

37  Nobue Suzuki, “Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages” in Women’s Studies 33, no. 4 (2004): 481–506; “Marrying a Marilyn of the Topics: Manhood and Nationhood in Filipina-Japanese Marriages,” Anthropological Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2007): 427–454. 38  For more about these women, see for example, Nobue Suzuki, “Between Two Shores: Transnational Projects and Filipina Wives in/from Japan,” Women’s Studies International Forum 23, no. 4 (2000): 431–444; and Rhacel Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 39   The Japan Times and Mail (April 23, 1927, p. 3; English newspaper in Japan) cited in Yu-Jose, 2007, 74. 40  Yu-Jose, Filipinos in Japan and Okinawa, 54.

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illustration 17.2 An example of cargo-passenger ship routes (services began in 1907). Postcard (n.d.): courtesy of Shōsen Mitsui (formerly Osaka Shōsen Kaisha)



Jazz in Mainland Japan

By exploring the new trans-Pacific ocean routes (Illustration 17.2), three brothers from Cavite (southwest of Manila), Vide, Gorio, and Raymond Conde, among others, led the jazz scene in Japan from the 1920s to the 1980s.41 As Japan’s military aggression and nationalism rose in the 1930s and 1940s, police surveillance of foreign residents also intensified. While the Conde brothers dealt with the situation by moving between Shanghai and Tokyo, prior to the outbreak of the war they also married local Japanese women and became naturalized Japanese, which enabled them to secure their residency in Japan. However, in May 1942 the Japanese state ironically made use of their legal status and musical talent and sent clarinetist Raymond (1916–2003), with another Filipino jazz pianist, Francisco “Kiko” Reyes (1906–1993), to perform Japanese pop music in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to boost the morale of Japanese soldiers, whose brutal wartime acts Filipinos would continue to remember clearly and abhor for decades to come. Upon returning to Japan, the Japanese military then asked Raymond and Kiko to play covers of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and other legendary American jazz musicians as part of the army’s strategies to “demoralize” American soldiers.

41  Ren Saitō, Shōwa no Bansukingu-tachi: Jazz, Minato, Hōtō (Advance Kings in the Shōwa Era: Jazz, Ports, Dissipation) (Tokyo: Music Magazinesha, 1983), 93–140.

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Illustration 17.3 Raymond Conde. Photo: courtesy of Yoshimi Fukasawa.

Their music was aired on the radio.42 In the meantime, the Japanese military police confiscated Raymond’s records – a lifeline for professional (cover) musicians of the time – and arrested other Filipino residents in Japan for alleged spy activities. Toward the end of the war, Raymond was drafted for defense purposes. In the Philippines the Japanese army set fire to Kiko’s natal home a few weeks after he had visited.43 Although both Raymond and Kiko commented that their assignments to the Philippines allowed them to play music, especially jazz, which had been otherwise prohibited for being “enemyassociated” and “decadent,”44 we must wonder how they and the other Filipino musicians really felt. 42  For the music aired on wartime propaganda radio, visit: J. C. Kaelin, Jr., “The Zero Hour: Sounds and Pictures,” accessed August 4, 2016, http://www.earthstation1.com/The_Zero_ Hour.html. See also, Masayo Duus, Tokyo Rose, Orphan of the Pacific (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983). 43  Hirai, “Filipino-tachi no Daitōa,” 221; Mōri, Nippon Swing Time, 277–278; Kōichi Uchida, Nihon no Jazz-shi (History of Jazz in Japan) (Tokyo: Swing Journal, 1976), 136. 44  Ren Saitō, Shōwa no Bansukingu-tachi.

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Despite and because of material poverty and despair, and just weeks after the August 1945 end of the war, music with light and vibrant tones, such as boogie-woogie, which had been taken over by martial music during the war, began to be produced again as if the Japanese people were embracing forbidden fruit.45 They were full of expectations for the possibility of a bright, free future and were conversely pushing the oppressive fascist past into history. In this context, Raymond and Kiko significantly contributed to the professional development of Japanese jazz musicians (Mitsuru Ono, George Kawaguchi, and Nancy Umeki among numerous others). Their bands, such as the Gay Septet formed in 1946, and others, performed full blast throughout Japan’s early postwar music scene. Filipinos’ performances enabled the Japanese public to sense their country’s recovery from the ruins of war, moving towards a joyous future, as well as to feel their own renewed status as citizens of a modern society. Desiring a pleasant, democratic society, the Japanese masses immediately accepted the English language as a key symbol of the United States.46 Reflecting this, Filipino musicians in both Japan and Okinawa were asked to sing in English so as to enhance the American ambience. To a lesser extent, the Japanese also welcomed Spanish, in which Filipino entertainers of the time were able to perform.47 As my Filipino musician informants in Okinawa attest, this racialization or western othering continues even to this day. Some Japanese jazz enthusiasts still celebrate the musical achievements of Raymond and Kiko.48 However, if we are to arrive at a critical understanding of 45  John W. Dower, Embracing the Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). Dower does not refer to jazz per se, but we can relate it to the people’s desires for something encouraging. Note also that jazz underlaid the emergence of pop music in postwar Japan. Ryōichi Hattori was so eager to play jazz that even during the war he manipulated the censor’s ignorance and the presence of Western allies – e.g., giving “German” or “Italian” names to American jazz numbers – to legitimize his performance. After the war, he produced and arranged much pop music. Hattori, Boku no Ongaku Jinsei, 193–244. 46  Dower, Embracing the Defeat, chapters 5 and 7. 47  Besides these jazz performers, Bimbo Danao (1915–1967), a Filipino singer/actor, was listed high in the ranking charts in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s and his popularity was attributed also to his ability to sing in English and Spanish. See Yu-Jose, “Filipinos in Japan and Okinawa.” See also the video clips in note 48. Some contemporary performers elsewhere in Asia continue to sing some Spanish songs. Watkins, “Minstrelsy in the Margin.” 48  In 2009, Nippon Columbia released a limited edition series of CDs (“Best 100 Series”) containing old jazz music, including music by Filipinos. In addition, some of Raymond Conde’s performances from his later years are available on YouTube: e.g., “Raymond Conde Pardido,” accessed February 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ KKVVBXNcls. In the video clip entitled, “Dahil sa Yo,” Raymond also sings this glob-

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the trans-Pacific world, their experiences, such as performing for the Japanese army in the Philippines, cannot be taken lightly. The same Japanese soldiers whom Raymond and Kiko entertained in 1942 may have later burned Kiko’s natal home and killed Totong’s parents. Hence, Totong’s determination to tell us his excruciating memories about the war and his parents clearly suggests that we must see beyond the entertainment value of musicians. While providing opportunities for Japanese (and after 1972, Okinawan) sonic, stylistic, masculine, western, and other modernities, Filipino musicians’ diasporic lives have shaped, as well as have been shaped, by multiple empires in the trans-Pacific world, the gender, racial, and (inter-)national politics of the region, and the modernity which the Japanese and Filipinos have associated with the United States (or the West).49

Jazz in Okinawa

Soon after the end of World War II, the United States recruited numerous Filipinos for the reconstruction of the “keystone” island of Okinawa, a place that would support the American military’s strategic purposes, including military personnel’s rest and recreation. Again, Filipinos spoke English. Plus, they needed jobs after the war and Okinawa was not too far from their newly independent country. The U.S. military recruited musicians such as Totong from the Manila Hotel and other prestigious hotels and clubs and through word of mouth referrals from Filipino bandleaders and music store owners.50 Even though their status at this time was that of “third-country nationals,” according to my Filipino interviewees in Okinawa, entry to the island during the American Occupation was fairly easy. Some even flew on U.S. military planes. Filipino workers on the U.S. bases were commonly housed in on-base Quonset huts.51 Moreover, given their musical and linguistic skills, Filipino jazz ally recognized Tagalog song, accessed February 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6NvfZJ7kg0s. For a professional commentary on jazz performed by Filipino (and Japanese) musicians, see Masahisa Segawa & Yoshio Ōtani, Nippon Jazz no Tanjō (The Birth of Japanese Jazz) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2008). 49  As Jones and Matsuda, for example, have demonstrated, it is important to consider how these transmitters and receivers of colonial modernity have shaped the “colonial core” of Euro-America or Japan vis-à-vis Okinawa. However, there is no space to discuss this here. Jones, Yellow Music; Hiroko Matsuda, “Becoming Japanese in the Colony: Okinawan Migrants in Colonial Taiwan,” Cultural Studies 26, no. 5 (2012): 688–709. 50  See also Yamomo, “Brokering Sonic Modernities.” 51   U SCAR, “Employment Agreement for Filipino Citizens Employed for Overseas Civilian Duty with U.S. Army at Okinawa, Ryukyu Islands,” USCAR Administrative Files, 1952–1972.

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musicians entertained the upper echelons of Americans at officers’ clubs and high-ranking hotels. They accordingly enjoyed both prestige and much higher wages than mainland Japanese and local Okinawans. A popular conception of wage differentials is that Filipinos earned half as much as Americans, but twice as much as mainland Japanese and six times more than Okinawans.52 These situations in turn led many Okinawan women, who were similarly struggling to survive in the aftermath of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, to desire Filipino men more than Okinawan or Japanese men as marriage partners and customers in sex-related trades.53 Although writing about mainland Japan, John Dower noted that, while reluctantly obeying the Allied Forces, Japanese men felt their gendered pride being hurt seeing GIs with Japanese women.54 Likewise, Filipinos demonstrated their (American) empire-based, modern masculine prowess in work and earning power over Japanese and Okinawans. However, Filipinos began losing employment opportunities to locals with the intensification of the Cold War and the U.S. military’s objectives to secure its influence in the region by gaining greater Okinawan acceptance and to cut costs. In 1965, other than those who had skills deemed to be necessary, the Americans discharged all Filipinos working on U.S. bases in Okinawa.55 In 1972, when Japan regained sovereignty over Okinawa and tried to re-Japanize the prefecture and its people, many Filipinos who had remained there after 1965 eventually had to return to the Philippines or relocate to Guam or elsewhere for employment. In the course of these trajectories, then, we see some of the Microfilm No. 0000069084, Box. HCRI-LA 00006, Folder 002, 1957. Okinawa Prefectural Archives. 52  Yoshikatsu Bise, “Bisekatsu Ichidaiki” (Bisekatsu’s Biography), ed., DeMusik Inter, Oto no Chikara Okinawa Koza Futtō Hen (The Power of Music Okinawa Koza Boiling) (Tokyo: Impact Shuppankai, 1998), 106. The realities were more complicated and the wages were determined by skills and experiences. For more details, see USCAR, “Comparative Hourly Wage Rates for Ryukyuan, U.S., Filipino, and Japanese Employees,” Memorandum for Record, 1959. Microfilm No. 0000069087, HCRI-LA Box 12, Folder 5, Okinawa Prefectural Archives. 53  Shun Ohno, Hapon: Philippine Nikkeijin no Nagai Sengo (Japan: the Long Postwar of the Japanese Filipinos) (Tokyo: Daisan Shokan, 1991); Katsumi Sunamori, Okinawa Shout (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2000). In U.S.-occupied Koza (now Okinawa) City, red-light quarters were racially segregated and there was one area designated for Filipinos. 54  Dower, Embracing the Defeat, 152. I found similar sentiments among Filipino men who saw their fellow countrywomen marrying Japanese men in the late 1980s–1990s. Widely observable sexism leads men to engage in the politics of masculinity. 55  Ohno, Hapon. See also Doi, “One Aspect of the System to Control ‘Foreigners’ ” in note 3 above.

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ways in which the two empires have treated Filipinos and Okinawans as if they were pawns in their respective imperial projects. Today, both the continuing presence of the U.S. military and Japan’s unresponsive, if not oppressive, attitudes towards Okinawa Prefecture – especially under the present pro-military, fascist Japanese (read: Yamato mainlanders) regime – have kept Okinawa under essentially Cold War conditions, which until 2005 paradoxically welcomed back Filipino (female) entertainers (and other workers).56 Conclusion In this chapter I have illustrated ways in which Filipino male entertainers, who because of U.S. colonization and its legacies are considered to embody “American” modernity, have through the circulation of their cultural performances come to shape Japanese’ and Okinawans’ senses of modernity at various historical times. We have thus been able to witness the iteration of transactions that for more than a century have invoked such feelings, although the referents of modernity and the parties involved may have changed as history and structural contexts have changed. I have used the lens of race and masculinity to capture these moments of emergence of “modern” feelings, desires, visions, and lifestyles. Filipino performers’ stories suggest that their lives have been full of ironies, such that even if Japanese and Okinawans have, at various points in time, viewed them with awe and respect, unequal political, military, legal, and economic powers have placed them in hierarchized positions in their particular locations in Japan and Okinawa, as well as in relation to the United States. Theoretically, the fluctuating power relationships between Filipinos, mainland Japanese, and Okinawans engender fascinating perspectives with which we may tackle what is going on in the trans-Pacific world. Both Filipinos and Japanese may be characterized as carrying “not-white, not-quite, yet-alike” qualities in their respective associations with the United States (and the West). They are not simply members of the “Rest,” and their “amphibious” positionalities in the global order and modernity have, to some degree, upset that order and modernity and defy easy analyses. At the same time, placing Okinawa – a domestic “black swan” of imperial Japan and of the contemporary, “ethnically homogenous” Japanese nation-state – into this picture further complicates our academic task. Okinawa allows us to see Japan’s internal incoherence and its 56  The visa with which foreign entertainers entered Japan (and Okinawa) was lifted in 2005 because of the U.S.’s not well-grounded assertion that it served as a foil for sex trafficking. For details and a critical view, see Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations.

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imperial duality, of dominating its domestic other(s) and being dominated by external power. Together, the Philippines, Japan, and Okinawa, in their interrelationships with the United States (the West), help us both to widen our investigative parameters and to deepen our understanding of the transactions over time among the global forces and local/national lives current in the transPacific world. Finally, this world has phenomenally changed as the West has come, comparatively, to lose influence with the recent rise of other imperial, military, and capitalist powers, as well as of (relatively) stabilized and independent countries and economies. Thus, rather than remaining within the common spatial and temporal frames of studies of colonial modernity, there is much for us to do in new cross-cultural, cross-regional, cross-disciplinary research in today’s trans-Pacific world. References Atkins, Taylor E. Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Barlow, Tani E., ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Bise, Yoshikatsu, “Bisekatsu Ichidaiki” (Bisekatsu’s Biography). In Oto no Chikara Okinawa Koza Futtō Hen (The Power of Music Okinawa Koza Boiling), ed. DeMusik Inter. Tokyo: Impact Shuppankai, 1998. Burns, Lucy Mae San Pablo. Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Ching, Leo. “ ‘Give Me Japan, Nothing Else!’: Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of Colonialism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 99 no. 4 (2000): 763–788. Cultural Studies. Special Issue: Colonial Modernity in East Asia and Beyond. Cultural Studies 26 no.5 (2012): 601–781. Davenport, Lisa E. Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Doi, Tomoyoshi. “One Aspect of the System to Control ‘Foreigners’ (Non-Ryukyuans) in the Ryukyu Islands under the U.S. Military Administration” (in Japanese), Okinawa Prefectural Archives Bulletin of Study 15 (2013): 33–50. Dower, John W. Embracing the Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Duus, Masayo. Tokyo Rose, Orphan of the Pacific. Translated by Peter Duus. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1983. España-Maram, Linda. Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: WorkingClass Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s–1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

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Fernandez, Doreen G. Palabas: Essays on Philippine Theater History. Quezon City, Metro Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1997. Fujitani, Takashi. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Gekkan Okinawa Sha, comp. Laws and Regulations during the U.S. Administration of Okinawa I, II, III, IV. Naha, Okinawa: Ikemiya Shōten, 1983. Go, Julian. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Gonzalves, Theodore S. The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/ American Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. Gunji, Nobuo. Bokushingu 100-nen (Boxing 100 Years), Tokyo: Baseball Magazinesha, 1976. Guttmann, Allen. Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Hattori, Ryōichi. Boku no Ongaku Jinsei: Episodes de Tsuzuru Wasei Jazz Song Shi (My Music Life: An Episodic History of Japanese Jazz Songs). Tokyo: Nihon Bungeisha, 1982. Hirai, Gen. “Filipino-tachi no Daitōa Bōryaku Jazz” (Filipinos’ Jazz Machination against the “Greater East Asia”). In Dai Nippon Teikoku no Sensō II (Imperial Japan’s War II), ed., Kazuo Nishikawa. Tokyo: the Mainichi Newspaper, 1999. Irving, D. R. M. Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Ishii, Kōta. Furōji 1945– (Homeless Waifs 1945–). Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2014. Ishioka, Tomonori. Local Boxer to Hinkon Sekai: Manila no Boxing Gym ni Miru Shintai Bunka (Local Boxers and the World of Poverty: Body Culture at a Boxing Gym in Manila). Kyoto: Sekai Shisōsha, 2012. Jōjima, Mitsuru. Kobushi no Hyōryū: “Kamisama” to Yobareta Otoko Baby Gustillo no Shōgai (The Trajectory of Fists: The Life of Baby Gustillo, a Man Called “God”). Tokyo: Baseball Magazinesha, 1976. Jones, Andrew. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Kaelin, J. C., Jr. “The Zero Hour: Sounds and Pictures,” accessed August 4, 2016, http:// www.earthstation1.com/The_Zero_Hour.html. Kerr, George H. Okinawa: The History of an Island People, rev. edition. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2000. Kondo, Dorinne. “Fabricating Masculinity: Gender, Race, and Nation in a Transnational Frame.” In Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem, 296–319. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Lee, Hyungjung and Younghan Cho. “Introduction: Colonial Modernity and Beyond: the East Asian Context.” Cultural Studies 26 no.5 (2012): 601–616.

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McKay, Steve. “Filipino Sea Men: Constructing Masculinities in an Ethnic Labour Niche.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 4 (2007): 617–33. McKay, Steve. “ ‘So They Remember Me When I’m Gone’: Remittances, Fatherhood, and Gender Relations of Filipino Migrant Men.” In Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances, and the Changing Family in Asia, ed. Lan Anh Hoang and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, 111–135. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Matsuda, Hiroko. “Becoming Japanese in the Colony: Okinawan Migrants in Colonial Taiwan.” Cultural Studies 26 no.5 (2012): 688–709. Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism (Japan). “Gaikokujin Sen’in no Kakuho Ikuseisaku ni Tsuite” (On Securing and Training Foreign Seafarers), MILT (2008. www.mlit.go.jp/common/000044423.pdf. Accessed November 3, 2015. Modern Girl around the World Research Group, The, ed., The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Mōri, Masato. Nippon Swing Time. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2010. Ng, Stephanie Sooklyn. “Filipino Bands Performing in Hotels, Clubs, and Restaurants in Asia: Purveyors of Transnational Culture in a Global Arena.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2006. Ohno, Shun. Hapon: Philippine Nikkeijin no Nagai Sengo (Japan: the Long Postwar of the Japanese Filipinos). Tokyo: Daisan Shokan, 1991. Parreñas, Rhacel. Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Philippine Overseas Employment Administration. “Deployment per Skill per Country,” (1992–2010), http://www.poea.gov.ph/stats/statistics.html. Accessed December 19, 2015. Quirino, Richie. Pinoy Jazz Tradition. Pasig City, Metro Manila: Anvil, 2004. Saitō, Ren. Shōwa no Bansukingu-tachi: Jazz, Minato, Hōtō (Advance Kings in the Shōwa Era: Jazz, Ports, Dissipation). Tokyo: Music Magazinesha, 1983. Segawa, Masahisa and Yoshio Ōtani, Nippon Jazz no Tanjō (The Birth of Japanese Jazz). Tokyo: Seidosha, 2008. Soh, C. Sarah. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Sunamori, Katsumi. Okinawa Shout. Tokyo: Kōdan-sha, 2000. Suzuki, Nobue. “Between Two Shores: Transnational Projects and Filipina Wives in/ from Japan.” Women’s Studies International Forum 23, no.4 (2000): 431–444. Suzuki, Nobue. “Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages.” Women’s Studies 33, no. 4 (2004): 481–506. Suzuki, Nobue. “Filipino Boxers and Hosts in Japan: The Feminization of Male Labor and Transnational Class Subjection.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 5, no. 4 (2007): n.p. http://apjjf.org/-Nobue-SUZUKI/2404/article.html.

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Suzuki, Nobue. “Marrying a Marilyn of the Topics: Manhood and Nationhood in Filipina-Japanese Marriages.” Anthropological Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2007): 427–454. Suzuki, Nobue. “Love Triangles: Filipinos, Japanese, and the Locations of American Power.” In The Philippines and Japan in America’s Shadow, ed. Kiichi Fujiwara and Yoshiko Nagano, 259–281. Singapore: University of Singapore Press, 2011. Uchida, Kōichi. Nihon no Jazz-shi (History of Jazz in Japan). Tokyo: Swing Journal, 1976. USCAR, “Employment Agreement for Filipino Citizens Employed for Overseas Civilian Duty with U.S. Army at Okinawa, Ryukyu Islands,” USCAR Administrative Files, 1952–1972. Microfilm No. 0000069084, Box. HCRI-LA 00006, Folder 002, 1957. Okinawa Prefectural Archives. USCAR. “Comparative Hourly Wage Rates for Ryukyuan, U.S., Filipino, and Japanese Employees,” Memorandum for Record, 1959. Microfilm No. 0000069087, HCRI-LA Box 12, Folder 5, Okinawa Prefectural Archives. Wacquant, Loïc. “A Fishpeddler at Work: Power, Pain, and Profit in the Prizefighting Economy.” Theory and Society 27 no. 1 (1998): 1–42. Watkins, Lee William. “Minstrelsy in the Margin: Re-covering the Memories and Lives of Filipino Musicians in Hong Kong.” Ph.D. diss., University of Hong Kong, 2004. Yamomo, MeLê. “Brokering Sonic Modernities: Migrant Manila Musicians in the Asia Pacific, 1881–1948.” Popular Entertainment Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 22–37. Yoneno-Reyes, Michiyo. “Singing of Modernity and US Shadow: Bodily Aesthetics and Ideology in Salidummay and Shoka.” In The Philippines and Japan in America’s Shadow, 227–258. Edited by Kiichi Fujiwara and Yoshiko Nagano. Singapore: University of Singapore Press, 2011. Yu-Jose, Lydia N. Filipinos in Japan and Okinawa: 1880s–1972. Tokyo: Research Institute for the Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 1992. Yu-Jose, Lydia N. “Why Are Most Filipino Workers in Japan Entertainers? Perspectives from History and Law.” Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies 22, no. 2 (2007): 61–84.

CHAPTER 18

A Careful Embrace

Race, Gender, and the Consumption of Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific in Mid-Century Los Angeles Shawn Schwaller Abstract This chapter examines interconnections between race, gender, and global politics in mid-century metropolitan Los Angeles’s Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges. After opening for business in the early 1930s, Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood was the first establishment to bring a real and imagined Hawaiʻi and South Pacific into mainland American food and drink culture. This chapter argues that gendered and racialized fantasies of the South Pacific played a key role in the popularity of these establishments. They allowed patrons to experience an exotic, yet safe and predictable Hawaiʻi and South Pacific within the continental United States during World War II. Chinese, Filipino Americans and Polynesians contributed to the creation and success of these establishments as chefs, bartenders, and musicians. However, racialized and sexualized stereotypes of Chinese and Filipino American servility and Polynesian hypersexuality overshadowed this influence.

