Our Voices, Our Histories: Asian American and Pacific Islander Women 9781479815067

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Our Voices, Our Histories

Our Voices, Our Histories Asian American and Pacific Islander Women Edited by Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura

New York Universit y Press New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2020 by New York University All rights reserved References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the authors nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hune, Shirley, author. | Nomura, Gail M., author. Title: Our voices, our histories : Asian American and Pacific Islander women / Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura. Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019009449| ISBN 9781479821105 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479877010 (pb : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Asian American women—History. | Pacific Islander American women—History. | Asian American women—Biography. | Pacific Islander American women—Biography. | Asian American women—Social conditions. | Pacific Islander American women—Social conditions. Classification: LCC E184.A75 H895 2019 | DDC 305.48/895073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009449 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

For Asian American and Pacific Islander women —S. H. and G. M. N. For the fourth and fifth generations of Hunes, Karen, Brandon, Bryan, Lindsay, Christie, Nicholas, Julia, Andrew, Allison; Christopher, Laura, Dan, Luke, Charlie, Aliya, Morgan, Mackenzie, Owen, Hazel, Astrid, Freja, and those to come —S. H. For Tsuma Nomura, Ushii Kunimitsu, Leatrice S. Nomura, Emi, Clare, and Alice Suzuki, and those to come —G. M. N.

Contents

Introduction: Our Voices

1

Introduction: Our Histories

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Gail M. Nomura Shirley Hune

Part I: Early Era, Indigenous and Global Roots

17

1. Mālamalama: Reconnecting as Native Hawaiian Women through Cultural History

19

2. Global Roots and Gendered Routes: Early Asian American Women’s History

37

3. Two Sisters, Two Stories: Transnational Lives of Ume Tsuda and Yona Abiko

53

Davianna Pōmaika‘i McGregor

Erika Lee

Masako Iino

Part II: New Intersections of Race, Gender, Generation, Communities

69

4. “Up to My Elbows in Rice!”: Women Building Communities and Sustaining Families in Pre-1965 Filipina/o America

71

5. Stretching the Boundaries of Christian Respectability, Race, and Gender during Jim Crow: Chinese American Women and the Southern Baptist Church

87

Dawn Bohulano Mabalon

Phonshia Nie

6. Stepping Onstage and Breaking Ground: Asian American Dancers Complicate Race and Gender Stereotypes, 1930s–1960s Mana Hayakawa

Part III: New Cultural Formations, New Selves 7. “She Speaks Well”: Language as Performance of Japanese American Femininity and Social Mobility in Postwar Hawaiʻi Christine R. Yano

106 123 125

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viii | Contents

8. History, Identity, and the Life Course: Mixed Race Asian American Women

140

9. Ancestral Ethics and Sāmoanness: Explaining the Contemporary Sāmoan American Women

155

Cathy J. Tashiro

M. Luafata Simanu-Klutz

Part IV: Wartimes and Aftermath

171

10. Memories of Mass Incarceration: Mobilizing Japanese American Women for Redress and Beyond

173

11. Refugee Lifemaking Practices: Southeast Asian Women

189

12. “Defiant Daughters”: The Resilience and Resistance of 1.5-Generation Vietnamese American Women

205

Alice Yang

Yến Lê Espiritu

Linda Trinh Võ

Part V: Globalization, Work, Family, Community, Activism

221

13. Precarious Labor: Asian Immigrant Women, 1970s–2010s

223

14. The Backbone of New York City’s Chinatown: Chinese Women and the Garment Industry, 1950–2009

238

15. Women’s Agency and Cost in Migration: Taiwanese American Transnational Families

254

16. “Revolutionary Care” as Activism: Filipina Nurses and Care Workers in Chicago, 1965–2016

269

Part VI: Spaces of Political Struggles

285

17. The Mother’s Tongue: Language, Women, and the Chamorros of Guam

287

18. Asian American Feminisms and Legislative Activism: Patsy Takemoto Mink in the US Congress

304

Krittiya Kantachote and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Margaret M. Chin

Maria W. L. Chee

Joy Sales

Sharleen Santos-Bamba and Anne Perez Hattori

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

Contents

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19. Opening the Path to Marriage Equality: Asian American Lesbians Reach Out to Their Families and Communities

321

20. Turning Points: South Asian Feminist Responses to Gender-Based Violence and Immigration Enforcement

338

Trinity A. Ordona

Monisha Das Gupta and Soniya Munshi

Part VII: New Diasporas, Diverse Lives, Evolving Identities

355

21. Locating Adoptees in Asian America: Jane Jeong Trenka and Deann Borshay Liem

357

22. “Let Them Attack Me for Wearing the Hijab”: Islam and Identity in the Lives of Bangladeshi American Women

373

23. Navigating the Hyphen: Tongan-American Women in Academia

388

Kimberly D. McKee

Nazli Kibria

Halaevalu F. Ofahengaue Vakalahi and Ofa Ku’ulei Lanimekealoha Hafoka

Part VIII: Gender, Cultural Change, Intergenerational Dynamics

405

24. Linked Lives: Korean American Daughters and Their Aging Immigrant Parents

407

25. Negotiating Cultural Change: Professional Hmong American Women

423

26. Stories and Visions across Generations: Khmer American Women

439

Barbara W. Kim and Grace J. Yoo

Chia Youyee Vang

Shirley Suet-Ling Tang, Kim Soun Ty, and Linda Thiem

Reflections

457

Acknowledgments

465

About the Contributors

467

Index

475

Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura

Introduction Our Voices Gail M. Nomura

Our Voices, Our Histories: Asian American and Pacific Islander Women brings together thirty-five Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, consciousness, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond. It examines the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, indigeneity, ethnicity, and other aspects of the lives of these women. Through the voices and lives of the women themselves, these works foreground the agency, power, and resilience of Asian American and Pacific Islander women and their capacity to enact change and transform their lives and communities within local, transnational, and global contexts. In addressing the diverse histories of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in this anthology, the editors recognize the heterogeneity within and between these socially and politically constructed panethnic umbrella groupings. We do not seek to subsume, obliterate, or obscure their distinctiveness but to expand the research and the interpretative boundaries leading to new ways of understanding a complex, richer history of the United States. In addition to the many possibilities of dialogue, alliances, and connections through differences we also seek to explore commonalities and shared agendas without perpetuating or reinscribing the same hierarchies and exclusions that have sometimes marred such projects. Effective coalition-building constructs a shared agenda that is a work in progress, constantly negotiated and debated. It requires continuous interchanges to explore boundaries, frontiers, and borderlands of interactions and separations to open new conversations and collaborations. This book is a step toward exploring these interactions and separations, which will enable readers to begin to question and push theoretical constructs and interpretations beyond the analyses of single ethnic groups. It will also allow readers to more deeply consider the power of individual intentional action within, at times, seemingly overwhelming limits and constraints. The selections present new research that studies diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander American women’s history while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States. The authors bring fresh, alternative insights, ways of knowing, analyses, and narratives as well as research sources, approaches, and 1

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strategies. In this way, they reveal the agency, resistance, and resilience of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in all their diversity and, in the process, a new understanding of women’s history.

Diversity The Asian American and Pacific Islander women presented in this anthology comprise diverse groups of peoples of many cultures, ethnicities, languages, and religions that have a history with the United States. Diversity within and between groups is a key point to remember. “Asian American” is a socially and politically constructed panethnic umbrella term emerging out of the social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s in the United States.1 It generally refers to immigrants and US-born people of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, South Asian (e.g., Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Indian, Maldivian, Nepalese, Pakistani, Sri Lankan), Southeast Asian (e.g., Burmese/Myanmarese, Hmong, Indonesian, Khmer/Cambodian, Lao, Malaysian, Mien, Singaporean, Thai, Vietnamese), Taiwanese, and Tibetan ancestry, among others. Some may expand the term to include peoples of Asian descent in all the Americas, and others have defined “Asian” as comprising peoples from the entire geographical region of Asia including West Asia/the Middle East. “Pacific Islander” and “Pacific Islander American” are socially and politically constructed terms designating US-born and immigrant people who have ancestry among the indigenous peoples from Oceania—Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. Most Pacific Islanders subscribe to a distinct island-based indigenous identity—for example, Native Hawaiian, Sāmoan, Chamorro,2 Tongan, Fijian, or Māori—rather than to a panethnic identity. Pacific Islanders see clear sociocultural, political, and historical distinctions between and among different islander groups. However, the panethnic terms have come into use in recent years to forge a pan–Pacific Islander identity and coalitions, notably in the continental United States, while maintaining island-based identities. In particular, “Pacific Islander” and “Pacific Islander American” refer to indigenous peoples of Pacific islands with a history of US colonialism: 1. the state of Hawaiʻi—incorporated into the United States in 1898 through a joint congressional resolution, organized as a US territory in 1900, became the fiftieth state in 1959 2. the US territory of Guam—acquired by the United States by treaty from Spain in 1898, established as an unincorporated organized US territory in 1950 3. the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI, main islands Saipan, Tinian, and Rota)—acquired by Germany from Spain in 1899; acquired by Japan after World War I as a League of Nations mandate;

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administered by the United States after World War II as part of the United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands; approved by the UN and the US Congress and by plebiscite to form the commonwealth in political union with the United States, with a new constitution and government taking effect in 1978, and covenant agreement fully effective in 1986 4. American Sāmoa—acquired by the United States in 1899, became an unorganized and unincorporated US territory in 1900 The indigenous peoples of Hawaiʻi, Guam, and the CNMI are US citizens, except for a small number of people living in the CNMI who, in 1986, voluntarily chose to give up their newly acquired US citizenship and remained noncitizen US nationals. Indigenous Sāmoans born in American Sāmoa are noncitizen US nationals. The terms “Pacific Islander” and “Pacific Islander American” also include the indigenous citizens of the three sovereign nations that comprise the Freely Associated States (FAS): 1. the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), composed of the states of Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, and Kosrae 2. the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) 3. the Republic of Palau (ROP) The citizens of all three of the FAS nations currently have rights to travel freely to, live, work, and study in the United States and its territories or possessions under nonimmigrant status, according to the terms of their individual nations’ Compacts of Free Association with the United States. Also, all Pacific Islander immigrants, indigenous peoples from Oceania, and their descendants born in the United States are included in the terms “Pacific Islander” and “Pacific Islander American.” A tension can exist between legal categories and self-identity when defining an “American.” For example, permanent residents may self-identify as American, and given issues of sovereignty and struggles for self-determination, some Pacific Islanders in US colonized territories may not self-identify as American. The complexity of “Asian American” and “Pacific Islander” is illustrated by noting the many ethnicities included in the larger subcategories of “Asian American” (e.g., Southeast Asian American) and the many different indigenous island groups encompassed by “Pacific Islander.” The panethnic terms often obscure distinctions within these synthetic groupings. For example, the term “South Asian American” is often taken to mean Indian American, the most numerous ethnic group under that designation; even the term “Indian American” masks, for example, regional, religious, and linguistic distinctions. Likewise, many take “Pacific Islander” to mean the numerically dominant subgroup “Native Hawaiian,” and

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the term “Chamorro” includes the Chamorro of Guam and the Chamorro of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, although separated politically since 1898 by imperial powers. Furthermore, the term “Sāmoan” includes those who are US nationals from American Sāmoa and those who come as immigrants to the United States from the independent state of Sāmoa. Further, if one interrogates a single ethnic category, such as “Chinese American,” one finds ethnic Chinese of varying national origins (e.g., ethnic Chinese from Vietnam or the Philippines) and sometimes multiple national journeys (e.g., Chinese who went to the United Kingdom, then Canada, then the United States) as well as those who conflate Taiwanese American with Chinese American. Distinct ethnicities emerge even in what seems to be an unambiguously homogeneous group, as in the case of Japanese Americans. Their generic category often subsumes and obscures the distinct Okinawan American grouping. Adding to the inability to neatly define stable categories of classification are the growing numbers of multiracial, multiethnic peoples who trace their ancestries in part to Asia and/or the Pacific Islands. While in 1990, 10 percent of Asian Americans were multiracial, it is projected that by 2060, that rate will be nearly 20 percent; in 2015, 50 percent of Pacific Islanders were multiracial, and that rate is expected to increase to 54.5 percent by 2040.3 Generational differences further complicate relations within and among these groups. For example, some Asian Americans have histories of seven, eight, or more generations in the United States. But particularly since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted many discriminatory policies and quotas against Asians,4 there has been a growing number of recent immigrants who brought their children with them, the “1.5 generation”—those who were born in Asia but came as young children to the United States and acculturated rapidly. After the Vietnam War, the Fall of Saigon in 1975 prompted a sudden wave of refugees from Southeast Asia, and in the present, other refugees have come from Bhutan, Myanmar/Burma, and Nepal. Thus, the number of Asia-born immigrants in the United States increased exponentially. The Asian American population shifted from a small but predominantly US-born population in 1960 to one of the fastest-growing racial groups in the United States with at times almost two-thirds being immigrants, though since 2000 there has been an increasing number of US born. Current projections indicate that by 2040 there will be an even numerical parity of US born and Asia born.5 With this influx of new immigrants and refugees from Asia, enhanced by US immigration policies that supported family reunification, the Asian American population more than doubled from 1.5 million in 1970 to 3.7 million in 1980 and nearly doubled again to 7.3 million in 1990. The Asian American population more than doubled again from 1990 to 2010, when the US Census counted 17,320,856 Asian Americans, including mixed race persons identifying as part Asian. Almost half of those Asian Americans lived in the western United States,

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and 52 percent were women. In 2017, the estimated number of Asian Americans was 22.4 million. The largest ethnic Asian American group (alone or in any combination) was Chinese (5 million, excluding those who reported Taiwanese only), followed by Asian Indian (4.4 million), Filipino (4 million), Vietnamese (2.1 million), Korean (1.8 million), and Japanese (1.5 million).6 More than 874,414 Pacific Islanders were enumerated in the 2000 US Census. Slightly less than 50 percent (434,733) were women in 2000. Their numbers grew to 1,225,195 in 2010 and were an estimated 1.5 million in 2017. The largest group of Pacific Islanders in 2017 was Native Hawaiians (614,572), followed by Sāmoans (202,268), Chamorro or Guamanian (156,482), Tongan (71,474), other Micronesian (64,915), Fijian (50,034), Marshallese (34,970), other Polynesian (21,888), and other Melanesian (1,656), with another 249,558 not specified other Pacific Islander.7 Among Pacific Islanders, one finds generational and regional differences between the indigenous island resident and the off-island Pacific Islander living in or born and raised in the continental United States.

Our Voices In coming together in this anthology, we and our authors collectively lift our voices with our subjects to narrate the complex history of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history. Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s voices and lives contest stereotyped mainstream views of them to reveal their strength, resilience, and transformative will and action in meeting the challenges of immigration/migration, colonialism, wars, economic globalization, transnationalism, racism, patriarchy, class, gender and sexuality, family/community building, and changing intergenerational relations. Our authors share the voices of these women, which articulate that women are active agents in shaping their own lives and impacting their community, nation, and world and not subordinate, passive pawns of history. Their “agency”—their capacity to make their own strategic, intentional choices within changing opportunities and constraints presented and to act on those choices—is a theme threading through all chapters in the volume. Our authors express the wide range of voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander women. In the chapters, we hear the voices of women who are indigenous; US-born; immigrant; refugee; 1.5 and second generation; LGBTQ; mixed race; transracial adoptee; engaged in political action in the grassroots and legislative areas; experiencing trauma and healing; challenging race, gender roles, and class constraints; and contributing to the empowerment of women and community uplift, among others. Pacific Islander women voice the importance of understanding indigenous worldviews, historical stories, oral narratives, cultural practices and values, and connections with deities and the land—counter to Western thought, which represses alternative worldviews and relationships.

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Some of our authors, including the editors, reveal their own stories and voices alongside their subjects’. In challenging our authors to step out of their academic, third-person-point-of-view positionality to share their stories and first-person points of view, the editors sought to bring to our readers a more palpable connection to and understanding of Asian American and Pacific Islander women. One of our authors, Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, expressed this view: “I also feel the hurt of a generation. It’s our story, and it demands our love, and attention and respect, and we need to tell this story.”8 The passionate voices and personal stories of our authors add to the richness and depth of the stories they tell in their chapters. In particular, we recognize the courage of some of our authors in revealing their own intimate and sometimes painful experiences in their analyses of their subjects and, in some cases, their self-stories. In order to learn the history of Asian American and Pacific Islander women, we need to hear these voices. We must be respectful and listen, really listen, to the women, and not impose our ill-informed ideas. The powerful voices and lived experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in dialogue in this anthology illuminate the agency of these women throughout history and their multifaceted cultural formations and identities. The voices, dignity, and humanity of the women are at the core of the histories we have presented in this anthology. Their lives have meaning. Notes

1 For discussions of Asian American identity and the Asian American movement, see, for example, Daryl J. Maeda, Rethinking the Asian American Movement (New York: Routledge, 2011); Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Kenyon S. Chan, “Rethinking the Asian American Studies Project: Bridging the Divide between ‘Campus’ and ‘Community,’” Journal of Asian American Studies 3, no. 1 (February 2000): 17–36; Russell Jeung, Karen Umemoto, Harvey Dong, Eric Mar, Lisa Hirai Tsuchitani, and Arnold Pan, eds., Mountain Movers: Student Activism & the Emergence of Asian American Studies (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2019). 2 In this anthology, “Chamorro,” and not “Guamanian,” is used to designate the indigenous island population in distinction from nonindigenous people residing in Guam who may be included in the term “Guamanian.” Although “Chamorro” is the more common spelling in English and is used by the US Census Bureau, some believe “CHamoru” or “Chamoru” more accurately reflects the phonetic spelling of the original language of the indigenous people of Guam. There are many political nuances and battles that belie what seems at first glance a simple orthographic issue. Who has the power to decide the spelling of a people’s language? For further discussion, see Gina E. Taitano, “Adoption of ‘Guamanian,’” Guampedia, November 10, 2014, www.guampedia.com; Gina E. Taitano, “Chamorro vs. Chamoru: Spelling Contested,” Guampedia, June 27, 2018, www.guampedia.com. 3 Jonathan Ong, Paul Ong, and Elena Ong, “The Future of Asian America in 2040,” in “Special Issue on AAPIs 2040,” AAPI Nexus 14, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 24–25; Paul Ong, Elena Ong, and Jonathan Ong, “The Future of Pacific Islander America in 2040,” in “Special Issue on AAPIs 2040,” AAPI Nexus 14, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 7.

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4 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 is also known as the Hart-Celler Act and is sometimes referred to as the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. 5 Ong, Ong, and Ong, “The Future of Asian America in 2040,” 21–22. 6 US Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census, We the Americans: Asian (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1993), www.census.gov/prod/cen1990/wepeople/we-3.pdf. From the 2000 census, numbers include those who self-identified as Asian in combination with one or more other races. Elizabeth M. Hoeffel, Sonya Rastogi, Myoung Ouk Kim, and Hasan Shahid, The Asian Population: 2010, 2010 Census Briefs, United States Census Bureau, brief C201BR-11, March 2012, www. census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-11.pdf; “Table 7. Asian Alone or in Combination Population,” at “Age and Sex Composition in the United States: 2010,” last revised July 6, 2016, United States Census Bureau, www.census.gov; 2017 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Asian Alone or in any Combination by Selected Groups, US Census Bureau, American FactFinder, https://factfinder.census.gov, accessed July 27, 2019. 7 The US Census uses the term “Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander” (NHPI). Throughout this volume, we use the term “Pacific Islander” as inclusive of Native Hawaiians. Numbers include those who reported “Native Hawaiian” and “Other Pacific Islander” in combination with one or more other races. Lindsay Hixson, Bradford B. Hepler, and Myong Ouk Kim, The Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Population: 2010, 2010 Census Briefs, United States Census Bureau, brief C2010BR-12, May 2012, www.census.gov; “Table 6. Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Population, by Age and Sex for the United States: 2000,” at “Race and Hispanic or Latino Origin by Age and Sex for the United States: 2000 (PHC-T-8),” United States Census Bureau, February 25, 2002, www.census.gov; 2017 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander Alone or in any Combination by Selected Groups, US Census Bureau, American Fact Finder, https://factfinder.census.gov. 8 As quoted in “The Passing of Dr. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon,” San Francisco State University, Department of History, https://history.sfsu.edu.

Introduction Our Histories Shirley Hune

The editors have developed Our Voices, Our Histories: Asian American and Pacific Islander Women to reenvision women’s histories and to advance aspects and understandings of their lives through new approaches, methods, and resources. As we saw in the previous introduction, Asian American and Pacific Islander groups are complex and have unique voices and experiences. While maintaining their own cultural institutions and community organizations, they also collaborate intentionally for common goals and in resistance to discriminatory policies and treatment. As Asian American and Pacific Islander populations have grown numerically in the United States after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, their members have become more multifaceted in national and ethnic origin; status and condition of arrival and treatment in America; education, occupation, and income; religion and spirituality; generation in America; family formations; and other characteristics. There is no single encompassing Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s experience. Recent trends emphasize their diversity, but there are features of their experiences that are similar. The purpose of this volume is to contribute to a fuller comprehension of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s lives by bringing together a collection of their histories that incorporates cutting-edge research approaches, focuses on their different communities as well as specific experiences in common, and highlights the women’s voices and perspectives. In this introduction, I consider new dimensions in the scholarly focus of US history, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and women’s and gender studies that are reinterpreting Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories and explain how this book reflects these new approaches. The content of this anthology, its scope and coverage of ethnic groups and topics, and three interlocking themes—agency, resistance and resilience, and identity—are discussed. These themes flow through the chapters and elucidate the kinds of experiences the women have in common in conjunction with their unique histories and lives. Finally, I outline how the volume is organized. In short, this book is a new anthology of original work grounded in historical studies that seeks to transform current understandings of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories. 8

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New Dimensions: Globalism and Transnationalism; Exclusion, Empire, and Colonialism; and Gender and Intersectionality In developing this anthology, the editors considered how new approaches in US history, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and women’s and gender studies inform research on Asian American and Pacific Islander women. I use the term “dimensions” to discuss cutting-edge approaches and recent research in history that are contributing to revisionist studies of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in general and women specifically. Three of them help to frame the structure and organization of this volume. They have been developing for more than two decades and are not necessarily new. What is novel is our application of these approaches to Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories. The new dimensions are akin to paradigm shifts that dramatically change previous interpretations,1 in this case of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s lives. I discuss them briefly below. It is not possible, however, to do justice to these new approaches in this limited space. For more details, I have included extensive endnotes and citations of pertinent revisionist studies.

Globalism and Transnationalism Dimension Asian American and Pacific Islander histories have generally been studied through the lens of US national history. As global historians challenge the dominance of nation-framed history, revisionist studies call for reinterpreting US history as part of a global or world history of colonial relations, trade, labor migration, and other dynamics.2 Transnationalism involves relationships and the integration of people and political, economic, and cultural forms across national borders. Consequently, transnational aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories—for example, memories and connections— become more visible and relevant. US immigrant and refugee experiences have always been transnational, whatever the circumstances of their leavings and resettlements, but dominant ideologies have focused on their American lives and marginalized their global dimension.3 Diaspora studies is also of value. Its emphasis is on emigrants with a shared history, culture, and geography who have dispersed to many distant lands thus placing it outside the scope of this volume.4 New studies of both pre-mid-nineteenth-century migrants and post-1965 communities are recontextualizing Asian American and Pacific Islander histories within globalism and transnationalism.5 Chapters include these contexts for early Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, and Korean women and present-day experiences of females of Bangladeshi, Chamorro, Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Indian, Japanese, Khmer/Cambodian, Korean, Laotian, Sāmoan, Taiwanese, Thai, Tongan, and Vietnamese backgrounds, integrating them with their lives in the United States. Several chapters discuss transnational and local dynamics in

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areas, such as the role of food, the politics of language, being a transracial adoptee, lesbian or of mixed race, and organizing across ethnic groups and national borders to include a larger range of women’s activities than has generally been addressed.

Exclusion, Empire, and Colonialism Dimension Reflecting the nation-state focus of both US history and immigration studies, earlier frameworks of Asian Americans emphasized immigrant chronicles and assimilation and adaptation, albeit interlocked with their resistance to racism and other inequities. The idea of the United States as a (welcoming) nation of immigrants has been systematically countered. In particular, Asian exclusion policies have long contradicted this concept. Revisionist studies, including indigenist and postcolonial critiques, highlight exclusion, empire, and colonialism in national and global history, especially the impact of imperialism, wars, military interventions, and colonial occupations on the displacement, forced relocation, and accompanying violence and trauma experienced by specific Asian American and Pacific Islander groups.6 Chapters document the varied experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander women under empire in earlier eras and less-studied locations. They also feature recent histories of Filipino, South and Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander women whose lives were considerably changed by empire, war, and colonial occupation. The dimension of exclusion, empire, and colonialism also shifts the geography of Asian American and Pacific Islander studies from solely the US continent to the larger Pacific world: its ocean, islands, and lands. This approach is more inclusive of former US colonies and territories—their histories, populations, and issues—including addressing American influence in their homelands.7 Several chapters offer new interpretations of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women’s activities, resistance and resilience, and identities through their histories and voices.