Keywords Hawaiʻi – South Pacific – Los Angeles – food and drink culture – white heterosexual masculinity – Asian American history – business – labor – architecture and interior design

“If you can’t get to paradise, I’ll bring it to you,” claimed Donn Beach, owner and operator of the first South Pacific-themed restaurant and cocktail lounge in the mainland United States.1 Beach opened his establishment, Don the Beachcomber, in 1930s Hollywood, igniting a trend that came to be known as

1  Jod Kaftan, “Drink in Paradise,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, February 2010, http://www .latimesmagazine.com/2010/02/drink-in-paradise.html (accessed July 24, 2014).

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“tiki” or “Polynesian pop” in late 20th-century food and drink culture. While the term tiki refers to the stylistic wood carvings found in various Polynesian cultures, which appeared as part of the décor in the businesses explored in this chapter, both this term and Polynesian pop hide the complexity of the rise of this trend in American popular culture. Tiki is a Māori and Marquesan term applied to the first man, or the creator of the first man, while usage of the term Polynesian pop hides the complex role played by both non-Polynesians and Polynesians. This chapter seeks to move the understanding of the rise and popularity of these establishments beyond simplistic labels by directing new and much-needed academic attention to the subject.2 The cultural history of the businesses explored in this chapter illustrates the way in which they linked greater Los Angeles to the broader Pacific world in both real and imagined ways. The Beachcomber started the circulation of new cultural forms in terms of restaurant and cocktail lounge interior and exterior architecture, themes, and décor, as well as new food and drink trends in the mainland United States. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, numerous establishments borrowed from Beach’s business model as the popularity of Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges spread, first across greater Los Angeles, then the nation. Beach’s version of “paradise,” however, was selective. The employment of Chinese and Filipino American men in service work; the exclusion of Japanese Americans; and the ubiquitous images of nude Polynesian and Asian women in menus and other objects allayed white fears and mirrored fantasies about Asia and the Pacific, while also creating hyper-heterosexual spaces for white middlebrow clientele. As the mid-century decades progressed, Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific became more well-known across the United States. World War II and the return of veterans who had served in the Pacific Ocean and Asian theaters of war, the increase in tourism in the Pacific, Hawaiian statehood in 1959, and Cold War era U.S. expansionism brought the Pacific into a much closer relationship with the United States. American popular culture depicted Asia and 2  Outside of the work of historian Sven E. Kirsten, author of several books on Tiki culture – including his latest text Tiki Pop: America Imagines Its Own Polynesian Paradise (2014) – and Adria Imada, author of Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire (2012), very little academic attention has been directed at Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges in the continental U.S. Sven mentions some of the establishments explored in this chapter without exploring them in detail, while Imada’s attention to the subject is limited to the hula dancers who performed at the Hawaiian Room in New York City’s Lexington Hotel.

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the Pacific in new cinematic and literary ways. As stated by Christina Klein in Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961, “American cultural producers churned out a steady stream of stories, fiction and nonfiction, that took Asia and the Pacific as their subject matter.”3 In the early Cold War era, images in American popular culture masked the brutalities of World War II and Cold War expansionism in Asia and the Pacific. Klein notes that the racial integration and harmony between Americans, Asians, and Polynesians in the World War II era depicted in the 1949 Broadway musical South Pacific, for example, presented the United States as a benevolent peacekeeper and assuaged anxieties about the inability of diverse peoples from the Pacific to assimilate into American society.4 Building on this scholarship by Klein and others, this chapter explores how Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific were incorporated into food and drink culture in the mainland United States. Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges constituted what scholars of food and restaurants studies refer to as “culinary tourism.” They allowed middlebrow patrons to experience an exotic Hawaiian and South Pacific food and drink culture that blended elements of greater Asia beyond the confines of metropolitan Los Angeles’s ethnic neighborhoods like Chinatown, Little Tokyo, and Little Manila. Like Jennie Germann Molz’s examination of the popularity of Thai restaurants in the U.S., the food, menus, and décor of Hawaiʻi and South Pacific-themed establishments examined in this chapter staged an “authentic” South Pacific that blurred the lines between myth and reality.5

Hawaiian and South Pacific Tourism in Greater Los Angeles

The romanticized, idyllic, and quasi-multicultural presentation of Asia and the South Pacific in greater Los Angeles’s Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges was modeled after one of the most popular and 3  Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 2. 4  Ibid., 146. 5  Jennie Germann Molz, “Tasting an Imagined Thailand: Authenticity and Culinary Tourism in Thai Restaurants” in Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy M. Long (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 56. Mark Padoongpatt, “ ‘Oriental Cookery’: Devouring Asian and Pacific Cuisine during the Cold War” in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader, ed. Ku Robert Ji-Song, Manalansan Martin F., and Mannur Anita (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 186– 207. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg92s.14. See also his article in Radical History Review at http://rhr.dukejournals.org/content/2011/110/83.abstract .

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successful commercial districts in the Pacific during and after World War II, Honolulu’s Chinatown. One of the highlights for American servicemen – a population that was largely young, white, and male – and for pre- and post-World War II tourists was a trip to Hotel Street, the center of the bustling district known for trinket shops, tattoo artists, bars, hotels, and photo stands (where visitors had their photos taken in front of tropical cardboard backgrounds), as well as prostitution.6 Beach himself was inspired to open the Beachcomber after his travels throughout the central and southern Pacific in the 1920s, something that was likely to have placed him in a position to encounter Honolulu’s Chinatown and the bustling early-20th-century business districts in places like Pago Pago, American Samoa. For most American visitors, Honolulu’s Chinatown was so exotic and different that it felt like a foreign country. Hawaiʻi represented what historians Beth Bailey and David Farber refer to as “the first strange place,” and the epicenter of this strangeness was Honolulu’s Chinatown.7 Its bars and restaurants, with names like Trade Winds, served the kind of potent tropical rum drinks that Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed establishments in greater Los Angeles came to be known for.8 Because of their resemblance to tourist spots in the South Pacific, establishments like the Beachcomber enabled patrons to “visit” the South Pacific within the confines of the continental United States. The Beachcomber’s interior was filled with tropical plants, bamboo and wood furniture, tables made of tamarind burl and Hawaiian monkey-pod and koa wood, and numerous objects from Asia and the central and southern Pacific: fishing nets, huge polished shells, bunches of coconuts, shields and war clubs, wood carved tikis, and jaws from sharks. Each side of the building’s interior housed a glass-enclosed area in which simulated rainstorms dropped real water above guests’ heads on a corrugated iron roof. Not long after the Beachcomber opened for business, The Tropics, the Seven Seas and the Hotel Roosevelt’s Islander in Hollywood, and the Hula Hut and Clifton’s Pacific Seas in Los Angeles copied Beach’s idea of a simulated rainstorm. Lighting in the Beachcomber’s dining areas was purposely dimmed, tables were isolated to provide customers with a private experience, and the restaurant was divided into several rooms, which featured dozens of ethnically and regionally themed alcoves. One room, known as the Cannibal Room, was decorated 6  Gwenfread Allen, Hawaii’s War Years: 1941–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1950), 246. 7  Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 96. 8  Ibid., 97.

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with headdresses and shields from the Fiji islands. Real bunches of bananas, which customers occasionally picked and ate, also hung throughout the establishment.9 As a pioneer in the Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurant business, Donn Beach enacted a particular kind of white masculinity that crossed racial, ethnic, and regional boundaries. An examination of the term beachcomber helps to shed light on his racial and gendered cultural positioning. In the 1964 essay “Beachcombers and Castaways,” H. E. Maude argued that European “beachcombers [historically speaking] were the spearhead, the first pioneers,” in the South Pacific, and “the counterpart of Turner’s Indianized hunters, trappers and squaw-men living beyond the pale of western civilization.”10 Their cultural explorations made them stand out from other types of Europeans in the late 18th- and 19th-century South Pacific. Historical figures such as Paul Gauguin, a late 19th-century European painter who fled to Tahiti and other South Pacific locales to escape “civilization,” found the supposedly primitive cultures they encountered to be a source of liberation from European social structures. European and, later, American beachcombers often mixed with indigenous populations and adopted new cultural ways. Because of this, beachcombers were regarded in 19th-century mainstream American and European society as cultural renegades who had descended into primitive savagery. In her essay, “Crossing the Beach: A Victorian Tale Adrift in the Pacific,” Michelle Elleray claims that beachcombers were historically “perceived to be morally dissolute, sexually promiscuous, and an absconder from the values of” Western civilization.11 However, by the mid-20th century, changing mainstream American views of Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific made the exploration of Polynesian cultures increasingly acceptable and even desirable. Beach’s consumption and marketing of the central and southern Pacific went beyond the walls of his establishment. Within a decade of opening the Beachcomber, he purchased land in the San Fernando Valley and constructed 9  In the late 1930s Beach moved his business across the street from its original location to a larger building, which seated eighty people. The new location included an open courtyard, which featured palm trees and other types of tropical plants, a Chinese grocery store, a rum shop, a gift shop, and a shop that sold fresh flower leis. Within a short time, the food and drinks prepared by the Beachcomber became so popular that the shops were either downsized or closed and a roof was constructed over the patio to increase maximum attendance to 300. 10  H. E. Maude, “Beachcombers and Castaways,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 73, no. 3 (1964): 255, 256, 275. 11  Michelle Elleray, “Crossing the Beach: A Victorian Tale Adrift in the Pacific,” Victorian Studies 47, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 164, 169, 170, 171.

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an extravagant custom home with architecture and décor that fused foliage, textiles, and artifacts from Asia, Hawaiʻi, and the South Pacific. A lush tropical jungle of palm trees, ferns, bamboo, and citrus and banana trees surrounded the 4,400 square foot home. A visitor exclaimed that it was the embodiment of “Samoa in the San Fernando Valley” and that it was “literally a South Seas museum.”12 The backyard featured a Samoan-themed treehouse and a pool surrounded by palm huts. The living room, which featured a large bar that ran the full length of the room, was decorated with rattan, palm fringes, lauhala matting, and punee couches from Hawaiʻi. Other rooms featured Batik wall hangings from the Marquesan Islands. Interior walls were made exclusively of a material composed of palm fringes and tapa cloth from Fiji, while open beams throughout the home were constructed of bamboo imported from the Philippines. Every corner of the home was decorated with objects imported from across the Pacific. One of Beach’s prized possessions was a calabash bowl, which had previously belonged to Queen Liliʻuokalani of Hawaiʻi, who was overthrown by the U.S. military in 1893. Beach’s ownership of such objects in his home and his business establishments reflected both his white masculine privilege and the cultures of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific. In Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, Noenoe Silva explains that “step by step, the religion, the land, the language, and finally the government were overtaken by the drive for [the] imperial domination” of Hawaiʻi.13 While the Beachcomber set the standards for the interior decorations and design of Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges, Clifton’s Pacific Seas represented the gold standard when it came to exterior design and architecture.14 The Pacific Seas opened in 1931 and was remade into a South Pacific-themed establishment in 1939. The building’s three-storey, three-dimensional façade was designed by world-renowned architect Welton Becket and his associates. An exemplar of functional architecture, the façade featured a waterfall pouring over a cave-like rock formation above the entrance and a jagged rocky cliff covered with tropical foliage. A bronze plaque on the front of the building claimed that its façade was “without parallel in the world 12  Dan Donahue, “Samoa in the Sen Fernando Valley,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1948, G3. 13  Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 202. 14  The business was opened in 1931 and remodeled to become the Pacific Seas in 1939. By the 1960s the Clifton family owned a chain of five restaurants in metropolitan Los Angeles, each with a different theme. Clifford Clifton founded the establishment after working as a captain for the Salvation Army and as a missionary to China.

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of architecture.”15 The interior contained exotic jungle-themed murals painted by artist Einar Petersen. Visitors to the Pacific Seas dined under grass huts, tropical foliage, and twenty-foot high palm trees made of steel and neon lights, and were serenaded by waiters who sang to organ music. “They had neon and gas lighting that was absolutely outrageous” recalled one patron, “and it was flowing throughout.”16 Another customer, who had fond memories of visiting Clifton’s as a child, reminisced that “in my adolescence I spent hours under its tropical spell, lingering over my chicken croquettes, enraptured by the lusty light-haired soprano waitress who sang beside the fountain.”17 In addition to the simulated rainstorms, the building’s interior contained numerous aviaries, aquariums, flowers made from neon lights, a variety of tropical foliage, a volcano that gushed streams of sherbet, and a full-flowing waterfall. One review of the Pacific Seas described the establishment as a “poor man’s Polynesia,” explaining that “whatever the Beachcombers, the Islander, Christian’s Hut or the Seven Seas may have, Clifton’s Cafeteria has by the dozen.”18 The tropical and lush décor of Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges also glossed over American servicemen’s unpleasant experiences in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Servicemen, attracted by the portrayal of Hawaiʻi – and the broader central and southern Pacific – in Hollywood films and the tourism market as a safe, exotic, and harmonious paradise filled with palm trees, grass huts, and hula dancers, were shocked by the negative realities they faced. The U.S. implementation of martial law in Hawaiʻi radically transformed life in Honolulu and elsewhere. Bars, restaurants, and other businesses closed hours before sundown, a curfew and mandatory blackouts were strictly enforced, and the beach at Waikiki was enclosed with a barbed wire fence.19 Because of this, the streets of Honolulu were congested and servicemen and civilians alike were forced to wait in long lines wherever they traveled. Food and gasoline were rationed and the constant threat of war encouraged everyone to carry a gasmask and prevented rest and relaxation.20 15  “Let’s Dine Out – Clifton’s Pacific Seas Cafeteria,” Westways, August, 1953, 36–37. 16  Karen Lansky, “Mid-Century Memoirs: Seven Southern Californians Recall Growing up in the 40’s and 50’s,” Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1990, SM12. 17  Jack Smith, “Article 5 – No Title,” Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1984, OC D1. 18  “Let’s Dine Out – Clifton’s Pacific Seas Cafeteria,” 37. 19  Bailey and Farber, The First Strange Place, 38–39, 47. 20  Clark Lee, They Call it Pacific: An Eye-Witness Story of Our War Against Japan from Bataan to the Solomons (New York: Viking Press, 1943), 303; Evelyn I. Gregory, Operation Memories: Incredible Stories of World War II Veterans (Vineburg: Senior Distributors, 1995), 307.

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The situations encountered by servicemen who traveled across the central and southern Pacific and the margins of this region to islands and atolls in the Solomon, Tasman, and Coral Seas were even worse than those faced in wartime Honolulu. Servicemen reported that the beaches on war-torn Pacific islands were “trashy” in contrast to those featured in the film South Pacific. They complained about the tropical climate, insects, and other features of the natural environment in letters sent home and other written accounts.21 They griped about the dense jungles that disoriented a soldier’s sense of direction, and the heavy rain and humidity that rendered compasses and other equipment useless.22 One military sergeant wrote that the marines desperately desired to “occupy an area that resembled civilization.”23 “Guadalcanal, the Russell Islands, the New Georgia Group, Vella Lavella, the Treasury Islands, and a portion of Bougainville have come under Allied control – and still no town,” complained the sergeant. He pointed out that while the U.S. military took control of towns with roads and electricity in Africa and Europe, troops in the Pacific encountered nothing but “grass shacks and lizards and swamp “gardens” of slimy banyan trees!”24 Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges erased this trauma by “re”-presenting the Pacific in a controlled and safe environment. These business establishments enabled war veterans to see first-hand the movie version of Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific, and to experience the Hawaiʻi and South Pacific of their dreams.

The Careful Embrace of Asian Americans

Numerous Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges in the Los Angeles region – locations such as Don the Beachcomber, Trader Vic’s, and the Hotel Roosevelt’s Islander in Hollywood, the Tropics in Beverly Hills, and A. L. Mack’s Hawaiian in Long Beach – were staffed by Chinese American chefs and Filipino American bartenders. Before, during, and in the immediate years following World War II, however, people of Japanese descent and Japanese objects and foods were excluded from these establishments. The 21  Gregory, Operation Memories, 308. 22  David Dempsey, “That Old White Magic,” in Semper Fidelis: The U.S. Marines in the Pacific – 1942–1945, ed. Patrick O’Sheel and Gene Cook (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1947), 308–310. 23  Murrey Marder, “A Real Town,” in ibid., 302. 24  Ibid.

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exclusion of all things Japanese, despite the fact that local Japanese constituted the largest ethnic group in Hawaiʻi during the mid-century, was part of the broader anti-Japanese movement in mainland U.S. that culminated in the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent – a majority of whom were American citizens – during World War II. Anti-Japanese racism was most pronounced in California throughout the mid-century years. Aeronautical engineer and aviator Roy A. Knabenshue of Pasadena testified to the House Patents Committee that 500,000 armed Japanese residents were well poised to take control of California and Hawaiʻi a decade before World War II, despite his inability to provide any evidence. The California Joint Immigration Committee, a group formerly known as the Japanese Exclusion League, supported the 1924 Immigration Act, which virtually banned Asian immigration to the United States. Organized labor on the West Coast warned that open borders would allow tens of thousands of Asian non-citizens in Hawaiʻi to migrate to the mainland U.S. In 1940 the House Immigration Committee passed legislation that legalized the deportation of American citizens who returned to their parents’ country for more than six months. The bill was a response to allegations that Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi were traveling to Japan to receive military training under the Emperor’s army. Prominent white politicians in Hawaiʻi attempted to counter the antiJapanese sentiments made by mainland individuals and institutions. Delegates who attended congressional hearings in the mid-1930s led by Samuel King (a non-voting congressman from Hawaiʻi) discussed Hawaiian statehood and argued that the Japanese population in the territory did not present a threat to American security. Supporters of Hawaiian statehood, such as Congressman King and Hawaiian Governor Joseph R. Farrington, argued that Hawaiʻi could support a significantly larger white population, that Native Hawaiians were a vanishing race, and that the Japanese population could be controlled by American policy and influence.25 Those against statehood, like The Native Sons of the Golden West – a fraternal organization composed of native-born Californians well known for their racist jingoism and nativist stances in the early 20th century – released a statement that claimed statehood would be “exceedingly dangerous” to the United States because of the territory’s large

25  Eric T. Love, Race Over Empire: Racism & U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 135, 138, 139, 146. Rubin Francis Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism: The Influence of Racial Assumptions on American Foreign Policy, 1893– 1946 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 57, 58, 60, 81.

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Asian population.26 While fears and anxieties were directed at the entire nonwhite population, public attention increasingly focused on the perceived dangers of the Japanese population during World War II. Anti-Japanese racism resulted in Japanese exclusion from Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges throughout the mid-century. By contrast, the U.S.–Philippines–China alliance during World War II enabled the inclusion of Chinese and Filipino Americans in these business establishments. As Robert G. Lee explains in Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (1998), U.S. political and military leaders worried about the Japanese sphere of political, cultural, and military influence in Asia and the Pacific from the turn of the century onward.27 Producers of American mainstream popular culture, from popular magazines to film, were heavily invested in drawing distinctions between people of Chinese and Japanese descent. Chinese men were depicted in what Lee refers to as an early version of the “model minority” and as less threatening racialized and gendered “others.”28 Chinese and Filipino Americans employed at Hawaiian and South Pacificthemed restaurants and cocktail lounges played a key role in the development of food and drink recipes at these establishments. Don the Beachcomber’s innovative Chinese and South Pacific-themed menu was created with the assistance of Chinese American chef Eddie Lee, an employee at the Beachcomber for several decades. Lee’s sons and other family members also worked for many years under his supervision among the predominantly Asian cooks and kitchen staff at the Beachcomber. The Beachcomber’s menu included ‘secret’ recipes passed down in Lee’s family, and he imported ingredients from Asia and the Pacific like water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, oyster sauce, wild plum sauce, lychee, and lotus nuts. The use of these ingredients deviated from the typical Americanized Chinese cuisine of the time, which tended to incorporate inexpensive ingredients like celery and bean sprouts into dishes such as chop suey and chow mein. Most importantly, the dishes served at the Beachcomber were popular among customers and well-received by food critics.29 As one critic declared in a review of the restaurant after listing off several entrées that included Mandarin Squab, Duck Lotus, Chicken Manuu, and Hawaiian

26   Los Angeles Times, “Sons Oppose Plea,” October 10, 1937, A6. 27  Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 106. 28  Ibid., 149–151. 29  “Let’s Dine Out – Don the Beachcomber,” Westways, August, 1949, 24.

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Spareribs, “the entire cuisine is so mouthwatering that every dinner is an occasion and gala.”30 The Beachcomber added a level of complexity and diversity to the Americanized Chinese cuisine in metropolitan Los Angeles. Food combinations on the menu were so varied and complex that the vast majority of customers placed decisions regarding their dinner orders in the hands of their waiters, or the floating adviser employed for that very task.31 Confusion among customers regarding what to order was a common dilemma in the restaurants that copied Beach’s business model. Thus, in his Trader Vic’s location in the Bay Area, Victor Bergeron carefully trained his Asian American waiters, many of whom were students at the University of California, Berkeley, to explain the complex menu in simple terms for patrons. Lucius Beebe, a columnist for Holiday magazine, explained that this work conducted by the waiters was necessary because Americans “are often baffled by the language in which it is advertised.”32 The dishes that required explanation included Trader Vics’ very own Bongo Bongo soup, a spinach and oyster soup with a broth made of clam juice, garlic, steak sauce, white peppers, and cream, among other things. Other dishes included Cho Cho (marinated beef skewers), Tahitian Chicken seasoned with ingredients such as soy sauce, ginger, and various fruit juices, and Cho Gu Langostino (a dish made of mushrooms imported from the forests of China, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and Chinese peas).33 At the Beachcomber, popular appetizers such as egg rolls, fried shrimp, spiced chicken liver, soy sauce-marinated ribs, and a dish known as rumaki (water chestnuts wrapped in bacon and deep fried in a ginger root infused oil), as well as various main-course dishes paired well with the establishment’s tropical alcoholic drinks. The first master bartender employed at the Beachcomber was Ray Buhen, a Filipino immigrant from the Philippines. Buhen helped create the drink recipes that popularized the Beachcomber and was the only employee who knew the exact recipes of the, so-called, rum rhapsodies. Popular drinks included the Missionary’s Downfall, Shark’s Tooth, Vicious Virgin, Never Say Die, Cobra’s Fang, and a prototype of a mixed drink of rum and fruit juice that would later become known as the Mai Tai.34 The 30  Ibid., 24. 31  Pete Martin, “Pago Pago in Hollywood,” Saturday Evening Post, May 1, 1948, 81. 32  Lucius Beebe, “Trader Vic’s,” Holiday, August 1950, 87–88. 33  “Trader Vic’s,” 9876 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA. From Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection, http://dbase1.lapl.org/images/menus/fullsize/i/rb02844-inside3.jpg (accessed July 15, 2016). 34  Ibid.

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Beachcomber’s most popular beverage, the Zombie, included twelve ounces of six different kinds of rum; the drink was so potent that each customer was limited to ordering no more than two. Exotic presentations of these drinks enhanced their appeal. For example, staff served popular dessert drinks, such as a grog with Kona coffee and West Indian rum, in a wooden tumbler with the top of the liquid on fire. Other drinks were served in hollowed-out pineapples, disemboweled coconuts, and ceramic tiki cups. With the help of Buhen, the Beachcomber transformed Los Angeles’s and mainland America’s cocktail culture by placing Hawaiian and South Pacificinspired alcoholic drinks into the American vernacular.35 Drinks were mixed behind closed doors by a staff of seven bartenders who pulled ingredients from label-less bottles identifiable only by codes.36 Beach’s reasoning for this methodology, besides keeping the recipes a secret from patrons, was based on the belief that if his bartenders left to work at other establishments they would steal them. Buhen’s position as a bartender was representative of the kind of service work performed by male Filipinos migrants in the era, but his role at this popular establishment and his later success with his own South Pacific-themed cocktail lounge, the Tiki Ti on Sunset Boulevard, set him apart from other Filipino Americans working in the mid-20th-century food service industry.37 Beach’s Asian American staff added to the exotic experience for many customers. However, the racialized masculinity they represented was complex. The role of bartender performed by Filipino Americans emerged from a sizeable Filipino presence in the restaurant and hotel service industry in the early 20th century. As Linda España-Maram illustrates in Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s–1950s (2006), work of this type in urban West Coast service economies allayed white masculine fears about the perceived threat posed by the large number of male Filipino migrants who dated, married, and danced with white women at

35  By the late 1960s the Beachcomber offered on a regular basis eleven different kinds of rum from Guiana, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Barbados, and several other locations in the Caribbean. The Beachcomber’s cellar stored 120 different rum varieties, some of which were as high as 150 proof. Beach copyrighted the names and recipes of the drinks his establishment served. 36  This method for mixing the drinks at Don the Beachcomber lasted several decades. 37   Linda España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s–1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 28–29.

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popular taxi dance halls and displayed prowess in boxing.38 As España-Maram notes, “removed from the supervision of parents and community elders in the Philippines, young Filipino migrants flocked to the commercialized leisure centers to work out, wrestle with, and claim what it meant to be Filipino men within the context of a racist host society.”39 The presence of Filipino employees like Buhen added to the exotic allure of these establishments without challenging race and gender hierarchies. Chinese cooks and chefs also performed a distinct role in these establishments. Aware of the fact that his customer base desired to encounter exotic others in a safe and predictable environment, Beach installed windows that made the kitchen visible in the dining area. He also encouraged patrons to take tours of the kitchen so that they could observe their food being prepared by the, predominantly Chinese American, staff. In a similar fashion, Chinese American cooks prepared dishes in front of restaurant-goers at The Islander in Hollywood and Trader Vic’s.40 The public preparation of dishes by Chinese American cooks de-escalated anxieties regarding how the food was prepared and added a significant level of entertainment value to the customer experience. In a photograph that accompanied a late 1950s article in Better Home and Gardens on Trader Vic’s, white patrons appeared awestruck as a Chinese American chef brushed sides of spare rib with sauce before placing it in the Chinese oven.41 According to one writer, “a squad of Chinese boys in black silk jackets” were responsible for Trader Vic’s success.42 One of these men was Chinese American chef Elmo Yee who directed the kitchen staff at the Beverly Hills’ Trader Vic’s for nearly three decades.43 Another was Chan Wong who helped 38   Ibid., 28–29. Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 59. 39  España-Maram, Creating Masculinity, 8. 40  The Islander’s interior was designed and decorated by Albert Parvin & Company, who were responsible for decorating a diverse number of establishments across the United States. The company designed a special collection of South Pacific-themed furniture and decorations for The Islander. The second floor of the two-storey building that housed The Islander contained a dance studio – also decorated in a South Pacific-themed motif – run by the famed ballroom dancers Frank Veloz and Yolanda Casazza. 41  Myrna Johnson, “Famous Food from Famous Places,” Better Homes and Gardens, 36, no. 5 (May 1958): 77. 42  Beebe, “Trader Vic’s,” 85. 43  Lois Dwan, “Trader Vic and the Art of Genuine Imitation,” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1970, J20. By 1970, Bergeron owned and operated over twenty Trader Vic’s locations from Hawaiʻi to London.

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Bergeron create an innovative Chinese and South Pacific-themed menu for Trader Vic’s by studying European, Asian, and South Pacific cuisine. Wong’s uncle constructed Bergeron’s first Chinese oven, which was used to cook rack of lamb, small whole pigs, fish, and squab. As the Trader Vic’s brand expanded through multiple establishments, retail products, and a series of recipe books, Bergeron noted that “he came to depend on Chan Wong more and more” to the point where Wong ran nearly every aspect of the business.44 Despite this dependence, however, Wong’s specific contributions are not mentioned at all in Bergeron’s 1973 autobiography Frankly Speaking: Trader Vic’s Own Story. Other establishments, such as A. L. Mack’s Hawaiian in Long Beach, the Islander in Hollywood, and The Tropics in Beverly Hills, adopted the Chinese oven popularized by Bergeron and Wong, and employed Chinese chefs and cooks and Filipino American bartenders. Sue Kay Hong visited China for a year to study Chinese barbequing techniques before becoming head chef at The Islander.45 As a woman chef, Hong was an exception to the rule, as most of the Asian American bartenders and chefs were men. In general, Chinese and Filipino Americans who worked in Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges were integrated into a racial and gender hierarchy through the types of labor they performed. Many of their contributions to American food and drink culture have yet to be fully recognized.

Polynesian Performers and Representations of Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific

Like the Chinese American chefs and cooks and Filipino American bartenders, Polynesian performers were also agents of change in American popular culture. After opening in the late 1930s the Hawaiian Room in New York’s Hotel Lexington was the first Hawaiian-themed establishment in the mainland United States to offer floor shows that featured both Hawaiian music and hula dancing.46 Hawaiʻi’s most innovative and popular musicians and vocalists, however, started performing in greater Los Angeles’s Hawaiian and South 44  Trader Vic (Victor Bergeron), Frankly Speaking: Trader Vic’s Own Story (New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1973), 69. Bergeron also failed to give credit to his Asian staff, especially Chan Wong, in numerous articles and interviews published between the 1930s and 1950s. 45  “Let’s Dine Out – The Islander,” Westways, March 1952, 32. 46  Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 176.

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Pacific-themed establishments in the early 1930s and the acts were much more varied than those on the East Coast. The Seven Seas, across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, hosted Lani McIntire and His Aloha Islanders. Hawaiian guitarists and vocalists like Andy Iona, Sam Koki, and Sol Ho’opi’i performed regularly in Los Angeles at the Hawaiian Paradise in the late 1930s, with local radio station KFWB broadcasting from the stage nightly.47 These performers introduced new styles that transformed American music. In the 1930s Sol Ho’opi’i, an innovative Native Hawaiian guitarist, performed with his Hawaiian Orchestra at Gene’s Hawaiian Village, a Hawaiian-themed restaurant and cocktail lounge in Los Angeles, and at the grand opening of the West Los Angeles-based Waikiki. Many of these establishments in metropolitan Los Angeles served as a miniature circuit for performers from Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific. In late 1930s Los Angeles, the Hawaiian Paradise, located on Melrose Avenue, featured acts like Tahitian dance combo Toui and Torita, Filipina vaudeville singer Diana Toy, hapa haole hula dancers like Princess Luana and Aggie Auld, and Hawaiian musicians Sol Bright and his Hawaiian Glee Club.48 As he performed on the Hawaiian and South Pacific restaurant and lounge circuit, guitarist Sol Ho’opi’i also assisted Ro-Pat-In (Electro Patent Instruments), a Los Angeles-based guitar manufacturer, with the invention and sale of the first electric guitar to be widely marketed across the United States.49 In the summer of 1932 Ro-Pat-In’s release of the A22 and A25, also known as the ‘frying pan’ guitars because of their round cast aluminum bodies and maple necks, made it the first company to market not only an electric version of the lap steel guitar, but also an amplifiable guitar. By the mid-1930s, as 47  Unlike numerous other venues, the Beachcomber never hosted live musical acts because Beach believed they would distract patrons from the South Seas atmosphere that he painstakingly worked to create. The Los Angeles County Public Welfare Commission forced Gene’s Hawaiian Village to permanently close in 1942 due to an insufficient number of exits and the abundance of flammable decorations. 48   Hapa haole is a commonly used term in Hawaiʻi to refer to people who are part Native Hawaiian and part white. Some of the most popular hula dancers in early and mid-20th century Hawaiʻi were hapa haoles. 49  The name Ro-Pat-In was eventually changed to Rickenbacher, and then to Rickenbacker – named after one of the company’s founders, Adolph Rickenbacher. The company, presently known as Rickenbacker International Corporation, is still based in Southern California at its current headquarters in Santa Ana. Before the founding of Ro-Pat-In, George Beauchamp, a vaudeville guitarist in Los Angeles owned a guitar company called National. He teamed up with Rickenbacher, a Swiss-American immigrant who owned a local metal-stamping shop to produce the new line of guitars.

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Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges opened across greater Los Angeles, Ro-Pat-In changed its name to Electro Strings Instrument Corporation and started to market the Bakelite Electric Hawaiian Guitar. During the 1930s officials at the federal patent office in Washington D.C. denied the company a patent on their guitars because they refused to believe a guitar could be electronically amplified. In the hope of changing their minds, owners Adolph Rickenbacher and George Beauchamp sent Ho’opi’i with a group of musicians to play Hawaiian music at the nation’s capital with one of their new electric guitars. Their performance was successful. The musicians returned to Southern California with a patent.50 In addition to his work with guitar manufacturers Ho’opi’i was also very popular on the radio in greater Los Angeles. He and other Hawaiian musicians and vocalists, who appeared regularly at Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges, performed on the same bill as Filipino, Mexican, and, western acts on Los Angeles-based KHJ and other radio stations under the banner of western music. During broadcasts on another Los Angeles-based station, KNX, Ho’opi’i shared studio space with popular California-based country and western groups like Johnny Crockett and the Crockett Cowboy Singers and popular country and western radio personalities like Stuart Hamblem. This programming illustrates that country and western music during this period was more inclusive of musical acts and styles from diverse geographical and cultural origins. Often referred to as coast country, country and western music in Southern California – a region known as a major center for country music by the early 1930s – was more open to innovation and the incorporation of various musical forms than country and western music in the American South and elsewhere. Hawaiian guitarists such as Ho’opi’i played an important role in the diversification of country music, which made the early 1930s scene in California one of the more creative eras in music and firmly placed the state at the center of

50  Michael Flagg, “Electronic Guitars Vital to the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1989, OC_C11. Jean A. Boyd, The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 113–115. George S. Kanahele, Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Illustrated History (Honolulu: The University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1979), 372. Richard Smith, The History of Rickenbacker Guitars (Fullerton: Centerstream Publishing, 1987), 2–4, 6, 11, 14, 18, 27.

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country music production.51 By contrast, in later decades country and western music came to be associated almost exclusively with the American South.52 This highly diverse ‘western’ music scene that emerged from Los Angeles’s restaurants and cocktail lounges, and the radio programming, contributed to a cross-pollination between country and western and Hawaiian music. Although western swing originally emerged from fiddle music and other folk musical forms such as the blues, by the early 1930s western swing bands mimicked Big Band jazz groups by adopting a larger instrument set. The size of nightclubs and bars expanded during the Depression so that the price of admission for musical acts could be lowered, but these larger venues also necessitated more instruments and a higher volume to create a louder sound. In addition to adding horn sections and drums, and in some cases full orchestras, the most important instrument added to western swing in the early 1930s was the Hawaiian steel guitar.53 Radio stations such as KNJ and KNX in Los Angeles possessed powerful transmitters that broadcast Hawaiian musicians and vocalists across the southern and midwestern United States. It is likely that the broadcasting of artists like Ho’opi’i counted as the first time that listeners in these regions heard Hawaiian music that pushed the loosely defined genre beyond the hapa haole music of 1920s Tin Pan Alley and the more traditional forms of Hawaiian music first recorded in the 1910s. The first country music act to incorporate the style of slide guitar picking popularized by Hawaiian guitarists was Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, a group based in Fort Worth, Texas. Brown’s band, a prototypical western swing band, also included two fiddles, a banjo, a bass, and a piano. Brown asked Bob Dunn, a trombonist and guitarist, to join the Musical Brownies in 1935 in order to replicate the sound of a horn section on an amplified guitar. Dunn, however, did not play the Ro-Pat-In A22 or A25, choosing instead to attach a makeshift pickup to a standard guitar and play it on his knees while sitting down, a style created by Hawaiian artists like Sol Ho’opi’i. Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies gained instant popularity with their new country and western swing sound in Depression-era Texas. After hearing Dunn’s steel guitar playing with Milton Brown’s group, Bob Willis and his Texas Playboys, an up-and-coming Oklahoma-based western swing group, asked guitarist Leon McAuliffe to join his group. McAuliffe, born 51  Gerald W. Haslam, Alexander Haslam Russell, and Richard Chon, Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 76. 52  Ibid., 28, 29, 65. 53  Charles T. Brown, Music U.S.A.: America’s Country & Western Tradition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986), 10, 45.

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and raised in Houston, learned to play Hawaiian music at a young age by experimenting on his own and taking lessons for a short time. Willis allowed McAuliffe to perform improvised solos and explore the possibilities of the amplified guitar sound, paving the way for McAuliffe to write the signature country and western swing song in the late 1930s entitled “Steel Guitar Rag.” Dunn and McAuliffe are widely considered to be pioneers in the western swing country music genre, but their adoption of the steel guitar and their method of performing – the strumming speed and note patterns – were directly influenced by the recordings of Sol Ho’opi’i and other Hawaiian musicians who had recorded with small Hollywood-based record companies a decade earlier.54 Although Hawaiian artists transformed the world of country music, stereotypical images of Polynesian people in restaurant menus and other forms of material culture were more well-known. Menus blatantly marketed racialized and sexualized fantasies through depictions of nude and partially nude Polynesian women. The menu cover for Kelbo’s, a Hawaiian-themed restaurant that specialized in barbequed foods and tropical alcoholic drinks at two locations in Los Angeles and Hollywood, contained several full-color cartoon drawings of naked and topless Native Hawaiian women being chased along the beach and into the ocean by Native Hawaiian men; in the foreground Native

54  See Boyd, “The Jazz of the Southwest,” 115, 117; Kurt Wolff, Country Music: A Rough Guide (New York: Penguin, 2000), 76; Jean A. Boyd, “Western Swing: Working-Class Southwestern Jazz of the 1930s and 1940s,” in Perspectives on American Music, 1900–1950, ed. Michael Saffle (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), 206, 210. Country music historians like Jean Boyd and Michael H. Price in their article entitled “Jazz Guitar and Western Swing,” in The Guitar in Jazz: An Anthology, ed. James Sallis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) lament the fact that western swing music has not been adequately included in the historiography of jazz, but these same historians fail to examine the strong influence that Hawaiian musicians like Sol Ho’opi’i had on western swing. Some, like Norman Cohen and Peter La Chapelle conclude that the steel guitar sound was popularized in the American South and that the subgenre of western swing was exclusively influenced by black musicians. See Peter La Chapelle, Proud To Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), and Norman Cohen, “The Skillet Lickers: A Study of a Hillbilly String Band and its Repertoire,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309, Hillbilly Issue (July–September 1965): 229–244. Others such as Nick Tosches argue that black blues artists such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, who incorporated the steel guitar style into his sound in 1926, were influenced by Hawaiian guitarists, and moreover, that Hawaiian guitarists also changed the sound of the blues (175, 176). Nick Tosches, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: De Capo Press, 1996).

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Hawaiian men rode an outrigger towards the shore hauling a barrel full of rum.55 Similar to other forms of popular imagery in the era, these representations objectified Native Hawaiian women, and sexualized Native Hawaiians. Menus often appealed to white heterosexual fantasies about the central and southern Pacific. A menu for the Palm Springs branch of Don the Beachcomber depicted a full-page, full-color drawing of Donn Beach gazing on a South Pacific landscape populated by brown-skinned topless women and exotic animals.56 Full-color drawings of topless women dressed only in grass skirts, presumably of Tahitian descent, lined the pages of Disneyland’s Tahitian Terrace menu.57 The menu cover at Trader Vic’s featured a cartoon drawing of a white male enjoying the company of two topless Polynesian women, while the menu of the Laguna Beach-based Royal Hawaiian encouraged patrons to “go native,” alongside a drawing of a topless Native Hawaiian woman being serenaded by a Native Hawaiian man playing a ukulele.58 Depictions of Polynesian women as sexualized figures were not limited to menus. Many establishments served their alcoholic drinks in ceramic and glass saucers decorated with topless women.59 As historian Kevin Starr has observed, Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges allowed patrons to escape Puritan sexual norms in an environment where “sexuality was made explicit in menu cartoons and other illustrations depicting bare-breasted wahines associated in one way or another with elaborately concocted and named (Navy Grog Cobra’s Fang, Vicious Virgin, Islander’s Pearl, Scorpion) rum drinks.”60 Overall, the racial and gender imagery that permeated these establishments buttressed the norms of 55  “Kelbo’s,” 101 N Fairfax, Hollywood, CA and 11434 W Pico Blvd, 1968. From Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection, http://dbase1.lapl.org/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll (accessed July 13, 2015). 56  “Don the Beachcomber,” 120 Via Lola, Palm Springs, California, 1941. Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection, http://dbase1.lapl.org/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll (accessed July 15, 2015). 57  “Tahitian Terrace,” Disneyland, Anaheim, CA, circa 1960s. From Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection, http://dbase1.lapl.org/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll (accessed July 13, 2015). 58  “Royal Hawaiian,” 331 North Coast Blvd., Laguna Beach, California, circa 1960s. From Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection. http://dbase1.lapl.org/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll (accessed July 14, 2015). 59  “Trader Vic’s,” 1968. From the New York Public Library’s What’s on the Menu Collection, http://menus.nypl.org/menus/28284 (accessed July 13, 2015). 60  Kevin Starr, Golden Dream: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 51. Wahine is a Native Hawaiian word for woman.

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heterosexuality during the Cold War when homophobia was at its peak. Thus, the experience for men and for women differed at these establishments. White male patrons participated in an experience that enabled them to temporarily escape the clean-cut, white-collar world of the ‘organization man.’ In this way, Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges belonged to the same cultural world as Playboy Magazine and early 20th-century pinup culture, a culture that hinged on male enjoyment of the objectification of women. Print advertisements for these establishments sometimes targeted white heterosexual couples by suggesting that these places could rekindle a sense of romance. As one advertisement for Trader Vic’s in Beverly Hills beckoned: “The same old menu makes her yawn? Bring her here and turn her on; Exotic South Sea Island dinners, and a mood that’s brewed for sinners.”61 Similarly, a two-page Sunset magazine advertisement featured Donn Beach serving tropical beverages to a white middle-aged married couple decked out in leis and Hawaiian shirts and seated behind a table covered with bananas, pineapples, and tropical flowers. In this advertisement, the wife characterized her experience at the Beachcomber as their “second honeymoon in Hawaii.”62 Mid-20th century Los Angeles’ Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges were an important site of interracial contact that brought peoples and cultures from the central and southern Pacific and the U.S. mainland together. Polynesian and other peoples from the central and southern Pacific, and Chinese and Filipino Americans played pivotal roles in the creation and success of these establishments. However, Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges ultimately relied on racialized and gendered fantasies that rendered these contributions invisible and perpetuated geopolitical and social inequalities. Bibliography Allen, Gwenfread. Hawaii’s War Years: 1941–1945. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1950. Bailey, Beth and David Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii. New York: The Free Press, 1992. Beebe, Lucius. “Trader Vic’s.” Holiday, August 1950. 61  “Trader Vic’s,” Los Angeles Magazine 12, no. 8 (1967): 67. 62  “Second Honeymoon in Hawaii,” Pan American Advertisement in Sunset, November 1953, 122–123.

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Boyd, Jean and Michael H. Price. “Jazz Guitar and Western Swing.” In The Guitar in Jazz: An Anthology, ed. James Sallis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Boyd, Jean A. “Western Swing: Working-Class Southwestern Jazz of the 1930s and 1940s.” In Perspectives on American Music, 1900–1950, ed. Michael Saffle, 193–217. New York: Garland, 2000. Boyd, Jean A. The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Brown, Charles T. Music U.S.A.: America’s Country & Western Tradition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986. Cohen, Norman. “The Skillet Lickers: A Study of a Hillbilly String Band and Its Repertoire.” The Journal of American Folklore. 78, no. 309, Hillbilly Issue (July– September 1965): 229–244. Dempsey, David. “That Old White Magic.” In Semper Fidelis: The U.S. Marines in the Pacific – 1942–1945, ed. Patrick O’Sheel and Gene Cook, 308–310. New York: William Sloane Associates: 1947. Donahue, Dan. “Samoa in the Sen Fernando Valley.” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1948, G3. “Don the Beachcomber,” 120 Via Lola, Palm Springs, California, 1941. Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection. http://dbase1.lapl.org/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll (accessed July 15, 2015). Dwan, Lois, “Trader Vic and the Art of Genuine Imitation.” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1970. Elleray, Michelle. “Crossing the Beach: A Victorian Tale Adrift in the Pacific.” Victorian Studies 47, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 164–173. España-Maram, Linda. Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: WorkingClass Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s–1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Flagg, Michael. “Electronic Guitars Vital to the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1989. Garcia, Matt. A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Gregory, Evelyn I. Operation Memories: Incredible Stories of World War II Veterans. Vineburg: Senior Distributors, 1995. Haslam, Gerald W. and Alexander Haslam Russell, and Richard Chon. Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Imada, Adria L. Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Johnson, Myrna. “Famous Food from Famous Places.” Better Homes and Gardens 36, no. 5 (May 1958).

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Kaftan, Jod. “Drink in Paradise.” Los Angeles Times Magazine. February 2010. http://www.latimesmagazine.com/2010/02/drink-in-paradise.html. Accessed July 24, 2014. Kanahele, George S. Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Illustrated History. Honolulu: The University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1979. “Kelbo’s,” 101 N Fairfax, Hollywood, CA and 11434 W Pico Blvd, 1968. Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection. http://dbase1.lapl.org/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub .dll. Accessed July 13, 2015. Sven, Kirsten. Tiki Pop: America Imagines its Own Polynesian Paradise. Cologne: Taschen, 2014. Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. La Chapelle, Peter. Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. Lansky, Karen. “Mid-Century Memoirs: Seven Southern Californians Recall Growing up in the 40’s and 50’s,” Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1990. Lee, Clark. They Call It Pacific: An Eye-Witness Story of Our War Against Japan from Bataan to the Solomons. New York: Viking Press, 1943. Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. “Let’s Dine Out – Clifton’s Pacific Seas Cafeteria.” Westways, August, 1953, 26. “Let’s Dine Out – Don the Beachcomber.” Westways, August, 1949, 24. “Let’s Dine Out – The Islander.” Westways, March, 1952, 27. Love, Eric T. Race Over Empire: Racism & U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Marder, Murrey. “A Real Town.” In Semper Fidelis: The U.S. Marines in the Pacific – 1942–1945, ed. Patrick O’Sheel and Gene Cook, 302. New York: William Sloane Associates: 1947. Martin, Pete. “Pago Pago in Hollywood.” Saturday Evening Post, May 1, 1948. Maude, H. E. “Beachcombers and Castaways.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 73, no. 3 (1964): 254–293. Molz, Jennie Germann. “Tasting an Imagined Thailand: Authenticity and Culinary Tourism in Thai Restaurants.” In Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy M. Long, 53–75. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004. Padoongpatt, Mark. “Too Hot to Handle: Food, Empire, and Race in Thai Los Angeles.” Radical History Review 110 (2011): 83–108. Padoongpatt, Mark. “‘Oriental Cookery’: Devouring Asian and Pacific Cuisine during the Cold War.” In Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader, ed. Ku Robert Ji-Song, Manalansan Martin F., and Mannur Anita, 186–207. New York: New York University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg92s.14.