Gender and Intersectionality Dimension As women’s and gender studies give more attention to nonwhite, non-Western women and their situations—locally, nationally, and globally—they bring visibility to female migrants around the globe. Feminists have also adopted gender as an analytical category for considering women’s disparities, especially the ideologies and practices that privilege men and disadvantage women.8 In this volume, the editors build upon our efforts to view Asian American and Pacific Islander women as historical subjects actively negotiating better lives for themselves, their families, and their communities within constraints of gender biases, laws, and customs, a construct we introduced in Asian/Pacific American Women:

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A Historical Anthology (2003).9 Chapters extend that construct to richly detail Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s agency,10 resistance and resilience, and identity as common themes as they confront gender boundaries in their families, communities, work situations, and public spaces in US society and their homelands. As a component of gender studies, intersectionality focuses on different hierarchies of power, such as race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, ability, etc., as they combine and overlap, conflict or contest, accumulate over time, and complicate women’s struggle for equality in a male-dominated Western world.11 We incorporate intersectionality in this book to reveal the complexity of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s lives as they may hold different advantages and disadvantages in particular eras, places, and situations. For example, several chapters discuss how religious affiliation or spirituality intersects with race, class, gender, and other hierarchies in different historical times and locations to inform the women’s agency, resistance and resilience, and search for identity.

Scope and Content Time Frame. This anthology extends previous time frames of Asian American and Pacific Islander histories through chapters that span from creation narratives of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders and Asian migration in the 1500s to their lives in the early twenty-first century. They include cutting-edge research findings that incorporate globalism and transnationalism; exclusion, empire, and colonialism; and gender and intersectionality dimensions in their analyses. Lo cations. We expand the geographical terrain of Asian American and Pacific Islander studies with chapters on women’s experiences in less-studied regions of the United States—the South, the Midwest, and New England—and in the islands of the Pacific. Other chapters introduce lesser-known voices, histories, and concerns of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in America and their birthplaces. There are also discussions of women’s transnational experiences and their struggle against the dominance of US mainstream culture in their homelands and the United States. Diversities. Chapters include more diversities of Asian American and Pacific Islander women as ethnic groups and social classes and as transracial adoptees, lesbians, mixed race persons, and different generations, such as youth and the elderly, than have generally been featured in prior works. This volume is also distinctive in that several chapters feature 1.5- and second-generation women as young adults in various historical times and places. And there are additional findings on long-standing topics of immigration, family, work, community, and political engagement. Moreover, the anthology also increases knowledge of women’s lives, with topics such as food studies, religious affiliations

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and spirituality, cultural performance, aging, the life course, alternative family formations, professional women, and intergenerational dynamics. Gender Dynamics/Life Histories. Chapters provide thick details on gender dynamics and intersections, such as women’s initiatives in migration; family and community building; challenging race and gender biases and obstacles in their careers; pushing boundaries in institutional settings like the church and academia; engaging in political change, ranging from national legislation to community practices; and holding highly visible community leadership and professional positions. Life histories also expand gendered analyses of Asian American and Pacific Islander lives by addressing women’s relations with spouses, partners, children, siblings, parents, grandparents, coworkers, community members, and others. Throughout the anthology, our authors identify individual women and provide their voices, life histories, and contributions, some at great length. This approach notably advances research findings on Asian American and Pacific Islander women who for too long have been invisible, unidentified, unheard, and unnamed.

Themes in Common: Agency, Resistance and Resilience, Identity Three interrelated themes also course through the chapters linking Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s experiences across time, topics, and communities. First is their agency or proactive participation as the women navigate new lives in different eras and through various lands, locations, and situations. The term “agency” here refers to a set of behaviors, such as a collectivity of aims, actions, initiatives, activities, and strategies, that they undertake consciously and unconsciously every day to ensure their and their families’ well-being. Second is the women’s resistance and resilience as they contest racism, sexism, and other inequalities in US society and as part of globalism and transnationalism, exclusion, empire, and colonialism and as they oppose injustices in their families, communities, and homelands while resolving to survive, keep to their goals, and persist through difficult times and impediments. Third is the women’s expressions of and search for new identities that are more representative of who they are or are becoming and what is important to them in the midst and aftermath of changing structures, conditions, and life courses, despite multiple constraints. Identity formation and sense of self are not fixed but fluid as their consciousness, lives, and encounters change.

Methods and Resources A strength of this anthology is the many ways in which contributing authors center Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s voices and experiences through a wide range of methods and resources; many are innovative. Most chapters

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employ traditional historical research methods and print archival sources. A few chapters include new media-based archives, especially films, videos, and digital formats, which are sometimes self-created. The telling of stories to record history—whether ancestral and passed from generation to generation (an especially important part of Pacific Islander women’s historical knowledge) or contemporary and reflective of cultural practice—is integral to many chapters in this volume.12 Forms of storytelling, including oral history, often in conjunction with ethnographic studies, interviews, life and self-histories, multimedia materials, memoirs, and autobiographies provide findings on Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries from a historical perspective. Our authors are inspirational in identifying new and underutilized resources, such as community archives, and innovating through peer- and youth-centered practices to document the evolving and often hidden histories, activities, and lives of Asian American and Pacific Islander women of all ages.

Organization In this historically grounded anthology, the editors have organized the main body of the volume into eight parts, which are roughly chronological around broad time periods that overlap. This approach allows for an unfolding of Asian American and Pacific Islander histories over time and for assessments of the women’s experiences within similar historical eras. Each part gives attention to a wide-ranging but significant topic in the women’s lives and consists of three or four chapters of different ethnic groups. Readers can both appreciate the women’s distinct histories and assess their common experiences. The editors have prepared an introduction to each part to explain its subject matter and the contributions of the chapters within it. The parts are: I – Early Era, Indigenous and Global Roots; II – New Intersections of Race, Gender, Generation, Communities; III – New Cultural Formations, New Selves; IV – Wartimes and Aftermath; V – Globalization, Work, Family, Community, Activism; VI – Spaces of Political Struggles; VII – New Diasporas, Diverse Lives, Evolving Identities; and VIII – Gender, Cultural Change, Intergenerational Dynamics. We recognize that chapters often have more than one focus, dimension, or theme and could alternatively be grouped with other chapters. No single volume can be comprehensive, nor can we represent here all the voices and histories of Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Nor can the chapters in each part fulfill all aspects of its focus. To close, the editors briefly provide “Reflections” as an afterword. This anthology provides a fresh perspective on Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories. We designed it to showcase innovative ways of approaching and doing Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories;

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to support ongoing reinterpretations; to be accessible for specialists, students, and a general audience; and to present some of the exciting leading-edge research on Asian American and Pacific Islander women being undertaken today. Notes

1 Paradigms are enduring concepts, models, or worldviews that govern scholarship and practice and that begin to change (i.e., shift), mainly when confronted with new social realities and reinterpretations. New trends are often paradigm shifts and reflect revisions in describing established concepts. See Shirley Hune, “An Overview of Asian Pacific American Futures: Shifting Paradigms,” in The State of Asian Pacific America: Policy Issues to the Year 2020 (Los Angeles: LEAP Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1993), 1–9; Hune, “Rethinking Race: Paradigms and Policy Formation,” in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 667–76. 2 A nation-state approach serves nationalist politics, which explains, in part, its duration as a model when, in fact, a nation’s role in colonialism, empire, trade, labor migration, and other circulations of people, ideas, and cultural practices are long-standing examples of global connections, integration, resistance, and conflict. Sebastian Conrad points out that historical relationships are not “territorially bounded containers” in What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 3. On examples of integrating global migration into world history, see Donna R. Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder, eds., Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s (Leiden: Brill, 2011). For global aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander histories, for example, see Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Paul A. Kramer, “A Complex of Seas: Passages between Pacific Histories,” Amerasia Journal 42, no. 3 (2016): 32–41. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, ed., Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globalization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), is an early effort to situate Asian Americans within a global framework. Erika Lee provides a new synthesis in The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015). “GlobaLinks: Community Institutions and Practices across Nations,” Amerasia Journal 36, no. 3 (2010), examines how contemporary Asian American communities are connected globally to Asian communities in other countries and original homelands. 3 On transnationalism and its different forms, see Erika Lee and Naoko Shibusawa, guest editors’ introduction, “What Is Transnational Asian American History? Recent Trends and Challenges,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 3 (2005), vii–xviii. Articles in this issue provide examples of transnational experiences in Asian American history. Jonathan Y. Okamura discusses the implications of transnationalism on Asian American studies in “Asian American Studies in the Age of Transnationalism: Diaspora, Race, Community,” Amerasia Journal 29, no. 2 (2003): 171–93. 4 On Asian diasporas, see Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Lok C. D. Siu, eds., Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1–27. Historical studies of Asians in the Americas, for example, are featured in two issues of Amerasia Journal: “Asians in the Americas” 15, no. 2 (1989), and “Asians in the Americas: Transculturations and Power” 28, no. 2 (2002). See also Zelideth María Rivas and Debbie Lee-DiStefano, eds., Imagining Asia in the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016). 5 Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University

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7

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Press, 2000), was one of the first studies of transnationalism and Asian American immigrants. Examples of new frameworks in Asian American immigrant history within globalism and transnationalism include Erika Lee, “From Asia to the United States, around the World and Back Again,” in The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History, ed. David K. Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 390–412; Paul Kramer, “The Geopolitics of Mobility: Immigration Policy and American Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 123, no. 2 (April 2018): 393–438. See also notes 6 and 7. Examples include Kornel S. Chang, “Reconsidering Asian Exclusion in the United States,” Yoo and Azuma, The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History, 154–70; Keith L. Camacho, “Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, and the American Empire,” Yoo and Azuma, The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History, 13–29; Simeon Man, “Empire and War in Asian American History,” Yoo and Azuma, The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History, 253–66. On indigeneity, see Camacho, “Filipinos, Pacific Islanders,” 21–25. On a postcolonial perspective, see Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tina Chen, “Editors’ Introduction,” in “Special Issue: Postcolonial Asian America,” Jouvet: A Journal of Post Colonial Studies 4, no. 3 (2000), https://legacy.chass.ncsu.edu. For example, Gary Y. Okihiro, “Imperialism and Migration,” in Finding a Path Forward: Asian American Pacific Islander National Historic Landmarks Theme Study, ed. Franklin Odo (Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior, 2017), 17–33. The explosion of work in Pacific Islander studies is noteworthy; see Amy Stillman, “A Sea of Islands: Early Foundations and Mobilities of Pacific Islanders,” in Odo, Finding a Path, 34–50; Kelly G. Marsh and Tiara R. Na’puti, “Pacific Islanders in the US and Their Heritage: Making Visible the Visibly Absent,” in Odo, Finding a Path, 234–52. See also Paul Kramer, “Transoceanic Flows: Pacific Islander Interventions across the American Empire,” Amerasia Journal 37, no. 3 (2011). The work of the Pacific Empires Working Group Forum in reconfiguring the Pacific in history appears in Amerasia Journal 42, no. 3 (2016): 1–41. Debra L. DeLaet, “Introduction: The Invisibility of Women in Scholarship on International Migration,” in Gender and Immigration, ed. Gregory A. Kelson and Debra L. DeLaet (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 1–17; Katharine M. Donato, Donna Gabaccia, Jennifer Holdaway, Martin Manalansan IV, and Patricia R. Pessar, “A Glass Half Full? Gender in Migration Studies,” International Migration Review 40, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 3–16. Caroline B. Brettell, Gender and Migration (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), calls for “engendering the study of immigration” to include the gendered demographics of US immigration history, law, labor, family, and others. A recent anthology also addresses gender as a category of analysis in the transpacific; see Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, eds., Gendering the Trans-Pacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Until recently, Asian American and Pacific Islander women have too often been left out of history or marginalized, their contributions considered less worthy, and when documented, are generally hidden or portrayed as passive, dependents, or victims. In our 2003 anthology, the editors sought a more authentic and gender-balanced interpretation of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s historical participation by (1) finding and making the women visible; (2) eliminating them from the margins and as “other” in history; (3) centering them as active subjects; and (4) engendering women, an analytical concept that understands the social constructions of women and men as gendered and determined through gender roles and ideologies that privilege men and disadvantage women. Shirley Hune, “Introduction: Through ‘Our’ Eyes: Asian/Pacific Islander American Women’s History,” in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 1–13.

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10 On agency, we build upon our framework established in Hune and Nomura, Asian/Pacific Islander American Women, of historicizing the women as visible, centered, dynamic, gendered, and active participants striving to create new lives in the midst of unequal relationships that restrict their choices and opportunities. In that volume, we chronicled Asian American and Pacific Islander women as actively negotiating “intricate hierarchies of power, including gender, race, class, sexuality, generation, language, religion, community, nation, and the global division of labor in the United States and elsewhere” for themselves, their families and communities, and in some cases, the larger societies in America and their original homeland. Hune, “Introduction,” 7. 11 Intersectionality grew out of black feminist studies of the late 1980s, some argue earlier, and has been adopted by other women of color as a method to analyze their multidimensional and layered forms of oppression. Jennifer C. Nash, “Intersectionality and Its Discontents,” American Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2017): 117–29. 12 On the value of storytelling, see “Where Women Tell Stories” special issue of Amerasia Journal 35, no. 1 (2009).

Part I Early Era, Indigenous and Global Roots

Part I emphasizes the early era of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s diverse histories in a broad sweep, from creation cosmology to the late twentieth century for Native Hawaiians and from the 1500s to pre–World War II for Asian Americans. Integrating indigenous approaches and the dimensions of globalism and transnationalism, exclusion, empire, colonialism, and gender and intersectionality, three chapters reconsider how, when, where, and why Asian American and Pacific Islander women become part of the history of what is now the United States. The authors bring early women out of the shadows by featuring noteworthy Native Hawaiian and Asian American women as historical agents of change. Class as an intersectional element also helps to explain women’s disparities in opportunity, treatment by US society, and access to resources. We begin with Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor, who examines the roles and agency of Native Hawaiian women historically from the creative and reproductive female forces of nature to high chiefesses and national leaders to family matriarchs, educators, and healers. These powerful and enduring female ancestors provide cultural guidance to heal and nurture families, communities, and nation, and they are sources to draw upon for meeting current and future struggles in everyday life. Utilizing the multigenerational wisdom and experience of the ancestors, contemporary Native Hawaiian women leaders are empowered to redress a history of colonialism and homeland destruction and to address disparities, such as income, education, and health. Global and immigration historians like Erika Lee are reassessing early Asian emigration, especially under empire, and providing a new history of their prenineteenth-century lives in the Americas. Lee discusses how the “roots” of early women’s migration from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and South Asia were shaped by colonialism from the mid-1500s to 1815. Vignettes of individual women of variable class backgrounds document their gendered emigration patterns, their work and family lives, and state officials’ and others’ treatment of them as determined by ideologies of women’s subordination and as dependents in their homelands and the United States. They also confirm the women’s agency in challenging adverse conditions and discriminatory laws and practices so that they could play a significant role in helping to build early Asian American families and communities before World War II. Masako Iino’s chapter discusses the transnational lives of two sisters from Japan’s elite. Ume Tsuda was one of a number of Asian women who came to the 17

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United States in the nineteenth century for education. She arrived in 1871 at the age of six, earned a degree from Bryn Mawr College, and chose to return to Japan to found Tsuda College for women in 1900. Her younger sister, Yona Abiko, immigrated to San Francisco and became a leader in the Japanese American community. Both sisters developed a network of American women friends who supported their efforts to empower women through education. Their remarkable lives among the educated US elite expand understandings of the intersections of race, gender, class, religion, friendships, and individual will in advancing women’s aspirations. These three chapters underscore that early Native Hawaiian and Asian American women were more diverse in background, circumstances, and access to resources, networks, and opportunities than has generally been appreciated, yet they were actively engaged in similar efforts to determine their lives. Hence, their futures varied. Their distinct histories allow us to focus more attention on indigenous and transnational experiences, intersectionality, Hawaiʻi, region, class, and cultural knowledge as influences on the women’s ability to exercise their agency and forge new paths and identities in the early era.

1

Mālamalama Reconnecting as Native Hawaiian Women through Cultural History Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor

Reflection Kohemālamalama O Kanaloa—the shining birth canal of Kanaloa—is one of the original names of the island, that, by my generation of Native Hawaiians, had come to be known as Kahoʻolawe.1 The island was bombed and used for military training exercises from December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, until a vibrant Native Hawaiian movement that started in 1976 succeeded in stopping the bombing on October 22, 1990. As a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, I engaged my students with the movement—circulating petitions, setting up informational tables, organizing teach-ins—but I had only reached the shores of the island in 1983. Impressed by her stark beauty, despite gaping erosive wounds, I had joined the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana (hereafter ʻOhana) to stop the military assaults and to work to heal and restore her landscape and resources.2 The ʻOhana delved deep into Kahoʻolawe moʻolelo (historic stories), chants, and place-names. Through kūpuna (elders), we learned her original names and sacred nature as a manifestation of Kanaloa, Hawaiian god of the ocean. It was a center for the training of navigators in the arts of wayfinding. As we rededicated cultural sites under the guidance of Aunty Edith Kanakaʻole and the Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation, we revived Hawaiian spiritual beliefs, customs, and practices, and these spread throughout Hawaiʻi. We began to observe the natural phenomena that our ancestors experienced at these cultural sites and realized that they had been constructed to mark the passage of time with the daily and seasonal movement of the sun and the monthly cycles of the moon. In 2014, as the ʻOhana planned for the island’s future, we reached the collective insight that the island actually serves as a portal through which we reconnect with our ancestors; their wisdom, experience, science, and beliefs; and the natural life forces that they honored as deities. In an “ah-ha!” moment, as we searched for the translation of “portal” into Hawaiian, came the insight that the deepest meaning of the name, Kohemālamalama O Kanaloa, is that of the ultimate portal, the passage from the realm of creation into the realm of the living. Our ancestors, too, had experienced the island as a sacred portal. 19

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Figure 1.1. Aunty Edith Kanaka‘ole, distinguished kumu hula of Hālau O Kekuhi, and the Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation guided the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana in the revival of Native Hawaiian religious practices on Kanaloa Kahoʻolawe, which has spread throughout the islands of Hawaiʻi. Photograph © Franco Salmoiraghi.

I share this story as an example of an indigenous approach to problem-solving and planning—upon recognizing a problem, an injustice, a challenge, start to intentionally research cultural histories—Hawaiian sources and practices—to derive alternative insights, narratives, approaches, and strategies. These provide excellent models for planning actions. This chapter shares the vital role and agency of Native Hawaiian women throughout history as an inspiration and resource for dealing with contemporary problems. It opens by acknowledging the challenges that Native Hawaiian women face in 2018, which is reflected in the health and wellbeing of Native Hawaiian women compared to non-Hawaiian women in the islands. It then examines the central and powerful role of women historically in Hawaiian cosmology, traditional Hawaiian society, and in the nineteenth

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century, where royal women challenged American imperialism and used their own resources to provide for our people in perpetuity. Next, the chapter explores trends in the livelihoods and living conditions in the twentieth century and women who distinguished themselves as perpetuators of Native Hawaiian beliefs, customs, and practices despite the colonization of Hawaiʻi as a US territory. Finally, I discuss the ways in which Native Hawaiian women find inspiration, agency, and insights from our historic deities, chiefesses, and leaders in taking up the challenges facing Native Hawaiian women today.

Disparities Hawai‘i is an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean with eight major islands. Native Hawaiians sustained a healthy self-sufficient social and governance system until contact with the West in 1778. Foreign diseases, a capitalist plantation system, Western settlers, and Asian immigrant contract labor caused the population to collapse and the sociopolitical and economic dislocation of Native Hawaiians. At 21 percent of the population in 2010, Native Hawaiians are a minority within the homeland. In May 2018, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs published a report, “Haumea: Transforming the Health of Native Hawaiian Women and Empowering Wāhine Well-Being,” which provided statistics on disparities faced by Native Hawaiian women, or wāhine.3 The report notes that economically, wāhine aged twentyfive and older hold 14.3 percent fewer postsecondary degrees than the statewide average.4 In 2016, the mean earnings for wāhine was $44,620, or $5, 967 less than non-Hawaiian females.5 In the 2010 US Census, wāhine comprised 43.7 percent of the women’s prison population.6 With regard to mental health, from 2012 to 2016, nearly one in five wāhine (19.3 percent) considered their mental health “not good” for one to six days of the month.7 In the same period, more Native Hawaiian females in public high schools (24.1 percent) seriously considered attempting suicide compared to non-Hawaiian females (18.7 percent).8 In health issues, between 2009 and 2013, wāhine had the highest incidence (17.4 percent) of and mortality (13.4 percent) from breast cancer among women in Hawaiʻi.9 Between 2012 and 2016, wāhine also had higher rates of chronic disease in comparison with non-Hawaiian females in Hawaiʻi: 11.2 percent versus 8.5 percent for type 2 diabetes; 37.7 percent versus 17.6 percent for obesity; 3.4 percent versus 2.1 percent for heart attack; and 3.7 percent versus 2.8 percent for stroke.10 Stark disparities exist in birth statistics, as a ten-year aggregate shows 45 percent of the extremely preterm births in Hawaiʻi occur with Native Hawaiian mothers,11 and Native Hawaiians have the highest rates of infant mortality in Hawaiʻi, 2.3 times higher than Caucasians.12

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Similar to the planning approach suggested in this chapter, the report invokes the female deity Haumea (also known as Papa) and customary Native Hawaiian approaches, sources for inspiration, and methods to empower wāhine to improve our health.

Inspiration Hawaiian moʻolelo demonstrate that women hold powerful positions, play vital roles, and are central to the documentation and transmission of knowledge through the generations. In traditional moʻolelo, Native Hawaiians acknowledge the creative and reproductive female forces of nature as being powerful and vital in and of themselves and in complement with male forces of nature. For example, Papanuihanaumoku (Great Papa who gives birth to islands, or Papa) embodies the female elements and processes from which life evolves in the Hawaiian Islands through her relationship with the male procreative element, Wākea, the deity of the sky. According to Pualani Kanakaʻole Kanahele, Hawaiian ancestors also identified Papa as the organizer of scientific observation and documentation.13 In her analysis of the Kumulipo, a chant documenting the origin and evolution of life in the Hawaiian islands, Kanahele explains that the thirteenth wā, or era, of the chant describes how Papa organized scientific observations and knowledge into three schools of science—Papahulilani, Papahulihonua, and Papahanaumoku. Papahulilani is the school of knowledge about natural elements that exist in the atmosphere, the sky, and the broad universe—corresponding to meteorology, atmospheric sciences, and astronomy. Papahulihonua is the science of the earth corresponding to geology, geography, oceanography, and other earth and ocean sciences. Papahanaumoku is the science of reproduction and life process of all living beings and organisms, from humans and animals to insects and microbes, and corresponds to medical and life sciences. The composers of the Kumulipo honored Papa as central to the development and transmission of ancestral scientific wisdom.14 Two other essential female deities are Hina and Pele. Hina embodies the processes related to the daily, monthly, and seasonal cycles of the moon and the related tidal fluctuations of the ocean. Her forms include the moon, coral reefs, marine reef life, and ocean caves.15 In a moʻolelo, Hina is the mother of Māui, who asks him to challenge the established order and secure innovations that improve the lives of the people—fire, more islands, longer days during half of the year, and a higher sky. Pele embodies one of the most awesome and magnificent creative forces of nature, the volcano, and all the explosive and dynamic forces of its eruption. In 1983 and 2018, the Kīlauea volcano eruptions and lava flows on Hawai‘i Island reaffirmed her continued existence. The powerful forces of healing and

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revitalization of the land following a volcanic eruption, essentially the ability to evoke life from death, are attributed to her sister, Hiʻiaka-i-ka-pouli-o-Pele (Hiʻiaka in the bosom of Pele).

Women and the ʻOhana, the Foundation of the Hawaiian Social System The core Native Hawaiian culture established between 300 and 1200 revolved around the productive and reproductive activities that were organized through the ʻohana, or extended family. As Native Hawaiian society evolved, gender played a major role in defining the lives of the people. The responsibilities of the women revolved around their natural childbearing role, distinct from those of the men. Men cultivated food plants, did deep-sea fishing, and cooked the food. Women’s work included gathering resources of the forest, streams, and reefs and materials used for thatching, clothing, rope, mats, sails, and so forth. Kapu (sacred restrictions) defined the roles of men and women in religious ceremonies and rituals. Women conducted ceremonies to cleanse participants, places, and structures, including heiau (temples), in preparation for rituals. Women worshipped in specific female temples called Hale O Papa, which are not found elsewhere in Polynesia.16 ʻAi Kapu (sacred eating restrictions) defined the preparation and eating of food for men and women and date back to the time of Wākea.17 Men and women ate separately, and their food was prepared in separate underground imu (ovens) by the men. Women were restricted from eating selected foods that were considered to be representations of male gods.18 Between 1200 and 1500, the migration of men and women from Tahiti to Hawaiʻi brought new influences. The cultures merged both through intermarriage of Tahitian chiefs with Hawaiian women of prominent indigenous genealogical lines and as a result of battles and conquest. The lives of the men and women of the ʻohana remained stable and improved with technological innovations in fishing, farming, and irrigation. Beginning in 1500 and up through European contact in 1778, chiefs emerged as rulers of the Native Hawaiian social system. Women were born into sacred and chiefly roles in the social hierarchy, and they were raised to be free from day-to-day labors and were accorded special privileges although they were still subject to the ʻAi Kapu. While society was patriarchal in political rule, the highest-ranking women of sacred birth could, nevertheless, determine which chief ’s son would inherit rank and privilege through his choice of mate.19 Often, chiefs of lower rank would attempt to ascend in genealogical status by usurping the sexual power of the sacred chiefess. Women were also important chiefs. Oʻahu’s first female paramount chief, Kūkaniloko (generation 106 in AD 1540), ruled over a period of peace and order. She was succeeded by her daughter, Kalaimanuʻia, who was praised by the historian Samuel Kamakau as a “good chiefess” whose governance allowed the aliʻi,

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ruling chiefs, and makaʻāinana, commoners, to live in comfort.20 During her reign, she oversaw the construction of the Pāʻaiau, Opu, and Kapaʻakea fishponds. On the island of Hawaiʻi, High Chiefess Kaikilani jointly ruled first with Kanaloakuaʻana and then with Lonoikamakahiki.21 When the British explorer Captain James Cook first arrived on Kauaʻi in January 1778, High Chief Kaneoneo jointly ruled with his wife, High Chiefess Kamakahelei. By the time Cook returned in November 1778, High Chiefess Kamakahelei had allied with High Chief Kaʻeokūlani to take over control of Kauaʻi.22

Women and the Hawaiian Monarchy With European and American contact and trade, the development of a capitalist social system in Hawaiʻi began to redefine the chiefs’ and chiefesses’ roles in relation to commoner men and women. High Chief Paiea Kamehameha took advantage of Western trade and utilized military technology in his battles to conquer and unite the chiefdoms of Hawaiʻi under his central rule, establishing the Kingdom of Hawai‘i as King Kamehameha I. Native Hawaiian women of chiefly birth trained as warriors under Kamehameha, who himself had three divisions of chiefly women warriors trained in lua, the Native Hawaiian fighting arts.23 Notably, the warrior chiefesses who accompanied their husbands into Kamehameha’s Battle of Nuʻuanu on Oʻahu were specially trained to be adept in the shooting of Western muskets and were the first line of offense against the Oʻahu chiefs.24 Upon the death of King Kamehameha I, High Chiefess Keʻōpūolani, the mother of his sons and successors, Kamehameha II and Kamehameha III, was the highestranking and most sacred chiefess in the islands. High Chiefess Kaʻahumanu was the most politically influential wife of King Kamehameha I, whose brothers and uncles constituted his principal allies in his rise to power. The position of Kuhina Nui, or prime minister, was created for her to jointly rule with King Kamehameha II. The two chiefly women, Ke‘ōpūolani and Ka‘ahumanu, worked with the Council of Chiefs to achieve a successful transition of rule. The ʻAi Noa—the abolition of the system of chiefly kapu under which the rival chiefs claimed divine power, prestige, and rights of succession—was key for the transition of governance to Kamehameha II. Once abolished, the right to rule became secular and based upon military power and faithful service to the central government of the king, the Kuhina Nui, and the appointed Council of Chiefs. High Chiefess Manono joined her husband, High Chief Kekuaokalani, in opposing the ʻAi Noa and fighting in the battle of Kuamoʻo, where they were both killed. Her motto Mālama ko aloha (care for and perpetuate love and respect for all) inspired her own resistance and continues to be an ideal inspiring work for social justice. The ʻAi Noa also abolished the restrictions upon women and opened the way for the roles of both women and men at all levels of society to be redefined.

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While the liberation of women, especially those of chiefly rank, was a critical factor in the ʻAi Noa, the primary motivation was to undermine the status of rival ritual chiefs who claimed traditional privilege and rank and threatened to overturn the central government.25 With the ʻAi Noa, there was no longer a division of labor or restrictions on the consumption of resources according to gender. Commoner women assumed a greater role in production for the households of ʻohana, including cultivation and food preparation, when men were increasingly drawn into wage labor outside the household as sailors and stevedores for whaling ships, as teamsters and haulers for merchants, as cowboys on ranches, and as manual laborers on plantations. The ʻohana of the makaʻāinana, or commoner class, bore the burden of social and economic change under the monarchy. Native Hawaiian families suffered catastrophic loss of lives from foreign diseases throughout the nineteenth century. Historian Samuel Kamakau reports that thousands died in 1826 “of an epidemic of ‘cough, congested lungs, and sore throat,’” and in 1848, measles “carried away about a third of the population of Hilo, Hawai‘i.”26 Consequently, a precontact estimated population of 400,000 to 800,000 was reduced to 40,622 in 1890. Under the traditional social system, land was sacred and could not be owned. The chiefs and later the king provided stewardship over the land, and the entitlement of the ʻohana to live upon and cultivate the land for subsistence was recognized and honored provided they also gave tribute and labor service to the chief. The unprecedented establishment of a Western system of private property by King Kamehameha III through a process called Māhele, meaning “division,” left the majority of ʻohana landless. When the final land grants were made under the Kuleana Act of 1850, 8,205 makaʻāinana received 28,600 acres, or 0.8 percent of all of the lands of Hawai‘i.27 Some of the women in the burgeoning port towns of the islands were drawn into prostitution. There, Native Hawaiian women also worked as nurses, house servants, washerwomen, and servingwomen, earning from one to ten dollars a week, about half of men’s usual wages.28 However, it was primarily the women who remained with the families and households of ‘ohana and held them together day to day. They also cultivated the taro and sweet potato fields and gathered food upland from the streams and from nearshore reefs. Between 1820 and 1845, the role of Native Hawaiian women was equal to that of men. Native Hawaiian women could own property, participate in elections, and freely leave intolerable marriages. Beginning in 1845, Western laws were adopted and included restrictions on the rights of women in Hawaiʻi. From 1845 through its repeal in 1888, the Hawaiian Kingdom adopted a coverture law from Massachusetts whereby a married woman surrendered ownership of her property and the right to conduct business to her husband.29 Upon her death, the husband received one-third interest in the wife’s fixed property, and the remainder

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passed on to her heirs. Likewise, upon death of the husband, the widow received a dower of one-third life interest in her husband’s fixed property and an absolute one-third ownership of his moveable property. In 1850, women were denied the right to vote that they had previously exercised. In 1860, the law required a married woman to adopt her husband’s name.30

Women Aliʻi While Western laws began to limit the rights of women in Hawaiʻi, chiefly women, unlike the commoner women, retained significant political power and owned property. They also attained significant positions in government equal to men. The position of Kuhina Nui held by High Chiefess Kaʻahumanu made her equal in power to King Kamehameha II. When he died in London of measles in 1824, his brother became Kamehameha III at the age of nine, and Kuhina Nui Kaʻahumanu ruled as regent until she passed away in 1832. Except for the period from 1844 through 1855, the Kuhina Nui were chiefly women from the creation of the office in 1819 until it was abolished in 1864.31 King Kamehameha V asked Bernice Pauahi Bishop to succeed him as ruler, but she declined to take on that responsibility. Through an election, King Lunalilo succeeded King Kamehameha V. When he passed away without naming a successor, another election was held. Queen Emma, widow of King Kamehameha IV, was a candidate against Chief David Kalākaua to succeed as ruler. Kalākaua became king, and his sister Liliʻuokalani succeeded him as the queen and last monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Chiefly women also served in the Council of Chiefs and in the House of Nobles. Under the Māhele, five of the ten high chiefs to receive lands were women, and ten of the twenty-four lesser chiefs to receive lands were women.32 Three Native Hawaiian queens and a princess endowed the Native Hawaiian people with their landed estates in perpetuity. One by one, as they passed away in the late nineteenth century not having children who survived them, the landed aliʻi bequeathed their substantial personal landholdings to the common Native Hawaiian people in the form of perpetual charitable trusts that generate revenues to provide programs for the education, health, and general welfare of the common people. The private landholdings of the Kamehameha chiefs, totaling 369,699 acres (9 percent of all the land in Hawaiʻi) were consolidated into the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Estate after the death of Princess Pauahi in 1884. In her will, Princess Pauahi stated that she wanted her trustees to provide an education “in such useful knowledge as may tend to make good and industrious men and women.”33 Her trust established and still funds the Kamehameha Schools for the education of Native Hawaiians. Queen Emma, widow of King Kamehameha IV, was concerned for the health and education of Native Hawaiians. In 1859, she and the king established the

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Queen’s Hospital to provide free health care for Native Hawaiians, and in 1867, she helped found Saint Andrew’s Priory, an Episcopalian school for girls. In 1885, when she passed away, her trust of 13,064 acres was established to fund Queen’s Hospital and scholarships for Native Hawaiian girls to attend the priory. As noted above, Queen Emma sought election to be the monarch under the motto Hawaiʻi for the Hawaiians. The key issue of the campaign in 1874 was the ceding of Keawalau o Puʻuloa (Pearl Harbor) to the United States for its exclusive use in return for a reciprocal trade agreement that would eliminate a tariff on Hawaiʻi sugar. Queen Emma opposed the ceding of Pu‘uloa, and Kalākaua supported it. Although Kalākaua won the election, Queen Emma remained a prominent icon of resistance to US influence over Hawaiʻi. Throughout the decades, Queen Emma persists as a prominent role model of strength, benevolence, compassion, and perseverance in the face of adversity, especially for women involved in medicine, public health, social work, and politics and the students and alumni of the priory. Concerned for the welfare of Native Hawaiian mothers and their babies, Queen Kapiʻolani, the widow of King Kalākaua, willed her estate to the maintenance of the Queen Kapiʻolani Maternity Hospital, which she helped found in 1890. Her inspirational motto Kūlia i ka nuʻu (strive for the highest) guided the development of that institution into the modern Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children and has been embraced by generations of Native Hawaiians, women and men, who strive for excellence in all endeavors. In 1909, Queen Liliʻuokalani established the Queen Liliʻuokalani Children’s Center by executing a deed placing the lands from her estate, totaling 9,793 acres, in trust to provide social services support to orphaned and indigent Native Hawaiian children.34 Her motto ʻOnipaʻa (to be steadfast and stand firm in the shifting tides of change) continues to inspire the work of those carrying out the mandate of her trust. It also inspires the contemporary Native Hawaiian movement for sovereignty and self-determination. The women ali’i bequeathed a remarkable legacy to future generations of Native Hawaiians whose well-being diminished as they were increasingly marginalized in their homeland by settlers. As the sugar economy flourished with the implementation of the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States and the importation of migrant contract labor, Native Hawaiians continued to succumb to foreign diseases and were displaced from ancestral lands. Collectively, these trusts for whom the Native Hawaiian people are beneficiaries provide a solid foundation for the Native Hawaiian people today in our pursuit of social justice and the excellent health and well-being of our people.

The Overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani and the Hawaiian Monarchy The Hawaiian monarchy, established in 1810, was overthrown on January 17, 1893, by US naval forces while Queen Liliʻuokalani held the throne.35 In her book,

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Hawaiʻi’s Story by Hawaiʻi’s Queen, she reveals her strategy to surrender to the US government rather than to the provisional government in the belief that the president and Congress would eventually restore her to power upon an investigation of the treasonous conspiracy against her by US citizens and diplomatic representatives. She also believed that this pathway would prevent bloodshed. While President Grover Cleveland did appeal to Congress to denounce the provisional government and reinstate the queen, Congress upheld the invasion of Hawaiʻi and the diplomatic recognition of the provisional government. Queen Liliʻuokalani grew to represent the sovereignty and national integrity of the Native Hawaiian people and became the focal point of Native Hawaiian protest against American rule and assimilation from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. Her motto ʻOnipaʻa is interpreted as a call to persevere and endure as a people. For the generations of Native Hawaiians born in the twentieth century, Native Hawaiian national consciousness and identity are symbolized by the image of the queen—regal, beautiful, defiant, proud, enduring. ʻOnipaʻa was a call for future generations of Native Hawaiians to live, practice, and perpetuate their native language, culture, science, spiritual beliefs, and customs and to endure as a distinct people despite American efforts to extinguish Hawaiian language and culture and to assimilate Native Hawaiians into the US social system.

Territorial Years At the beginning of the twentieth century, after Hawaiʻi was incorporated into the United States as a territory, irrigation systems were constructed to carry water from the windward sides of the island to open new sugar plantations on the leeward sides of the islands, which increased sugar production. The diversion of stream waters negatively impacted year-round taro production in some rural areas, leading Native Hawaiians to migrate into the cities for new livelihoods. In the cities, Native Hawaiian women began to be represented in all classes of labor, and their condition of life was determined primarily by their class status rather than according to their gender. Native Hawaiian women who moved to Honolulu entered the workforce, working part-time as hula dancers, lei makers, greeters, waitresses, and hotel workers. They also worked in the pineapple canneries and as clerical workers and telephone operators, and they entered the professions of teaching and nursing. Nevertheless, the majority of Native Hawaiian women continued to work as homemakers, and most of them remained in rural communities, where they continued to rely on subsistence fishing and farming guided by Native Hawaiian cultural beliefs and knowledge. By 1930, Native Hawaiian women made up 21 percent of the territory’s teachers, 15 percent of the trained nurses, 17 percent of the clerical workers, and 35

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percent of the telephone operators. In agriculture, Native Hawaiian women comprised only a small proportion, 5 percent, of the female employees; however, they were 27 percent of the women operatives in the pineapple canneries.36 The census also revealed a greater trend of outmarriage by Native Hawaiian women than by men. In 1910, the census takers began to count “Hawaiian,” “Caucasian Hawaiian,” and “Asiatic Hawaiian” as distinct categories. By 1930, there were 50,860 Native Hawaiians, of which 22,636 were pure “Hawaiian,” 15,632 were “Caucasian Hawaiian,” and 12,592 were “Asiatic Hawaiian.”37 This is the first census in which the number of part Hawaiians exceeded the number of full Hawaiians. Native Hawaiian women, who distinguished themselves as leaders during this era, actively worked for women’s suffrage and then became active in politics. Three Native Hawaiian women served in the Territorial Legislature: Anna Kuulei Furtado Kahanamoku, Rosalie Enos Lyons Keliʻinoi, and Bina Kailipaina Niewper Mossman. Princess Abigail Campbell Kawānanakoa was the most influential in territorial politics. In 1924, after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Princess Kawānanakoa was the first woman delegate from Hawaiʻi to the Republican National Convention.38 She distinguished herself as a champion of justice for Native Hawaiians in her advocacy of a fair trial for the Native Hawaiian and “local” Japanese American men who were unfairly accused and eventually acquitted of the assault and rape of Thalia Massie, the wife of a navy lieutenant. She bitterly criticized Governor Lawrence M. Judd for commuting the sentences of Massie’s mother, husband, and their accomplices for the murder of one of the accused men, Joseph Kahahawai.39

Statehood Years and Sovereignty After Hawaiʻi became a state in 1959, unprecedented development transformed the landscape of island shorelines, polluted fishing grounds, drained underground water tables, and displaced Native Hawaiian fishing and farming communities. In the 1970s a Native Hawaiian political movement emerged. Louisa Rice, a Hawaiian homesteader from Hoʻolehua, Molokaʻi, who worked as a taxi driver in Honolulu, was one of the first women to lead this movement. After a woman passenger rode in her taxi, the car burned, and upon cleaning it out, Rice found a book that had been left by the passenger, which was unscathed by the fire. The book was Hawaiʻi’s Story by Hawaiʻi’s Queen, and Rice took this as a sign that she was meant to read the book and act upon its message. Rice had an aunt, Agnes Brown, on the board of her Native Alaskan tribal corporation, Cook Inlet Region, Inc. (CIRI). Given the information in the queen’s book, CIRI encouraged and provided funding for Rice to pursue a congressional law to provide reparations to Native Hawaiians for the illegal role played by US troops in the overthrow of the monarchy.

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Louisa Rice and other Native Hawaiian community leaders founded Aboriginal Lands of Hawaiian Ancestry (ALOHA) in 1972 and worked with Hawaiʻi’s congressional delegation to introduce a bill to provide reparations to the Native Hawaiian people. When the bill languished in Congress in 1975, then president of ALOHA Charles Kauluwehi Maxwell called for the occupation of the island of Kahoʻolawe, which was being used for military live-fire training and bombing, to draw attention to the plight of Native Hawaiians. The January 1976 occupation launched the movement to stop the bombing of the island, led by the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana. In 1978, Congress established a Native Hawaiians Study Commission, which held hearings in Hawaiʻi. The majority of members appointed by President Ronald Reagan were conservative Republicans from outside Hawaiʻi, and in 1983, they reported that the United States was not responsible for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.40 Significantly, Native Hawaiian Republicans, who were a minority of the members, filed a report that found the United States responsible for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. This contradiction did not get resolved until 1993, when Native Hawaiians succeeded in having the US Congress and the president of the United States offer a joint apology to Native Hawaiians “for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi on January 16, 1893, with the participation of agents and citizens of the US and the deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination.”41 With Queen Liliʻuokalani as the patron of sovereignty, Native Hawaiians continue to seek full redress, including restitution of all of the territory of the Hawaiian nation, compensation for the mismanagement and destruction of national lands and resources, and most important, the reestablishment and recognition of a government to exercise sovereignty and self-determination. Despite statehood, the consciousness of, pride in, and practice of Native Hawaiian culture and spirituality evolved into a modern renaissance. In rallying to stop US Navy bombing of the island of Kahoʻolawe, the traditional concept of aloha ʻāina, that land is sacred and must be nurtured, gained prominence. Rural Native Hawaiian communities are recognized as cultural kīpuka, or strongholds, of Native Hawaiian cultural practices that are organized around subsistence lifeways. Pele practitioners organized the Pele Defense Fund to stop the extraction of geothermal energy out of the Kīlauea volcano as a desecration of the deity’s life force. In 1994, they stopped a 500-megawatt project in the Wao Kele O Puna. In 2018, eruptions of Kīlauea in the lower East Rift Zone shut down the 25-megawatt geothermal plant, Puna Geothermal Ventures. Traditional navigational arts and skills were revived with transpacific voyages of the Polynesian Voyaging Society on the canoes Hokuleʻa, Hawaiʻi Loa, and Makali’i. Both women and men are trained as navigators, captains, and crew members. Hālau hula, schools of traditional Hawaiian dance and chant for both women and men and led by both women and men kumu, or teachers,

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Figure 1.2. Molokaʻi kūpuna (right to left) Aunty Mary Lee, Aunty Clara Ku, and Aunty Lani Kapuni with two other women and a child on their way to the island Kanaloa Kahoʻolawe, where they shared their knowledge about the historical purpose and use of cultural sites that they were familiar with. Photograph © Franco Salmoiraghi.

increased and flourished. Lāʻau Lapaʻu, traditional herbal and spiritual healing practices, were revived as valid holistic medicinal practices. Hawaiian studies from the elementary to university level became part of the regular curricula, and Hawaiian music evolved into new forms of expression and gained popularity. In this renaissance, the knowledge and experience of Native Hawaiian kūpuna, or elders, was of crucial significance. Kūpuna shared their knowledge of chants, hula, legends, genealogies, place-names, religious rituals, subsistence fishing and planting, astronomy, navigation, and healing practices. Among these kūpuna, women were prominent and included kumu hula trained in the Pele traditions (Edith Kanakaole and Aunty ʻIolani Luahine from the island of Hawaiʻi); those schooled in the traditions of powerful spiritual kahuna and kūpuna from the traditionally spiritual island of Molokaʻi (Aunty Mary Lee, Aunty Clara Ku, Aunty Lani Kapuni, and Aunty Harriet Ne); the Native Hawaiian scholar from Kaʻū, Hawaiʻi, who worked as translator, ethnographer, and resource person at the Bishop Museum on Oʻahu (Mary Kawena Pukui); and Oʻahu kumu hula and cultural resource (Emma De Fries). Through these women, the images of the cosmic gods of nature, powerful spiritual healers, and great rulers—including ancestral female gods and chiefesses—were acknowledged, respected, and honored.

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Diaspora Statehood also expanded the diaspora of Native Hawaiians and other Hawaiʻiborn residents to the US continent, a trend that began after World War II. In 1950, 12.7 percent (51,955) of Hawaiʻi-born persons lived on the US continent. By 1960, that number more than doubled to 115,070, or 21.5 percent of Hawaiʻi-born persons.42 Among Native Hawaiians in the United States in 2010, 45 percent (237,107) lived on the US continent and 55 percent (289,970) lived in Hawaiʻi.43 Many Hawaiian women living on the West Coast are descendants of Native Hawaiian men who migrated and settled there for the fur trade and California gold rush in the nineteenth century. After World War II, Native Hawaiian women migrated for economic opportunities—to attend college, as members or dependents of the military, and for better and higher-paying jobs. Hawaiian women also migrated to the US continent as entertainers. For example, the Hawaiian Room in the Lexington Hotel in New York City was known as an oasis of Hawaiian culture and entertainment, with hundreds of dancers, singers, and musicians from Hawaiʻi performing there between 1937 and 1966.44 As Las Vegas boomed into a gambling and entertainment mecca, Native Hawaiian women also performed there, notably Mary Kaye who initiated the all-night lounge performances.45 Since the 1950s, there have now been three generations of Native Hawaiians living throughout the US continent. They have sustained their connection to Hawaiʻi and an active engagement in Hawaiian cultural activities through Hawaiian civic clubs, canoe clubs, and hālau hula (hula schools) as well as regular visits to the islands. There are dynamic networks of Native Hawaiian families and communities who organize huge lūʻau events, language classes, large community gatherings, and music concerts. Hawaiian food restaurants and craft retail stores also reinforce cultural ties.46 Hawaiian women and men from the continent actively participate in cultural and political events in Hawaiʻi. Hālau from the US continent compete in the Merrie Monarch hula festival. Hawaiians on the US continent are enrolled in the Kanaʻiolowalu Roll to reestablish a sovereign Native Hawaiian government and had delegates participate in the ʻAha Kumu Kānāwai in February 2016 to draft a constitution for ratification by Native Hawaiians in Hawaiʻi and on the continent.47

1978 Constitutional Convention A Native Hawaiian woman, Adelaide “Frenchy” DeSoto, affectionately known as “Aunty Frenchy,” was an important leader of the Hawaiian Affairs Committee of the 1978 Constitutional Convention (ConCon). Under her leadership, the committee designed singularly important amendments that define Hawaiian rights and entitlements and laid a solid foundation for the perpetuation of Native

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Hawaiian culture, language, and claims for self-governance. Through Aunty Frenchy’s vision and political acumen, the amendments gained the support of the majority of ConCon delegates and approval by the majority of Hawaiʻi voters. The constitution designates both Hawaiian and English as the official languages of the State of Hawaiʻi, reaffirms and protects the exercise of Native Hawaiian rights, and provides for the promotion of the study of Hawaiian culture, history, and language. It established the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to advocate for Native Hawaiians and to utilize public land trust revenues to support the well-being of Native Hawaiians and recognizes Native Hawaiians and the general public as the two beneficiaries of the public land trust.48

Conclusion This chapter has reviewed the vital role and agency of Native Hawaiian women throughout our history to serve as a resource to draw upon for inspiration as new challenges arise. Native Hawaiian women can reach deep and reconnect with a powerful cultural heritage to contravene the social processes of colonization that undermined, demeaned, and appropriated the standing of female ancestors. In the twenty-first century, Native Hawaiian women lead the movement for Hawaiian sovereignty and self-determination and continue to fulfill a wide variety of meaningful roles across the broad spectrum of a multiethnic society in Hawaiʻi and the US continent. Native Hawaiian women of every class are empowered by a legacy of powerful, brilliant, and enduring female ancestors—as creative life forces of nature in myths, powerful high chiefesses, national leaders, family matriarchs, educators, and healers—to take on new challenges and the struggles of everyday living. The same source that reported the disparities in health and well-being cited at the beginning of this chapter also provides an indigenous Hawaiian approach to utilize the multigenerational wisdom and experience of our ancestors in healing, birthing, and nurturing our families, communities, and nation. Reflecting upon the experience with the island Kohemālamalama O Kanaloa provides a glimmer of hope. Once the most abused island of the Hawaiian archipelago, the island is not only being healed and nurtured, it is being elevated to its original status as a most sacred island and a center for training in and mastering of Native Hawaiian culture, arts, sciences, and spiritual practices. I OLA KANALOA! I Ola Nā Wāhine. Life to Kanaloa Kahoʻolawe! Life to Native Hawaiian Women!49 Notes

1 “Mālamalama” means “shining, light of knowledge, enlightenment.” 2 For more information, see Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana website, www.protectkahoolaweohana.org; Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana translates to “extended family for the island of Kahoʻolawe.”