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“Royal Hawaiian,” 331 North Coast Blvd., Laguna Beach, California, circa 1960s. Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection. http://dbase1.lapl.org/dbtw-wpd/exec/ dbtwpub.dll. “Second Honeymoon in Hawaii.” Pan American Advertisement in Sunset, November 1953, 122–123. Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Smith, Jack. “Article 5 – No Title.” Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1984, OC D1. Smith, Richard. The History of Rickenbacker Guitars. Fullerton: Centerstream Publishing, 1987. “Sons Oppose Plea.” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1937, A6. Starr, Kevin. Golden Dream: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. “Tahitian Terrace.” Disneyland, Anaheim, California, circa 1960s. Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection, http://dbase1.lapl.org/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll. Tosches, Nick. Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll. New York: De Capo Press, 1996. Trader Vic (Victor Bergeron), Frankly Speaking: Trader Vic’s Own Story. New York: Double Day & Company Inc., 1973. “Trader Vic’s.” Los Angeles Magazine 12, no. 8 (1967). “Trader Vic’s,” 1968. New York Public Library’s What’s on the Menu Collection. http:// menus.nypl.org/menus/28284. “Trader Vic’s” 9876 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection. http://dbase1.lapl.org/images/menus/fullsize/i/rb02844-inside3 .jpg (accessed July 15, 2016). Weston, Rubin Francis. Racism in U.S. Imperialism: The Influence of Racial Assumptions on American Foreign Policy, 1893–1946. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972. Wolff, Kurt. Country Music: A Rough Guide. New York: Penguin, 2000.

CHAPTER 19

We Are Pacific Men Craig Santos Perez We are more than what they say we are We noble chiefs & kings We watch over the land & our people We control territory & declare war We untouchables & the first baptized We trade for iron, guns, tobacco, alcohol & God We violently unite archipelagoes We Kepuha & Mata’pang, Kamehameha & Kalākaua, Tupou & Tanumafili We sign the Treaty of Waitangi We overthrown by foreigners and their diseases We diplomats, politicians, congressmen & presidents We Tosiwo Nakayama making Micronesia We John Mangefel reciting a letter from Ngabchai We Robert Underwood demanding reparations from Congress We Tony de Brum insisting “1.5 to survive!” We Ricky Bordallo committing suicide We Frank Bainimarama executing a coup We impeached, corrupt & disgraced We are more than what they say we are We warriors We headhunters & cannibals We conquest & conquered We feed the land with blood & bones We US Navy mess attendants & the Māori Battalion We haka We drafted to fight in the Vietnam War We enlist at the highest rates We stationed at military bases We exported to private defense contractors We return home in folded flags We injured & forgotten veterans We built for combat

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We are more than what they say we are We natural athletes We disciplined by colonial sports We National Football League islands We Junior Seau playing defense against concussions & suicide We Troy Palumalu – Head & Shoulders above the rest We In Football (scholarships) We Trust We Heisman Trophy winners We appropriate the haka We Rugby Union islands We All Blacks, Manu Samoa & ʻIkale Tahi We Jonah Lomu attacking the try, we the scrum of his arteries We USA Sevens Rugby in Las Vegas (the 9th Hawaiian island) We Major League Baseball islands We John Hattig & Shane “Flyin Hawaiian” Victorino We National Basketball Association islands We the dunks and rebounds of Jabari Parker & Stevan Funaki Adams We All-Mike Basketball Tournaments We MMA (Mixed-Martial Arts) islands We the submission moves of Jon Tuck & BJ Penn We Sumo islands, we Yokozuna Akebono using his weight We Olympians & Hall of Famers We global sports commodities We beat them at their own games We are more than what they say we are We gangsters & criminals We drug dealers, thieves, murderers, rapists & pimps We drunk drivers & drive-bys We street fights, dog fights & cock fights We incarcerated, we solitary We cops & prison guards We hula for Makahiki from an Arizona prison We wrongly accused & convicted We Joseph Kahahawai We the Mighty Mongrel Mob, Sons of Samoa, Tongan Crips, USO Family & the Hawaiian Syndicate We are more than what they say we are We navigators

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We star formations & wave currents, song maps & stick charts We lost at sea We Mau Piailug & Nainoa Thompson guiding us back We Hokuleʻa on a worldwide voyage We Duke Kahanamoku breaking the 100-meter freestyle world record in 1911 We Eddie (Aikau) would go We once were whalers We still fishermen We bone hooks & spears, throw nets & fish ponds We tuna canneries We watch the fish disappearing We are more than what they say we are We farmers We taro & yams, coconut & breadfruit We aquaponics & “No Panic Go Organic” We work for Dow & Monsanto We hunters with rifles & bows We raise chickens, goats, pigs & cattle We feed you with our harvest & slaughter & pesticides We are more than what they say we are We orators, chanters & storytellers We speak native tongues & remaster colonial languages We “Unwriting Oceania” (Steven Winduo) We editors, publishers, scholars, translators, poets, novelists, and playwrights We Uncle’s Story (Witi Ihimaera), Visions of a Chamoru (Peter Onedera), No Ordinary Sun (Hone Tuwhare) & Towards a New Oceania (Albert Wendt) We pidgin, creole, tok pisin & multilingual We mispronounce each others languages & names We The Land Has Eyes (Vilsoni Hereniko), Star Waka (Robert Sullivan), Waimea Summer (John Dominis Holt) & Once Were Warriors (Alan Duff) We long-winded litanies We beat them at their own genres We the silent type We are more than what they say we are We artists, tattooists, musicians, carvers, blacksmiths, weavers, actors, dancers, designers, muralists & chefs – We John Pule & John “Prime” Hina

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We Manny Crisostomo receiving the Pulitzer Prize for his photographs of a Detroit school We the fantastica in Polyfantastica (Solomon Enos) We Leonard Iriarte & Halau Na Kamalei We Keanu Reeves, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Taika Waititi & Jason Momoa We Cliff Curtis playing an African American drug dealer, Iraqi rebel, Colombian drug lord, Indian self-help guru, Latino FBI director, Chicano gangster & the Fire Nation lord We Alex Munoz & the Muna Brothers We Bruddah Iz & Che Fu, JD Crutch & JBoog, Marianas Homegrown & Fiji, Common Kings & Sudden Rush, Savage & Boo-Yaa TRIBE We Nesian Mystics We Sig Zane & Fokai We Keone Nunes & Suʻa Peter Suluape tatauing the post-colonial body We Tun Jack Lujan forging a machete We Cecilio & Kapono singing “Goodtimes Together” We are more than what they say we are We educated We AA, BA, MA, MFA, Ph.D., JD, & MD We graduates up to our noses in candy & flower lei We teachers, scientists, researchers & professors We Repositioning the Missionary (Vince Diaz), Racial Crossings (Damon Salesa) & Cultures of Commemoration (Keith Camacho) We place-based, culturally grounded & eco-literate We Futa Helu & ʻAtenisi We don’t see ourselves in the curriculum so We rewrite the curriculum We Dismembering Lāhui (Jon Osorio), We Native Men Remade (Ty Kawika Tengan) & “Our Sea of Islands” (Epeli Hauʻofa) We sinking below grade level, dropouts & student debt We are more than what they say we are We hard workers We sugar & pineapple plantations, service industries & construction sites We hotel security & McKinley car wash We lawyers in designer suits & judges in black gowns We offshore bankers & business owners We recruited by Tyson Chicken & Sea World We social entrepreneurs with a cultural purpose

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We janitors & firemen We landlords, landscapers & landless We wash dishes at restaurants we can’t afford to eat at We unemployment checks & eviction notices We exploited labor & labor unions We are more than what they say we are We revolutionaries We protect Kahoʻolawe We Angel Santos & I Nasion Chamoru climbing the military fence We Benny Wenda raising the Morning Star flag #FreeWestPapua We Jean-Marie Tjibaou & the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front We Polynesian Panthers opening homework centers for children We the Mau movement on Black Saturday We Ondobondo posters at the University of Papua New Guinea We the voice of George Helm #WeAreMaunaKea #KapuAloha #KuKiaʻiMauna We tearing up patents for GMO kalo We the hands of Walter Ritte #WeAreGuahan #SavePagat #PrutehiYanDifendi We Pacific climate warriors blockading a coal port in Australia We not drowning, we fighting We arrested & taken into custody We will not remain silent We are more than what they say we are We are faʻafafine, māhu, mamflorita, fakaleiti, raerae & takātapui We third gender, transgender & transvestite We S.O.F.I.A.S. (Society of Faʻafafine in American Samoa) We Living Photographs (Shigeyuki Kihara), Black faggot (Victor Rodger) & Coconut Milk (Dan Taulapapa McMullin) We same sex marriage advocates We Esera Tuaolo Alone in the Trenches We afraid to tell our families We gender on the edge, gender variance, migrating genders We U.T.O.P.I.A. (United Territories of Pacific Islanders’ Alliance) We “ritualized homosexuality” in Melanesia We Kumu Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu We Coming Out & Overcoming We Gay Pride Parade islands

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We are more than what they say we are We religious We worship Ao, Adaro, Afa, Atu, Bakoa, Bue, Dakuwanga Hoa-Tapu, Kū, Kāne, Kanaloa, Limu, Lo, Loa, Lono, Maui, Nobu, Oro, Puntan, Ra, Rangi, Rua, Tangaroa, Tagaloa, Tiki & Tu We forced to convert & attend church We Christians, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindis, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists & Protestants We preachers, pastors, & priests We molest choir boys & altar boys We once choir boys & altar boys We oppose homosexuality & same-sex marriage We pay tithings & pray We atheists We eat more than what they say we are We always hungry We Spam & Starkist tuna, Vienna sausage & corned beef We turkey tails, cheap meats & flap food nations We two scoops white rice with mac salad We “like our fish & poi” We grind McDonald’s & Zippy’s, KFC & Krispy Kreme We no need green salad We co-founded a “vegan butcher shop” in Minnesota We Coca-Cola & kava, Heineken & Budweiser, rum & tuba We EBT cards & foodstamps We malnutrition & diabetic We are more than what they say we are We every color in sand from black to tan We pure blood, half breed, afakasi, hapa & every fraction in between We tall & short, six-pack & beer gut We long kotekas to protect our cocks We ponytails, dreadlocks, topknots & crew cuts We aloha shirts & khakis, t-shirts & board shorts We leave our slippahs at the door We bird feathers, face paint & tribal tattoos We flex in front of the mirror at the gym We strong & insecure, beautiful & ugly

We Are Pacific Men

We are more than what they say we are We grandfathers, godfathers, fathers, sons, brothers & uncles We teach our children what our elders taught us We abandoned by our fathers We abandon our families We raised by villages & churches We foster care We know we nothing without Pacific women We domestic violence We are more than what they say we are We migrate for school, for work, for hospitals, for militaries We settle in large cities, urban islands & distant continents We send remittances, we wish we could send more We dawn raided and deported We homesick We return for holidays & funerals We were born far from where our ancestors were born We migration in our blood We frequent flyer miles We stay We are Pacific men We imperfect, moving islands We shaped by waves of culture, colonialism & change We belong to one ocean We are more than what they say we are

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CHAPTER 20

Gendering the K-Vampire Hyungji Park Abstract What makes a vampire a vampire? From an affective life generally driven by unfulfilled desire to the signature modus operandi of the penetrative biting and entering of the victim’s neck, vampires in Western culture are recognizable throughout the centuries. While the Western vampire, for which Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the chief exemplar, is mostly male (and phallic), the Asian vampire is often gendered female, returning from death in human form to enact revenge like the Western vampire, but is usually nonpenetrative, acting rather as a life-sucking succubus. In Korean folklore, the kumiho, the nine-tailed fox who can take the shape of a woman and suck out the lifeblood of her husband and his family, is the closest we get to a vampire figure. In contemporary Korean cinema, we can see the convergence of traditional folkloric images with Western motifs. For example, yeogui (girl ghost) films represent vampire-like figures who often protest against the strictures of a patriarchal society. But the Western vampire, too, has experienced a renaissance of sorts in the last couple of decades, and it is the popularity of figures from Twilight, True Blood, and others that has regendered the K-vampire into being predominantly male. While the webtoon Orange Marmalade still features a female vampire as protagonist, the watershed Park Chan-Wook film Thirst represents a main male vampire with a much more visceral, kumiho-like female counterpart. Meanwhile, recent television series like Vampire Prosecutor/Vampire Detective offer us handsome, law-enforcing prosecutors and detectives as the newest K-vampires. How does this different gendering of the vampire across Eastern and Western traditions reveal fundamental differences in understanding the individual’s relationship to his or her society? Meanwhile, how do popular media, like film, television, or webtoons, demonstrate the convergence of Eastern and Western popular traditions within a shared transnational medium?

* This work was supported by the Yonsei University Future-leading Research Initiative of 2015 (2015–22–0150). I would also like to thank my research assistant Eun-hae Kim for her invaluable help.

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Keywords vampire – kumiho – folklore – yeogui – Dracula – Korean film – webtoon – Park ChanWook – Thirst – Vampire Prosecutor



The Cross-cultural Vampire

The kumiho is a resonant figure in Korean folklore. With a name that literally means nine-tailed fox, the kumiho can take on human form, often as a beautiful woman who seduces men. Throughout countless versions and traditions, the kumiho is always a liminal figure between human and beast, motivated by longing and lust and violence. A shape-shifting, succubus-like figure, the kumiho is close to immortal: the fox must live for fifty years before gaining the ability to take a woman’s form, another fifty to become an exceptionally beautiful one, and a thousand years to reach a sort of heavenly ascension. The kumiho is at once cannibal and predator in its victimization of humans (self and other), alluring and dangerous, and symbolizes human fear of the other – of the beast, of the dark, of the forces that appear at the borders of human experience. The kumiho can also be sympathetic. The fox’s desire to become human can only be realized through decades or centuries of self-denial and suffering. In some versions, the fox carries a special bead in its mouth, which, when swallowed, gives a profound understanding of the sky, the earth, or the human, whatever is being looked upon at the moment of swallowing. The bead-swallower invariably fails to look heavenward, demonstrating the existential limitations of human knowledge. Changing with the times, the kumiho figure has moved from being a benign, even sacred, figure in early Korean folkloric traditions to gaining more negative connotations as the centuries have passed. As Myunghyun Lee writes, “through the figure of the kumiho, who begins as folklore but now has expanded into ‘drama,’ we can see an evolution in the nature of the insecurities or fear contained in its image.”1 Strong, seductive, shape-shifting, spirit-sucking, and long-living, the kumiho is the closest figure to a vampire within Korean folklore. This chapter contrasts the Korean vampire’s folkloric antecedent, the kumiho, with representations of the vampire in contemporary Korean film and media. It asks how the K-vampire negotiates its origins in a kumiho-like animistic tradition with the 1  Myung-hyun Lee, “A Study on the Expansion of the Tale of the Nine-tailed Fox and the Return of the Suppressed Others,” (Kumiho iyagiŭi hwakchanggwa ŏgaptoen t’ajaŭi kwihan) Journal of International Language and Literature (Kukcheŏmun) 8 (2012): 14. Translation mine.

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black-caped brooding Dracula tradition of Western vampire lore. How can we anatomize the genealogy of the K-vampire, with its double lines of origin? Central to this inquiry is the fact that the folkloric and Western traditions gender the vampiric figure differently. The kumiho’s liminality is intricately tied to her marginal gender (and often class) status in a patriarchal society. The kumiho is a metaphor for woman who is the ultimate ‘other,’ literally a beast. The kumiho functions not just as an ambiguous figure of desire and violence, but one of uniquely female longing, aggression, and marginalization. Sometimes translated as fox girl, the kumiho is at once a symbol of dread, loathing, and fear of the other, and a lone figure in her solitude, repression, and unrequited need. From the kumiho’s perspective, it is perilously difficult to find a stable place within human society. The misogynistic nature of the kumiho’s representation gained strength during the conservative, patriarchal Chosun dynasty in Korean history (1392–1897). In a version of the kumiho legend called fox sister, the kumiho marries a bachelor and proceeds, over several years, to suck out/consume the livers of her husband and his family, leading to the family’s complete ruin. Such a parodically extreme fear of the daughter-inlaw as a predatory, life-sucking force in her in-laws’ household demonstrates the radical gender tensions of traditional Korean society, or, more specifically, the profound distrust of the interloping woman. Vampire-like figures of a woman motivated by loss, longing, and vengeance are common throughout the Asian tradition. Chinese and Japanese lore share versions of the kumiho. The Chinese huli jing (fox spirit) or Japanese kitsune (fox) are analogous figures of foxes who can assume human form and serve as shape-shifting tricksters, which have probably emerged from the same folkloric tradition. The kitsune can be a benign or wise figure, but this tradition gave rise to the belief in medieval Japan that any woman, alone, especially encountered around twilight, might be a fox. In other Asian cultures, the vampire figure is a woman who has experienced loss, and returns as a revenant to haunt those she left behind. In the Malay culture, the langsuir is a vampire spirit who died in childbirth and likes to drink the blood of women who have just given birth. Her weakness is literalized in a hole in her back, covered by long hair. She can be disabled if that hole is plugged with a metal object, which makes her unable to fly. The pontianak, another Malay counterpart, is a beautiful female figure that preys on male victims. The Balinese leyak can be of either gender but is more often female, and it haunts graveyards and takes on human form during the day, becoming a partially disembodied flying figure by night. The Hindu vetala, or baital, initially termed a vampire in Sir Richard Burton’s 1870 translation titled Vikram and the Vampire, is a bat-like creature who inhabits and animates dead bodies. All these folkloric traditions share the

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qualities of a usually female figure returning from the dead in shape-shifting, part-animal form, to avenge/revenge herself on those remaining in the human world, usually men, to fulfill some lack incurred during her lifetime. Many of these vampires have died during childbirth, and they haunt the human world to protect/save/destroy their children, or to take revenge upon the husbands or family members who mistreated them in life. When we turn to the Western tradition, we see that the vampire is generally male, sharing shape-shifting/animal traits with the Asian vampire but often better integrated into human society. Bram Stoker’s late-Victorian novel Dracula (1897) remains the Ur-text of vampires within a Western literary tradition. Stoker was not writing in isolation, however, and the vampire has its literary origins in 18th-century German Romanticism. By the early 19th century in Britain, romantic images of the vampire were, unlike the folkloric figures, associated with aristocratic, lineaged men. In John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), the first vampire story written in English, Lord Byron served as the actual model for the vampire-figure Lord Ruthven. Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood (serialized 1845–1847) by James Malcolm Rymer, features the travails of Sir Francis Varney, while “The Mysterious Stranger,” author unknown, translated from German and published in England in 1860, also features a lineaged figure as a vampire. This tradition leads us back to the end of the century and Count Dracula of Transylvania, who is portrayed as being from the august line of Szekelys, who could trace his line back to Attila the Hun. Within the 19thcentury English tradition, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), the first lesbian vampire story in English, is the most notable exception to the male vampire. The emphasis on lineage and blood within the Western vampiric tradition may well derive from the fact that this vampire has its origins in Eastern European regional and ethnic politics, and in medical history. As Carol A. Senf writes, “Fear of vampires began in Hungary, Moravia, and Silesia during the late 17th century, a period when the conflict between the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church . . . reached a crisis.”2 The vampire label served as the ultimate Othering of those on the opposite side of political, religious, or linguistic spectrums. Meanwhile, major outbreaks of contagious diseases – from the Black Plague to smallpox to tuberculosis – often led to corresponding reports of vampire sightings. “The history of the vampire myth is . . . in essence the history of disease itself,” Katherine Byrne writes, “for belief in the Undead arose out of a need to explain mysterious or untimely death in past cultures which had little medical understanding and that therefore associated illness 2  Carol A. Senf, The Vampire in 19th Century English Literature (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), 20.

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with supernatural forces.”3 Tuberculosis, for example, a wasting disease with patients coughing up blood in the final stages of illness, and often passed on among family members, could be construed as vampiric during this era when the mechanisms of disease transmission were poorly understood. While the Eastern vampire is usually female, the defining modus operandi of the Western vampire is a logic of penetration, the bite. This action, which renders a vampire a vampire, is a phallic gesture of consumption, attack, and sometimes affection. Vampires do engage in other behaviors: they drink, they suck, they sometimes chew. But the signature vampiric act remains that of biting and entering. Within this tradition, even female vampires employ the same penetrative method. The Eastern vampire, rather than being penetrative, is more of a revenant or succubus (life-sucking, night time-visiting) figure. Unlike the often lineaged, sometimes quite cosmopolitan and well-traveled Western vampires, Asian ones tend to be locally or regionally circumscribed and lower on the socioeconomic scale. More clearly victims in their first lives, they are more vituperative after death against their former oppressors. As the Eastern vampire enters filmic representations, these figures often attack more viscerally than the Western vampire, sometimes engaging in acts of revenge and comic play that are more commonly associated with ghosts, or at other times sucking blood or life-spirit out of their human victims. Unlike the Western vampire, the Eastern one generally does not have a self-reproductive ability, in other words, does not ‘turn’ humans into versions of themselves. In some ways, the Eastern folkloric animistic revenant resembles the (female) succubus/(male) incubus, which also serves as a precursor for the vampire in the Western tradition. The succubus is a mythological figure of nightly visitations, sucking out the breath/life of the sleeper, and sometimes depicted as sexually seductive. As with the vampire, the succubus can also be read against a background of medical history and seen as symptomatic of certain sleeping disorders, such as sleep paralysis. The legendary Lilith, Adam’s wife before Eve, is sometimes considered the first succubus.

The 21st-Century K-Vampire

When we move into the 20th and 21st centuries, these folkloric and literary examples of the vampire, Eastern and Western, take on a new life in cinematic and other media forms. Vampires, with their lavish graphic potential, have 3  Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 124.

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become such a staple of film adaptations that it is almost impossible to imagine cinema history without them. From the iconic black-and-white Nosferatu (1922), to the black-caped Bela Lugosi (1931), and the camp Leslie Nielsen in the Mel Brooks spoof (Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 1995), popular film history is unthinkable without the vampire. As a child I learned to count along with Sesame Street’s the Count (von Count), and my children enjoy the animated Hotel Transylvania and its sequels (2012, 2015, expected 2018). Korean film has also been increasingly attracted to the vampire motif. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a survey of Korean films on vampires, but it will touch on a certain tradition of the horror film, which draws upon legacies of the kumiho, before addressing Korean popular interpretations of the vampire in the last decade. An explosion of interest in the vampire in Korean popular culture probably draws upon a similar, also recent, interest in the United States. Like its U.S. counterparts, the K-vampire becomes a touch-point to highlight issues current in Korean society, from multicultural/multiethnic households to broader issues of social inclusion. This new K-vampire, by taking on distinctly Western traits (sensitivity to light, fangs, etc.) is now predominantly male. The K-vampire has experienced a sex change. In Korean film before, say, 2005 or so, we see that representations of the vampire bring together traditional folkloric images and Western motifs. These films continue to depict the vampire figure as mostly female. As So-young Kim writes, “the Korean version of vampirism is unmistakably feminine.”4 Among the films that answer to this description are a category of girl ghost films. The yeogui (yŏk’wi, technically female ghost), sometimes termed a ghost-maid, exhibits the viscerality and feral violence of the kumiho but also demonstrates specifically vampiric traits. As Kim argues, “the women characters with vampiric powers are represented as ghosts rather than ‘pure’ appropriations of Western vampire figures.”5 Even so, they exhibit some of the central traits of the Western vampire: “Motifs such as blood sucking, the resultant transformation of the victim into a vampire and the curse of immortality are all operative.”6 The Korean girl ghost shares with the Western vampire a lack, a loss, unfulfilled desire and a thirst to avenge herself upon those in her past. Much of this loss is represented through the concept of han, a uniquely Korean sensibility likened to sorrow, or a lack, or an unrequited longing that emerges out of pain or disenfranchisement. 4  So-Young Kim and Chris Berry, “ ‘Suri suri masuri’: The Magic of the Korean Horror Film: A Conversation,” Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 1 (2000): 56. 5  Ibid. 6  Ibid., 56–57.

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The girl ghosts of Korean film have a han that is often directed against the constraints of a patriarchal society. Moonim Baek, for instance, writes that in films such as The Female Vampire of the Night (Hŭp‘yŏlgwi yanyŏ) (1981) and Cemetery of Beautiful Women (Minyŏ kongdongmyoji) (1985) and others, the girl ghosts that return to avenge their deaths may have been killed in their human lives, or committed suicide, because of allegations that they failed to maintain their chastity. Baek writes, “sometimes these girls’ suicide is because of patriarchal conventions but at times also because they could no longer accept their circumstances within a society that equated ‘chastity’ with ‘life’ itself.”7 HeeJeong Sohn describes Korean cinema featuring girl ghosts as a critique of a society that is so intolerably patriarchal that girls choose to escape their plight by becoming girl ghosts. The Korean title for Sohn’s essay is Yŏk’wi kwŏnhanŭn sahoe which, literally translated, means, a society that recommends girlghosthood.8 These critics and others view the advent of girl ghosts as a cultural phenomenon that exposes the difficulties of living in the oppressive patriarchal society that is South Korea. While this tradition of the girl ghost still retains much of the viscerality and anti-patriarchal anger of the kumiho, a new kind of K-vampire has emerged in this decade. These recent K-vampires are distinctly indebted to the renaissance of vampires in recent American popular culture. The film version of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (1994), which represented Tom Cruise’s Lestat as a sensitive, tortured soul, may be one beginning of this renaissance. Angel (WB, 1999–2004), the spin-off from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series (WB/UPN, 1997–2003), also represented the vampire as one who battles his conscience and tries to make up for his past as a violent vampire by doing good. Perhaps the breakthrough sea change in this representation of vampires was Stephanie Meyer’s young adult Twilight series (novels 2005–2008, films 2008–2012). Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen as the sensitive, chivalric, Victorian vampire who hangs out in high school cafeterias in the latest teen metrosexual style permanently wiped away our image of the reclusive, caped vampire. Since then, True Blood (HBO, 2008–2014) and The Vampire Diaries (CW, 2009–present) expanded the possibilities for vampires among us by 7  Moonim Baek, “Close Encounter: ‘Horror Films’ on ‘A-rang’ Prototype Narrative. (T’ŭkchip: Tamaech’e shidaeŭi munhak 1; Mijiwaŭi chou ‘Aranghyŏng’ yŏk’wi yŏnghwa),” Journal of Korean Modern Literature (Hyŏndae munhakŭi yŏn’gu) 17 (2001): 82. Translation mine. 8  Hee-Jeong Sohn, “Return of Yeogui: Thinking on the Representation of Motherhood in the Recent Korean Horror Films (Yŏk’wi kwŏnhanŭn sahoe: 2002, 2003 nyŏn han’guk kongp’o yŏnghwawa mosŏngchaehyŏn),” Journal of Image & Film Studies (Yŏngsang yesul yŏn’gu) 4 (2004): 199.

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featuring complex interactions not just between vampires and humans but also with other supernatural creatures (werewolves, witches, fairies, etc.). All of this thanks to a dietary shift; these new vampires are ‘vegetarians’ who eschew human blood, or who have found passable alternatives, allowing for integration into human society. It is notable, though, that while these new vampires can be either male or female, the lead vampire (Angel, Edward Cullen, Bill Compton, Stefan Salvatore) remains male. The K-vampire of the last decade has inherited some of these characteristics but is also building a distinctly Korean phenotype. Park Chan-Wook’s Thirst (Pakchwi, 2009) is, arguably, the watershed film in marking the new K-vampire. It is a film on the cusp of a wholesale import of the Western vampire motif, but also one that remains acutely tied to traditional images. Indeed, the director is on record as describing the film as “a story about imported culture and objects,” even as he uses a lot of motifs and visual images of Korean society, such as the hanbok shop operated by the mother-in-law figure.9 Thirst is an important marker because it is by one of Korea’s most prominent filmmakers, Park Chan-Wook (of Oldboy 2003 fame), and has the director’s characteristic noir sensibility and psychological complexity. For another, it inaugurates a common K-vampire motif of the reluctant vampire, a professional who has become a vampire accidentally while pursuing his line of work, and who uses his vampiric qualities to continue to work within that professional identity. The main character Sang-hyun, played by prominent actor Song Gangho, becomes a vampire as a result of a medical procedure he undertakes while on a humanitarian mission to Africa. A Catholic priest by profession, Sang-hyun must accommodate his newfound thirst for blood not only with his pacifist view of the world, but also with his congregation’s belief that he has divine healing powers. This film also features a strong female lead who bridges the gap between the new male K-vampire and the traditional Korean yeogui. Tae-ju, the female lead who is turned into a vampire by Sang-hyun, becomes an even more aggressive and predatory vampire than her maker. Tae-ju, married to her adoptive family’s mentally slow son and serving an irascible mother-in-law, declares, “I’d rather be a vampire than a maid.” Her comment links her to figures like the yeogui or the housemaid, who chooses the extreme other (vampirism) to gain freedom from class and patriarchal bondage. Soyoung Kim places this film in juxtaposition with The Housemaid (Hanyŏ), both the 1960 version by Kim Kiyoung and its 2010 remake by Im Sang-soo, to suggest that Tae-ju, engaged in unpaid housework and family obligations, can be classified as a domestic 9  James Bell, “A Stake through the Heart,” Sight & Sound 19, no. 11 (2009): 43.

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laborer just like the maid. While the housemaid in the eponymous film remake kills herself spectacularly in front of the employer’s family as a way of avenging herself against those who oppress her, Taeju elects to become a vampire as a way to escape her domestic enslavement.10 Korea is a society, it seems, in which women commit suicide, return as ghosts to avenge their deaths, or choose vampirism over human life to escape gender- and class-based pressures. It is a society, indeed, that ‘recommends’ ghosthood. Thirst embodies the past and present of the K-vampire by having both the indigenous yeogui female figure retaliating against her mother-in-law’s oppression, and the reluctant male priest/vampire inhabiting the same film. In a longer work on this film, I compare Thirst’s representation of vampirism to that in Park Chan-wook’s subsequent film and Hollywood debut, Stoker (2013). Tae-ju looks back to the folkloric origins of the Korean vampire myth, and Sang-hyun opens the door to a whole succession of professionally minded, fully socially integrated male vampires. After Thirst, the diversity and range of vampires in the Korean contemporary film/media scene explode dramatically. There are parodic films such as You are My Vampire (Kŭdaen naŭi paemp’aiŏ, 2014), which depicts a down-on-her-luck woman who meets a man who seems suspiciously like a vampire. In the TV series Blood (KBS2, February–April 2015) the vampires are medical doctors who have been infected in their line of work, continuing the phenotype of the reluctant professional turned vampire. In this most recent decade of the K-vampire, vampires are living, eating, working, going to school, and building careers, all in full view in human society. One friendly home for these new K-vampires has been that very Korean of media, the webtoon. Webtoons are serialized online cartoons that draw upon the highly wired, highly Internet-based Korean youth culture and its interest in Japanese-style manga. There are quite a number of vampire webtoons, including Scholar Who Walks in the Night” (Pamŭl kŏnnŭn sŏnbi, 2012–present), a Chosun-dynasty scholar-vampire, Crepuscule (K’ŭrip’ŏsŭk’yul) (2011–present), who features a human with a vampire’s red eyes who lives amongst vampires, or Noblesse (Nobŭllesŭ) (2007–present), an aristocratic vampire who emerges out of 820 years of sleep to embark on a new life of adventure. All three of these sport male leads, but one very popular webtoon, Orange Marmalade (Orenji mamalleidŭ, 2011–2013) features a high-school age female vampire. Orange Marmalade is a vampire twist on the sunjung manhwa, romantic young love cartoons targeted at a primarily female audience. In Orange Marmalade the main character is a teenage vampire girl who has just transferred into a new 10  Soyoung Kim, “The State of Fantasy in Emergency: Fantasmatic Others in South Korean Films,” Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 265.

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high school and attracts the attention of the most popular guy in the school. She has moved around from school to school, forced to abandon neighborhoods in sequence when her identity as a vampire is revealed, and lives in fear that her new schoolmates will discover (and hate) her true self. She eats the school lunch but then vomits it up; she carries around packs of pigs’ blood, which she sips with a straw in the bathroom stall. She is exceptionally beautiful but termed an ice princess by her peers because she rejects all overtures of friendship, romantic or otherwise. This webtoon addresses questions of difference, discrimination, bullying, and teenage social dynamics by placing a vampire within a high school setting. Both Orange Marmalade and Scholar capitalized upon their popularity as webtoons to become serialized as television dramas in 2015 (Orange Marmalade on KBS2, Scholar on MBC), but, plagued by low ratings, neither succeeded in making the transition to television. While webtoons did not succeed in capturing a television audience, two quite successful television series take the K-vampire phenomenon to the next stage. Vampire Prosecutor 1, 2 (Paemp’aiŏ kŏmsa, OCN, October–December 2011, September–November 2012) and its sequel Vampire Detective (Paemp’aiŏ t’amjŏng, OCN, March–June 2016) both attained positive critical reviews and a significant viewership. In both cases, the central vampire figure is a male prosecutor/private detective who has unwittingly become a vampire while working in a professional capacity, and uses that ability to solve crimes. The prosecutor drinks the blood at the crime scene and the detective focuses a preternatural vision on the scene to recall/gain insight into the final moments. Like Sanghyun in Thirst or the doctors in Blood, these two have become vampires in the line of duty, and use their powers to do good. Along with the parodic (and earlier) film Vampire Cop Ricky (Hŭphyŏrhyŏngsa nadoyŏl, 2006), these very recent series show a new side of the vampire, as one who is not on the dark side of society but the opposite. In 2016 the K-vampire is taking on new roles and new features. The glossy world of Vampire Detective looks like it has come a long way from the folkloric kumiho, but even this TV series features a dark and vengeful female vixen vampire. In folklore, as we have seen, the Asian vampire is generally based upon the problems of female longing, of anti-patriarchal revenge, of childbirth and child loss. Most folkloric Western vampires are based upon the problem of ethnic conflict, bloody turf battles, and religious strife. In what might be an example of convergent evolution, the vampire is a staple of traditional folklore around the world. And yet, it is not the common characteristics but rather the ability to adapt to local color that gives the vampire tradition its flexibility and durability. What might it mean that the Western vampire is generally a male figure, and also often placed within a dominant social order, sometimes as an

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aristocrat boasting a storied lineage? By contrast, the Asian vampire is often much more emotionally expressive, crying aloud about the inequities of life that have led to her revisitations, and lamenting the structures of social oppression. How does this different gendering of the vampire across Eastern and Western traditions reveal fundamental differences in understanding the individual’s relationship to his or her society? Meanwhile, how do popular media like film, television, or webtoons demonstrate the convergence of Eastern and Western popular traditions within a shared transnational medium? Vampires, always cultural mirrors of our times, are facing a brave new world in which the mirrors reflect, ad infinitum, multifaceted, multiethnic, views of ourselves across time and across place. As Nina Auerbach writes in Our Vampires, Ourselves, “what vampires are in any given generation is a part of what I am and what my times have become.”11 References Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Baek, Moonim. “Close Encounter: ‘Horror Films’ on ‘A-rang’ Prototype Narrative (T’ŭkchip: Tamaech’e shidaeŭi munhak 1; Mijiwaŭi chou ‘Aranghyŏng’ yŏk’wi yŏnghwa).” Journal of Korean Modern Literature (Hyŏndae munhakŭi yŏn’gu) 17 (2001): 69–91. Bell, James. “A Stake through the Heart.” Sight and Sound 19, no. 11 (2009): 43. Byrne, Katherine. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kim, Soyoung and Chris Berry. “ ‘Suri suri masuri’: The Magic of the Korean Horror Film: A Conversation.” Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 1 (2000): 53–60. Kim, Soyoung. “The State of Fantasy in Emergency: Fantasmatic Others in South Korean Films.” Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 257–270. Lee, Myung-hyun. “A Study on the Expansion of the Tale of the Nine-tailed Fox and the Return of the Suppressed Others.” (Kumiho iyagiŭi hwakchanggwa ŏgaptoen t’ajaŭi kwihan), Journal of International Language and Literature (Kukcheŏmun) 8 (2012): 11–41. Senf, Carol A. The Vampire in 19th Century English Literature. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. Sohn, Hee-Jeong. “Return of Yeogui: Thinking on the Representation of Motherhood in the Recent Korean Horror Films (Yŏk’wi kwŏnhanŭn sahoe: 2002, 2003 nyŏn han’guk kongp’o yŏnghwawa mosŏngchaehyŏn).” Journal of Image & Film Studies (Yŏngsang yesul yŏn’gu) 4 (2004): 199–226. 11  Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1.

CHAPTER 21

Through a Trans-Vietnamese Feminist Lens The Cinemas of Vietnam and the Diaspora Lan Duong Abstract This thought piece insists on a feminist method of analysis that takes into account Vietnam’s history and continuing practice of collaboration to understand the nature of Vietnamese and diasporic subject formations. Framed by questions of gender and sexuality, trans-Vietnamese feminism advocates for rigorous readings of the textual and the geopolitical in the making of Vietnamese cultural politics. Thinking through such questions across trans-Pacific politics is especially relevant in the way in which films are being made and received in Vietnam today. It discusses several commercial and noncommercial films about the LGBTQ community and the importance of contextualizing the production and circulation of culture via the state and its neoliberal mode of governance. More than forty years after the war has ended, Vietnam collaborates with a number of different nation-states, including the U.S., to bolster its neoliberal agenda. These collaborations constitute part of the country’s strategies to preserve its cultural history and privatize its cultural industries. Collaboration, as this piece concludes, is a useful analytic for the study of cultural asymmetries within a transnational frame; but it can also serve as the grounds for a generative feminist praxis, one that is premised on academic and artistic work.

Keywords transnationalism – feminism – neoliberalism – cultural production – Vietnam – diaspora – gender – sexuality – collaboration

On May 22, 2016 President Obama traveled to Vietnam, a trip that was billed as historic because it was his first visit to the country as a sitting president.1 1  Kristin Donnelly, “President Obama Arrives in Vietnam for Historic Asian Trip,” NBC News. May 22, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/president-obama-arrives-vietnamhistoric-asia-trip-n578251 (accessed September 1, 2016).

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During the three-day trip, Obama spoke on human rights and the casualties sustained by both the U.S. and Vietnam as a result of the Vietnam War. He also found the time to beatbox with Vietnamese female rapper Suboi at a youth forum, and ate bún chả with Anthony Bourdain for a forthcoming episode of Bourdain’s television food show, Parts Unknown. Even though political and economic rapprochement had been established in 1994 when then-President Bill Clinton lifted the trade embargo against Vietnam, Obama’s trip during an election year needed to do a lot of work to secure the country’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and in lifting an arms’ ban against its former Cold War enemy. In an ironic twist, Vietnam is now free to buy U.S. armaments and thus protect itself from Chinese encroachment. Forty-one years after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the U.S. and Vietnam are no longer at odds with one another, rather, they are engaging in collaborations that would allow both countries (and their economies) to defend themselves against a “rising China.” This chapter begins at the present moment and moves backwards to illustrate the vicissitudes that mark the relations between Vietnam and the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries. Where before the trans-Pacific relationships between the two countries were predicated on war and the violence of military incursion, now their trans-Pacific partnerships are premised on trade and tariffs, with an emphasis on Vietnam’s increasing militarization. For the arms deal with the U.S. serves to reanimate Vietnam’s settler colonial history, beginning with its domination of the Champa kingdom in the 15th century and its later invasion of Cambodia in the late 1970s. Because the Ho Chi Minh Trail cut through parts of Laos, Vietnam established satellite sites in the neighboring country during the Vietnam War. By being one of Laos’ biggest foreign investors and communist allies today, the Vietnamese state has vested interests in the continued control of Laotian political and economic affairs.2 To be certain, Vietnamese history is an embattled one, marked by centuries of colonialism and foreign invasion and domination, but, as its history also shows, Vietnam has harbored imperial ambitions and engages in projects of forgetting that suppress the violence of these endeavors. Delineating these geopolitical arrangements of power in Vietnamese culture is one of the aims of trans-Vietnamese feminism, a method of analysis that looks at Vietnam and the vexed relations the country has with its foreign Others, which include Western countries like the U.S. and France, and the diaspora and its outerlying neighbors. Trans-Vietnamese feminism views Vietnam 2  Brian McCartan, “China and Vietnam Square Off in Laos.” Asia Times Online, August 30, 2008, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JH30Ae01.html (accessed September 1, 2016).

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as a site of foreign subjugation and of ‘subimperial formations’. Various scholars have discussed subimperialism in relation to South Korea’s relationship with Vietnam during and after the Vietnam War,3 while the call to identify both imperial and subimperial formations has been echoed most recently in an essay by Yen Le Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama, in which the authors advocate for a sustained critique of U.S. empire and its “trans-Pacific entanglements.”4 Following these authors, trans-Vietnamese feminism disentangles the transnational engagements between Vietnam and the diaspora to root out (cultural) nationalist designs of domination. It asks scholars to consider, in the wake of Vietnam’s past and present, the gendered facets of local, diasporic, and national politics. This mode of analysis focuses on those who are marginalized by such politics, as these treacherous subjects tend to be women, and ethnic and sexual minorities. This thought piece maps out the tenets of trans-Vietnamese feminism as it has been formulated in my book Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism, which analyzes how postwar Vietnamese writers and filmmakers situate themselves in relation to the politics of collaboration.5 This chapter presses for trans-Vietnamese feminism’s continuing relevance in viewing Vietnam in terms of its collaborative history, when the Vietnamese had to collaborate with foreign powers and/or with various groups who claimed ownership to the country. This history has produced oppositional subject positions for the Vietnamese: one is either a traitor or a patriot to the transnational family qua nation. What follows charts the transnational relations between Vietnam and diaspora through acts of collaboration as a way to: 1) contextualize the terms of exclusion found in state and community discourses; and 2) analyze the kinds of marginalized subjectivities that travel between here and there, home and abroad, in Vietnamese culture and politics. Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism, centered on the ways in which Vietnamese history has been subject to extended periods of Chinese and French colonialism, Japanese occupation and U.S. 3  Jin-Kyung Lee, “Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity: South Korea in the Vietnam War: 1965–1973.” positions: east asia cultures critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 655–682; Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 4  Yến Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama, “Transpacific Entanglements,” in Flashpoints in Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy Schlund-Vials (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming). 5  Lan Duong, Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).

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military involvement. It argued that a history of collaboration has haunted how Vietnamese cultural producers in France, the U.S., and Vietnam imagine their subjectivities in relation to this history. Films and literature produced in the aftermath of war highlighted the extent to which discourses about betrayal and treason limned the works and the reception of writers and directors such as Duong Thu Huong, Tran Anh Hung, and Le Ly Hayslip. Most expressly, Treacherous Subjects critiqued how the traitor was often heterosexualized and gendered female in national and community discourses. Decades after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, charges of collaboration scored the anxieties involved in the work of nation-building and community-making. In cultural form, the collaborator was figured as a female traitor, an outsider who consolidated collective solidarity against the menace of the treacherous subject. To fully unpack these implications, the book posited a distinctly feminist position that elucidated upon the discursive power of naming those who are outside or inside the community and nation-state. The book was intended to challenge the braided ideology of patriarchy and nationalism that undergirded Vietnamese discourses of nationalist and community politics. A flexible notion of collaboration continues to underlie this current scholarship. Collaboration forms the spine upon which Vietnamese writers and artists today work with one another and the state to produce a corpus that spans several regions. Seen through such trans-Pacific engagements, an emphasis on collaboration makes visible the neoliberal modes upon which contemporary Vietnamese statecraft is founded. Given the country’s ongoing ventures to forge improved relations with the diaspora and countries like the U.S., trans-Vietnamese feminism thus turns into a critical reading of transnational Vietnamese cultures, as Vietnam’s move towards political reconciliation and economic renovation impacts the way in which Vietnamese cultural productions are not only culturally hybrid but also transnationally produced and received in several sites at once. One component of a trans-Vietnamese feminist framework is to regard Vietnam and the diaspora in mutually constitutive terms. This allows a disabling of the notion that one could be mired in nostalgia and regressive politics, taking seriously the representational politics that both are invested in. While the state certainly has more power in the distribution of culture, both Vietnam and the diaspora must deal with the politics of the other and the presence of the traffic of people, goods, and funds traveling between such “imagined communities” today. Vietnam’s project of renovation began in 1987 when the 5th Party Congress of Vietnam voted to implement a series of economic reforms called Đổi Mới, or Renovation. Thereafter the country opened itself to the market economy and, eventually, to globalization, as Vietnam entered into a series of trade

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deals and memberships with nation-states and organizations to become an economic force within the Southeast Asian region. In 1995 Vietnam joined ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) forum. The U.S. and Vietnam finalized Bilateral Trade Agreements in 2000. In 2006 Vietnam gained membership to the WTO (World Trade Organization). Ten years later Vietnam has played an important role as the ‘Asian pivot,’ which has been a hallmark of Obama’s foreign trade policies in the region, while capital investment continues to pour in from Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, “giving an Asian face to wealth in Vietnam for the first time.”6 Đổi Mới was also an important benchmark in the revitalization of the country’s cultural arts and their privatization. It allowed for greater cultural exchange between Vietnam and other countries. For example, Vietnam’s foreign policies permit diasporic artists to return to the homeland and work with the government to produce their work. Once denounced as traitors for having left the homeland, Vietnamese diasporans are now “an inseparable part of the Vietnamese nation.”7 Immigration laws, which included the granting of fiveyear visas for Việt Kiều (returning Vietnamese) in 2007, fostered the improved standing for this community. In 2008 the state legislated for dual citizenship, which ensured that the older and one and a half generations of the diaspora could become naturalized citizens in the country in which they were born. Even while Hà Nội tries to “disappear refugee history,” the state’s gesture of inclusion towards the diaspora is perhaps best understood in economic terms, underscored by the way that remittances to Vietnam total in the billions.8 At last estimate the Vietnamese diaspora sent 12.25 billion dollars in remittances in 2015.9 These changes in how the state views the diaspora have transformed the Vietnamese film industry. Once film production was privatized in 2002, the 6  Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 8. 7  Collet and Furuya, “Contested Nation: Vietnam and the Emergence of Saigon Nationalism in the United States,” in The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans, ed. Christian Collet and Pei-Te Lien (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 56. 8  Carruthers and Huynh-Beattie, “Dark Tourism, Diasporic Memory and Disappeared History: The Contested Meaning of the Former Indochinese Refugee Camp at Pulau Galang,” in The Chinese-Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the Boatpeople, ed. Yuk Wah Chan (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 148. 9  “Vietnam Receives $12.25 Bln in Remittances in 2015,” Vietnam.Net. January 1, 2016, http:// english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/business/149900/vietnam-receives--12-25-bln-in-remittancesin-2015.html (accessed September 1, 2016).