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Aunty Edith Kanakaʻole advised the group to organize in the Hawaiian way, as family for the island, rather than as a Western structured association. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Haumea—Transforming the Health of Native Hawaiian Women and Empowering Wāhine Well-Being (Honolulu: Office of Hawaiian Affairs, 2018). Office of Hawaiian Affairs, 97. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, 99. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, 77. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, 11. Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, 39. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, 38. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, 47. Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Pualani Kanakaole Kanahele, with Huihui Kanahele-Mossman, Ann Kalei Nuʻuhiwa, and Kaumakaiwapoʻohalahiʻipaka Kealiʻikanakaʻole, Kūkulu Ke Ea A Kanaloa—The Cultural Plan for Kahoʻolawe (Maui: Kahoʻolawe Island Reserve Commission, February 1, 2009). Kanahele. Martha Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1976), 12–14. Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa, “Kaulana Oʻahu Me He ʻĀina Momona Mamuli O Nā Haʻawina ʻAumākua: Famous Is Oʻahu as a Land Fat with Food because of Ancestral Teachings” (unpublished manuscript, 2014). Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires: Ko Hawaiʻi ʻĀina a me Na Koi Puʻumake a ka Poʻe Haole, Pehea la e Pono ai? How Shall We Live in Harmony? (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1992), 23–24. She states, “The ʻAikapu is a religion in which males and females are separated in the act of eating, males being laʻa or ‘sacred,’ and females haumia or ‘defiling,’ by virtue of menstruation.” Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land, 33–35. Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land. Carolyn Kēhaunani Cachola Abad, “The Evolution of Hawaiian Socio-Political Complexity: An Analysis of Hawaiian Oral Traditions” (PhD diss., University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2000). Cachola Abad. Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs of Hawai‘i, rev. ed. (Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools, 1992), 92. Richard Paglinawan, “Olohe Lua or Master of Hawaiian Fighting Arts” (presentation, Counseling and Treating People of Color Conference, Honolulu, HI, November 9, 1999). Stephen Desha, Kamehameha and His Warrior Kekuhaupiʻo (Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools, 2000), 35, 44, 151, 400–402, 408–10. Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, l981); William Davenport, “The Hawaiian ‘Cultural Revolution’: Some Economic and Political Considerations,” American Anthropologist 71 (1969): 1–20; A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948). Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs of Hawai‘i, 236–37. Marion Kelly, cited in Neil M. Levy, “Native Hawaiian Land Rights,” California Law Review 63, no. 4 (July 1975): 856. G. W. Bates, Sandwich Island Notes (New York: Harper, 1854), as cited in Jocelyn Linnekin, Sacred Queens and Women of Consequence: Rank, Gender, and Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 183.

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29 Judith R. Gething, “Christianity and Coverture: Impact on the Legal Status of Women in Hawaiʻi, 1820–1920,” Hawaiian Journal of History 11 (1977): 188–220. 30 Gething. 31 Keoni Ana, half-Hawaiian son of King Kamehameha’s British military adviser John Young and a niece of King Kamehameha I, served as Kuhina Nui from 1844 through 1855. 32 Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land, 227. 33 “Pauahi’s Will,” Kamehameha Schools, www.ksbe.edu, accessed May 19, 2018. 34 Acreage statistics found in “Public Land Policy in Hawaii: Major Landowners,” report no. 3, 1967 (Honolulu: Legislative Reference Bureau, 1969), 17–18, table 3. 35 Sources on the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy include US House of Representatives, 53rd Cong., 2nd Sess., report no. 243, “Intervention of United States Government in Affairs of Foreign Friendly Governments” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), 21; US Senate, 53rd Cong., 2nd Sess., report no. 227, “Report from the Committee on Foreign Relations and Appendix in Relation to the Hawaiian Islands, February 26, 1894” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894); Queen Liliʻuokalani, Hawaiʻi’s Story by Hawaiʻi’s Queen (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1964); petitions in archives to Queen Liliʻuokalani. 36 US Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930: Outlying Territories and Possessions, Number and Distribution of Inhabitants Composition and Characteristics of the Population Occupations, Unemployment and Agriculture (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1932), 90, table 8; US Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Population, Second Series, Hawaii, Composition and Characteristics of the Population and Unemployment (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931), 6, table 2. 37 US Bureau of the Census, 1931, 6, table 2. While the term used was “Asiatic-Hawaiian,” the overwhelming majority of intermarriages were with Chinese rather than with Japanese or Koreans. 38 Richard Hawkins, “Princess Abigail Kawānanakoa: The Forgotten Territorial Native Hawaiian Leader,” Hawaiian Journal of History 37 (2003): 167. 39 Hawkins, 168. Regarding Massie Case, see John Rosa, Local Story: The Massie-Kahahawai Case and the Culture of History (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014). 40 Native Hawaiians Study Commission, “Report on the Culture, Needs and Concerns of Native Hawaiians, Pursuant to Public Law 96–565, Title III. Final Report. Volume I” (Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, June 23, 1983); Native Hawaiians Study Commission, “Report on the Culture, Needs and Concerns of Native Hawaiians. Final Report. Volume II. Claims of Conscience: A Dissenting Study of the Culture, Needs and Concerns of Native Hawaiians” (Washington, DC: Department of Interior, June 23, 1983), https://archive.org, accessed July 4, 2018. 41 Public Law 103–150, November 23, 1993, 107 Stat. 1510. 42 Robert Schmidt, Demographic Statistics of Hawaiʻi: 1778–1965 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1968), 183, table 63. 43 “2010 Census Summary File 1: QT-P9—United States: Race Reporting for the Native Hawaiian by Selected Categories: 2010,” Native Hawaiian Data Book, www.ohadatabook. com, accessed March 3, 2018. 44 “The Hawaiian Room,” PBS Hawaii, November 8, 2016, www.pbshawaii.org, accessed March 18, 2018. 45 Shannon Wianecki, “Cha Cha Cha Boom!,” HanaHou!: The Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines 14, no. 4 (September 2011), www.hanahou.com, accessed March 18, 2018. 46 Rona Halualani, “Discover More: Aloha on the Mainland,” PBS, www.pbs.org, accessed March 18, 2018. Also see Rona Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians: Native Identities and

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Cultural Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Kehaulani Kauanui, “Off-Island Hawaiians ʻMaking’ Ourselves at ʻHome’: A [Gendered] Contradiction in Terms?,” Women’s Studies International Forum 21, no. 6 (1998): 681–93. 47 Kanaiolowalu: Native Hawaiian Roll Commission, www.kanaiolowalu.org, accessed March 3, 18, 2018; “‘Aha 2016,” Hawaiian Nation, www.hawaiiannation.com. 48 Hawaiʻi State Constitution, Articles V.4, X.4, XII.4, XII.7. 49 See Edith Kanakaole Foundation, 2009, note 2; Kanaloa 2026 Working Group, I OLA KANALOA! A Plan for Kanaloa Kahoʻolawe through 2026, 2014, “Plans, Policies, and Reports,” Kaho‘olawe, www.kahoolawe.hawaii.gov, accessed July 5, 2018.

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Global Roots and Gendered Routes Early Asian American Women’s History Erika Lee

When my great-grandfather and great-grandmother sailed for the United States in 1919, they left my grandmother Moy Sau Bik behind in China and took her male cousin instead. Perhaps my great-grandfather believed that boys were more likely to find steady work and contribute to the family economy. It might have been safer for my grandmother, a girl, to remain in China, whereas a boy might more easily navigate the nation’s anti-Chinese environment at the time. Or maybe there was no other way for my grandmother’s cousin to immigrate under the Chinese exclusion laws. Passed in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers from America while allowing only select groups of Chinese to gain entry. In place until 1943, the exclusion laws separated many families and set in motion decades of immigration based on false papers and fraudulent identities. Families often bent the rules. My great-grandfather, for example, listed his nephew as his son on his immigration application, and they were admitted as merchant and son into the United States. They became part of the larger story of global migration that has shaped our modern world. But women like my grandmother did not have the same access to migration. Her father had given away her immigration slot. She would never see her mother again, and she would not come to the United States herself until 1933, when she married my grandfather, a merchant and restaurant owner in New York City. She was not alone in enduring family separation and limited immigration opportunities. Nearly all Asian immigrant women faced similar obstacles as they left their homes and crossed the ocean to America. Their stories show the importance of women and the significance of gender in shaping the causes and consequences of migration to the United States. This chapter highlights early Asian American women’s history before World War II as a story of global roots and gendered routes shaped by colonialism, race, and gender inequality. Asian women in the United States are part of a longer global history of Asian migration to the Americas that followed the ebbs and flows of empires dating back to the sixteenth century. Imperialism in Asia caused massive civil and political unrest, economic inequality, and disruption that spurred people to leave their homes. It also established the ways and means to initiate and sustain global mass migration. The Spanish 37

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Empire—with colonies in the Philippines and New Spain (present-day Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Florida, and parts of the United States and Central America)—first connected Asia and the Americas through colonization and trade and sent the first Asians to the Americas. The rise of the British Empire in South Asia and China caused massive economic dislocation, established regular transpacific trade, and inaugurated the business and profitability of mass migration. Japanese colonialism in Korea turned Koreans into refugees while Japan’s imperial ambitions displaced many Japanese farmers and laborers who sought their futures abroad. And as the United States became a world power and expanded its reach into Asia, Asians started coming to America as part of these imperial crossings. This chapter is also a story of gendered routes, i.e., the ways in which gender shaped migration, determining who could come, how, and under which conditions.1 Up through the mid-twentieth century, the numbers of Asian immigrant women were small compared to those of their male counterparts because of their uneven and unequal access to migration. Patriarchy and gender inequality in both Asia and the United States discouraged women from migrating. Moreover, US immigration policies favored male migrants. This would not change until after World War II and especially after 1965, when the numbers of Asian immigrant women became more equal—and sometimes surpassed—those of men. Because most studies either focus on the more numerous men who came in the pre–World War II era or on the feminization of contemporary migration, in which women are the majority of US immigrants, this early history is significant and fills an important historiographical gap.2 The global roots and gendered routes of Asian women and girls reveal much about how colonialism and gender shaped early migration and migrant lives in the Americas. It also demonstrates how gender inequality interacted with racism to impact both foreign- and US-born Asian Americans. Asian women’s voices and experiences are thus important in understanding this history of Asian immigration and the formation of communities in the global Asian diaspora. Some women suffered terribly. However, Asian immigrant women—a diverse group with varied economic and ethnic backgrounds—negotiated their way into the nation, where they helped shape early Asian America and made it possible for later generations of Asian immigrant women to follow in their footsteps.

First Journeys From 1565 to 1815, up to one hundred thousand Asians from China, Japan, the Philippines, and South and Southeast Asia were taken to the Americas as Europe’s age of exploration and colonization increasingly linked Asia to the “New World.” They came as sailors, servants, and slaves on Spanish trading vessels that brought porcelain, spices, furniture, and silk from Asia and returned with silver pesos

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from Mexico and Peru. This first wave of Asian migrants became an important part of the Americas. The locals collectively called them los chinos.3 Asian women came as either servants or slaves. Women from India, Malaca, and Maluco were known to be “excellent seamstresses, cooks, and preparers of conserves, and are neat and clean in service,” according to one observer. Others were captured for sale as concubines or sex slaves and faced particularly harrowing ordeals. Spanish officials and nobles often brought Filipino women onboard the ships as concubines and then abandoned them upon reaching Acapulco.4 Perhaps the most well-known “chino” in New Spain was Mirrha-Catarina de San Juan. Mirrha was only twelve years old when she was abducted by Portuguese slave traders in southwestern India, sold in Manila to a Spanish captain, Miguel de Sosa, and taken to Puebla, Mexico, in 1610 as a slave. Captain de Sosa married her to another Asian slave, but Mirrha refused to be a wife. Instead, she dedicated her life to Christ and became a healer and a Catholic visionary who worked among the poor and sick. Mirrha was so revered that the Jesuit order nominated her for sainthood. She became a local heroine and the inspiration for la china poblana, “the Chinese [Asian] girl from Puebla town,” an iconic symbol of Mexican womanhood representing the beauty and strength of local culture (and people) over imported European tastes and colonialism.5 A statue of Mirrha still stands in the main plaza in Puebla.

Coolie Women in the West Indies Between 1838 and 1918, more than 419,000 South Asians went to British West Indian plantations in British Guiana, Trinidad, and Jamaica as “coolies,” or indentured laborers, replacing or working alongside African slaves in these and other British plantations throughout the empire.6 Another 250,000 Chinese were similarly brought to Cuba and Peru. They were mostly men. But in the West Indies, women soon played an important role in the indenture system. Planters sought to bind the overwhelmingly male labor force to the plantations by recruiting women to encourage permanent settlement. Sujaria Bahadur was one coolie woman who sailed from Calcutta in 1903 and landed three months later in British Guiana. She joined a growing number of widows, runaways, and outcasts who endured lives of hard labor and sometimes sexual exploitation.7 Over the decades, both male and female indentured laborers from South Asia became central to sugar production in the West Indies. By 1891, they made up over 80 percent of the workforce on British Guianan sugar plantations.8 The work was divided according to sex, age, ability, and experience. Gangs of men took on the hardest physical work of forking and cutting sugar cane, sometimes working alongside freed blacks who performed the heaviest manual labor. Women weeded, and young boys tended livestock.9 In the fields, women often worked as many hours as the men, even in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Yet

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they earned less than men and were prohibited from working in higher-paying and higher-status positions on the plantations. Women also cooked, cleaned, and cared for their children in their homes. Their double duty often meant waking before dawn and toiling until the late hours of night.10 They were also vulnerable to sexual exploitation. According to a government commission, overseers commonly kept “Hindu and Muslim females as paramours or concubines.” On another plantation, women were regularly brought in by the South Asian overseer to serve as prostitutes for the male workers.11 Condemning these and other abuses, the Indian government suspended emigration in 1917 and abolished the indenture system in 1920.

Chinese Women in America US imperialism helped to initiate emigration from China. Afong Moy, the firstrecorded Chinese woman in the United States, was brought into New York harbor in 1834 as one of the “treasures” aboard the Washington, a vessel owned by two US-China traders. The nineteen-year-old was exhibited twice a day in an elaborate “national costume” within an ornately decorated set of exotic screens, furniture, lamps, and fans from Asia. Moy was instructed to walk around to display her bound feet and answer questions from viewers through an interpreter. The cost for viewing her was fifty cents. One newspaper account did report that after Moy was approached to fulfil a specific request for the general public to see her unbound feet, she demanded that the admission price double to one dollar for this invasion of her person and privacy. This response on her part suggests that Moy was not without some agency. Still, Afong Moy not only represents the ways in which white Americans profited from Asian bodies, she also reveals how US-China relations were rooted in imperial, racial, and gender inequalities. The Afong Moy exhibit sent a clear message: China and the Chinese were exotic, different, and inferior. China and Chinese women were commodities for the West to acquire.12 By the 1850s, the California gold rush had propelled tens of thousands of Chinese to America. Domestic crises and foreign intervention in China sustained and expanded their emigration over several decades. Once the conditions and the means for migration were established, Chinese (the majority of whom were men) left their homeland in droves. The traditional Chinese patriarchal family system discouraged and even forbade “decent” women from traveling overseas. Chinese folk sayings instructed that “a woman’s duty is to care for the household, and she should have no desire to go abroad.”13 Women married to male migrants were expected to remain in China, take care of their husbands’ parents, and perform the filial duties of their absent husbands. Some women were also valued agricultural workers at home.14 Others—especially those of the merchant class—did not want to leave their

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comfortable lives. Harsh living conditions, high levels of anti-Chinese violence, expensive transpacific transportation, and the lack of jobs for women were additional factors that discouraged Chinese women from immigrating. US immigration laws also presented formidable barriers to female Chinese immigration. The 1875 Page Act barred Asian women suspected of prostitution as well as Asian males transported to the country as contract laborers. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, only merchants, students, teachers, diplomats, and travelers—professions held almost exclusively by men in nineteenth-century China—were exempted from exclusion. Most women were simply not eligible to enter independently. Court cases initiated by Chinese in the United States eventually allowed for the wives and children of Chinese merchants and US citizens of Chinese descent to come. But Chinese women could not initiate immigration on their own. Because their admission was based on their relationship to a male relative, they were forced to rely on their husbands or fathers to sponsor them. Moreover, their own right to enter and remain in the country was based on their sponsor’s legal immigration status as well. As a result, women accounted for only 0.3 percent of all Chinese admitted in 1880 and 0.7 percent in 1900.15 The small numbers of women brought to the United States by the end of the nineteenth century included prostitutes who had been kidnapped, lured, or purchased and imported as indentured or enslaved laborers. Some became concubines or mistresses to wealthy Chinese men, but most were sold to parlor houses in Chinatown that catered to well-to-do Chinese and white men. Those who ended up in alley cribs—small, sparsely furnished shacks—were forced to entice customers until they were sold again or died from venereal disease.16 While many Chinese prostitutes were virtual slaves, a few found new lives. Polly Bemis (Lalu Nathoy) had been sold into prostitution as a young girl in China and brought to San Francisco and then to Idaho. Through perseverance and luck, she eventually gained her freedom, married, and owned and operated a boardinghouse and ranch. She became respected as a businesswoman and community member. Her house is now a museum on the National Register of Historic Places.17 As Chinese men decided to stay in the United States, an increasing number of women came as their wives or daughters. Many viewed both marriage and immigration in terms of economic opportunities and choice; others did not. Bandits in China had robbed Law Shee Low’s parents of their possessions and destroyed their farmland. “We . . . had no food to go with rice, not even soy sauce or black bean paste,” she recalled. Some neighboring families begged for food or even sold their daughters. “That was when my parents decided to marry me off to a gam saan haak [gold mountain man] from the next village,” Law explained. “They thought I would have a better future in Gold Mountain.” When she left for the United States in 1922, Law Shee Low was eighteen.18 By 1910, women were

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9.7 percent of all new Chinese immigrants, increasing to 20 percent in 1920, and 30 percent by 1930.19 Most Chinese immigrant women worked alongside their husbands in family restaurants, shops, and laundries. Some worked for wages in factories, canneries, and other businesses. By World War I, Chinese women dominated the garment industry in San Francisco. Some immigrant families took in boarders to add to their income, and it was the wife’s job to prepare food and clean for the additional household members. Juggling their dual responsibilities as homemakers and wage earners, Chinese women were indispensable partners in their families’ struggles for economic survival in the United States.20 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese American women were seeking out education, working outside the home, and participating in community activities. Some, like Mary Tape, took an active role in the nationalist movement in China and in the struggle for equality in the United States. In 1884, Mary and Joseph Tape went to enroll their daughter Mamie in San Francisco’s Spring Valley School. School officials and the San Francisco School Board refused their application in an attempt to establish racial segregation in the public schools. The family launched a legal fight for equal access to education. They sued the San Francisco Board of Education and argued that as a native-born US citizen, Mamie was entitled to the free education that was every American’s birthright. San Francisco Superior Court judge James Maguire agreed. The San Francisco School Board responded by establishing a separate Chinese primary school in the Chinatown district. Although it was not the outcome that the Tapes wanted, Mamie and her younger brother Frank were the first two students to show up for class when the school opened in April 1885. The Tapes’ legal challenge had affirmed that Chinese children in the United States had the right to a public education, albeit one that was still separate from whites.21

Japanese Women in America The first organized group of Japanese immigrants, including six women, arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1868 to work on the sugar plantations. Between 1885 and 1924, 200,000 Japanese went to Hawaiʻi, and 180,000 more went to the US continent.22 Some women came as students, but most of the early immigrants were men from farming families who struggled to make ends meet.23 As the Japanese government imposed high taxes to fund its modernization, industrialization, and imperial ambitions, emigration netsu, or fever to go to America, continued to spur young men abroad. Male laborers under contract in Hawai‘i could come as family units or send for wives as soon as could be arranged. In addition, after the United States annexed Hawaiʻi in 1898, the Gentlemen’s Agreement (1907–1908), which barred Japanese laborers, still allowed Japanese (and Korean) wives, children,

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and parents to join men in Hawaiʻi and on the US continent. Unmarried men often had their families arrange marriages for them by proxy through an exchange of information and photographs. From 1908 to 1920, twenty thousand Japanese women arrived until the 1921 Ladies’ Agreement ended the practice of these proxy marriages. However, men could return to Japan to marry and bring back their wives until the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act ended all Japanese immigration. Consequently, the Japanese American sex ratio was the most balanced among all Asian immigrant communities and contributed to an increase in the birth of large numbers of US-born citizen Japanese American children. When their ships arrived in San Francisco or Honolulu, many picture brides faced rude awakenings. Sometimes the photographs of the handsome, young, and well-dressed men sent to Japan were years old and did not represent the aged, wrinkled, and pockmarked farmers who appeared before them. Women’s dashed expectations and harsh lives in America often led to lifelong disappointments and difficult, if not failed, marriages. A few disillusioned brides asked to return to Japan on the next ship. Others left their husbands, and notices of these desertions often appeared in the Japanese-language press.24 Still, many Japanese women overcame their disappointment and stayed. Some were eager to embark on an adventure abroad. Others reluctantly followed their parents’ wishes. Marrying a Japanese man on the US continent or Hawai‘i was considered a “good” marriage, and daughters were expected to send money home to help support the family. This appealed to Kame Iwatani, who had heard that “in Hawaii, you can earn money.”25 Like their Chinese counterparts, Japanese immigrant women assumed crucial roles to support their families and their communities. In Hawaiʻi, women worked in sugarcane fields, pineapple canneries, and laundries; served as midwives, barbers, tailors, seamstresses, and domestic workers; and ran businesses, boardinghouses, and hotels. They supplemented family wages by washing, cooking, and sewing for male plantation laborers. They also played an important role in the labor movement through their participation in the plantation workers’ strikes of 1909 and 1920.26 The women on the US continent worked on farms, ran small businesses with their families, operated boardinghouses, and performed domestic work. They developed important community organizations, raised their US citizen Nisei (second-generation) children, and helped build the foundations of early Japanese America.

Korean Women in America Korean immigrant women’s journeys overseas were also shaped by imperialism, but it was the Japanese who controlled their homeland. As part of its expansion in East Asia, Japan declared Korea a protectorate in 1905 and formally annexed

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it in 1910. Harsh colonial policies designed to control the Korean population followed. The Korean army was disbanded, Korean teachers were replaced with Japanese ones, Korean language was no longer taught in schools, newspapers were closed down, and the Japanese controlled Buddhist temples and Christian churches. Koreans lived in daily fear of the Japanese secret police and deeply resented being colonized. Many sought refuge abroad and freedom from persecution. About 7,400 Koreans left for Hawai‘i between 1902 and 1905 before Japanese rule. Another six hundred political refugees and 1,060 “picture brides” came to America from 1905 to 1924 before the Immigration Act of 1924 ended Asian immigration.27 Like other Asian immigrants, Koreans were predominantly young and male. Only 10 percent were women. The imbalanced sex ratio gradually grew more even with the arrival of picture brides. In 1920, 75 percent of the Korean population on the US continent was male; in 1930, it was 66 percent.28 Like Japanese women, Korean picture brides were at the mercy of matchmakers and suitors who exaggerated the truth, including the ages and economic status of the men seeking to marry them. Thus, many of them were unprepared for their harsh new lives. Barely scraping by as plantation laborers or migratory farmworkers, their husbands expected and needed their wives to work for wages as well as maintain the house and raise children. Because their husbands were often much older than them, some women needed to work even harder to support their families when their husbands became too old and infirm to continue working. Worse yet, they could become widows at a very young age. One woman was in Hawai‘i for only seven years when her husband passed away. Still, she persisted. “It was very sad and depressing, but I could not spare the time and energy for crying,” she explained. “I had all my [five young] children and myself to support. I worked without rest, straight through the week.”29 With grit and perseverance, Korean immigrant women survived and played central roles supporting and leading Korean nationalist efforts that would one day lead to Korea’s independence. They knew from firsthand experience the terror of Japanese colonial rule, sometimes even more than their husbands who had left Korea before the Japanese annexation. They infused their family lives with Korean language and culture while also helping to form Korean American ethnic identities. They spearheaded important nationalist activities through Korean churches and other groups. And they also organized their own separate women’s organizations to support Korean independence by raising funds and spreading the nationalist message.30

South Asian Women in America Early South Asian immigrants to the United States were a diverse group of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus. The majority came from the Punjab region of modern-day

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India and Pakistan, an area that was most affected by British rule beginning in the nineteenth century. Farming losses combined with high British taxes led many families into poverty and indebtedness. The Punjab also suffered heavily from a population explosion, famines, and severe epidemics. By the early twentieth century, the stage was set for unprecedented South Asian migration abroad. A diverse group of male students and laborers sought to escape their economically depressed homeland. Many would become involved in the Gadar (Indian nationalist) movement abroad to seek freedom for themselves and for the cause of an independent India.31 Most migrants were young single men. A few women and children came, but they were rare. Those who did were often from the landed, educated, and professional classes. Kala and Vaishno Das Bagai and their three sons were among the few who arrived in the United States as a family. For them, emigration was a political act. The couple sought the end of British rule in India and wanted to raise their children in America.32 But the sight of a South Asian woman was such a rare occurrence that Kala’s arrival in 1915 with her family was covered by the San Francisco Call-Post.33 The Bagais bought a home, ran an import business and general store, and became involved in the San Francisco–based Gadar Party. But life in America was difficult. Kala struggled with everyday tasks of learning English, shopping, and caring for her three young boys. The family also faced overt discrimination from their neighbors after they bought a home in Berkeley, California. Their unequal status had a great impact on their lives. Although Vaishno had become a naturalized citizen in 1921, the US Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1923 Bhagat Singh Thind case ordered the denaturalization of all South Asian immigrants on the grounds that they were not white. Feeling trapped and betrayed, Vaishno committed suicide by gas poisoning in 1928. After his death, Kala struggled, but she focused on raising her children and getting them off to college. She eventually remarried. In 1946, the Luce-Celler Act allowed South Asians to naturalize, and Kala and her sons finally became US citizens.34

Filipinas in America US colonization of the Philippines in 1898 set in motion the second wave of Filipino migration to the Americas (following the thousands who came during the Manila galleon era). US rule transformed the Philippine economy to benefit American investors but not Filipinos. American companies bought farmland for export crops. By the twentieth century, the Philippines was exporting so many agricultural products and natural resources that it could no longer feed itself. Dislocation and inequalities followed as small family farms became divided into unsustainable plots by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tenancy, landlessness, poverty, and emigration followed.35

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The proliferation of American culture also spurred migration. With missionaries, teachers, doctors, and other Americans active throughout the Philippines as part of US imperial efforts to “uplift” the country, Filipinos were schooled from a young age to admire the United States and to think of themselves as American. With its commitment to freedom and democracy, America was believed to be a “land of Paradise.”36 American laws facilitated Filipino migration as part of its colonial agenda. The first group of second-wave Filipino men and women came at the invitation of the US government. Under the Pensionado Act of 1903, a few thousand elite Filipino students, known as pensionados, were recruited to attend American universities, act as goodwill ambassadors, and lend support to US efforts in the Philippines. After returning to the Philippines, these elites drew upon their American experiences to become “successful and powerful [pro-US] leaders” of the Philippines.37 The vast majority of the pensionados were men. Of the more than two hundred students in the first year, only eight were women. But one of them, Honoria Acosta-Sison, became the Philippines’ first female physician.38 By the early twentieth century, Hawaiian plantation labor recruiters had identified the Philippines as the next source of labor from Asia, and 150,000 Filipinos migrated across the Pacific. Here, too, men predominated. In 1930, there were only 2,500 Filipina women out of 42,500 Filipinos in California. The few women who did migrate to America came as students, accompanied their husbands, or were sent to join family already there. The small numbers of Filipina women were revered because they were so rare. Camila Labor Carido, who came to Stockton, California, in 1929 to join her father, soon found that she and the other women were “like diamonds to the Filipinos.”39 They played important roles, building families, contributing to family economies, and keeping bonds of extended family strong. Through women’s organizations, Filipinas took leadership positions and helped organize events that built community ties and promoted Filipino culture, such as beauty queen contests, cultural performances, sports tournaments, and church functions.40

Gendered Routes through Angel Island and US Immigration Laws and Practices The Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco was one of the main sites where both the global roots and gendered routes of Asian female migration intersected. From 1910 to 1940, Angel Island served as the processing and detention center for five hundred thousand immigrants, including twenty thousand Chinese women, twenty-five thousand Japanese women, two hundred Korean women, one hundred South Asian women, and two hundred Filipinas.41 Gender as well as national origin, race, and class shaped immigration policies and Asian immigrant women’s experiences at the immigration station. Policies like

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the Chinese exclusion laws and the 1907–1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement explicitly allowed Chinese and Japanese women, respectively, to enter the country only as dependents to a husband or father. And all female applicants were subjected to gender-based policies that favored the admission of valuable laborers (mostly men) and “respectable” women, that is, women who were dependent upon husbands and who conformed to middle-class standards of domesticity. It was rare for women to be admitted independently. Most of these cases involved women visiting the country temporarily as students or travelers. Working-class women were clearly disadvantaged; they were deemed “likely to become a public charge” (LPC) under a clause in general immigration laws that was disproportionately applied to women who were seen as both moral and economic risks. Those traveling alone or who had suspicious moral pasts were routinely excluded as LPC. Those traveling with husbands who were suspected of not being able to support their families were also excluded regardless of their own abilities to support themselves and their families. How these gender-based policies worked in practice can be seen through cases of Asian immigrant women. Their agency was limited, but they did have some, and they fought to enter the country. Typically applying for admission as the dependent wives or daughters of Chinese merchants or US citizens already in America, Chinese women faced two tests. They first had to prove to immigration officials that their husband or father still qualified as a person exempt from the exclusion laws. They also had to prove that their relationships were real. Both Chinese men and women were subjected to rigorous interrogations, but women were placed at a comparative disadvantage due to the gender bias embedded in the questioning. Chinese men were asked about their own families and villages in order to corroborate their identities. Chinese women, on the other hand, were interrogated about their husbands’ villages and families instead of their own. Intimate knowledge about their husband’s neighbors, the location of the village school, the well, or the furniture within their in-laws’ house was considered proof that the marital relationship existed. Many women did not readily remember such details. Following Chinese custom, wives moved to their husband’s villages only after marriage, and some stayed there for only a short time before arriving on Angel Island. Their interrogations also included personal, invasive questions about their moral behavior and sexual activities, questions that male applicants were not asked. Chinese women, like other immigrant women applying for admission, were also scrutinized for any evidence of immoral behavior. Women who were suspected of being prostitutes were subjected to long interviews to determine whether the marital relationship existed or whether they were being brought into the country for prostitution. Quock Shee, who applied for admission in September 1916 as the wife of merchant Chew Hoy Quong, for example, was repeatedly interrogated because officials suspected that she was part of a “concerted move to

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import Chinese prostitutes” into the country. Denied entry, she was not deterred. Quock and her husband hired attorneys, and after a two-year legal battle, she was finally allowed entry. Nevertheless, Quock Shee was detained for nearly six hundred nights, making hers one of the longest known detentions at the Angel Island Immigration Station.42 With the backing of their powerful homeland and government-issued passports, most Japanese immigrants were generally admitted into the country within a day or two. Unlike Chinese immigrants, whose deportation rate was 5 percent, less than 1 percent of Japanese immigrants were excluded or deported. Although their stays at Angel Island were short compared to those of Chinese immigrants, it was still a frightening experience. “I had never seen such a prison-like place as Angel Island,” recalled Kamechiyo Takahashi, who had been summoned by her husband in 1917.43 Teiko Tomita, who was on Angel Island in 1921, remembered that “though they gave us three meals a day, their food did not agree with us. We all cried and cried because we didn’t know when we’d be free and because we couldn’t understand anything they said to us.”44 Tomita eventually moved to Washington, where she and her husband raised a family and farmed first on the Yakima Indian Reservation and then at a nursery in Sunnydale before Executive Order 9066 forced her family into the incarceration camps at Tule Lake in California and Heart Mountain in Wyoming.45 One thousand Korean men and women sought admission through the port of San Francisco, including Korean students and activists like Kim Ok Yun, who arrived in 1926. She had a student visa and a letter of acceptance to a San Francisco school, but according to family members, Ok Yun had been an undercover agent in the anti-Japanese resistance movement in Korea, and the cause of Korean independence was never far from her heart. At the immigration station, Ok Yun was detained for five days while she underwent treatment for hookworm and was interrogated. Once admitted, she attended college and graduated in 1933. She returned to her hometown in Korea, where she taught at a girls’ school and rejoined the political movement for independence. Relatives in America never heard from her again and suspected that she might have been killed by the Japanese secret police while fighting for her country’s freedom.46 By the early 1900s, South Asians had become the latest targets of American immigration restriction campaigns. The 1917 Immigration Act created the Asiatic Barred Zone and prohibited almost all immigrants from Asia. But the act—and the 1924 Immigration Act that followed—still allowed elites, including travelers, students, teachers, merchants, and immigrants who held various professional occupations, to apply for admission. During this period of heightened exclusion, small numbers of South Asians, including female students, entered the country. The elite and well documented did not set foot on Angel Island but were admitted from their steamships. Among these were eighteen-year-old Leelabati Guhuthakurta and her twin sister, Seeta, from Bengal, who applied for admission

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as students in 1934. They held proper documents, including admission letters from an administrator at Glendale Junior College in Glendale, California, and a letter of introduction from their uncle, the Reverend Swami Paramananda, founder and head of the Ananda-Ashrama in La Crescenta, California, a respected nonsectarian place of worship founded in 1909. Reverend Paramananda provided letters from prominent white acquaintances as additional evidence of his standing in his Southern California community. With these credentials, the sisters were admitted the same day they arrived in San Francisco. Seeta later transferred to Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, where she studied science. She later worked for the United Nations and lived in New York City as a rare educated and professional Indian woman in America.47

Conclusion Fleeing homelands that were controlled by foreign powers or transformed by imperial ambitions, early Asian women’s journeys to the United States were rooted in the ebbs and flows of empire and colonialism dating back to the sixteenth century. Discriminatory colonial policies and practices led to civil and political unrest and economic dislocation. Mass migration followed. But Asian women did not have equal access to migration abroad. The numbers of Asian immigrant women were always much smaller than those of men before World War II. Their routes were impacted by gender bias and discrimination in their homelands and in the United States. Post–World War II US immigration laws—such as the War Brides Acts of 1945 and 1947, which allowed American military personnel to bring their spouses and dependent children to the United States, and especially the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act—as well as the arrival of Southeast Asian refugees and the economic globalization over the past four decades, have greatly increased the numbers of Asian women arriving with families and independently. As a result of these new arrivals, Asian America has been transformed. Of all foreign-born Asians in the nation in 2010, women were the majority (54 percent) and more diverse than in the past.48 These contemporary migrations are the latest chapters in the long history of Asian female migration to the United States, one that was and continues to be shaped by global roots and gendered routes. But it is the early migration of Asian women and their agency as reflected in their labor in and outside the home, the families they raised, the organizations they formed, and their leadership and participation in political movements and communities that helped lay the foundation for what Asian America is today. Notes

Parts of this essay have been adapted from Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway

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to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Special thanks to Judy Yung for providing the statistics for Asian immigrant women processed through Angel Island. 1 On the importance of viewing migration through a gendered lens, see Caroline Brettell, Gender and Migration (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 3. 2 Katharine M. Donato and Donna Gabaccia, Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age (New York: Russell Sage, 2015), 1. 3 Edward R. Slack Jr., “Los Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image,” Journal of World History 20, no. 1 (2009): 37n3. 4 Jonathan Irvine Israel, Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610–1670 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 75–76; Pedro Chirino, “Relacion de las Islas Filipinas,” 1604, in The Philippines Islands, 1493–1898, ed. Emma H. Blair and James A. Robertson (Project Gutenberg e-book, 2005), 18:1617–20; Tatiana Seijas, “The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish Manila: 1580–1640,” Itinerario 32, no. 1 (2008): 19, 24–25. 5 Over time, the Asian origins of la china poblana became merged with Mexico’s mestizaje (mixed race) and indigenous peoples. Seijas, “The Portuguese Slave Trade,” 19; Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “A Mughal Princess in Baroque New Spain: Catarina de San Juan (1606–1688), the China Poblana,” Annales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 19, no. 71 (1997): 47; Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, “Mirrha-Catarina de San Juan: From India to New Spain,” Amerasia Journal 28, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 29–36. 6 Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 107; David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 24–26. 7 Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 8 Lai, Indentured Labor, 117–18. 9 Basdeo Mangru, Indenture and Abolition: Sacrifice and Survival on the Guyanese Sugar Plantations (Toronto: TSAR, 1993), 88. 10 Rosemarijn Hoefte, In Place of Slavery: A Social History of British Indian and Javanese Laborers in Suriname (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 108–9. 11 Lai, Indentured Labor, 143–44; Mangru, Indenture and Abolition, 83. 12 Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 60–63. For additional details on Moy’s exhibits, see John Haddad, “The Chinese Lady and China for the Ladies: Race, Gender, and Public Exhibition in Jacksonian America,” Chinese America: History & Perspectives, Chinese Historical Society of America with UCLA Asian American Studies Center (2011): 5–19. 13 Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 99. 14 Sucheta Mazumdar, “What Happened to the Women? Chinese and Indian Male Migration to the United States in Global Perspective,” in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 58–74. 15 Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 117–19. 16 Yung, Unbound Feet, 26–29. 17 Ruthanne Lum McCunn, Thousand Pieces of Gold: A Biographical Novel (San Francisco, CA: Design Enterprises of San Francisco, 1981). On the agency and varied experiences of Chinese prostitutes, see Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 5, no. 1 (1979): 3–29.

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18 Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 72–73. 19 Lee, At America’s Gates, 117–19. 20 Yung, Unbound Feet, 86–92. 21 Ruthanne Lum McCunn, Chinese American Portraits: Personal Histories 1828–1988 (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle, 1988), 41–45; Mae M. Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 43–57. 22 Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1984), 43, 45. 23 For example, see discussion of Ume Tsuda in chapter 3 by Masako Iino in this volume. 24 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 43–44; Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1988), 168–69. 25 Women Workers in Hawaii’s Pineapple Industry, Ethnic Studies Oral History Project 2 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1979), 839. 26 For further discussion of Japanese immigrant women in Hawaiʻi, see Gail M. Nomura, “Issei Working Women in Hawaii,” in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women, ed. Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon, 1989): 135–48. 27 Richard S. Kim, The Quest for Statehood: Korean Immigrant Nationalism and US Sovereignty, 1905–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15. 28 Wayne Patterson, The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896–1910 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988), 105–10. 29 Wayne Patterson, The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawaiʻi, 1903–1973 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 97. 30 Patterson, The Ilse, 98; Lili M. Kim, “Redefining the Boundaries of Traditional Gender Roles: Korean Picture Brides, Pioneer Korean Immigrant Women, and Their Benevolent Nationalism in Hawai‘i,” in Hune and Nomura, Asian/Pacific Islander American Women, 106–22; Kim, The Quest for Statehood, 49. 31 Joan Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 24–25; Sucheta Mazumdar, “Colonial Impact and Punjabi Emigration to the United States,” in Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II, ed. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 316–17, 325. 32 Rani Bagai, “‘Bridges Burnt Behind’: The Story of Vaishno Das Bagai,” under “History: Immigrant Voices” tab, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, www.aiisf.org. 33 “Nose Diamond Latest Fad Arrives Here from India,” San Francisco Call & Post, September 1915, South Asian American Digital Archive, www.saada.org, accessed August 25, 2017. 34 “Oral History Interview with Kala Bagai Chandra,” November 26, 1982, South Asian American Digital Archive, www.saada.org, accessed August 25, 2017; Lee and Yung, Angel Island, 145, 153–54, 173–74. 35 Miriam Sharma, “The Philippines: A Case of Migration to Hawaii, 1906–1946,” in Cheng and Bonacich, Labor Immigration, 340–49; Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 40–45. 36 Francisco Carino, “My Life History,” August 1924, in Survey of Race Relations, major document no. 85, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, 1–2. See also chapter 4 by Dawn Bohulano Mabalon in this volume.

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37 James Sobredo, “From American ‘Nationals’ to the ‘Third Asiatic Invasion’: Racial Transformation and Filipino Exclusion (1898–1934)” (PhD diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1998), 56. 38 Teresa Brawner Bevis and Christopher J. Lucas, International Students in American Colleges and Universities: A History (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 76. 39 Mabalon, Little Manila, 151–52; chapter 4 this volume. 40 Mabalon, Little Manila, 163–73. 41 Calculations by Judy Yung from Investigation Arrival Case Files at the National Archives and Records Administration and US Commissioner General of Immigration, Annual Reports, Board of Special Inquiry registers, Lists of Chinese Applying for Admissions to the United States through the Port of San Francisco California, 1903–1947; Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, table 5. 42 Robert Eric Barde, Immigration at the Golden Gate: Passenger Ships, Exclusion, and Angel Island (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 6–52; Robert Barde and Gustavo J. Bobonis, “Detention at Angel Island: First Empirical Evidence,” Social Science History 30, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 106. 43 Eileen Sunada Sarasohn, ed., Issei Women: Echoes from Another Frontier (Palo Alto, CA: Pacific, 1998), 52. 44 Sarasohn, Issei Women, 72. 45 Gail Nomura, “Tsugiki, a Grafting: A History of a Japanese Pioneer Woman in Washington State,” in Women in Pacific Northwest History: An Anthology, ed. Karen J. Blair (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 207–29. 46 Lee and Yung, Angel Island, 196–97. 47 Lee and Yung, Angel Island, 171; Shannon Lin and Bhavna Sharma, “A Student from India Who Bypassed Angel Island,” under the “Immigrant Voices” tab, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, www.aiisf.org, accessed August 25, 2017. 48 Act of December 28, 1945: Admission of Alien Spouses and Alien Minor Children of Citizen Members of the United States Armed Forces “War Brides Act,” 59 Stat. 659; 8 U.S.C. 232-23; Amended by Act of July 22, 1947 (61 Stat. 401) to explicitly include Chinese and Japanese wives of American citizens; 2010 figures from Pew Research Center, The Rise of Asian Americans (Washington, DC, 2013), 23–24.

3

Two Sisters, Two Stories Transnational Lives of Ume Tsuda and Yona Abiko Masako Iino

In 1871, six-year-old Ume Tsuda (1864–1929) was sent by the Japanese government to study in the United States, and she remained there until 1882. She later returned to study at Bryn Mawr College and started her efforts to contribute to women’s education in Japan. In 1900, with the support of American friends, she founded Joshi Eigaku Juku (school of English studies for women), later called Tsuda College and now known as Tsuda University, one of the oldest women’s universities in Japan.1 Yona Abiko (1880–1944) was Ume’s younger sister. Educated at Joshi Eigaku Juku and having traveled to the United States and Europe with Ume in 1907, she immigrated to the United States and married Kyutaro Abiko, an immigrant leader in the Japanese American community in San Francisco. Together with Kyutaro, she contributed to raising the status of Japanese Americans through education and promoting better US-Japan relations. When Tsuda College was destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake in the Tokyo area in 1923, Yona utilized her US and Japanese connections to raise funds among educated American women to rebuild it. Ume and Yona shared the idea that education, particularly higher education, would raise the status of Japanese women and help them to be economically and socially independent. Using archival materials, this chapter examines why and how Ume Tsuda founded a school for women’s higher education in 1900 and how Yona Abiko supported Ume in her endeavor. It also discusses Yona’s work in the Japanese American community to improve race relations in the United States and US-Japan relations through building a network of supportive influential American women. With its focus on educated elite women, the chapter sheds new light on the history of early Asian women immigrants in the United States and how two sisters were successful in bringing change in Japan by making use of their ideals, education, and transnational ties with their American friends, which had a lasting influence on the lives of women in Japan as well as on friendly relations between the United States and Japan.

Ume Tsuda and the Education of Women in Japan Women’s education in Japan in the late nineteenth century lagged far behind that of men. Though the Meiji government (1868–1912) encouraged elementary 53

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education for girls, their rate of entering elementary school was about half of the boys’ rate until 1890. On the secondary school level, male students further outnumbered the female students: girls’ enrollment was only 2.6 percent of the boys’ in 1882, 12.1 percent in 1890, 22.6 percent in 1900, and 34.5 percent in 1910.2 In higher education, the number of female students entering normal school was quite low until the end of the nineteenth century because professional education for women was not yet socially acceptable and many women themselves did not seek “professional” employment, which was considered unsuited for “ladies,” except as teachers, nurses, or midwives. Moreover, Japanese universities and colleges were not open to women, though by the late 1890s, some Japanese women had pushed the boundaries further. For example, Japan’s first female doctor was Ginko Ogino, who had become certified in 1885, and Keiko Okami was the first Japanese woman to study medicine in the United States, attending the Medical College of Pennsylvania (now Drexel University’s College of Medicine) between 1885 and 1889. The Meiji government pursued a vigorous modernization policy, best expressed in the slogan “Civilization and Enlightenment,” to achieve a level of industrial development found in more advanced Western nations. Westernization—the introduction and adaptation of Western practices—was an important aspect of modernization. Aware of the importance of education as a major tool, the Meiji government set up a special program to send Japanese students to technologically advanced Western nations to gain the knowledge and skills needed for Japan’s modernization and to develop future leaders for the new state. Among the early students were five girls, ages six to fourteen, who were sent to the United States for education. The government’s idea of sending girls to the United States started with Kiyotaka Kuroda, then deputy head of the recently established Hokkaido Colonization Board. While in the United States consulting with American experts about the development of Japan’s frontier, the northern island of Hokkaido, Kuroda was impressed with “the happy condition of the American women.” He learned that it was because they “were educated, treated with the highest consideration, and regarded equal to men in all the higher qualities of humanity.”3 Tomonori Mori, leader of the Japanese legation in the United States, agreed with Kuroda’s plan. Ume Tsuda was the youngest of the five girls sent to the United States. By this unique experience, which she later referred to as a “strange destiny,”4 Ume became one of the most modernized women in Japan at that time. Sending young girls to an unknown land represented a dramatic departure from the traditional pattern of educating daughters in Japan. The promise of individual advancement through education might explain why the families of these five girls decided to send them abroad. Their fathers and some of their brothers were former government officials, and all came from feudal domains that were on the losing side of the imperial restoration because of their support for the previous

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government. Ume’s father, Sen Tsuda, was a samurai who had studied Dutch and English before the opening of Japan to the West in the mid-nineteenth century. As an interpreter for the Japanese government, he traveled with the Meiji government’s Iwakura Mission to the United States in 1867. Ume was transplanted from a Japan that was still half feudal to a comparatively advanced United States at a time when the liberalization of women’s education was in full bloom. She was taken in by Charles and Adeline Lanman and spent her formative years, ages seven to eighteen, with them. Charles Lanman was the American secretary to the Japanese legation, working under Arinori Mori, the first Japanese chargé d’affaires to the United States. He and his wife did not have children and looked after Ume as their own child. Ume received her elementary education at Stephenson Seminary, a private girls’ school in Washington, DC, and continued her secondary education at the Archer Institute in the same city. At nine, upon her own request, she was baptized as a Christian. Her parents also became Methodist Christians in Japan in 1875. She returned to Japan in 1882 after an absence of eleven years. Ume’s residence in the United States during her most formative years proved decisive; it determined her way of thinking, her feelings, and her habits. In Japan, she was like a foreigner, “an American with a Japanese body.”5 She had difficulty handling chopsticks and could not sit on tatami mat floors. She wrote to Mrs. Lanman, “The hardest thing is the taking off the shoes.”6 Language was a serious problem. She also wrote, “O, if the language would only come back to me as easily. I am bound hand and foot, I am both deaf and dumb. . . . Everywhere I go I must have someone as interpreter. I can’t go about, walk, shop, visit, even take a jinricksha ride alone.”7 It was pathetic that she could not communicate with her own mother, who did not speak English. Although these habitual inconveniences of daily life that she had forgotten eventually resolved, she found great difficulty in being virtually outside the mainstream of Japanese culture. Having received an exceptionally high level of education for a Japanese woman of the time, Ume was an extreme example of the “new woman,” educated and not bound by Japanese traditional customs and manners. On her return, she was most struck by “the great difference between men and women, and the absolute power which the men held.” In comparing it with her experiences in the United States between 1871 and 1882, what she found most striking was “the position American women hold, the great influence that they exercise for good, the power given them by education and training, the congenial intercourse between men and women, and the sympathy existing in the homes, between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.”8 There were three alternatives for this eighteen-year-old girl. First, she could return to the United States, where she might feel at home. Second, if she adjusted her values to fit Japanese social standards, she could marry a peer in high society who would recognize the value of her knowledge of Western languages and