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film industry began to incorporate immense pools of diasporic talent and funding; many directors, writers, and producers regularly return to, or remain in, Vietnam to make and screen their films. This is a remarkable feat, given the deep suspicions that the state harbored towards those who left Vietnam in 1975, and by those in the diaspora towards the state in the years following the end of the war. On April 30, 1975 the Vietnam War ended with the communist takeover of Saigon, the capital city in South Vietnam. The ‘reunification’ of the country included brutal re-education camps for former South Vietnamese soldiers and sex workers, the repossession of property and land in the region, and the forced migration of many urbanites to the countryside to New Economic Zones in the country’s surge towards a centrally planned economy. In the decades following the ‘fall’ of Saigon, countless southern Vietnamese, many of whom were former U.S. allies, fled in successive waves to countries like the U.S., France, and Australia, forming the Vietnamese diaspora.10 More than four decades into the formation of the diaspora, Vietnam’s media and cultural environments are profoundly shaped by the presence of the diaspora in the country. What was taboo – for example, doing business with the Vietnamese state in the postwar years – is now being narrated as a rite of passage for a young generation of Vietnamese Americans who return to remake the “American Dream in Vietnam.”11 This work applies a trans-Vietnamese feminist lens to the making of film, analyzing Vietnamese cinema through the dual optics of transnationalism and feminism. An insistence on the transnational aspects of this cinema contradicts the state’s renarration of the country’s film history as a nationalist one. Sights are set on the film archive in this instance, because it clearly embodies an exercise of state power. The films also represent the uneven developments that mark the country’s economic growth. For, while the film archive in Hà Nội – the country’s most important cinematic trove – tries to make legible the country’s film history through a story about war and revolution, it does so 10  To commemorate this day, the Vietnamese diaspora also call it and the events that commemorate the ‘fall’ of Saigon, Black April, in Vietnamese Ngày Quốc Hận, which translates as National Day of Resentment. In Việt Nam, however, this day is referred to as the Liberation of Sài Gòn, or Ngày Giải Phóng Sài Gòn. 11  See Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar, “Finding the American Dream Abroad?: Narratives of Return among 1.5 and Second Generation Vietnamese American Skilled Migrants in Vietnam,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 11, no. 2 (2016): 97. Also see “With Reverse Migration, Children of Immigrants Chase ‘American Dream’ Abroad,” Online Video, 10:49, from a segment produced by KCET on January 16, 2013, https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-con nected/with-reverse-migration-children-of-immigrants-chase-american-dream-abroad (accessed January 26, 2013).

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poorly (because film preservation is still a developing art), and by repressing those filmic narratives that run counter to an official story about the nation. Noticeably absent in the circulation of films in the country are narratives like southern Vietnamese films produced during the American War, diasporic Vietnamese films about the refugee or re-education experience of the four million overseas Vietnamese, many of whom fled the revolutionary regime, and the large number of colonial films produced before the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945. While this research is very site specific – the cultural productions of the Vietnamese, specifically in terms of film – trans-Vietnamese feminism represents a focalization on the relations of power that undergird the production and distribution of culture in general. Shu-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet argue that understanding local and global cultures through a framework of “minor transnationalism” foregrounds the hierarchies of power that structure cultural productions. Shih and Lionnet eschew the binary model of the local and global, which presupposes that “minorities engage with and against majority cultures in a vertical relationship of opposition and assimilation.”12 Tracking instead forms of participation that engage with the transnational in complex ways, they advance a study of the relations of power between minority groups and specify that “minor transnationalism” names “the creative interventions that networks of minoritized cultures produce within and across national boundaries.”13 We now turn to recent films and other discursive texts to outline how a framework of minor transnationalism and the analytics of trans-Vietnamese feminism clearly discern the historical and political contexts in which some films have been made and received. More specifically, I suggest that national and community discourses focusing on non-normative identities and desires signal a minor transnational relationality and a changing dynamic in the ways in which Vietnam and the diaspora imagine their political boundaries. This piece traces how notions of queerness in several discursive sites show the degree to which community and national bonds, themselves modeled on family relations, are presently contested and reformed. In 2015 Vietnam’s National Assembly approved a bill to recognize trans* subjects, allowing them to have gender reconstruction surgeries within the country

12   Francoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih. “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Shih and Lionnet (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) 7. 13  Ibid.

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and to register in accordance with their new identities.14 That same year the state legalized same-sex marriage.15 While indexing an important change in the state’s understanding of gender and sexuality, this mantle of progressivism must be understood alongside the country’s dismal record of human-rights abuses and the way it continues to crack down on expressions of dissent by ethnic minorities and political and religious activists.16 Even while the LGBTQ community faces discrimination and abuse at every level of Vietnamese society, the state’s stand on such issues promotes the country as one with liberal and progressive views. Indeed, Vietnam was cited in some news outlets as the first among Southeast Asian countries to adopt such policies.17 During this period, a spate of Vietnamese films, both commercial and noncommercial, trafficked in images of gay male sexuality and dealt with issues of trans* identities. (As far as I know, queer films exploring lesbian sexuality are rare; the closest to this kind of representation is in Bùi Thạc Chuyên’s Adrift, which intimates rather than actualizes sexual desires between women characters.) Treacherous Subjects talks about the resistant possibilities of a Vietnamese commercial cinema that visualizes queer desire on screen, as seen in films like Long-Legged Girls by Vũ Ngọc Đãng and Souls on Swings by Nguyễn Quang Dũng. After these two films were released in 2004 and 2006, respectively, other movies highlighting queer male sexuality followed: Trai Nhảy (Bar Boys) (2007) and Lost in Paradise (2011). The former film is directed by Lê Hoàng whose earlier Bar Girls (2003) set a precedent for the ways that contemporary Vietnamese films treated such salacious topics as AIDS, female prostitution, and drug use. Other smaller films touching on the lives of trans* women also appeared in this time frame. In 2014, Madam Phung’s Last Journey, directed by a young

14  “Vietnamese Transgender People Celebrate,” BBC News. November 26, 2015, http://www .bbc.com/news/world-asia-34929437 (accessed September 1, 2016). 15   John Boudreau and Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen, “Gay Weddings Planned as Vietnam Marriage Law Is Repealed,” Bloomberg. January 7, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/ news/articles/2015-01-07/gay-weddings-planned-as-vietnam-marriage-law-is-repealed (accessed September 1, 2016). 16  Seth Mydans, “Activists Convicted in Vietnam Crackdown on Dissent,” The New York Times, January 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/world/asia/activists-con victed-in-vietnam-crackdown-on-dissent.html (accessed March 14, 2014). 17  Thomas Maresca, “Vietnam: Flawed on Human Rights, but a Leader in Gay Rights,” The Atlantic, April 30, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/ vietnam-flawed-on-human-rights-but-a-leader-in-gay-rights/275413/ (accessed May 25, 2013).

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female director, Nguyễn Thị Thấm, debuted to a warm reception.18 This eightyseven-minute documentary follows the lives of gay and transgender circus performers. Even as the film’s subjects serve as queer spectacles in the frames of the film, Madam Phung nevertheless illuminates the ways that trans* subjects try to survive in a homophobic and transphobic society. Finding Phong (2015) explores similar terrain by engaging with the themes of traveling and tourism. This time, however, a trans* subject directs the camera’s eye, as she narrates and documents her transition after undergoing gender affirmation surgery in Thailand. The film’s treatment of medical tourism and transgender identity are cross-hatched by issues of class and the complex of queer and transgendered characters who make up Phong’s rich social life. As the film shows, these groups are marginalized in a heteropatriarchal society by a host of intersectional factors like class, gender, age, and sexuality. What these films suggest is that while the Vietnam of U.S. imagination still carries the burden of failure and shame that comes along with being known as America’s first failed war, queer notions of failure and precarity underlie some of these latest works about the trans* community originating from Vietnam.19 Placed against state narratives of the country’s success and progress, economic development, and political fortitude, Madam Phung’s Last Journey and Finding Phong dramatize the lived realities of minority subjects who experience firsthand the rigidities and limitations of a postsocialist regime. A trans-Vietnamese feminist methodology, one organized by the coordinates of gender and sexuality, sharpens the ways in which such films can be analyzed in terms of both their text and context, both in Vietnam and the diaspora. Finding Phong eventually found its way to southern California where it was screened at the Viet Film Fest in 2016. Since its inception in 2003 Viet Film Fest has been an important venue in Orange County for the screening of films about Vietnam and the diaspora, drawing hundreds of attendees at different showings each year. The screening of the film in this context is of note because of the ways that it brought out LGBTQ activists in the Vietnamese American community to screen and discuss the film. Co-sponsored by Viet Rainbow of Orange County (VROC), the Q&A panel that followed the film screening included participants who flew in from Vietnam, Lê Anh Phong herself and the producers (Gerald Herman and Nicole Pham), and activist Tran Phuc from 18  “Transgender Film Hits Big Screen,” Việt Nam News, December 26, 2014, http://vietnamnews.vn/life-style/264496/transgender-film-hits-big-screen.html#0ul2mhtutZcw9O4e.97 (accessed June 17, 2016). 19  Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

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VROC, a local community organization that advocates for LGBTQ inclusivity and issues in the context of Vietnamese American politics. It is worth emphasizing that the carving out of these community spaces via Viet Film Fest is necessary and demonstrates the extent to which the Vietnamese American community is heterogeneous and diverse in terms of class, political ideology, and sexual orientation. The notion of sexual diversity is often muted in community discourses that sentimentalize Vietnamese American formations of tradition and family as bulwarks against change. Nowhere is this more apparent during the festivities surrounding the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, or Tết, when Little Saigon in Westminster, California, becomes the site for parades and festivals that privilege the cultural traditions (and military history) of its Vietnamese American population. In fact, the conflict between community values and the LBGTQ community came to a head in 2013 when the parade’s organizer, the Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California, banned LGBTQ groups from participating in the parade.20 Up until that year the Tết event was financed by the city of Westminster but this funding was later privatized when the city could not afford to pay for it. The banning controversy sparked protests by LGBTQ activists like VROC, who emphasized their vital membership of the ‘community’ in terms of respectability and cultural contribution.21 The group’s participation was reinstated the following year with the help of Westminster politicians and legal advocates, but the protest and the discourse surrounding it left its mark, indicating the ways that community bonds were being tested.22 Indeed, in 2014 the neighboring city of Garden Grove elected its first Vietnamese American mayor, Bao Nguyen, who came out when the Supreme Court overturned the prohibition of same-sex marriages

20   See Roxana Kopetman, “Vietnamese Americans to LBGT: Don’t Join the Parade,” Orange County Register. November 15, 2013, http://www.ocregister.com/articles/parade537365-vietnamese-lgbt.html (accessed September 1, 1016). 21  I took part in the protests in Westminster in 2013 and was told to wear an áo dài, a traditional Vietnamese dress for women. We also held up posters that delineated Vietnamese LGBTs like the acclaimed poet Xuân Diệu. 22  Phillip Zonkel, “Gay Community Allowed in Vietnamese Lunar New Year Parade,” CBS Los Angeles, February 1, 2014, http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/02/01/gay-communityreturns-to-vietnamese-lunar-new-year-parade/ (accessed September 1, 2016); and Anh Do, “In Little Saigon, Evolving Views on Gay Rights,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ff-viet-same-sex-20150206-story.html (accessed September 1, 2016).

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in 2015.23 Such transformations in the public make-up of this community mark an important moment in Vietnamese American politics, which had involved mostly anticommunist protests surrounding historical and cultural representations to now include intra-communal demonstrations of loyalty and treason by those who dispute community membership along the lines of gender and sexuality.24 Trans-Vietnamese feminism juxtaposes these competing discourses in Vietnam and the Vietnamese American community to put in relief the kinds of organized efforts to include and exclude certain groups, and the strategies of resistance that challenge such expressions of power. Highlighting modes of resistance is important in light of what Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins underscore in their discussion of trans-Pacific studies. As they note, this emergent field tracks, often against the weight of history, the (im)mobilities of bodies, ideas, and capital that crisscross the transPacific. They explain further that, “the concept of the transpacific not only involves trauma, haunting, and marginalization but also empowerment, enrichment and expansion.”25 Similarly trans-Vietnamese feminism puts postwar Vietnam and its management of power under a microscope, analyzing the methods by which Vietnamese subjects mobilize and negotiate their lived and historical realities. At the start of this century, Vietnam has collaborated with a number of different nation-states, including the U.S., to bolster its neoliberal agenda. These 23  Stephanie Bai, “Bao Nguyen, First Vietnamese-American Mayor of Major U.S. City, is Running for Congress.” NBC News, November 18, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/ asian-america/bao-nguyen-first-vietnamese-american-mayor-major-u-s-city-n462421 (accessed September 1, 2016). 24  Although not meant to be exhaustive, this list of critical works on Vietnamese American protests represents some of the diverse arguments surrounding this community and its politics. See C. N. Le, “ ‘Better Dead Than Red,’ ” in Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S.: The Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees, ed. Ieva Zaka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Thuy Vo Dang, “The Cultural Work of Anticommunism,” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): 65–86; Nhu-Ngoc Ong and David Meyer, “Protest and Political Incorporation: Vietnamese American Protests in Orange County, California, 1975–2001,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3, no. 1 (2008): 78–107; and Lan Duong and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, “Vietnamese American Art and Community Politics,” Journal of Asian American Studies 15, no. 3 (2012): 241–269. For a more recent overview, see Tuan Hoang, “From Reeducation Camps to Little Saigons: Historicizing Vietnamese Diasporic Anticommunism,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 11, no. 2 (2016): 43–95. 25  Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins, “Introduction: Transpacific Studies: Critical Perspectives on an Emerging Field,” in Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, ed. Hoskins and Nguyen (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 13.

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collaborations constitute part of the country’s strategies to preserve its cultural history and privatize its cultural industries. A trans-Vietnamese feminist theory enables us to think through how these exchanges have affected Vietnamese subjects at the macro-level and are reproduced at the level of the cultural text itself. Ultimately, trans-Vietnamese feminism is a call not only for transnational feminist cultural analyses but also for transnational feminist collaborations as the bases for possibility in the realm of art and politics.26 References Adrift. Directed by Bùi Thạc Chuyên. Performed by Đổ Thị Hải Yến. Acrobates Film and Vietnam Feature Film Studio, 2012. Film. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso, 1983. Bai, Stephanie. “Bao Nguyen, First Vietnamese-American Mayor of Major U.S. City, is Running for Congress.” NBC News, November 18, 2015. http://www.nbcnews.com/ news/asian-america/bao-nguyen-first-vietnamese-american-mayor-major-u-scity-n462421. Accessed September 1, 2016. Bar Girls. Directed by Lê Hoàng. USA: Tam Giác Vàng Productions, 2003. DVD. Boudreau, John, and Tu Uyen Dieu Nguyen. “Gay Weddings Planned as Vietnam Marriage Law Is Repealed.” Bloomberg. January 7, 2015. http://www.bloomberg .com/news/articles/2015-01-07/gay-weddings-planned-as-vietnam-marriage-law-isrepealed. Accessed September 1, 2016. Carruthers, Ashley, and Boi Tran Huynh-Beattie. “Dark Tourism, Diasporic Memory and Disappeared History: The Contested Meaning of the Former Indochinese Refugee Camp at Pulau Galang.” In The Chinese-Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the Boatpeople, ed. Yuk Wah Chan, 147–160. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Collet, Christian, and Hiroko Furuya. “Contested Nation: Vietnam and the Emergence of Saigon Nationalism in the United States.” In The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans, ed. Christian Collet and Pei-Te Lien, 56–73. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. Dang, Thuy Vo. “The Cultural Work of Anticommunism in the San Diego Vietnamese American Community.” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): 65–86. 26  Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 349–363; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique,” Signs 38, no. 4 (2013): 967–991.

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Do, Anh. “In Little Saigon, Evolving Views on Gay Rights.” Los Angeles Times. Feb 1, 2015. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ff-viet-same-sex-20150206-story .html. Accessed September 1, 2016. Donnelly, Kristin. “President Obama Arrives in Vietnam for Historic Asia Trip.” NBC News, May 22, 2016. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/president-obamaarrives-vietnam-historic-asia-trip-n578251. Accessed September 1, 2016. Duong, Lan. Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Duong, Lan, and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud. “Vietnamese American Art and Community Politics: An Engaged Feminist Perspective.” Journal of Asian American Studies 15, no. 3 (2012): 241–269. Espiritu, Yến Lê, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama. “Transpacific Entanglements.” In Flashpoints in Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy Schlund-Vials. New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming. Finding Phong. Directed by Swann Dubus and Phuong Thao Tran. Performed by Lê Anh Phong. Produced by Nicole Pham and Gerald Herman, 2015. Film. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides.” In Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan and Minoo Moallem, 349–363. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Hoang, Kimberly Kay. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Hoang, Tuan. “From Reeducation Camps to Little Saigons: Historicizing Vietnamese Diasporic Anticommunism.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 11, no. 2 (2016): 43–95. Kopetman, Roxana. “Vietnamese Americans to LBGT: Don’t Join the Parade.” Orange County Register. November 15, 2013. http://www.ocregister.com/articles/parade537365-vietnamese-lgbt.html. Accessed September 1, 2016. Le, C. N. “ ‘Better Dead Than Red’: Anti-Communist Politics Among Vietnamese Americans.” In Anti-Communist Minorities in the US: The Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees, ed. Ieva Zake, 189–210. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Lee, Jin-Kyung. “Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity: South Korea in the Vietnam War: 1965–1973.” positions: east asia cultures critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 655–682. Lionnet, Francoise, and Shu-Mei Shih. “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally.” In Minor Transnationalism, ed. Shu-Mei Shih and Francoise Lionnet, 1–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Long-Legged Girls. Directed by Vũ Ngọc Đãng. Performed by Anh Thư. Hãng Phim Thiên Ngân, 2004. Film.

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Lost in Paradise. Directed by Vũ Ngọc Đãng. Performed by Lương Mạnh Hả. BHD Co. and Vietnam Media Corp & Vietnam Studio, 2011. Film. McCartan, Brian. “China and Vietnam Square Off in Laos.” Asia Times Online, August 30, 2008. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JH30Ae01.html. Accessed September 1, 2016. Madam Phung’s Last Journey. Directed by Nguyễn Thị Thấm. Icarus Films, 2014. Maresca, Thomas. “Vietnam: Flawed on Human Rights, but a Leader in Gay Rights.” The Atlantic, April 30, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/ vietnam-flawed-on-human-rights-but-a-leader-in-gay-rights/275413/. Accessed May 25, 2013. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique.” Signs 38, no. 4 (2013): 967–991. Mydans, Seth. “Activists Convicted in Vietnam Crackdown on Dissent.” New York Times, January 9, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/world/asia/activistsconvicted-in-vietnam-crackdown-on-dissent.html. Accessed March 14, 2014. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nguyen, Viet Thanh, and Janet Hoskins. “Introduction: Transpacific Studies: Critical Perspectives on an Emerging Field.” In Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, ed. Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, 1–38. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. Nguyen-Akbar, Mytoan. “Finding the American Dream Abroad?: Narratives of Return among 1.5 and Second Generation Vietnamese American Skilled Migrants in Vietnam.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 11, no. 2 (2016): 96–121. Ông, Như-Ngọc T., and David S. Meyer. “Protest and Political Incorporation: Vietnamese American Protests in Orange County, California, 1975–2001.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3, no. 1 (2008): 78–107. Souls on Swings. Directed by Nguyễn Quang Dũng. Performed by Johnny Trí Nguyễn and Anh Thư. HK Films, 2006. Film. Trai Nhảy (Bar Boys). Directed by Lê Hoàng. USA: Raymond Movie and Hãng Thiên Ngân, 2007. DVD. “Transgender Film Hits Big Screen.” Vietnam News. December 26, 2014. http://viet namnews.vn/life-style/264496/transgender-film-hits-big-screen.html#joKum5 cpl6XkKoGz.97. Accessed June 17, 2016. “Vietnamese Transgender People Celebrate Win.” BBC News, November 26, 2015. http:// www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34929437. Accessed September 1, 2016. “Vietnam Receives $12.25 Bln in Remittances in 2015.” Vietnam.Net, January 1 2016. http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/business/149900/vietnam-receives--12-25-bln-inremittances-in-2015.html. Accessed September 1, 2016.

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“With Reverse Migration, Children of Immigrants Chase ‘American Dream’ Abroad,” KCET. Online Video, 10:43. January 16, 2013. http://www.kcet.org/shows/socal_con nected/content/economy/with-reverse-migration-children-of-immigrants-chaseamerican-dream-abroad.html. Accessed January 26, 2013. Zonkel, Phillip. “Gay Community Allowed in Vietnamese Lunar New Year Parade.” CBS Los Angeles. February 1, 2014. http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/02/01/gaycommunity-returns-to-vietnamese-lunar-new-year-parade/. Accessed September 1, 2016.