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manners. Indeed, two girls who had been sent to the United States and returned to Japan with Ume followed this course. Ume chose a third alternative: she committed herself to the struggle to become a “new woman” despite conservative opposition. She could not accept the inferior place Japanese society assigned to Japanese women in general, nor could she ignore her personal responsibility to enlighten her fellow Japanese women, knowing that the Japanese government had had a purpose in mind when it gave her such a rare opportunity of studying in the United States. During the period following her return to Japan in 1882 until the opening of her own school in 1900, Ume worked at a variety of what might be called preparatory tasks. In 1885 she was employed by the Peeresses’ School, founded by the Imperial Court that year for the girls of noble families. Teaching was one of the few professions open to women, and the connection with the most prestigious school in Japan was an honor highly regarded by the general public. Ume, however, was not satisfied, for the educational philosophy of the school was so different from her American experiences and from her own ideals. Japanese women’s education in the 1880s was more than a half century behind that of the United States, and, as in the girls schools of early nineteenth-century America, “ladylike” character and traits were emphasized, the primary aim of education being the training of women to be obedient wives. Surrounded by women of the nobility whom she critically observed as living in monotonous quiet, knowing nothing of the great changes outside, she felt a need to explore more fully her own potentialities. In 1889, the twenty-four-year-old Ume left Japan once again, this time to receive in America the higher academic training that was still unavailable to women in Japan. Mary Morris, wife of wealthy businessman Wister Morris of Philadelphia, whom Ume had met when she was living with the Lanmans, asked her friend James E. Rhoades, the first president of Bryn Mawr College, which had been founded only four years before, about financial support for Ume’s college expenses. He agreed to take Ume as a special student, giving her full exemption from college tuition. Ume’s primary concern for the cost of studying in the United States was thus solved, and she entered Bryn Mawr College. She studied biology under Professor T. H. Morgan, and at the end of her study in 1892, she received an offer to remain at Bryn Mawr to collaborate with Morgan on some special research, an opportunity that would have made her one of the first Japanese woman scientists. But she declined this “overwhelming temptation to her intellect and ambition” because she felt obliged to go back to the Peeresses’ School.9 Her decision to forego a career as a scientist is best understood by her increased interest in the education of Japanese women. Her stay at Bryn Mawr was marked by several opportunities that advanced her thinking regarding the need for a school of higher education for women in Japan. In the summer of 1890 she stayed in Hampton, Virginia, with Alice Bacon, a woman whose father

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had accepted one of the five girls sent by the Meiji government, and who had herself been Ume’s colleague at the Peeresses’ School between 1888 and 1889. At that time, Alice was writing a book about Japanese women, and her comments and insights stimulated Ume’s concern about the condition of Japanese women. That concern matured into a wish to establish a higher educational institution for women in Japan. Ume decided to enroll in a six-month training program in education and teaching at Oswego Teachers College in New York. Her next move, regarded as “her first independent scheme for education,” called for creating the American Scholarship for Japanese Women.10 Like such American feminists as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon, Ume recognized the need to increase the numbers of educated women teachers and appealed to her friends in Philadelphia to support her plan for the American Scholarship. Showing her practical ability to turn wishes into reality, she herself raised money by giving lectures on Japan. If Japanese women could be properly trained, they would make far better teachers than foreigners, Ume believed, because they would be better able to understand and reach their own countrywomen. And her idea of bringing them to the United States for training underscored her commitment to American culture. The American Scholarship program would help other Japanese women to share the American experience that she had so enjoyed and benefitted from. She said, “I regard the intimate association with American girls and women and the glimpses obtained of woman’s position in American homes and woman’s work in the world, as one of the most important points of this [scholarship program].”11 Her campaign was successful, and the Japanese Scholarship Committee, later called the Philadelphia Committee, was formed under the leadership of Mary Morris as its chairman and M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College. Its fifteen members, who pledged to pay an annual subscription fee, came from the Quaker, Episcopal, and Presbyterian churches in the Philadelphia area. Like Mary Morris, whose husband was a director of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, most of the members were affluent women married to bankers or railway executives. The committee began in 1892 with a fund of more than $5,000, with the goal of $8,000 almost achieved. This scholarship program supported twentyfive women students for three to six years each before it ended in 1976. Almost all the recipients studied at Bryn Mawr College. Many of them became leaders in academia. The first recipient, Michi Matsuda, became president of Doshisha Women’s College; the second, Michi Kawai, became the first YWCA general secretary from Japan and founded Keisen Women’s School; and the third, Ai Hoshino, became president of Ume’s school.

Founding Joshi Eigaku Juku In 1892, Ume returned to Japan again to resume her teaching at the Peeresses’ School. Eight years later, Ume resigned with a plan to found Joshi Eigaku Juku

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(school of English studies for women). The letter she sent to her close friends in the United States indicated her determination to live a free but difficult life: I broke off a 15 years [sic] connection with the highest rank[ing] school in Japan, and gave up my official rank and title worthless to me, but valued so among our people. . . . I wanted to get away from all the Conservatism and Connection of my old life, and now I am only a commoner, free to do what I like, and free from my salary, which however small, still in Japanese eyes was ample!12

Ume received critical support from her friends both in Japan and in the United States. The Christian women in Philadelphia who had raised the scholarship funds for Japanese women while Ume was at Bryn Mawr College now called themselves the Committee on Behalf of Miss Tsuda and later changed the title again to the Philadelphia Permanent Committee for Tsuda College. They gave a substantial amount of financial support to help Ume at the start of her school. One supporter, her longtime friend Sutematsu, who had been sent to the United States and returned to Japan with Ume, became an adviser for Ume’s new school. Married to well-known Minister of War Iwao Oyama, she could use her high rank to add status to the school. It was also Sutematsu’s wish to contribute to the improvement of women’s social conditions in Japan. Alice Bacon also came to Japan to help Ume in April 1900, several months before the school was to open. When Ume started her new school in September 1900, she fulfilled her obligation to the country to contribute to its nation-building. She had a strong sense of mission to produce a new kind of Japanese woman—many other Ume Tsudas— that she thought Japan critically needed. She observed that while much progress had been made for men, no corresponding advantages had been given to women. She wished that good women could arise at that pivotal period in Japan’s history to be helpers and coworkers with the men. A modernized Japan needed new women—able, intelligent, responsible, and independent—to contribute to the new society. While Ume had a distinctive Japanese purpose in mind, she adopted many educational ideas and methods from American colleges, particularly Bryn Mawr. For example, like Bryn Mawr, Joshi Eigaku Juku stressed the importance of language instruction and liberal arts education. The address Ume gave at the opening ceremony with ten students and seven teachers, including Sutematsu, clearly illustrates her educational ideology.13 Ume gave her speech in Japanese, though the draft was written in English. She made it clear that she believed in “elite education,” supporting high-quality intensive training for a small number of students.14 She said that the school’s main purpose would be to offer advanced courses in English and to make her students well-rounded women through learning English and English literature. At a time when other women’s schools were stressing domestic science education, the introduction of liberal

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Figure 3.1. Ume Tsuda, age thirty-six, 1901. Courtesy of Tsuda University Digital Archive.

arts education for women was a remarkable development. It was necessary, she believed, to make women “intellectual and spiritual co-operators” with men. She said, “Without culture, education, and experience, women can only share the lowest side of a man’s life and must indeed fall short of the ideal wife and mother. The loss of this is not only for the women themselves, but for future generations.” And she emphasized that “when women through a core liberal education have proved themselves capable of greater things, there will come the day when they can take a higher place in society, as they certainly will in the home.”15 She also believed that “the reading of the good and noble thoughts of great English writers was the best help possible in moral training.”16 At the same time, she recognized certain utilitarian values in learning English. She regarded vocational training, particularly teacher training, as another important basis for women’s liberation. The graduates of Joshi Eigaku Juku were encouraged to acquire enough ability to pass the government examination for a teacher’s certificate in English, thereby opening up a place for women in the field of education. Women, Ume believed, should have training of commercial value to enable them to be self-supporting. She pointed out that “even a thorough knowledge of English [would place] a girl on a separate plane, giving her a ‘weapon to defend herself in the fight for independence.’” This was a new, pioneering approach to women’s education in Japan. Using the image of American

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women as her ideal, she urged Japanese women to acquire reason, judgment, and will.17 From this grew the characteristic feature of Ume’s teaching: guiding the students to form their own opinions on various matters, an approach unique in women’s education in Japan at the time. By letting students arrange social entertainments and perform dramas, she tried to teach them to take initiative and to lead, which was difficult for them since they were accustomed to responding obediently to the guidance of a superior. Impressed with the position and influence American women held in society—though she admitted that “the women question had not entirely ceased to be agitated in progressive America”—she thought there was no reason why it should not be the same in Japan. Nevertheless, she did not promote sweeping Americanization or Westernization. Although American influence was essential in every sphere of her life, her teaching, and her belief, she valued traditional Japanese virtues. She felt that if “gentle ways, loveliness or sweetness,” the traditional focuses of training for Japanese women, were combined with the strength of character and knowledge of Western women, Japanese women would be “an example for the world.”18

Yona Abiko Yona was Ume’s sister, younger by sixteen years. She was born in Tokyo in 1880, when Ume was in the United States. At age ten, she was adopted by her father’s sister, Naka (who later changed her name to Yaeno), and her husband, Yonekichi Sudo, and lived in Hakodate on the northern island of Hokkaido. Between 1887 and 1897 she went to a Methodist mission school in Tokyo and entered the Peeresses’ School in 1897 where Ume was teaching. Graduating from it in 1900, she entered Ume’s newly established school, Joshi Eigaku Juku, where she remained until 1907. Yona was definitely one of the intellectual elites in Japan at the time. From January 1907 to January 1908, Yona accompanied Ume to the United States and Europe. One of the purposes of Ume’s trip was to report the current condition of her new school to its supporters in Philadelphia and to meet with Adeline Lanman, whom she had not seen for nine years. Also, Ume felt she needed to take some time off to recuperate her health. In Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC, she had nice reunions with her old friends, including Alice Bacon, and met many new people, including President Theodore Roosevelt and his wife at the White House. One experience in California caused Ume and Yona to reconsider the influence of international relations.19 On their way to the East Coast, they visited San Francisco and Miramar near Santa Barbara in February 1907. At that time, anti-Japanese exclusion sentiment was at its height on the West Coast, mainly in reaction to the increasing inflow of Japanese immigrants who were accused of unfair labor competition by working for purportedly lower wages than whites.

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With Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, people on the West Coast were alarmed that their interests conflicted with those of Japan. In 1906 the San Francisco Board of Education decision that Japanese children in other San Francisco schools should be transferred to the racially segregated Oriental School sparked a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Japan. This was resolved by the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907–1908, limiting the immigration of Japanese male laborers but allowing settled Japanese male immigrants to send for their wives, children, and parents. Ume and Yona were exposed to this tide of anti-Asian exclusion. In their hotel in Miramar, they were not allowed to eat in the regular restaurant but instead were taken to a dining room for the hotel employees. This episode made both Ume and Yona aware of the dichotomy of the public and private spheres in international relations. Ume’s new school was supported by the goodwill of many American friends, reflecting international relations in the private sphere, while the strained US-Japan relations in the public sphere affected Ume and Yona in an adverse way. This experience at the hotel convinced them that private relations should be utilized to improve international relations in the public sphere. In January 1909, a year after her return from her overseas trip with Ume, Yona married Kyutaro Abiko (1865–1936) in Tokyo. Though the details are not clear, it seems that one of Yona’s relatives introduced Kyutaro to Yona, and their marriage was arranged. Kyutaro was an Issei pioneer who had immigrated to the United States in 1885 as an indigent but very ambitious student and established himself after the turn of the century as a successful businessman, owning a company called Japanese American Industrial Corporation, which helped Japanese immigrants to get jobs. He was also an influential publisher of the Japanese-language newspaper Nichibei, making him a Japanese immigrant leader in San Francisco. Yona and Kyutaro were both devout Methodists, and Kyutaro was a founding member of the San Francisco Japanese Methodist Church. They both shared a high level of education. Kyutaro had attended the University of California from 1892 to 1896 as a “special student,” taking classes almost exclusively in history, philosophy, economics, and jurisprudence. Being highly educated, Kyutaro and Yona both had an uncommon fluency in English, an invaluable ability in their roles as leaders within the Japanese immigrant community during the turbulent anti-Japanese exclusion period.20 After arriving in San Francisco in 1909, Yona quickly became involved in church activities and community service. Before their marriage, Kyutaro had written to Yona, “We have a very heavy responsibility in terms of our relationship to the United States,” stressing the “paramount importance of engaging in people-to-people diplomacy.” He also said in 1915, “As husband and wife, we have a special mission of contributing to the solution of Japanese-American problems, particularly the immigration issue.” They both believed it was their duty to work toward improving the relationship between the two nations by being worthy

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Figure 3.2. Yona Abiko, date unknown. Courtesy of Tsuda University Digital Archive.

representatives of the Japanese people, which included maintaining a morally upright, respectable family.21 Based on this idea, in 1912, Yona and her friends established the Joshi Seinen Kai, a branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association of Japan, the first branch outside Japan. Yona wrote that the purpose of establishing this organization was “to offer a solution for a social malady caused by picture brides.”22 There were increasing numbers of so-called picture brides entering the United States in this period. The Joshi Seinen Kai offered temporary lodging and classes to help Japanese immigrant women, often ill prepared for life in the United States, settle into American life by teaching them English and American ways of living, including American manners, cooking, and sewing. The Joshi Seinen Kai became a part of the San Francisco YWCA. With the increased demand for their services, the building was later rebuilt through fund-raising efforts by Yona and her friends to serve the young Nisei (second-generation, US-born citizen children of Japanese immigrants) women by teaching classes ranging from Japanese flower arrangement and tea ceremony to American/British law and economics. Yona also contributed to educating young Japanese Americans by helping to develop and organize the Kengaku Dan program, which was sponsored by the Nichibei newspaper company owned by Kyutaro. With their ultimate purpose

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of improving US-Japan relations, Kyutaro and Yona both believed that Nisei needed to learn more about the country of their parents to have pride in their ethnicity, to be good American citizens, and to build bridges between the United States and Japan. It would lead to “furtherance of peace,” Yona said in her speech on the Kengaku Dan tour. She declared, We are not mere sightseers, we have come with serious purpose of studying the country of our ancestors. Probably for the first time a group of Japanese students, American born of Japanese descent, is visiting Japan for the express purpose of building themselves into a bridge between the two countries.23

Miya Sannomiya’s Kengaku Dan experience led her to study Japanese in Japan and become an English secretary for the Society for International Cultural Relations, a Japanese educational organization devoted to disseminating information about Japan in various Western languages.

Raising Funds to Rebuild Joshi Eigaku Juku A tragedy struck Joshi Eigaku Juku at Gobancho, Koji-machi, Tokyo, after the Great Kanto Earthquake hit the area around Tokyo at about noon on September 1, 1923. The following morning, the school burned to the ground from fires caused by the earthquake. Fortunately, it was summer recess, and no students were on campus. The school reopened the next month in a borrowed building, but its future was in doubt. Anna C. Hartshorne—who was teaching at Joshi Eigaku Juku and had been helping Ume since the time Ume told her about her dream of founding a school for women in Japan when Ume was studying at Bryn Mawr—decided to travel to the United States at the age of sixty-four to solicit Ume’s and Anna’s American friends to help rebuild Joshi Eigaku Juku. Anna was met by Yona in San Francisco, and they began their fund-raising in Philadelphia, Anna’s hometown, and near Bryn Mawr College, where Ume had studied. Here, with the Philadelphia Committee for Tsuda College as the center, Tsuda College Emergency Committees were formed in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Washington, DC. Members included elites supportive of Japan such as Roland S. Morris, former US ambassador to Japan, and Mabel Narcissa Vanderlip, wife of Frank A. Vanderlip, a millionaire and “friend of Japan.” Using every opportunity, committee members talked about Joshi Eigaku Juku, about Japan, and about women’s education to invite those who understood their goal to be listed as committee members and to gain their cooperation in fundraising. Pamphlets with detailed explanations of Ume’s school were distributed with letters soliciting donations to rebuild the school in order to continue giving the women students “the ability to make a good living, which their graduation

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practically guarantees.”24 Some committees made the pamphlets more compelling with photos of Joshi Eigaku Juku before and after the earthquake. Yona described some of her activity in Philadelphia: At an alumni meeting of Bryn Mawr College, I gave a speech . . . because Miss Hartshorne suggested that it should be more convincing if a Japanese person talked about what was needed. . . . Whenever I was invited, I attended the meetings, wearing Kimono, the brightest possible I chose, and did not lose any moment to bring up Ume’s school in the conversation. One of the ideas I proposed to them, which would greatly contribute to a friendly relationship between the US and Japan, I thought, was as follows: The name of the contributor who donated $250, which is the cost of building a room of the dormitory, would be put up at each room. This idea was unexpectedly successful.25

This idea went further. Classrooms would be named for $2,000 contributors and large classrooms named for $5,000 contributors. The committees were pleased with the Rockefeller Foundation’s proposal of a matching fund of $100,000 and with the Carnegie Foundation’s offer of a $30,000 donation.26 As early as January 1924, the Philadelphia Committee had recognized that Yona and her husband, Kyutaro, were a valuable team. In a letter to Kyutaro describing the activities of the committee, they requested his cooperation. The letter described that “an appeal for fund” to rebuild Joshi Eigaku Juku would be made in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other locations. It made it clear that Yona, educated at Joshi Eigaku Juku, was fluent in English and had many American friends in high society, which aided her fundraising work and that Kyutaro was a great contributor for the cause, as he was a leader in the Japanese American community in California.27 In April 1924, Yona returned to San Francisco to start fund-raising in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Pasadena as well as San Francisco. She wrote a letter to Ume with a detailed report on what she had done in the East over six months, ending by saying that she was satisfied and grateful that she had been able to do this much.28 Yona set up an office in San Francisco; obtained the advice of Kyutaro, Anna Hartshorne, and others; and attended monthly committee meetings as an ex officio.29 She made numerous telephone calls and asked her church friends to introduce “interested individuals” to her. Though there is no date, presumably the first letter sent out—with the signature of the California Committee chair Mrs. Merrill (wife of a well-known lawyer) under the letterhead of “Tsuda College Emergency Committee, California,” and addressed “to all friends of international go od will”—urged, “Let us show Japan now that Californians cherish only good will for such an institution as Tsuda College, which is struggling so heroically to rebuild and carry forward its invaluable work.”30

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Among those who pledged to cooperate with the project were universityrelated people such as David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, entrepreneurs, owners of newspaper companies, and those related to churches.31 As Christians, both Kyutaro and Yona sought support for their cause through churches. Yona also visited some high schools to talk about Japan, Japanese women, and the school. She gave speeches at ten places, including three schools and three churches in January 1925.32 In November 1926, Anna Hartshorne decided to return to Japan, as $200,000 had been raised with the prospect that the school would soon receive $300,000, reaching the goal of $500,000 set at the beginning of the fund-raising campaign. In February 1927, the Tsuda College Emergency Committee (the Philadelphia Committee) changed its name to the Tsuda College Association, whose major purpose was to support Ume’s school financially as well as morally, not just to rebuild it after the earthquake. The California Committee closed its office in July, 1927, and no public activities were recorded after that.33 In 1929, then President Hoshino of Tsuda College sent Yona a long letter of appreciation stating that as “the amount of donation reached the goal we had set,” she sought to show her appreciation for Yona’s efforts and contribution by “constructing a grand school building and dormitory” since she “could not find words to express her appreciation” for Yona’s “great efforts which had lasted for such a long time.”34 This letter shows that Yona’s support for Joshi Eigaku Juku did not stop with the end of the Tsuda College Emergency Committee but lasted even after the committee accomplished its goal. With Yona’s strong sense of mission, abilities as a spokesperson, and networks of US friends and committees, Joshi Eigaku Juku, which had been completely destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake, was revived in a short period of time despite the fear that the school might not survive. This small school for women would continue to greatly contribute to the higher education of women in Japan to the present day.

US-Japan Relations The rebuilding of Joshi Eigaku Juku had a larger significance. Those who contributed to its rebuilding were also concerned about US-Japan relations at the time. In the 1920s, US society in general tended to be intolerable to things “unAmerican.” Anti-immigration sentiments were moving public opinion and the US government toward enacting the Immigration Act of 1924, which sought to restrict immigration from certain countries and particularly targeted Japanese immigrants. Immigration from Japan was to be prohibited by the act, and the Japanese government and concerned people in Japan feared that relations between the two nations would deteriorate. There were, however, some people who were deeply concerned about this trend and let their attitude show in their

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cooperation in rebuilding Joshi Eigaku Juku. For example, the California Committee was conscious of which way the US government was to move concerning the Immigration Act. During the first meeting of the committee with twentythree members attending on December 5, 1924, Robert N. Rinch, vice president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and vice chair of the California Committee, mentioned that he was trying to reach out to the people in California to convince them that the fund-raising for Joshi Eigaku Juku was a very good opportunity for people in California to do something meaningful. According to him, California should influence the direction of the whole American attitude regarding the Japanese immigration problem, and California should deal with the problem based on a friendly spirit toward Japan.35 One important person who promised cooperation with the California Committee, David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, was well known as being strongly against the anti-Japanese movement in California. The committee made its position clear in the letters asking for donations for Ume’s school. For example, the letter asking for contributions to Joshi Eigaku Juku dated January 10, 1925, concluded, “We can show Japan that we are interested in enhancing the friendly relations between the United States and Japan, in spite that there is an obstinate opinion regarding the government’s domestic policy, such as the government’s immigration policy.”36 The request of contributions to rebuild the school after the Great Kanto Earthquake, with an implication that there had been immigration problems between the US and Japan, reflected the experiences of Yona and Kyutaro in the Japanese American community. Both shared the idea that they should contribute to “furtherance of peace” and a good relationship between the United States and Japan through educating Japanese Americans and their community. This idea was connected to Yona’s undertaking to support her sister’s school.

Conclusion Ume Tsuda and Yona Abiko were sisters born into an elite samurai family sixteen years apart, who received higher education, which was not common for women in Japan in the late nineteenth century. They were pioneers at a time when women were expected to be subordinate to men, without authority or power to contribute to society. The paths they followed were unique for their time. Ume and Yona, with their respective transnational lives as their backgrounds, made great efforts in pursuing their goals: to raise the status of women in Japan by empowering them through education and to improve the relationship between the United States and Japan when it was negatively affected by the anti-Japanese exclusion movement in California. Ume and Yona were able to tap into American capital for their causes through their friendship circle of American women. Christianity was also an important factor in their networks. As Christians, they

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believed that their Christian faith supported their work of contributing to society and the world. Another key factor they used to move their friendship networks was their strong wish to improve the relationship between the United States and Japan. They brought about change in Japan by making use of their transnational ties with friends in America and Japan and had a lasting influence on the lives of women in Japan. Their class privilege and education as well as their own agency expanded gender roles for Japanese and Japanese American women by empowering women through education. Notes

1 In Japan, the name of Ume’s school was Joshi Eigaku Juku (school of English studies for women). In the course of its development, and with changes of the rules the Japanese government set, its name changed. In 1948, it was called Tsuda College in honor of its founder, Ume Tsuda, and indicating that it was on the level of a university. In 2017, Tsuda University became its official name. But in the United States, Ume’s school was called Tsuda College from the time it was founded in 1900. 2 Japan Statistics Research Center, Nihon Keizai Tokei-shu [Japanese economic statistical tables] (Tokyo: Hyoron Sha, 1958), 312. 3 Charles Lanman, The Japanese in America (New York: New York University Press, 1872), 45. 4 Ume Tsuda, “Resume of a Talk Given by Miss Tsuda, Head of the Joshi Eigaku Juku at the Opening of the School Work Sept. 14th, 1900,” Shin Eigo [the present English] no. 12 (October 1900): 1. 5 Masunori Hiratsuka, Joshi Kyoiku Shi [History of women’s education] (Tokyo: Teikoku Chiho Gyosei Gakkai, 1965), 215. 6 Ume Tsuda, letter to Adeline Lanman, November 23, 1882, Tsuda Papers, Tsuda University Archives, Tokyo, Japan. 7 Ume Tsuda, Letter to Adeline Lanman, [no date, written between November 29 and December 7, 1882]. 8 Ume Tsuda, “The Education of Japanese Women” [Philadelphia, 1892?] in Tsuda Juku Daigaku, ed., Tsuda Umeko Monjo [Writings of Umeko Tsuda] (Tokyo: Tsuda Juku Daigaku, 1984), 23. 9 Anna C. Hartshorne, “The Years of Preparation: A Memory of Miss Tsuda,” Tsuda College Alumni Bulletin 35 (July 1931): 2. 10 Hartshorne. On the American Scholarship program, see Ryoko Shibuya et al., A Record of the Japanese Scholarship: The First Study Abroad Program for Japanese Women (Tokyo: Bunshin Shuppan, 2015). 11 Tsuda, “The Education of Japanese Women.” 12 Ume Tsuda to Abby and Emily Kirk, August 6, 1900, Tsuda Papers. 13 Tsuda, “Resume of a Talk,” 1–3. 14 Masako Iino, “Tsuda Umeko,” “Modern Japan and Women Educators,” special issue, Daigaku Jiho 35, no. 165 (July 1982): 69. 15 Ume Tsuda, “The Future of Japanese Women,” in Daigaku, Tsuda Umeko Monjo, 72–73. 16 Ume Tsuda, “Teaching in Japan,” Bryn Mawr Alumnae Quarterly (August 1907). 17 “Talks on the Position of the Japanese Women: Miss Tsuda Believes They Will Gain a Higher Place,” unidentified clipping (about Ume’s speech, “Women’s Movement in Japan,” Karuizawa) [1914?], Tsuda Papers.

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18 Tsuda, “The Future of Japanese Women.” 19 Riichi Yoshikawa, Tsuda Umeko Den [Biography of Umeko Tsuda] (Tokyo: Tsuda Juku Dosokai, 1956), 270–72. 20 For published accounts of Kyutaro’s life, see Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (New York: Free, 1988), 20–21, 59–61, 146–50, 174–75, 183–84; Tamotsu Murayama, “Abiko Kyutaro—Hainichi Iminho to Tatakau,” [Abiko Kyutaro—fighting against the anti-Japanese Immigration Act]; Niigata Nipposha, ed., Zoku Echigo ga Unda Nihonteki Jimbutsu [Sequel to outstanding Japanese Echigo produced] (Niigata Nipposha, 1965), 311–32; Seizo Oka, “Abiko Kyutaro Den” [Biography of Kyutaro Abiko], Hokubei Mainichi, May 8–10, 13–16, June 13–14, 17–19, 26–28, July 2–3, 8–9, August 23, 26–30, 1980. 21 Kyutaro to Yona, January 1, 1909, May 29, 1915, Abiko Family Papers, Japanese American Research Collection, Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. 22 Yona Abiko, “How the Young Women’s Christian Association of Japan Was Established in the United States,” Joshi Seinen Kai 9, no. 9 (October 1912): 17–19. 23 Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 8; Yuji Ichioka, “‘Kengaku Dan’—The Origin of the Trip of Nisei to Study Japan,” in Tairitsu to Dakyo [Confrontation and compromise], ed. Kazuo Ueyama and Yasuo Sakata (Tokyo: Daiichi-Hoki, 1995), 281–308. 24 Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 8. 25 Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 9. 26 Tsuda College Alumni Bulletin no. 29 (July 1924); Minutes of Tsuda College Emergency Committee, California Branch, Abiko Family Papers, box 35, folder 4, 1; “Carrying On in Tokyo: A Series of Letters from the Acting Principal and Teachers of Tsuda College,” Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 9; Minutes, Abiko Family Papers, box 35, folder 4, 8. 27 Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folders 2 and 8. 28 Letter from Yona to Ume, March 23, 1924, Tsuda Papers. 29 Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 6. 30 Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 2. 31 David Starr Jordan to James A. B. Sharer, December 11, 1924, Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 2; Wallace M. Alexander to Yona, August 16, 1926, Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 2. 32 Correspondence, December 12, 1925, January 22, 1925, Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 2; Minutes, 6. 33 Correspondence, July 29, 1925, Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 3. 34 Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folders 6 and 11. 35 Minutes, Abiko Family Papers, box 35, folder 4; San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, “Plans Formulated to Aid Japanese College, Business,” December12, 1924, Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 8. 36 Correspondence, January 10, 1925, Abiko Family Papers, box 33, folder 2.

Part II New Intersections of Race, Gender, Generation, Communities

Part II focuses on the intersections of race, gender, generation, and communities between the 1900s and the mid-1960s as Asian American women engaged with other racial and ethnic groups in the United States. In this pre–Civil Rights era, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and stereotyping of Asian women in America were acute. These three chapters introduce original approaches to the study of foodways in family and community existence, life under Jim Crow in the US South, and performing as professional dancers, respectively. They also allow us to make comparisons in the same period between the lives and possibilities of firstgeneration or immigrant Filipinas in the first chapter and second-generation, or US-born, Chinese and Japanese American women in the following two chapters. We may also consider the women’s choices and different and similar challenges given their backgrounds and locations. Family and community foods are a central component of Asian American and Pacific Islander histories. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon discusses the significance of food and women’s roles for family survival and community building among pre-1965 Filipina/o immigrants in the United States. First-generation Filipinas adapted their indigenous and colonial heritage of staples and recipes, became entrepreneurial to increase family income, and helped to sustain the 1965–1970 Delano grape strike through their cooking. In reshaping gender roles in their homes and communities, they gained more personal power. By connecting with women from many regions of the Philippines through food, Filipinas also formed a new Filipina/o American ethnic identity and community through intergenerational and panregional gatherings around tables of food. Two chapters on second-generation Asian Americans offer a contrast to each other and to Mabalon’s immigrant Filipinas. Phonshia Nie examines the lives of Inez Lung from Austin, Texas, and Dancie Yett Wong of Mississippi. Both US-born of Chinese heritage, they navigated Jim Crow laws and culture in the US South from the 1930s to the 1950s by working through the Southern Baptist Church to bend race and gender boundaries. Lung and Wong were bold but fell short of their goal for social equality. Their life histories bring visibility to Chinese American women’s resistance and resilience in an understudied region and the black-white racialized context of Asian American history in the US South. Nie discloses the complexity of exercising agency within the intersections of race, gender, and class restrictions in conjunction with religious affiliation during Jim Crow. 69

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Mana Hayakawa’s chapter follows the lives of four second-generation Asian American women from their twenties into their senior years. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the women worked as professional dancers in San Francisco’s Chinatown nightclubs, on Broadway, and in film, and toured nationally. Although the women’s dance forms both disrupted and perpetuated Orientalist stereotypes, they focused primarily on demonstrating their talent. In breaking race and gender boundaries of acceptable employment for US women of Asian background and pushing social and cultural norms, these Asian American dancers gained new identities, long-standing cross-ethnic friendships and support in hard times, and opportunities for work and travel. Mostly, they did what they loved— they danced. The distinctive topics and intersections of race, religion, regional culture, art forms, and ethnic groups with gender and generation in part II fill gaps in our knowledge of Asian American women’s experiences in pre–Civil Rights America. The individual life stories, motivations, and activities of first- and second-generation women who transformed gender roles and developed new community forms and practices reveal wide-ranging opportunities and challenges. They also shed light on the women’s agency in expanding their possibilities and new lives in a time of considerable race and gender constraints.

4

“Up to My Elbows in Rice!” Women Building Communities and Sustaining Families in Pre-1965 Filipina/o America Dawn Bohulano Mabalon

Deanna Daclan Balantac remembered her Stockton, California, home full of visitors in the 1940s and 1950s: “We would always have a lot of company. . . . We always set for ten or twelve. . . . I never thought we were poor because we always had all these foods to feed all these people. That was always the tradition.” For Filipina/o American families, “family” also meant coworkers, town mates, friends, and relatives gathered to stretch resources and create bonds of community in a precarious time. “I was always up to my elbows washing rice,” Balantac recalled, “because you never knew who would come through the door. . . . Whenever we cooked, we had two pots of rice.”1 This chapter explores the central role that Filipinas played in creating and sustaining their families and communities and Filipina/o American ethnic culture in the decades before 1965 and the gender role transformations that gave women more power as well as multiple roles and responsibilities in their families. Filipinas shouldered heavy burdens as wives and mothers and culture bearers and producers and contributed to family incomes as farm workers, campo (agricultural labor camp) cooks, restaurant owners, caterers, and owners of food businesses. Filipina/o women’s work was critical to family survival during a time in which Filipina/o American lives were circumscribed by racism, sexism, brutal work conditions, and segregation. Moreover, because of the sex ratio imbalance of fourteen Filipino men to one woman before World War II, Filipinas took on even more labor as the center of the family and community. The food that Filipinas on the West Coast produced, cooked, and ate supported not only their families and communities but also the formation of a collective ethnic identity as Filipina/o Americans. In addition, as many Filipino men learned skills as cooks in campos, as houseboys, as stewards in the US Navy and Merchant Marines, and in restaurant and hotel kitchens, the division of labor with regard to cooking was shared more equally in pre-1965 Filipina/o American communities, especially after World War II. Women gained more time to devote to side businesses, hobbies, wage work, and community leadership and activities. 71

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This chapter is based on oral history and email interviews conducted by the author from 1995 to 2017; oral history interviews and archival materials housed at the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) in Seattle, Washington, and at the local archives of the Stockton Chapter of FANHS; the archives of the United Farm Workers; and the records of the colonial Philippines at the US National Archives and Records Administration. Additional materials include community newspapers, memoirs, personal essays, cookbooks, and oral and local history publications. Histories of Filipina/o Americans have focused mainly on men: their labor, immigration exclusion, and racial oppression. In contrast, this chapter centers women, gender, class, family formation, communities, women’s labor, and cultural production in Filipina/o American history. Studying what Filipina/o immigrants produced and consumed allows us to explore the cultures and communities they made for themselves. As historians of food, gender, and migration have noted, foodways tell our stories. They shape and symbolize identity and reflect the heart of a community’s cultural world.2 In first half of the twentieth century, Filipina/o immigrants on the West Coast of the United States turned to their family networks to survive, making a community and ethnic identity shaped by regional identities and their new homes. For these early immigrants, food symbolized their collective struggle to endure and flourish despite overwhelming odds. Filipinas’ initiatives and labor were at the center, changing gender roles and providing them more power in both family and community life.

Culture and Cuisine in the Philippines Filipina/o American cuisine has its origins in the multilayered cuisine of the Philippines as well as the campo, canneries, and plantations of Hawaiʻi, Alaska, and the West Coast. The Philippines, with more than one hundred dialect, language, and ethnic groups and seven thousand islands, boasts myriad regional and local methods and ingredients, layers of history, and varied influences. For centuries, the people have depended on staples such as rice; fresh, dried, and fermented seafood; water buffalo meat and milk; indigenous fruits; and a plethora of vegetables.3 Regional variations abound.4 The Philippine diet at the turn of the twentieth century had evolved through centuries of interactions between peoples of mainland and insular Southeast Asia, the Pacific, China, Spain, and Mexico. Around the eleventh century, Chinese traders brought noodles, soy products, and lumpia (rolls of julienned vegetables and meats in a flour-based wrapper). Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth century introduced cured meats, tomatoes, olive oil, breads, and fiesta dishes like flan de leche (egg custard), ensaimada (sweet bread), and mechado (beef stew in tomato sauce). The Spanish galleon trade (from the late sixteenth century

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to 1815) brought Mexican products like cassava, cacao, camote (sweet potatoes), achuete seeds, empanadas, tamales, and more.5 From Spain and Mexico came a new term, “adobo,” for the indigenous method of braising protein or vegetables in vinegar, garlic, and salt, of which there are myriad variations.6

Eating, Cooking, and Migrating under the American Empire The United States claimed the Philippines as a colonial territory after war with Spain and a nationalist resistance, the brutal Philippine-American War (1899– 1902), which ravaged the countryside and resulted in at least a million deaths. The American colonial regime shifted local Philippine economies from subsistence farming to export-oriented agriculture. Most pre–World War II emigrants were lower middle class from the Ilocos provinces, Tarlac, Pangasinan, and the islands of the Visayas. Most Filipinas/os in the provinces subsisted on vegetables and fresh, dried and fermented seafood and rice or some form of starch (bananas, corn, or sweet potatoes). The provincial poor, such as Camila Labor Carido, who emigrated from Hinundayan, Leyte, to Stockton, California, in 1929, tasted red meat and sweets only during Christmas, weddings, and Catholic fiestas. “We always have lots of fish, but we never complain,” Carido said. “Maybe [once] in a blue moon, [we eat] chicken.”7 The poorest might only eat rice or camote, salt, and tomatoes.8 In 1901, the American colonial regime established public schools in English throughout the archipelago with goals of shaping loyal servants of the empire and civilizing the “savages” for self-rule. In 1905, an American teacher wrote in a periodical for her colleagues, “That to have good government we must first have good people; that in order to have good people we must first have good homes.”9 These “good homes” would be shaped by ideas from domestic science (later called home economics), developed by white middle-class American women in the late nineteenth century to professionalize domestic labors such as cooking, household sanitation, and child raising through modern managerial and scientific methods. It soon dominated women’s education throughout the West and its colonies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.10 All Filipinas were required to take domestic science courses taught by American and later Filipina teachers. Domestic science buildings sprang up in every town.11 Filipinas were taught the superiority of American ways of child raising, cooking, sewing, and household sanitation; one domestic science textbook warned against mothers kissing and cuddling babies and offered an American method for cooking rice, as though Filipinas/os needed tutelage for even the most mundane tasks.12 Former interior secretary of the Philippines Dean C. Worcester noted proudly that by 1912–1913, approximately fifteen thousand girls across the Philippines were engaged in domestic science courses.13 These courses left Camila Carido bitter: “We are not educated. We are just taught how to be a

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good wife, darn and sew, cook for your husband. That’s our life in the Philippines, to serve your husband even if he kills you for not doing it.”14 Domestic science courses and American companies such as Heinz and Dole championed twentieth-century American food as modern and hygienic.15 Teachers pressed students to abandon native and indigenous vegetables for American varieties.16 Filipinas/os were encouraged to worship American food: sandwiches, red meats, canned goods such as corned beef and Del Monte fruit, pies, cakes, hot dogs, and macaroni salads.17 Students were admonished to abandon the cultural practice of eating with their hands; teachers emphasized the use of forks, knives, and spoons and American standards of tableside etiquette and kitchen sanitation. The Board of Education frowned on eating between meals and scorned the traditional afternoon snack time called merienda.18 However, few poor Filipinas/os could afford ovens and imported ingredients prescribed by the recipes in their domestic science textbooks.19 In the 1920s, increasing poverty, the influence of American schools, the desire for higher education, and the demand for labor in the United States pushed and pulled thousands of Filipinas/os to migrate to Hawai‘i and the mainland. Being “nationals” (colonial subjects), they moved freely within the American empire, unhampered by the 1924 Immigration Act, which barred the entry of all Asians. In 1934, the Philippines was given commonwealth status, and Filipinas/os were reclassified as “aliens,” with an entry quota of fifty per year. By the time Filipinas/os arrived in large numbers in the 1920s, Chinese and Japanese immigrants on the West Coast were farming rice and Asian vegetables and had opened grocery stores that sold noodles, coconuts, soy sauce, ginger, and garlic.20 Filipina/o cooks creatively adapted local ingredients and those used by other Asian Americans. To substitute for fish sauce (patis) and fish paste (bagoong), some Filipinas/os made their own, using fish they caught or scraps from the salmon cannery.21

Working, Cooking, and Eating in the Campo and the Canneries By the early 1920s, Filipina/o migratory workers were traveling to Alaska for salmon cannery work in summer, and for the rest of the year moved up and down the West Coast and to Idaho and Montana to harvest a plethora of crops. While most of the workers were men, Filipinas also worked in the fields as laborers, cooks, and bookkeepers. “I picked hops in Elk Grove; peas in Greenfield and Salinas; grapes in Fresno, Selma, and Delano; bunched carrots and covered cantaloupe in Yuma and El Centro; and packed lettuce in Soledad, sorted potatoes on MacDonald Island, and picked tomatoes in Tracy and walnuts in Concord,” remembered Mary Arca Inosanto, whose parents had been sakadas (sugar workers) in Hawai‘i. In 1924, she and her family, like thousands of other sakada families, migrated to California after a failed sugar strike. “It was hard

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work. . . . We endured insecticide and sulphur. We migrated like birds to harvest the crops.”22 In the campo, they suffered brutal conditions and poor wages. Even college-educated Filipina/o immigrants could only find work in the canneries and farms until the 1960s.23 Children toiled alongside their parents. At age thirteen, San Francisco–born Angelina Bantillo Magdael worked ten-hour days, sorting potatoes in scorching summer heat near Stockton in the late 1930s. For a reprieve, she recalled, women would throw something into the machine to break the conveyor belt.24 Women also worked in canneries in Alaska and along the West Coast, which, like farm work, required skill and endurance. My grandmother Concepcion Bohulano, a schoolteacher in the Philippines, canned peaches every summer in Modesto, California, in the 1950s and early 1960s. However, she was clumsy and slow. “It was tough,” she cried. “Before [I work] four hours, I’m tapped by a floor lady who tells me to go home after lunch hour.”25 Many Filipinas in the Watsonville/Salinas area after World War II worked at the Birds Eye factory, such as Jean Vengua’s mother, who had been a bank clerk in the Philippines. “Mom came home after every shift tired and smelling of Brussels sprouts,” Vengua wrote in her memoirs. “On her first day of work, the vegetables whizzing by on the conveyor belt made her dizzy and she nearly fainted.”26 Filipinas whose domestic science courses bragged of modern American kitchens and sanitation systems were shocked to find rustic campo conditions. Even up to the 1970s, farm workers in California lived without electricity, indoor plumbing, or flushing toilets in segregated, decrepit wooden bunkhouses and barns. Camila Carido made thirty-five cents an hour cooking for fifty men in the San Joaquin Delta in the 1930s and 1940s. She cooked and hauled water, and they all bathed, one by one, in a giant tub over an open fire: “We used to complain because they had a bathroom in the [farmer’s] house and electricity.”27 During the Depression, Segunda Reyes’s husband, a University of California, Berkeley graduate student, lost his dishwashing job. They went to work in the asparagus fields in the San Joaquin Delta. Segunda woke up at one in the morning to gather wood and water for cooking and bathing for the workers: “And I was crying. Oh, it was sad.”28 Hundreds had to be fed at once, so much of the campo cooking was basic and inexpensive. Campo cooks used parts that butchers sold cheaply or discarded, such as soup bones, heads, feet, necks, tails and belly parts of chicken, fish, beef, and pork for soups and stews like adobo and mung bean stew (monggo/balatong) served with rice. A small amount of meat was stretched with vegetables in various kinds of gisa or sudan (meaning “sautéed” in some Philippine languages) cooked in a kawa (a massive wok-like pot).29 A favorite of Angeles Monrayo Raymundo’s family was pigs feet cooked adobado style (boiled with vinegar, soy, and spices).30 After World War II, my grandmother Concepcion Bohulano worked as my grandfather’s campo cook in Tracy, California; she even learned how to make tortillas for the braceros (temporary farm laborers from Mexico).

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Figure 4.1. The author’s grandmother Concepcion M. Bohulano, a war bride, takes a break from her work as the campo cook for the tomato crew of her husband, Delfin, near Tracy, California, circa 1950s. From the author’s collection.

In most rural Filipina/o families, every family member worked. Henry Dacuyan and his sister Helen helped cut vegetables and washed dishes in their parents’ campo kitchen in Winton, California.31 Luna Jamero’s parents, Apolonia and Ceferino, scraped together their earnings as migrant laborers to buy farmland in Livingston in 1944 in their children’s names (because the Alien Land Law barred Filipinas/os from landownership). “Mama’s typical workday started early when she woke with Papa to fix breakfast for the men who often left before 7:00 a.m. to work in the fields,” Luna reminisced. “Papa was the cook, and Mama was actually the brains behind the business.” Luna and her siblings were kitchen helpers.32 Apolonia was the bookkeeper and ran her own side business, a variety store—called a “sari-sari” store—for the workers on their farm. Across the West Coast, Filipinas planted gardens; raised pigs, goats, and chickens; and scrounged for food. During the Depression, Rizaline Raymundo’s parents foraged for wild mustard greens and mushrooms in the San Joaquin Valley.33 Anita Bautista’s family in the San Joaquin Delta made adobo with the local jackrabbits, pheasants, and ducks and ate striped bass from the rivers.34 Dorothy Cordova’s family gathered berries, mushrooms, greens, and game from the forests surrounding Seattle and seafood from its rivers and lakes.35 From the 1930s to the 1950s, north of Stockton, Eudosia Juanitas and her children grew

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American and Asian vegetables, including carrots, alugbati (a Filipina/o green), and tanglad (lemongrass).36 In the 1950s and 1960s, Nickie Delute Tuthill’s parents tended their enormous garden of vegetables such as opo (squash), asparagus, banana trees, nuts, and fruits and helped supply campo cooks in Delano, California. Her mother also canned fruit from her garden.37

Gathering at the Filipina/o American Table in and outside the Home The women of pre-1965 Filipina/o American kitchens created a unique Filipina/o American cuisine born of regional recipes and resourceful adaptations. Immigrants shared tiny rooms in residential hotels and grocery expenses.38 Filipinas/ os also shared American and Philippine cooking and food knowledge across diverse regional origins and generations, Camila Carido explained, The woman who cooks the guinataan [coconut milk soup], she is from Luzon. The Visayan islands . . . have different ways of cooking. . . . [Those] from the Southern part, Mindanao, they have different cooking too because they have Moros [Muslims] there. They use different utensils. The women also taught the other[s] the American customs.39

The mostly Ilocano members of the First and Second Filipino Infantry Regiments married women from the Visayas, where they had been stationed during World War II; those families ate a mix of both regional styles. Some immigrant Filipinas learned how to cook Filipino food in the United States. Some came as young girls and had not yet been exposed to domestic science, or they had servants in the Philippines. “My mother was so young when she came, she had to learn from the other women how to cook,” said Eleanor Galvez Olamit, whose mother arrived in the 1910s.40 Asuncion Nicolas arrived as a sixteen-year-old and three years later married Sixto Nicolas, a barber in Stockton who was thirteen years her senior. “My poor husband taught me how to cook,” she remembered. “He never insulted me, he never told me the food is lousy.”41 The poverty of the Depression and war forced women and families to endure terrible sacrifices and hunger. As aliens, Filipinos were ineligible for New Deal food relief programs and were embarrassed to stand in soup lines. By sharing their resources, Filipinas/os survived. In the 1930s, Seattle-based nurse Maria Abastilla Beltran and her brother and husband hosted up to ten additional people for dinner every night. “That’s why we always cook more, because you don’t know who was coming,” Beltran said.42 Each night, guests crowded into Camila and Leon Carido’s tiny apartment in Stockton’s Little Manila. “They would say, ‘Can we sleep with you and we can help pay the grocery?’” Camila recalled.43 During the leanest times, Angelina Bantillo Magdael’s mother, Virgilia Bantillo,

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served her six children and husband only rice cooked with milk and sugar. Nonetheless, Angelina’s kindhearted father sometimes brought home starving Filipino strangers for dinner, much to her mother’s dismay.44 Virgilia Bantillo’s diary entry on March 19, 1939, revealed her deep anxieties: “Very unlucky day for us. Broke like anything. I feel blue. I shed tears.”45 The constant labor to feed many mouths with few resources took its toll on the psychological well-being of Filipinas upon whose shoulders family survival depended. Women fed their families with animal parts discarded by butchers, fishmongers, and grocers and produce and canned goods brought by relatives who worked in fields or canneries. Dorothy Cordova’s mother’s Ilocano cooking relied mainly on vegetables with only a small amount of meat such as pig tails as a flavoring.46 Canned goods like corned beef were stretched with onions, tomatoes, cabbage, and rice.47 There were occasional treats. Dorothy Cordova’s favorite treat was hot rice, fried eggs, and chopped tomatoes topped with canned salmon that relatives brought back as gifts from their Alaska cannery summers.48 Seafood provided by friends visiting landlocked Delano from San Francisco and Los Angeles “made it feel like Christmas all over again!” remembered Nickie Delute Tuthill.49

Entrepreneurs Selling Filipino Cuisine Some Pinays (a nickname for Filipina Americans created in the 1920s; Pinoys for males) were entrepreneurs and had side businesses alongside their wage work. In Oakland in the 1940s, Evangeline Canonizado Buell’s grandmother offered lodging and board for Filipinos who worked at Mare Island Shipyard in nearby Vallejo. Family friends brought produce from their nearby campos in Alvarado and Alameda Bay Farm Island. Cooking rice was often one of the first tasks assigned to Buell and her sister Rosita and cousin Rosario. “Grandma taught us to prepare rice Asian style, using our fingers to measure the water,” she recalled. She remembered her first pot: “I felt so proud of my accomplishment that I could hardly wait to serve it.”50 Filipina entrepreneurs opened restaurants in West Coast Little Manilas and Chinatowns. Bibiana Laigo Castillano’s café in Seattle’s Chinatown served regional Ilocano specialties; most offered basic Philippine classics, such as adobo and sinigang.51 Others operated catering businesses out of their home kitchens and sold homemade regional snacks and desserts at cockfights, pool halls, and community gatherings and on the street in Little Manilas. These side businesses brought regional favorites such as lumpia (popular in Central Luzon), binangkal (a Visayan sesame-seed-covered donut), or Ilocano cascaron (sweet rice fritters) to Filipinas/os with roots across the archipelago. For some women, selling special regional specialties was critical for family survival. During the 1920s and 1930s, Virgilia Bantillo of Stockton sold lumpiang