Index activism: breast cancer activism 311–312, 313, 314 Chinese woman 89–90, 132 international activism 81 pacifist activism 89 Pankhurst, Sylvia 78, 80, 81, 89 political activism 132 Adams, Stevan Funaki 390 adoption 250 adoptee affect 229, 240 adoption agency 222, 233 Arrival (2016) 225 biological family 221, 222, 225, 229, 232–233, 235, 236, 238 critiques of 223 economy and 222, 223, 232 Finding Seoul (2011) 225 from Korea 111, 223n4, 224, 225 from South Korea 221, 222–223 Passing Through (1998) 224–225 scholarship on 224 transnational adoption industrial complex  222 transnational and transracial adoption  221, 222–223, 224, 237 see also akaDan; child; Matthews, Dan affect 6, 322, 337, 396, 400 adoptee affect 229, 240 affective economy 6, 196, 198–199, 203, 208, 209n41 affective formation 25, 32 affective project 196, 208 emotional knowledge 25 Japan 196, 198, 215 masculinity and 230 mothering 246, 247, 252 U.S. citizenship 204–205 Aid China Campaign 79 Aikau, Eddie 391 akaDan (2014) 221, 222, 225, 230–237, 240–241 in South Korea 237–240 soft masculinity in 226–227, 229–237, 238, 240 see also adoption; Matthews, Dan

Alien Land Law 200, 201, 209, 214, 215 Japanese women 202n17 see also Japanese Associations of America aloha 140, 144, 155, 156, 394 aloha state apparatuses 144 Silva, Noenoe: Aloha Betrayed 371 amalgamation policy 45–54, 66 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 152 American Guardian Association 66n64, 168, 182–193 American Studies 3, 26 Americanism, 100% 126 see also World War I Americas 8, 21, 22n5, 22–23n6, 24, 248 ‘amphibious’ qualities 349, 361 annexation: anti-annexation campaign in Hawaiʻi  117, 120–121, 126 Hawaiʻi, annexation to the United States  117, 118, 146 Japanese annexation of Korea 111 see also anti-annexation campaign in Hawaiʻi Anthony, Susan B. 118, 129 Archard, David 171, 172 archive 16, 62 archival research/recovery 5, 10, 11–12, 13, 14, 16 digital archive 13, 17 photographic archive 8 print archive 13, 16, 17 Arguilla, Lyd 16 Arvin, Maile 25 Asian American Studies 3, 5, 20, 22, 29, 32–33, 248 Atcherley, Mary Kinimaka Ha‘aheo 134 ʻAtenisi 392 Atlantic World 3 Austro-Oceanic realms 8 Bainimarama, Frank 389 bakla 15, 26, 28 see also LGBTQ Balce, Nerissa 174, 175, 180 Baldasano, Maria de la Cruz 262, 263

424 Baldwin, Harry Alexander 130 Banet-Weiser, Sarah 259, 280 Barretto, Manolita 274 Beachcomber 367, 369–370, 371, 375–376, 377, 380n47, 385 see also Los Angeles beauty 6, 239, 296, 309, 313 footbinding and 292, 293, 296, 297 maganda 268–269 mestiza child/girl’s beauty 168, 190, 192 notions of 268–269 see also body; Filipina beauty pageants Beck, Israel 262, 263 Bell, Roger 135 Benedicto, Bobby 15 benevolent assimilation 165, 168, 184, 192, 204n24, 260, 262, 264 see also Philippines Benitez, Paz Marquez 16, 267n35, 275, 278 Best, Jonathan 179–180, 181, 184n48 Philippine Picture Postcards 175 betrayal 332, 410 Beyer, Henry Otley 60–62, 63, 64, 65 Beyer, Lingayu 60, 61–62 binationalism 92 see also internationalism; nationalism; transnationalism blood 389, 394, 395 mixing of 183 ‘Native Hawaiian’ 115n3 protecting (white) American blood 168, 182–193 vampire 398, 399, 400, 401, 403, 405 body 6 Chinese female body 285, 289, 296, 303 commodification of 143, 144, 150, 153, 155, 222, 321, 323 depoliticized body 141 desire and 145 female body 303, 316, 318, 319, 323, 328, 330 Lei Stand Protest 141, 147 male body 328 mestiza body 272, 273 native female body 141, 143–144, 174 nudity 58, 173, 174, 179, 328, 330, 367, 383 photography and 179, 323, 328, 330 racialized body 181–182, 328

Index sexualization/sexualized body 141, 148, 181–182, 328 surveillance of Asian female bodies  321–31 see also beauty; desire; Filipina beauty pageants; footbinding; sexuality Bordallo, Ricky 389 bound feet see footbinding boxing 230, 351–353, 363 Boys over Flowers (2009) 230 Brady, Kat 153 breast cancer 6 breast cancer activism 311–312, 313, 314 causes of 307, 310, 312–314 South Korea 307, 308, 309–311, 314 Trans-Pacific World and 308, 313, 314 treatment 311 Buckland, Ralph Kent 166–167, 168, 170, 178, 179, 192 Burns, Lucy Mae San Pablo 13 Byrd, Jodi 22 Camacho, Keith 22, 24 Campbell, Abigail Kuaihelani Maipinepine  120–121, 126 Cannell, Fennella 15 capitalism 26, 52, 145, 147, 149, 154, 157, 362 colonialism and 158 expansion of 4 female labor and 167n4, 319 global capitalism 319, 323 patriarchy and 317–318 prison and 153, 155 transnational corporate capitalism 318 Trans-Pacific World 21 Western capitalism 10, 119 Capozzola, Christopher 175, 178, 179, 180 Carlos, Vicente 279 cartes de visite 180, 181, 190 Castañeda, Claudia 181–182 Castle, Alfred Lowery 126n41 Castle, Beatrice 126n41 Catt, Carrie Chapman 114, 115, 118, 121–122, 123, 131n60, 132 Chiang Kai-shek, Generalissimo 94, 96, 99, 100, 101 Chiang Kai-shek, Madame 77, 88, 99

Index child 6, 393, 395 child sexuality 172n17, 187, 188–189 China as child 96, 98 citizenship 202 Filipina/o as child 92, 165, 167–168, 169–182, 193 girl, sale into marriage 188, 191 hypersexualed child 6, 168, 169–182, 176, 177, 190–191, 192–193 immoral mixed-race child 188–189, 192; mestiza child/girl’s beauty 168, 190, 192 mixed-race child 41, 66, 183, 222 neglected child 213 racialized child 181–182, 188–192 sexual exploitation of 178, 189n58 victim of war 86, 87 see also adoption China: Aid China Campaign 79 China as child 96, 98 China Campaign Committee 84 Chinatown 202n20, 295, 368, 369 Chinese exclusion laws 6, 284, 285, 287, 303 Chinese merchant 21, 285, 288n7, 298, 300, 301 coaching book/document 302–303 democracy 89, 94, 101 see also Chinese woman; footbinding; Manchuria; Pankhurst, Sylvia; Romulo, Carlos; Sino-Japanese War The China Mystique 29 Chinese woman 6, 99, 323 activism 89–90, 132 Chinese female body 285, 289, 296, 303 suffrage 121, 132 see also footbinding; Pankhurst, Sylvia Chua, Amy: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother  248, 251 see also mothering civilizing 63, 140, 144, 146, 155, 351 civilizing mission 116–117, 118, 351 Clegg, Arthur 85 Cleveland, Grover 117 Cold War 108, 144, 216, 223, 360, 361, 367, 368, 385, 408 Cold War Orientalism 368 collaboration 33, 46, 407, 409–410

425 Colman, Harriet Angeline Castle 126 colonialism 15, 108, 111, 150, 159, 178, 181, 320, 346, 395, 408, 409 Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism 371 anti-colonialism 31, 32, 157 British colonization 43 capitalism and 21, 158 colonial hypersexualization of the native  168, 173 colonial mentality 258 colonial modernity 343, 346–349, 359n49, 361, 362 colonial state 29, 60, 65 colonization 7, 20, 23, 32, 49, 343, 348, 355 colonization of gender 27, 145 contemporary colonialism 140, 142, 144, 147, 155, 281 empire/imperialism 343 internalized colonialism 258 neocolonial project/logics 25, 115, 108, 143, 144, 155, 222 settler colonialism 20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 29, 30, 39, 65, 66, 115, 137 Spanish colonization 27, 182, 353 U.S. colonization/colonialism 7, 24, 26, 30, 39, 40, 51, 165, 168, 173, 174, 175, 191, 192, 361 white settler colonialism and women’s rights in Hawaiʻi 116–119 see also empire; imperialism commodification 316 body, commodification of 143, 144, 150, 153, 155, 222, 321, 323 commodity production 142, 143, 144, 150, 158 cultural commodification 140, 143, 147, 156 music 230 prison 140, 143, 151–155 tourism 140, 143 woman, commodification of 144, 317, 321, 322, 323, 332 communism 82, 223, 408, 412 community 249, 409, 410, 413 American community 40, 52, 53, 58, 62, 63

426 community (cont.) Asian American community 26, 230 community knowledge 25 Filipino national community 267, 268 missionary community 119 Vietnamese American community 417 white community 125 Corio, Silvio 83 correctional facility: beds in 152 California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation 151 Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) 151, 152, 153, 154, 156 Eloy Detention Center 151 O’ahu Community Correctional Center  152 La Palma Correctional Center 151 Red Rock Correctional Center 151 Saguaro Correctional Center 151–152 Women’s Community Correctional Center 152 see also criminal justice system; incarceration; inmate; prison/private prison Council of National Defense 125 criminal justice system 145, 152, 155 see also correctional facility Crisostomo, Manny 392 culture 203, 395 American culture 66, 192, 294, 347, 351, 366, 368, 377, 379 cultural commodification 140, 143, 147, 156 cultural dispossession 146 cultural labor 31, 147 food and drink culture 366, 367, 368, 377, 379 Hawaiian culture 31, 146, 148 Japan 212, 351 Malay culture 398 Maoli culture 149, 158 media culture 231 mobility of 7, 347, 407, 410, 413 Philippines 55, 60, 65, 172, 175, 279, 353, 355 South Korea 312, 313 Western culture 228, 353, 396 see also popular culture Curtis, Cliff 392

Index De Brum, Tony 389 DeLisle, Christina 22, 24 De los Reyes, Pacita 278 democracy 309, 358 China 89, 94, 101 Democrat 117, 123, 130, 184 Hawaiʻi, Democratic Party 119, 121 Pankhurst, Sylvia 80, 84, 88, 89, 94, 101 Philippines 184, 262 U.S. democracy 25, 28, 95, 223 Denetdale, Jennifer Nez 27 desire/desirability 144, 145, 192, 360 American men and 57 body and 145 woman’s sexual desire 178 see also sexuality diaspora 8, 249, 251, 350 Hawaiian diaspora 7 Korean diaspora 107, 227, 238 Okinawan diaspora 7 South Korean diaspora 240 Vietnam and 409, 410, 411–12, 413, 415 Diaz, Robert 13 digital scholarship 14 dispossession 23, 30, 149, 150, 154 cultural dispossession 146 political dispossession 146 documentary 224n8, 225, 415 see also akaDan Đổi Mới (Renovation) 410, 411 domesticity 121, 135, 210, 211, 215, 326 Don the Beachcomber 366, 373, 384 Dosser, William 59, 62, 63, 65 Dowsett, Wilhelmine K. Widemann 119–120, 123, 126, 128, 131–132, 133, 134 Duff, Alan 391 Eames, Aldice Gould 170–171 economy 362, 377 adoption and 222, 223, 232 affective economy 6, 196, 198–199, 203, 208, 209n41 global economy 4, 155, 147, 158, 320, 321 globalizing labor economy 107, 108, 110, 112 GRIC 30 Hawaiian tourism 144, 146–147, 157 Japan 200n11 sexual economy 44, 46–48, 57, 323

Index Vietnam 408, 410–411, 412 see also remittance Egan, R. Danielle 189 empire 4, 5–6, 14, 172, 259, 308, 343, 347 empire building 65 Japanese Empire 78n1, 107, 108, 111, 210, 348 U.S. empire 23, 44, 45, 141, 148, 149, 151, 159, 171, 174, 264, 360, 409 see also colonialism; imperialism Engstrom, Erika 227, 228, 230, 239 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement  258 Enos, Solomon 392 entertainment 212, 227–228, 378 Filipina entertainer 355, 361 Filipino entertainer 7, 343, 344, 350–351, 355, 358, 359 Japan 344, 355 Equal Rights Committee 89 Ethiopia 79–80, 83–84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 101 Ethiopia News 80, 83, 85, 88, 90 Faʻafafine 393 Fajardo, Kale 15 family 251, 314, 393, 395, 413 biological family 221, 222, 225, 229, 232–233, 235, 236, 238 family connections 261, 269, 275, 279 family labor 111, 197n2, 202, 206, 375 family migration 110, 111 feminism and 247, 249, 250, 251 Filipino family 50, 53, 65–66 immigration law and 27, 201–202 Japanese family 202–203, 211–213 mixed-race family 62, 65–66, 206 transnational family 28, 111, 251, 409 see also marriage fascism 78, 79 anti-fascism 89 feminism and anti-fascism 77, 81, 88, 89, 91 Pankhurst, Sylvia: anti-fascist feminism  77, 78–79, 80, 82–91, 101 felt theory 25 feminism 143, 149, 188, 228–229, 278, 288n8 anti-fascism and 77, 81, 88, 89, 91 eco-feminism 313 family and 247, 249, 250, 251

427 indigenous feminism 25, 158n40 native feminism 29 transnational feminism 250, 418 trans-Pacific feminism 246, 248, 249, 250, 251 trans-Vietnamese feminism 7, 407–418 passim see also Gosling, Ryan; Pankhurst, Sylvia; suffrage Fernando, Gilda Cordero 16 fertility 190, 250, 251 see also pronatalism; reproductive politics; sexuality Filipina beauty pageants 6, 257–261, 267–280 beauty and politics 258, 261, 280 beauty, notions of 268–269 beauty queen 257, 259, 267, 270, 273–274, 275, 277, 278, 279 family connections 261, 269, 275, 279 Filipina womanhood 269, 270, 272, 274 Manila Carnival 259, 260–266, 267, 268, 269–270, 272, 274, 276, 277, 278, 280, 281 Manila Carnival Association 260–262, 264n23 Manila Carnival Queen Contest 259, 263, 267, 269, 277, 280 markers of 270–271, 274–275 nationalism 6, 257, 259, 267–277, 280–281 Under House Bill 5691 280 see also beauty; Miss Philippines; Miss Universe; Philippines folklore 396, 397, 405 footbinding 6, 284–285, 290, 291 anti-footbinding 293, 294–295, 296, 303 beauty and 292, 293, 296, 297 female body 285, 303 footbinding in China 287, 289–293 footbinding in the United States 284, 286, 294–298, 303 ‘Golden lilies’ 284, 285, 291, 298–303 history of 287–288, 303 meanings of 292–293, 295–296, 298–303 self-identity 286 small feet 293, 296–297, 301, 303 U.S. immigration policy 287, 298–303 X-ray of bound feet 290 see also body; China

428 Forbes, Cameron 185, 186, 261 Frear, Walter F. 121 Freud, Sigmund 172n17 Fujikane, Candace 22, 32 Garcia, J. Neil 15 gender 4–5, 349, 393 colonization of 27, 145 gender hierarchies 5, 226, 378, 379 gender identity 7, 225, 303 gender inequality 143 gender norms 231, 270, 278, 330, 355 gender performance 227, 230 gender politics 24, 81, 90, 101, 116, 117, 123, 137, 216, 268 gender privilege of white American men  42 gender roles 4, 107, 112, 199, 215, 239, 257 gender-sexual deviance 42, 43 gender socialization 228, 231 gendered division of labor 203, 319 gendered internationalism 77, 88, 91, 100–101, 102 gendered labor recruitment 26 sexuality and 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 22, 28, 39, 173, 189, 407, 414, 415 Trans-Pacific World and 3, 4–5, 8, 10, 11–13, 15, 17 U.S. monoracial gender system 52 see also LGBTQ; sexuality Germany/German 84, 85, 87, 90, 99, 120, 125, 126, 297, 399 Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) 30 girl see child Gloria, Angela Manalang 16 Gollancz, Victor 84 Gosling, Ryan 228 graphic narrative 7, 316–317, 319, 320, 322, 337 Grimshaw, Patricia 121 Gulick, Sidney 203–204, 205 Gutierrez, Ariadna 257 Halau Na Kamalei 392 Hallyu 227 Harvey, Steve 257 Hattig, John 390 Hau, Caroline Sy 13, 15

Index Hau‘ofa, Epeli 22 Hawai‘i: 1.5 Generation 132 Democratic Party 119, 121 Hawaiian Allied War Relief Committee  125 Hawaiian Organic Act (1900) 118, 128 Hawaiian culture 31, 146, 148 Hawaiian diaspora 7 Hawaiian Renaissance (1970s) 157 Hawaiian/South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges 366, 368–369, 373, 375–379, 382–385 Honolulu International Airport 141, 147, 148 Kingdom of Hawai‘i 117, 120 music 379, 381–383 Newlands Resolution 117 paradise 31, 32, 144, 148, 149, 158, 380 Republic of Hawai‘i 117, 118 State of Hawaiʻi 140, 142, 144–145, 146, 148, 150–153, 154, 155, 156, 158–159 see also commodification; correctional facility; Hui Hawai‘i Aloha ‘Aina; Hui Hawai‘i Aloha ‘Aina o Na Wahine; lei; Lili‘uokalani, Queen; Native Hawaiian Hawkes, Gail 189 Hays, Sharon 251 Healy, David 172–173 Helu, Futa 392 Hereniko, Vilsoni 391 heteronormativity 11, 226, 228, 240 Hidalgo, Cristina Pantoja 16 Hina, John 392 Hoganson, Kristin 24 Hokuleʻa 391 Holt, John Dominis 391 Home Rule/Home Ruler/Home Rule Party  116, 118, 123 homesteading 40, 45, 50, 53, 64 homophobia 149n20, 239, 385 Hsing-Chen, Kuan 15 Hu Chow Yuan 79 Hui Hawai‘i Aloha ‘Aina (Hawaiian Patriotic League) 120 Hui Hawai‘i Aloha ‘Aina o Na Wahine (Women’s Hawaiian Patriotic League)  121

Index human trafficking 6, 316, 317, 319, 321, 334 hypersexualization see sexuality Igorot, inhabitants of northern Luzon, Philippines 40, 58, 59, 181 Ihimaera, Witi 391 Ileto, Reynaldo 13–14 Imada, Adria Lyn 22, 31, 32, 143, 149 immigration: 1.5 Generation 132 1924 Immigration Act 199, 215, 374 1952 McCarran-Walter Act 216n68 American immigration officials 284, 285, 286, 287, 298, 300, 301, 303, 323 Chinese exclusion laws 6, 284, 285, 287, 303 family migration 110, 111 immigration law and family 27, 201–202 immigration laws 27, 28, 411 Japanese exclusion laws 201, 374 labor migration 109, 110, 115, 200–201, 212–213, 299, 321, 350, 374 marriage migration 110 see also Alien Land Law; United States, immigration law/policy imperialism 173 anti-imperialism 39, 81 European imperialism 22 modernity and 343, 346, 347 racism 159, 265, 320 subimperial formation 409 U.S. imperialism 22, 43, 44, 46, 149, 154, 159, 258, 259, 371 see also colonialism; empire incarceration 5, 30, 140, 154 carceral state 143 civilizing 140, 146, 155 neocolonial logics of 143, 144 a strategy of containment 140, 146 see also correctional facility; inmate; prison/private prison inmate: female inmate 153 interstate transfer 5, 153 male inmate 153 see also correctional facility; incarceration; prison/private prison inter-Asia relations 8

429 International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA) 224, 232, 234, 237 International Woman Suffrage Association (IWSA) 115 internationalism: female internationalism 90, 101 gendered internationalism 77, 88, 91, 100–101, 102 masculinist internationalism 77, 96 Pankhurst, Sylvia 77, 79, 80, 85–86, 88, 90–91, 100, 101–102 Romulo, Carlos 77, 79, 94, 96, 100, 101–102 Rotarian internationalism 101 see also binationalism; nationalism; transnationalism interpreter 299 interracial relationship: anti-miscegenation laws 41, 42 interracial intercourse 39, 40–45, 46–48, 51–54, 58, 63, 65, 67 interracial marriage 41, 43, 50, 51, 53, 60, 61–62, 64–65, 183, 309 miscegenation 40, 50, 63, 65, 119, 180, 182 polygamy 51–52 U.S. policies 59, 64 Iriarte, Leonard 392 Italy 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 122 Japan 21, 111, 348 1924 Immigration Act 199, 215, 374 1952 McCarran-Walter Act 216n68 anti-Japanese racism 196, 198–204, 373–375 boxing 351–353 culture 212, 351 economy 200n11 entertainment 344, 355 Japanese Emigration Society 210, 211, 212 Japanese Empire 78n1, 107, 108, 111, 210, 348 Japanese exclusion laws 201, 374 Japanese family 202–203, 211–213 Japanese militarism 85 jazz 351, 356–361 militarism 85 music 348, 351–355 prostitution 321

430 Japan (cont.) U.S.-Japan friendliness 196, 198, 208 World War II 348, 352, 373–374, 375 see also Alien Land Law; Okinawa; Osaka; Sino-Japanese War Japanese Americans 30, 115, 367, 374 Japanese Associations of America 199, 208–210, 212–215 see also Alien Land Law Japanese Woman Question 198, 216 jazz 353, 382, 383n54 Conde, Raymond 356, 357, 358 Japan 351, 356–359 Okinawa 359–361 see also music Johnson, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ 392 Johnston, Gordon 184 Jones, Henry Mrs. 262, 263 Jung, Sun 227, 228 Kahahawai, Joseph 390 Kahanamoku, Duke 391 Kalaniana‘ole, Elizabeth Kahanu KaleiwohiKa‘auwai, Princess 126, 134 Kalaniana‘ole, Jonah Kūhīo (Prince Kūhīo)  119 Kalaw, Maria 266, 276 Kalesniko, Mark: Mail Order Bride 316, 317, 318, 321, 324, 325, 328–332, 329, 331, 338 Kamakura Maru 8 Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) 141, 149, 157–159 prison system 143, 146, 154, 155 tourism 146, 156 Kawānanakoa, Abigail Wahi‘ika‘ahu‘ula Campbell (Princess Kawānanakoa) 126 Kawānanakoa, David La‘amea Kahalepouli Piikoi (Prince David) 119 Kibei Nisei 7–8 Kihara, Shigeyuki 393 Kim, Myungja (pseudonym) 108, 109, 111 Kina, Laura 7–8 Kintanar, Thelma 16 Kiram-Bates Treaty 46 Knepper, Margaret 134 Koo, Wellington 84, 85 Korea: adoption 111, 223n4, 224, 225

Index diaspora 107, 227, 238 Korean folklore 396, 397 Korean Independence Movement 108 Korean War 108, 222 Kuo, Karen 31, 32 K-vampire 7, 369, 397–398 21st-Century K-vampire 400–406 see also vampire labor 20, 207, 393 citizenship/residence and 22 cultural labor 31, 147 family labor 111, 197n2, 202, 206, 375 female labor 147–148, 167n4, 196, 200–201, 212–213 female labor and capitalism 167n4, 319 female transnational labor 27 forced labor 317 gendered division of labor 203, 319 gendered labor recruitment 26 globalizing labor economy 107, 108, 110, 112 labor migration 109, 110, 115, 200–201, 212–213, 299, 321, 350, 374 nurse migration 108, 109 transnational family labor 28, 111 U.S. federal regulations on 23 U.S. immigration and 108 Ladies Agreement 214 Langhorne, George T. 260–261 Larson, Jane 189–190 Lastimosa, Mary Jean 280 League of Nations 83, 88, 89–90, 188 Lee, Heeja (pseudonym) 108–109, 111 Lee, Mary Paik 107–108 lei 141, 392 lei greeting 147, 148 lei stand 147, 148 see also Pao, Adrienne Keahi LGBTQ 407, 414, 415–416 gay 26, 28, 414, 415 lesbian 399, 414 same sex marriage 393, 394, 414 transgender 393, 415 see also bakla; gender; sexuality Liem, Deann Borshay 223 Lili‘uokalani, Queen 23–24, 118, 119, 126, 134, 371 overthrow of 117, 137

Index Lim, Bliss Cua 13 Limjap, Leonarda 262, 269, 270n42 Lingle, Linda, Governor 152, 154 see also prison/private prison Lomu, Jonah 390 Lopez, Lori K. 231 Los Angeles 7 ethnic neighborhood 368 food and drink culture 366, 367, 368, 377, 379 Hawaiian/South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges 366, 368–369, 373, 375–379, 382–385 Hawaiian/South Pacific tourism in  368–373 Japanese exclusion 373–375 Los Angeles Japanese Association 213, 214 Polynesian entertainer 7, 379–383 see also Beachcomber; Trader Vic’s Lujan, Jack 392 Lye, Colleen 12 Macfarlane, Emilie K. Widemann 126, 134 MacMillan, Louise 133, 134 maganda 268–269 see also beauty Manalansan, Martin 15, 27, 28, 269 Global Divas 26 Manchuria 78n1, 79, 84, 108, 111, 210n45 see also China Mangefel, John 389 Manila, Philippines 40, 44–45, 54, 64 1945 Battle of Manila 344 Manila Rotary Club 95 see also Filipina beauty pageants man/masculinity 7, 9, 24, 96, 146 affect and 230 Asian American masculinity 221, 225–230, 240, 328 colonial modernity 343, 347 Filipino entertainer 7, 343, 344, 350–351, 355, 358, 359 hegemonic masculinity 228–229, 237, 239 homosocial behavior 239 hypermasculinity 221, 225, 227, 229–230 male body 328 male body, commodification of 143, 153, 155, 323

431 masculinist internationalism 77, 96 Native Hawaiian men 136–137, 140, 143, 145, 383–384 popular culture and 349, 377–378 racial politics of masculinity 351, 360n54 racialized masculinity 222, 225, 230, 361, 377 U.S. immigration law 27 see also soft masculinity Māori Battalion 389 Marquez, Paz 16, 267n35, 275, 278 marriage 21, 279, 326 divorce 54n37, 57, 322 girl, sale into marriage 188, 191 interracial marriage 41, 43, 50, 51, 53, 60, 61–62, 64–65, 183, 309 marriage market 279, 309, 312 marriage migration 110 military bride 107, 110, 111 picture bride 108, 109, 110, 200, 214 same sex marriage 393, 394, 414 trial marriage 57 see also interracial relationship; polygamy Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women 135 Matthews, Dan 6, 221, 222, 225, 226–227, 229–230, 234 social media 6, 235–237, 240 see also adoption; akaDan Mau Movement 393 McCarthy, Charles J. 130 McClatchy, V.S. 200, 201, 204 McClintock, Anne 167n4 McKinley, William 117, 192, 204n24 McMullin, Dan Taulapapa 393 McNutt, Paul 98 mestiza/mestizo: American mestiza/mestizo 185, 186n52, 188, 190–193 beauty of 271 Filipina identity and 271–273 Hispanic mestiza 265, 272 hypersexualed child 190, 192–193 mestiza body 272, 273 mestiza child’s/girl’s beauty 168, 190, 192 mestiza identity 271–272 terno 272–273 traje de mestiza 271–273, 274 see also mixed-race

432 middle class 128, 147, 198n4, 203, 206n32, 219 migration see immigration the military: homomilitarism 24 Japanese militarism 85 militarism 4, 90, 141, 143, 149 militarization 24, 31, 314, 408 military bride 107, 110, 111 military domination 141 military occupation 150 military/tourism bounds 5, 141, 143, 147, 155, 157 military violence 141, 184, 408 militourism 31, 157 U.S. military’s wartime regulation of prostitution 46–47, 48, 55 Miller, Stuart 42 Million, Dian 25 Mindanao, Philippines 39, 45, 65, 66 colonies in 50 interracial intercourse 39, 40–45, 46–48, 51–54, 58, 63, 65, 67 interracial marriage 50, 51 Mindanao Plantation 48, 52 Moro/Muslim population 39, 45, 46, 49, 51, 55, 64 U.S. incorporation of 48–49, 52 miscegenation laws 41, 42 see also interracial relationship missionary 23, 62, 129, 206, 285, 294, 295 missionary heritage 119, 125, 126, 127, 128, 135, 136, 137 Miss Philippines 257, 267, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280 see also Filipina beauty pageants Miss Universe 257, 279, 280 see also Filipina beauty pageants Mitchell, Mary Niall 180, 181, 190–191 mixed-race: immoral mixed-race child 188–189, 192; mixed-race child 41, 66, 183, 222 mixed-race family 62, 65–66, 206 see also interracial relationship; mestiza/ mestizo Miyose, Colby 227, 228, 230, 239 modernity 292, 294 colonial modernity 343, 346–349, 359n49, 361, 362 imperialism and 343, 346, 347

Index music and 353–356 Philippines 274, 275, 276, 277, 280 modernization 117, 276, 280, 288, 292, 303 Momoa, Jason 392 Momungan colony, Philippines 50, 52, 53, 65 Montano, Joseph 183 Moore, Lina Espina 16 Morrill, Angie 25 mothering 190, 247 constructions of 249–240 intensive mothering 251 mommy wars 248 racialized mothering 246, 249, 250 reproductive politics 246, 251 see also Chua, Amy; reproductive politics Munoz, Alex 392 music 7, 350, 372, 380 commodification of 230 Filipino band 345 Hawaiian music 379, 381–383 Japan 348, 351–355 music and modernity 353–356 piano 206n33 pop music 309, 356, 358 see also entertainment; jazz Nakayama, Tosiwo 389 Nakpil, Carmen Guerrero 16 natalism see fertility; pronatalism; ­reproductive politics; sexuality National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) 115–116, 118, 123, 125, 135 effect on woman suffrage in wartime Hawaiʻi 127–130 nationalism 15, 346, 356, 410 Filipina beauty pageants and 6, 257, 259, 267–277, 280–281 U.S. nationalism 29 see also binationalism; internationalism; transnationalism Native American population 49, 174 Navajo Nation 27 removal of 49 Native Hawaiian 5, 31 Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism 371 Native Hawaiian body 143, 144

Index Native Hawaiian men 136–137, 140, 143, 145, 383–384 Native Hawaiian resistance 118, 143, 155–159 Native Hawaiian women 114, 115, 116, 117, 133–137, 140, 144, 145, 383, 384 suffrage movement 116, 119–124, 128, 131, 136–137 World War I 124–127 see also body; Kānaka Maoli; resistance Nāwahī, Emma ‘Aima Ai‘i 120–121, 123–124 Nāwahī, Joseph 120–121 neocolonial project/logics 25, 115, 108, 143, 144, 155, 222 see also colonialism Newlands Resolution 117 newspapers 95, 186, 209, 261, 269, 270n42, 275, 285, 293, 294 Noble, Anita 278 Nunes, Keone 392 nurse 108, 109 O’Brien, Patty 178, 179, 180, 181 Ocampo, Felicidad 16 Oceania 5, 24–25, 148, 149, 150, 151, 307, 308, 391 Okamura, Jonathan 22, 32 Okinawa 344n2, 346, 348, 359–361 diaspora 7 see also Japan Olivarez, Eric 280 Onedera, Peter 391 Ong, Aihwa 11, 15 Ono, Kent A. 231 ‘Open Door’ policy 23 Orientalism 10, 226, 326, 328 American Orientalism 20, 29, 31, 32 radical Orientalism 32 Osaka, Japan 108, 111n9 Osorio, Jon 392 Pacific Islands 5, 8, 11, 129, 150, 373 Pacific Islander 5, 7, 20 Pacific Ocean 4, 8, 39, 221, 356, 367 Pacific studies 3, 149 see also Trans-Pacific studies Pacific War 108 Pacific World 3, 4, 110, 285, 288, 303, 367 see also Trans-Pacific World Pai, Margaret 108, 109

433 Palumalu, Troy 390 Pankhurst, Sylvia 5, 77, 82 activism 78, 80, 81, 89 anti-fascist feminism 77, 78–79, 80, 82–91, 101 China News 85 democracy 80, 84, 88, 89, 94, 101 Ethiopia 80, 83–84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 101 feminist internationalism 90, 101 internationalism 77, 79, 80, 85–86, 88, 90–91, 100, 101–102 New Times and Ethiopia News 80, 83, 85, 88, 90 Sino-Japanese War 77, 79–91, 94, 100 woman suffrage 81, 82 Panlilio, Yay 16 Pao, Adrienne Keahi 140, 141, 142 Lei Stand Protest/Kapua Leihua Kapa (Lei Flower Covering) 141, 142, 147, 155–156 paradise 53, 366, 367, 372, 380 Hawai‘i as paradise 31, 32, 144, 148, 149, 158, 380 Park, Alice Locke 127, 130, 136 Park Chan-Wook 403, 404 Park, Maud Wood 129 Parker, Jabari 390 Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar 27, 28 patriarchy 223, 228, 229, 250, 307, 326 capitalism and 317–318 heteropatriarchy 27, 29 patriarchal ideology 228, 410 patriarchal power 328 patriarchal society 396, 398, 402 patriarchal structures 249, 278 Penn, BJ 390 Pham, Vincent N. 231 Philippine-American War 42, 46, 48, 169, 184, 261 Philippine Independence Mission 92 Philippines: 1916 Jones Act 40n1 beauty 181 Cordillera 39, 40, 55n38, 57, 58, 60, 63 culture 55, 60, 65, 172, 175, 279, 353, 355 democracy 184, 262 Filipina identity 271–273 Filipina/o as child 92, 165, 167–168, 169–182, 193 Filipino family 50, 53, 65–66

434 Philippines: (cont.) Igorot, inhabitants of northern Luzon 40, 58, 59, 181 independence 26, 40n1, 95, 97, 184, 185, 186n52 mestiza child’s/girl’s beauty 168, 190, 192 modernity 274, 275, 276, 277, 280 see also benevolent assimilation; entertainment; Filipina beauty pageants; Manila; Mindanao; Momungan colony Philippines Herald 78, 91, 92, 95, 96, 99–100 political cartoon 78, 91, 97, 98 see also Romulo, Carlos photography 8, 62, 165, 168, 274, 378 body and 179, 323, 328, 330 civilizing 63 Filipinas/os as children 165 picture bride 108, 109, 110, 200, 214 pornography 180, 184 shaping the development of U.S. immigration policy 323 woman 323, 328 see also Pao, Adrienne Keahi; Worcester, Dean C. Piailug, Mau 391 Pietro, Carmen 274 Pitman, Almira Hollander 128–130, 135 Pitman, Benjamin F. 128 plantation 109, 115, 117, 124 Mindanao Plantation 48, 52 political cartoon 91–92, 168, 269 Philippines Herald 78, 91, 97, 98 polygamy 178 interracial relationship 51–52 see also marriage Polynesian people/culture 7, 146, 367, 370, 385 Polynesian entertainer 7, 379–383 Polynesian Panthers 393 see also Los Angeles popular culture 7–8, 227–228, 250 Korea 227 masculinity and 349, 377–378 pop music 309, 356, 358 South Korea 227, 229, 231, 238–239 ‘tool of rule on the ground’ 345–346

Index U.S. 29, 229, 343, 346, 367, 368, 375, 379, 402 vampire 402 pornography 174, 189n58, 323, 330 photography 180, 184 Portugal/the Portuguese 115, 123, 124, 125, 126 postcard 145, 148, 179–180, 181, 184n48 Philippine Picture Postcards 175 print culture 10, 17, 277, 385 print archive 13, 16, 17 prison/private prison: Arizona 151, 153, 154, 390 beds in 151, 152, 153, 155, 156 capitalism and 153, 155 commodification 140, 143, 151–155 Eloy prison, Arizona 140, 151, 154 Kānaka Maoli 143, 146, 154, 155 State of Hawaiʻi 140, 142, 144–145, 148, 150–153, 155, 156, 158–159 tourism/prison link 143, 153 see also Arizona, prison/private prison; correctional facility; incarceration; inmate pronatalism 87 see also fertility; reproductive politics prostitution 39, 43, 46, 110, 189, 269, 292, 321, 323, 326, 414 anti-prostitution policy/campaign 55, 189n58, 210n45, 334 brothel 110, 269, 319, 321 forced prostitution 78n1, 188 informal systems of 57 Japan 321 sex tourism 321 sex worker 317, 321n14, 412 sexual exploitation of children 178, 189n58 U.S. military’s wartime regulation of 46–47, 48, 55 see also sexuality Pule, John 392 querida/querida system 39, 54n37, 64 Quezon, Manuel 95 race 5 anti-Japanese racism 196, 198–204, 373–375

Index colonial racism 6, 260–266 hierarchies of 22, 249, 378 ideologies of 257, 259, 303 imperialism and racism 159, 265, 320 racial divisions 263 racial exclusion 199, 215, 249 racial formation 328 racial politics of masculinity 351, 360n54 racial privilege of white American men  42 racialized body 181–182, 328 racialized child 181–182, 188–192 racialized masculinity 222, 225, 230, 361, 377 racialized mothering 246, 249, 250 racism 137, 173, 181 U.S. monoracial gender system 52 see also interracial relationship; mothering; mixed-race Rafael, Vicente 14, 15 Red Cross 125, 126 Reddy, Chandan 32 Reeves, Keanu 392 remittance 28, 395, 411 reparation 156, 389 reproductive politics 87, 246, 248, 249, 250, 251 see also fertility; mothering; pronatalism Republican 123, 129 resistance 31n34, 32, 55, 151, 417 Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism 371 Native Hawaiian resistance 118, 143, 155–159 respectability 196, 203, 215, 216, 257, 280, 296, 416 affective economy of 199, 208 Black women 197n2 a form of economy 200, 211 rest and recreation 57, 158n40, 166, 203, 344, 359, 372 Reyes, Ligaya Victorio 16 Reyes, Raquel A. G. 15 Reyes, Soledad 16 Ritte, Walter 393 Roces, Mina 15, 268–269, 277n61 Rodger, Victor 393

435 Romulo, Carlos 5, 78, 91–99, 93 internationalism 77, 79, 94, 96, 100, 101–102 Manila Rotary Club 95, 98, 99, 100, 101 masculinist internationalism 77, 96 Philippines Herald 78, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99–100 Sino-Japanese War 77, 94, 96–100 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 97, 98 Rotary Club: Romulo, Carlos 95–96, 98, 99, 100, 101 Rotarian internationalism 101 Said, Edward 10 Salesa, Damon 392 Samoa 369, 371, 393 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen 191 Santos, Angel 393 Saranillo, Dean 22 Scheerer, Otto 63, 65 Seau, Junior 390 segregation 154, 360n53 self-determination 132, 155, 156n36, 157, 171, 193 sexuality 5, 384 child sexuality 172n17, 187, 188–189 colonial hypersexualization of the native 168, 173 gender and 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 22, 28, 39, 173, 189, 407, 414, 415 gender-sexual deviance 42, 43 heteronormative constructions of 240 hypersexualized child 6, 168, 169–182, 176, 177, 190–191, 192–193 hypersexualization of women 5, 167n4, 168, 174, 175, 178, 179 interracial intercourse 39, 40–45, 46–48, 51–54, 58, 63, 65, 67 sexual economy 44, 46–48, 57, 323 sexual geographies 5, 44, 45, 54, 64, 65, 67 sexualization/sexualized body 141, 148, 181–182, 328 see also body; desire/desirability; LGBTQ; man/masculinity; pronatalism; prostitution; reproductive politics Shafroth, John F. 129 Shaw, Anna Howard 125, 129, 130

436 Shima, George 214 Shimizu, Celine Parreñas 226 Sino-Japanese War 101, 102 Pankhurst, Sylvia 77, 79–91, 94, 100 Romulo, Carlos 77, 94, 96–100 Smith, Andrea 29 Smith, James Francis 260 social media 230–231, 257–258, 279 Instagram 234, 235, 236, 237 Matthews, Dan 6, 235–237, 240 Twitter 235, 236, 237 soft masculinity 221, 225, 228, 239–240 definition 227 rise in U.S. 229 soft masculinity in akaDan 226–227, 229–237, 238, 240 see also man/masculinity South Korea: adoption 221, 222–223 culture 312, 313 diaspora 240 popular culture 227, 229, 231, 238–239 South Pacific see Los Angeles Spanish-American War 51n28, 92, 117, 174 squaw man 59n52 standard of living 203, 205n30, 215 Stanford Graphic Novel Project 317, 319–320 Archer, Dan 317 From Busan to San Francisco 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 327, 333–334, 335, 336, 337, 338 Johnson, Adam 319 Mail Order Bride 316, 317, 318, 321, 324, 325, 328–332, 329, 331, 338 state 86, 154–156, 251 carceral state 143 colonial state 29, 60, 65 nation-state 29, 32, 154, 159, 348, 352, 355, 361, 410 paternalist state 26 settler state 22, 28, 30 state apparatus 144 State of Arizona 151 State of Hawaiʻi 140, 142, 144–145, 146, 148, 150–153, 154, 155, 156, 158–159 state recognition 25, 29, 32 Stoler, Ann Laura 188n57 stress 307, 312–313, 337

Index Subido, Trinidad Tarrosa 16 suffrage: Fifteenth Amendment 122 see also woman suffrage Sullivan, Robert 391 Suluape, Su’a Peter 392 surveillance 333 Asian female bodies 321–31 immigration officials 323 Sweet, Owen 46–47, 48, 55 Tadiar, Neferti 15 Tahiti 370 Tam, Winnie 27, 28 Taylor, Emma Ahuena Davison 126, 128 Tengan, Ty Kawika 145, 392 terno 272–273, 274 see also mestiza/mestizo Thompson, Nainoa 391 Tjibaou, Jean-Marie 393 tourism/tourist 367 commodification 140, 143 culinary tourism 368 feminization and tourism 140, 143–148 Hawaiian/South Pacific tourism in Los Angeles 368–373 Hawaiian tourism and economy 144, 146–147, 157 Kānaka Maoli 146, 156 medical tourism 311, 314, 415 military/tourism bounds 5, 141, 143, 147, 155, 157 militourism 31, 157 sex tourism 321 State of Hawaiʻi 140, 144–145, 146, 148, 153, 154, 156, 158–159 tourism/prison link 143, 153 toxicity 313, 314 Trader Vic’s 373, 376, 378–379, 384, 385 see also Los Angeles transnationalism 316, 412, 413 see also binationalism; internationalism; nationalism Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) 408 Trans-Pacific studies 5, 10, 12, 33 see also Pacific studies Trans-Pacific World: breast cancer 308, 313, 314 capitalism 21

437

Index gender 3, 4–5, 8, 10, 11–13, 15, 17 trans-Pacific feminism 246, 248, 249, 250, 251 see also Pacific World trauma 337–338, 373, 417 woman’s trauma 7, 316, 317, 320, 322–323, 332, 333, 334 treason 410, 417 Treaty of Waitangi 389 Trenka, Jane Jeong 223 Tuck, Eve 25 Tuck, Jon 390 Tuwhare, Hone 391 Underwood, Robert 389 United States of America: American culture 66, 192, 294, 347, 351, 366, 368, 377, 379 American exceptionalism 3, 149, 150, 265 American men and desire 57 American mestiza/mestizo 185, 186n52, 188, 190–193 American Orientalism 20, 29, 31, 32 colonization/colonialism 7, 24, 26, 30, 39, 40, 51, 165, 168, 173, 174, 175, 191, 192, 361 democracy 25, 28, 95, 223 federal regulations on labor 23 interracial relationship and U.S. policies 59, 64 monoracial gender system 52 popular culture 29, 229, 343, 346, 367, 368, 375, 379, 402 settler state 22, 30 U.S. Department of Justice 151 U.S. empire 23, 44, 45, 141, 148, 149, 151, 159, 171, 174, 264, 360, 409 U.S. imperialism 22, 43, 44, 46, 149, 154, 159, 258, 259, 371 see also United States, immigration law/ policy United States, immigration law/policy 27, 286, 287 1924 Immigration Act 199, 215, 374 1952 McCarran-Walter Act 216n68 American immigration officials 284, 285, 286, 287, 298, 300, 301, 303, 323 exclusion laws 6, 284, 285, 287, 303 footbinding 287, 298–303

labor 108 masculinity and 27 see also Alien Land Law United War Work Campaign 126 vampire: blood 398, 399, 400, 401, 403, 405 cross-cultural vampire 397–400 Dracula 396, 398, 399, 401 Korean film 401, 402 kumiho 396, 397–398, 401, 402, 405 popular culture 402 Thirst 396, 403–404, 405 Vampire Prosecutor 396, 405 webtoon 396, 404–405 yeogui (girl ghost) 396, 401, 403, 404 see also K-vampire Vargas, Jorge 274 Vicenti Carpio, Myla 30, 32 Victorino, Shane 390 Vietnam: diaspora 409, 410, 411–12, 413, 415 economy 408, 410–411, 412 trans-Vietnamese feminism 7, 407–418 passim Vietnam War 389, 408, 409, 410, 412 Villanueva, Pura 264, 265–266, 267, 268, 274 Waititi, Taika 392 war: children and women as victim of 86, 87 mommy wars 248 violence 86, 94, 99, 261 see also Cold War; Korean War; Pacific War; Philippine-American War; Sino-Japanese War; Spanish-American War; United War Work Campaign; Vietnam War; World War I; World War II Webb, Lahilahi 134 Wenda, Benny 393 Wendt, Albert 391 Wexler, Laura 169 whiteness 26, 190, 204, 229, 271 hybridity and whiteness of Native Hawaiian suffragists 119–124 not-white, not-quite, yet alike 349, 361 protecting (white) American blood 168, 182–193

438 Wilcox, Robert 118 Wilson, Ara 21 Wilson, Woodrow 125, 126, 130, 132, 184, 209 Winduo, Steven 391 Winter Sonata 227 Wollstonecraft, Mary 88n39 woman: comfort woman 107, 110, 111 commodification of 144, 317, 321, 322, 323, 332 domestic violence 321, 332, 395 female labor 147–148, 167n4, 196, 200–201, 212–213 female labor and capitalism 167n4, 319 female transnational labor 27 feminization and tourism 140, 143–148 hypersexualization of women 5, 167n4, 168, 174, 175 mail-order bride 107, 110, 111 Native Hawaiian women 114, 115, 116, 117, 133–137, 140, 144, 145, 383, 384 photography 323, 328 rape 188, 189n58 sexual desire 178 trauma 7, 316, 317, 320, 322–323, 332, 333, 334 victim of war 86, 87 see also Chinese woman; domesticity; gender; marriage; prostitution; respectability; sexuality; womanhood; woman suffrage womanhood 86, 167, 190, 294 cult of 121, 135 Filipina womanhood 269, 270, 272, 274 modern womanhood 211–212, 267

Index Woman’s Equal Suffrage Association of Hawai‘i (WESAH) 131n60 woman suffrage 5, 115–116, 127–128 Chinese woman 121, 132 Native Hawaiian suffrage movement 114, 116, 119–124, 128, 131, 136–137 Nineteenth Amendment 116, 135 Outdoor Circle 135 Pankhurst, Sylvia 81, 82 World War I and 116, 124–127, 128 see also International Woman Suffrage Association; Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women; National American Woman’s Suffrage Association; Woman’s Equal Suffrage Association of Hawai‘i Wong-Kalu, Hinaleimoana 394 Wood, Leonard 184–185, 186 Worcester, Dean C. 56, 63, 175, 176n28, 177n29, 178, 179, 184 World War I 80, 83, 200 Native Hawaiian 124–127 woman suffrage and 116, 124–127, 128 see also Americanism, 100% World War II 27, 29, 144, 148, 359, 366, 367, 368, 369, 372 Japan 348, 352, 373–374, 375 Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun 32, 259n3 Wurtzbach, Pia Alonzo 257, 258 Yamamoto, Susie 196–197, 199, 216 Yellow Peril 200–203, 225n11, 250 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) 209, 210, 212, 214 YouTube 13, 222, 231, 235