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sariwa (sautéed vegetables in a soft flour-based wrapper, not deep fried) and maruya (banana fritters) in Little Manila and sent her husband out with a full basket to hawk her snacks, her daughter Angelina remembers.52 She also sold her homemade wrappers at ten cents apiece to other Filipinas. When her family moved to Seattle from Stockton in the 1940s, Iloilo-born Lucia Cordova brought her fried lumpia business. After Seattle-born Dorothy Laigo married Fred Cordova, her mother-in-law gave her wrapper-making lessons, and she burned all her fingers on the hot cast-iron griddle.53 In the 1960s, Jean Vengua helped her mother bake pastries to sell at Friday night Filipino community dances in Salinas. Each week, mother and daughter dressed up and packed the car with twogallon coffee makers and Tupperware containers full of fluffy ensaimada rolls and sweet rice cakes.54 Families knew this cuisine, born from American and Spanish colonial residue, regional styles, campo cooking, and local ingredients as Filipino. At dinnertime and at parties, the array of dishes—Philippine regional specialties, American dishes, local ingredients—reflected the coming together of Ilocanas/os, Visayans, and Tagalogs as Filipina/o Americans. “Like most Filipino American families, we straddled both cultures and enjoyed our adobo along with our love for hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries,” Luna Jamero reminisced of her Central Valley, California, childhood. “There was always food, and I don’t recall ever seeing cupboards empty. . . . It was a blessing to have never known hunger [in my childhood].”55

World War II and Postwar Prosperity: Transforming Communities and Cuisine World War II changed Filipina/o American communities, women’s labor, and the food that sustained the community. Segregated Filipino units in the US Army were formed, and some found well-paying work in the defense industry. In many pre–World War II West Coast Asian neighborhoods, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans owned or leased farms and ran most of the Asian grocery stores, restaurants, and residential hotels because they had arrived earlier than Filipinos and had more capital. In a tragic twist of fate, Japanese American incarceration was a boon for Filipinas/os. Filipina/o entrepreneurs took over the empty Japanese American establishments and turned them into Filipina/o American restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores and leased or purchased their farms. After the war, Filipina/o grocery stores imported Philippine ingredients like salted, fermented fish paste and fish sauce. Postwar changes in immigration and citizenship laws further transformed Filipina/o lives. The 1946 Luce-Celler Act allowed for Filipina/o naturalization and set an annual quota of one hundred for Filipino immigrants. Citizenship enabled Filipinos to petition for their wives and children left behind. A handful of Filipino veterans, including my grandfather Delfin Bohulano, used GI Bill benefits for

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college or low-interest home loans. Many Filipino veterans returned with Filipina brides, enabled by the 1945 War Brides Act, which allowed for entry to the United States of 118,000 spouses and children of members of the armed forces. Of these, approximately 2,215 were Filipinas. Postwar immigrants—war brides, students, and family members—breathed new life into Filipina/o American communities. According to the 1930 US Census, there were 94,973 Filipino men, but only 13,451 Filipinas in the country. By 1940, there were 5,327 married Filipinas/os, and by 1950, that number had more than tripled to 17,616. In 1960, there were 112,286 men, and the number of women had grown fivefold to 64,024.56 Postwar immigrant women, like my maternal grandmother, Concepcion Bohulano, a war bride, brought with them cooking skills, seeds for Philippine vegetables, Philippine cookbooks, and family recipes. Because of this influx, families after the war had more access to ingredients, methods, and varied cultural influences from the Philippines. In the 1950s, Juanita Tamayo Lott remembers, there was a Filipino grocery store in the San Francisco Fillmore district and Asian vegetables at the farmers market on Alemany Avenue, where many Asian American farmers still ply their produce to this day.57 Moreover, postwar Filipina women experienced greater prosperity, namely the ability to naturalize and become citizens and therefore buy farms and homes or rent homes with well-equipped kitchens. Most had large extended families with whom to share child-rearing and cooking responsibilities for mealtimes and special celebrations. My maternal grandparents used a Veterans Affairs loan to buy a new suburban tract home in South Stockton in 1955. After she became a public school teacher in 1962, my grandmother Concepcion Bohulano sold biko (brown sugar rice cakes) and other foods made in her spacious new kitchen for extra income for many decades. By the postwar period, many Filipino men had experience as cooks in campos, hotels, restaurants, and the military, and they shared cooking responsibilities with their wives, transforming gender roles in the home.58 In 1952, Juanita Tamayo Lott’s parents, Anicia and Lorenzo Tamayo, brought her and her sister from the Ilocos region to San Francisco, where her father had lived before the war. Lott’s mother worked as a beautician until 1979 and cooked only on Mondays, her day off. “Mom loved to feed her family Ilocano dishes and kankanen [rice desserts],” Lott recalled. As her father, like other Filipino immigrants, had experience cooking in domestic service, hotels, and restaurants, he “was the main cook,” preparing both American and Filipino dishes.59 Nickie Delute Tuthill’s father, who had served in the merchant marines, was also the main family cook. Her parents, both from Hinunangan, Leyte, married in 1952 in the Philippines and settled in Delano, California. “Mom cooked but loved baking and making desserts,” Nickie recounted. After having Nickie’s younger twin siblings, her mother worked in the vineyards, always taking along a canister of her baked goods to sell in the campo.60

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Party Time: Celebrating Family and Community with Food Throughout the twentieth century, family celebrations such as graduations, holidays, weddings, and birthdays called for tables groaning with food. Big parties with a whole lechon (pig), an impressive buffet, and a house bursting with loved ones all symbolized the achievement of the American Dream. Evangeline Canonizado Buell recalled enormous buffets for Sunday potlucks after the Filipino American Methodist Church services in East Oakland in the 1940s.61 At Buell’s grandmother’s weekly poker group in Oakland, the women shared homemade snacks, talked about how to cook “American,” and traded recipes.62 A party required advance planning and the delegation of tasks by the women in Juanita Tamayo Lott’s family, such as making paridosdos (coconut soup) and Jell-O-mold salads, procuring banana leaves, and grinding coconut. “I don’t think that even the adults got together just to see and talk with one another,” she noted of her postwar family parties in San Francisco. “The main point of a party was the food, or more accurately, the foods.”63 Lott’s father and uncles (who had professional cooking experience) took great pride in their culinary skills and were responsible for the main dishes such as goat, pancit, and seafood. “[These] were the sole domain of the men, and no woman would dare intrude on such a gathering,” she said.64 Parties often featured whole roast goats (kalding) or pigs. In the campo, lechoneros (cooks skilled in roasting pigs and goats) dug pits and prepared the fires in massive end-of-harvest celebrations featuring food and dancing.65 Even in urban areas after World War II, a wedding or baptism called for a lechon. Juanita Tamayo Lott’s family built a crackling fire in their backyard for the pig on the morning of her brother’s christening party in the Fillmore district of San Francisco in the mid-1950s.66 Filipinas/os wasted nothing. The pig’s blood and innards were boiled with garlic, vinegar, and chilis to make the dark-brown stew called diniguan (dinardaraan in Ilocano), nicknamed “chocolate meat.” Goat roasts featured the Ilocano delicacy pinapaitan (goat bile and innards) and kilawen (boiled goat skin and meat).

The Kitchen That Sustained a Movement: Filipino Hall and the Delano Grape Strike Perhaps no event more clearly demonstrates the critical role of women’s labor to the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, of the early Filipina/o American community than the strike kitchen that women maintained at Filipino Hall during the Delano grape strike and boycott from 1965 to 1970. Led by strike chairman Larry Itliong, more than two thousand mostly Filipina/o members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee walked off the Delano vineyards on September 8, 1965, and demanded higher wages. A week later, they were

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joined by the mostly Mexican National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), led by Cesar Chavez. Growers refused to negotiate and hired guards; cut off gas, water, and electricity in the work camps; and evicted their longtime workers. When resourceful strikers built toilets and cooked over campfires, the guards kicked over pots and scattered the strikers’ food. A group of Filipinas and Mexicanas—among them Carmen Reyes, Esperanza Pulmano, Leona Guzman, Velva Armington (a white woman married to Filipino union leader Mariano “Bob” Armington), and many other women—transformed Filipino Hall in downtown Delano into a union hall, boardinghouse, and strike kitchen for the five years of the strike and boycott.67 Hundreds of strikers, most of them Filipina/o and Mexican, would have gone back to work were it not for the daily hot breakfasts, lunches, and dinners they cooked. The women improvised with the donated food that poured in from across the nation. John Armington, a teenager during the strike, remembers his mother, Velva, as well as his ninangs (godmothers) and community members cooking in the resourceful campo style: plenty of white rice, adobo, fish-head soup, and American and Philippine homemade desserts.68 Everyone looked forward to the adobo and fish soup from the strike kitchen.69 Growers had kept Filipinos and Mexicans apart, but mealtimes brought them together, creating warm bonds of solidarity.70 NFWA leader and later United Farm Worker board member Gilbert Padilla looked back on that time with great affection. “For the first time, I [a Mexican American] began to talk to the Filipinos as brothers and friends. Before that, we never talked to them, and they never talked to us.” He and other Mexican Americans grew to like the food. “I learned how to eat the fish heads,” he said, laughing fondly. “And the bitter melon for the Chicanos . . . [Laughs] . . . that was a big one!”71 In March 1966, Senator Robert F. Kennedy addressed a crowd at Filipino Hall, ate with the strikers, and slipped into the kitchen to personally thank the cooks.72 In 1966, the two unions came together as the United Farm Workers (affiliated with the AFL-CIO) and the grape boycott ended in 1970, when growers signed contracts with the UFW. By then, most of the Filipina/o strikers were ready to retire. The Immigration Act of 1965 allowed for the entry of thousands of Filipinas/os; many were reunified with family members. Those who were educated professionals, such as nurses, doctors, and engineers, bypassed the campo and canneries for the cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco and found white-collar and service work. They and their descendants as well as the descendants of earlier immigrants are engaged in a new chapter of Filipina/o American culinary history.

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Conclusion Filipinas’ critical roles as cooks, farm laborers, and wage earners in the mostly male pre-1965 Filipina/o American community transformed gender roles and ethnic culture and gave women more power, and more work, in their families and communities. They bore heavy responsibilities for the physical sustenance of their families and communities, and their labor was a vital component of the agricultural empire of the West Coast and Hawai‘i. In addition to their reproductive and wage labor, they created side businesses selling food, ran their own grocery stores or restaurants, or took in boarders. Immigration patterns, various origins, the Depression, World War II rationing, local foods, and the sharing of cooking between men and women all played roles in shaping women’s labor and the meals that Filipina/o Americans produced and ate. The absence of elders, the sex ratio imbalance, poverty, and the lack of many Philippine ingredients gave Filipinas the responsibility—and also the freedom—to create a unique Filipino American cuisine. It was shaped by homesickness, improvisation, Spanish colonialism, American domestic science, adaptation of local resources, and foods they themselves harvested and canned. Also influential were their migratory lives and intermarriage and interaction among Ilocanas/os, Tagalogs, and Visayans as well as among Filipinas/os and Mexicans, African Americans, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islanders, and white Americans. The landscape of Filipina/o American food has changed dramatically since young Filipinas shared regional recipes with one another and made adobo over open campfires in the San Joaquin Delta. One study, drawing from 2015 US Census data, identified Filipina/o Americans as the third-largest Asian American ethnic group nationally, following Chinese and Indians.73 With restaurants and grocery stores from Honolulu to Washington, DC, shoppers can find frozen lumpia wrappers, canned coconut milk, noodles, lemongrass, and fish sauce nearly anywhere, including mainstream grocery stores. Food media and social media also highlight new Filipino restaurants and chefs and unique ingredients, such as ube, or purple yam. But long before TV host Andrew Zimmern and Vogue magazine called Filipino cuisine the next American food trend, before “local,” “artisan,” “farmto-table” or “nose-to-tail” cooking became trendy, Filipino food has always mattered to those who grew up during the Depression, World War II, and the 1950s and 1960s. They were raised on fresh local produce they themselves harvested; campo-style cooking with pig feet, heads, and tails; backyard lechon roasts; and homemade pastries based on family recipes sold at community gatherings.74 Filipina/o Americans cherish these dishes and their memories and revere the women who performed the labor and sacrificed to make those foods for them. From the Filipina cooks in the campo who toiled daily to feed hundreds of workers to the post–World War II family parties with tables groaning under platters

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of food to the resourceful women of the strike kitchen at Filipino Hall, Filipinas created and sustained Filipina/o American culture, transformed gender roles, and built strong communities as they fed their families. Notes

1 Deanna Balantac, interview with author, Stockton, CA, July 2000. 2 Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish & Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 10. 3 Doreen Fernandez’s publications include “Why Sinigang?,” in The Culinary Culture of the Philippines, ed. Gilda Cordero-Fernando (Manila: Bancom Audiovision, 1976), 25–29; Palayok: Philippine Food through Time, on Site, in the Pot (Manila: Bookmark, 2000), 6; Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture (Manila: Anvil, 1994), 62, 223. 4 For example, coconut dishes, rice cakes, and sweets proliferate wherever there are sugar plantations and rice fields. The Ilocos region specializes in vegetable-centered cuisine, typified by pinakbet (vegetables with fish paste). Pork is absent from the cooking of the mostly Muslim Southern Philippines. Monina A. Mercado, “The Geography of the Filipino Stomach,” in The Culinary Culture of the Philippines, ed. Gilda Cordero-Fernando (Manila: Bancom Audiovision, 1976), 10. 5 Filipinos working in the galleon trade jumped ship at the Gulf of Mexico and went to Louisiana, where they pioneered shrimp farming and drying in the bayou in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Marina Espina, Filipinos in Louisiana (New Orleans, LA: A. F. Laborde, 1988). 6 Fernandez, Tikim, 196. 7 Camila Carido, interview with author, Stockton, CA, June 2002. 8 Mercado, “The Geography of the Filipino Stomach,” 11. 9 “Domestic Science,” Philippine Teacher 3, no. 5 (October 1905): 19. Records of the Bureau of Insular Affairs (BIA), RG 350, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, MD. 10 On domestic science, see Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 11 Annual Reports of the Bureau of Education, esp. 1917 and 1931, BIA, RG 350, NARA. 12 Alice M. Fuller, Housekeeping and Household Arts: A Manual for Work with the Girls of the Elementary Schools of the Philippine Islands, Bureau of Education, bulletin 35 (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1911), 77, appendix C, “How to Cook Rice.” 13 Dean C. Worcester, Philippines: Past and Present (New York: MacMillan, 1914), 403–4. 14 Camila Carido, interview with author, Stockton, CA, February 1996. 15 Rene Alexander Orquiza Jr., “Lechon with Heinz, Lea and Perrins with Adobo,” in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader, ed. Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin Manalansan, and Anita Mannur (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 177–86; Doreen Fernandez, “Food and War,” in Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, ed. Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 241. 16 Worcester, Philippines, 404. 17 Fernandez, Palayok; Felice P. Sta. Maria, “The Turn of the Century Kitchen,” in CorderoFernando, The Culinary Culture, 65. 18 Sta. Maria, 61–65. Posters of the Board of Education, General Classified Files, 1898–1945, General Records, 1914–1945, BIA, RG 350, NARA, file 1092, box 746. 19 Fuller, Housekeeping and Household Arts.

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20 Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 269. 21 Sleepy Caballero, “Ketchikan, Alaska Memories,” Stockton FANHS Newsletter 16, no. 3 (July 2010): 5. 22 Demonstration Project for Asian Americans (DPAA) Journal Writing Files, Filipino American National Historical Society Archives, Seattle, WA. 23 On Filipina/o farm labor migration, see Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California: (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 24 Voices: A Filipino American Oral History (Stockton, CA: Filipino Oral History, 1984). 25 Concepcion Moreno Bohulano, interview with author, Stockton, CA, July 2001. 26 Jean Vengua, “The Social Box,” in Beyond Lumpia, Pansit and Seven Manangs Wild: Stories from the Heart of Filipino America, ed. Evangeline Canonizado Buell et al. (San Francisco: T’boli, 2014), 169. 27 Camila Carido, interview, February 1996. 28 Segunda Reyes, interview with Mary Inosanto, DPAA, Stockton, CA, 1981. 29 Herb Jamero, “Campo-Style Sudan,” Flavors of Filipino American Kitchens, Central Valley Chapter, Filipino American National Historical Society Archives, 2012. 30 “Tomorrow’s Memories: The Diaries of Angeles Monrayo Raymundo, Compiled and Edited by Rizaline R. Raymundo,” “Filipino Americans: Forever Our Legacy,” special issue, Filipino Journal 5, no. 5 (1998–1999), Santa Clara Valley Chapter, Filipino American National Historical Society Archives, 122. 31 Helen Dacuyan Villaruz, “A Story of a Filipino Family in Winton,” and Henry Dacuyan, “Growing Up in a Filipino Farm Labor Camp,” both in Talk Story: An Anthology of Stories by Filipino Americans of the Central Valley of California (Merced, CA: Carpenter, 2008), 15, Central Valley Chapter, Filipino American National Historical Society Archives. 32 Luna Jamero, email, February 10, 2017. 33 Rizaline Raymundo, interview with author, San Jose, CA, August 2001. 34 Anita Bautista, interview with author, Stockton, CA, July 2001. 35 Dorothy Cordova, interview with author, Seattle, WA, November 2011. 36 Violet Juanitas Dutra, email, November 8, 2011. 37 Nickie Delute Tuthill, email, February 10, 2017. 38 Fred Floresca, interview, DPAA, FANHS, Seattle. 39 Eleanor Galvez Olamit and Camila Carido, interview with author, February 19, 1996. 40 Eleanor Galvez Olamit, interview with author, Stockton, CA, February 1996. 41 Asuncion Nicolas, interview with author, Stockton, CA, February 1996. 42 Maria Abastilla Beltran, interview with Caroline Koslosky, DPAA, FANHS National Office, 1981. 43 Camila Carido, interview with author, Stockton, CA, January 1996. 44 Angelina Bantillo Magdael, interview with Filipino Oral History Project, Stockton, CA, 1984. 45 Diaries of Virgilia Marello Bantillo, 1926–1946, Bantillo Family Papers, Stockton, CA. 46 Dorothy Cordova interview, November 2011. 47 Rizaline Raymundo, “Recipes,” author’s collection; Fred Cordova, interview, Seattle, WA, November 2011. 48 Dorothy Cordova interview, November 2011. 49 Tuthill email. 50 Evangeline Canonizado Buell, Twenty-Five Chickens and a Pig for a Bride (San Francisco: T’Boli, 2006), 24–25.

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51 In Stockton, California, Margarita Balucas owned a pool hall and the Lafayette Lunch Counter, which she sold to my grandfather Pablo Mabalon. Eudosia Juanitas opened the Juanitas Grocery in Stockton. In San Francisco, Maria Velasco Basconcillo and her husband ran the New Luneta Café on Kearny Street in Manilatown. In the 1930s, Bibiana Laigo Castillano’s Philippine Café served Ilocano specialties including goat (Dorothy Cordova interview, November 2011). 52 Angelina Bantillo Magdael, interview with the author, Stockton, CA, August 2001. 53 Fred and Dorothy Cordova interviews, November 2011. 54 Vengua, “The Social Box,” 167. 55 Jamero email. 56 Caridad Concepcion Vallangca, The Second Wave: Pinay & Pinoy (San Francisco: Strawberry Hill, 1987), 57; Filipina war bride entry data from Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the 20th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 108; 1940, 1950, and 1960 census data from Juanita Tamayo Lott, “Demographic Changes Transforming the Filipino Community,” in Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity, ed. Maria P. P. Root (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 11; marriage data from Vince Reyes, “The War Brides,” Filipinas (October 1995): 24. 57 Juanita Tamayo Lott, email, February 11, 2017. 58 Juanita Tamayo Lott, “Pilipino Partytime,” in Liwanag: Literary and Graphic Expressions by Filipinos in America (San Francisco: Liwanag, 1975), 201; Lott, email, February 10, 2017. 59 Lott email, February 11, 2017. 60 Tuthill email. 61 Buell, Twenty-Five Chickens, 7. 62 Evangeline Canonizado Buell, “Seven Card Stud with Seven Manangs Wild,” in Seven Card Stud with Seven Manangs Wild: An Anthology of Filipino American Writing, ed. Helen Toribio (San Francisco: T’boli, 2002), 185. 63 Lott, “Pilipino Partytime,” 201. 64 Lott, “Pilipino Partytime”; Lott emails, February 11, 2017, December 9, 2017. 65 Angelina Bantillo Magdael, interview, DPAA, FANHS National, Stockton, CA, July 1, 1981. 66 Lott, “Pilipino Partytime,” 201; Lott email, February 11, 2017. 67 Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (London: Verso, 2011), 152. 68 John Armington, phone interview with the author, January 27, 2017; El Macriado, Sunday, December 1, 1968. 69 Miriam Pawel, Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 16. 70 Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage, 162. 71 Gilbert Padilla, interview with the author, Fresno, CA, May 2015. 72 Armington phone interview. 73 In 2015, Chinese comprised 4,948,000; Indians, 3,982,000; and Filipinos, 3,899,000. Gustavo López, Neil G. Ruiz, and Eileen Patten, “Key Facts about Asian Americans, a Diverse and Growing Population,” Pew Research Center, September 8, 2017, www.pewresearch.org, accessed December 24, 2017. 74 Veronica Meewes, “Andrew Zimmern: Filipino Food Is the Next ‘Big Thing,’” USA TODAY, June 12, 2012, www.usatoday.com, accessed February 12, 2017; Claudia McNeilly, “How Filipino Food Is Becoming the Next Great American Cuisine,” Vogue, June 2, 2017, www. vogue.com, accessed July 16, 2017.

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Stretching the Boundaries of Christian Respectability, Race, and Gender during Jim Crow Chinese American Women and the Southern Baptist Church Phonshia Nie

In 1936, Chinese American Inez Lung, sponsored by the First Baptist Church of Austin, Texas, became the first Chinese American Southern Baptist foreign missionary to China. Since 1927, Lung had been working in China, serving as an English teacher and informal missionary at an all-girls Southern Baptist school in Southern China.1 Born in 1900 and raised in Texas, she had enjoyed access to white institutions in Austin throughout her lifetime, and her white colleagues and classmates eagerly supported her evangelical interest in China. Lung embodied and encouraged a white evangelical perception of China as a friendly foreign field for proselytizing Christianity. Accordingly, Lung was given an opportunity to serve the church in China, but she was to learn that she was not accepted as equal to white Southern Baptist foreign missionaries in either pay or status. In another part of the US South, the Mississippi Delta, Chinese Americans like Dancie Yett Wong relied on the Southern Baptist Church and its connections to advocate for quality education. In 1937, Wong’s two eldest children, Pershing and Kellogg, joined the inaugural class of Mississippi’s first Chinese American School located in Cleveland, Mississippi. Her youngest child, “Little Dancie,” joined her brothers at the school the following year. Wong had been one of many parents who fund-raised across the expansive 150 miles of the Mississippi Delta for the cost of the two-story school building during the 1930s.2 Seeking the support of sympathetic white city and church leaders, Wong and other Chinese American parents advocated for quality, albeit Chinese-segregated, education after the landmark US Supreme Court Gong Lum v. Rice decision (1927) established that Chinese children were legally “colored” and thus restricted from attending white public schools in Mississippi.3 The Cleveland Chinese Mission School, officially known as the Chinese School of Mississippi, operated for a little over a decade and provided public education for Chinese children who did not wish to attend public schools for the “colored.” The school is perhaps the most tangible evidence of the racial position most Chinese Americans, being neither black nor white, occupied or aspired to occupy under Jim Crow laws and everyday practices that 87

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reinforced white supremacy through enforced black and white racial segregation during the early twentieth century.4 While Austin, Texas, and the Mississippi Delta have vastly different histories, the two locations do share some commonalities. They offer two types of southern settlement patterns in which Jim Crow thrived and structured daily life and where Chinese Americans negotiated racial space. In southern cities including Augusta, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana; and San Antonio, Texas, Christian outreach and mission churches organized in Chinese American communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Markedly different from the ethnic enclave communities in more industrial and urban centers on the East and West Coasts during the same period, Chinese Americans in the South settled across small towns largely in African American neighborhoods where their small numbers quelled the “yellow peril” fear of Chinese encroachment sweeping the nation. The vast majority engaged in family-operated grocery, restaurant, and laundry businesses, and they often lived above or behind the store. In southern towns with larger Chinese populations like Greenville, Mississippi, with more than one hundred Chinese residents, Chinese segregation was more strictly enforced than in towns like Austin with only a handful of Chinese families.5 Scholarly work about Chinese Americans in the US South has focused heavily on the law and Jim Crow and has mostly relied on legal documents or contemporary sociological fieldwork.6 Moreover, the studies have often emphasized the injustice of Chinese school segregation and exclusion.7 While educational access is key to understanding the history of Jim Crow and the struggle for racial integration, the Chinese segregated classroom was more complex than just Chinese exclusion from white society. Distancing themselves from the disenfranchised and overtly oppressed African American population in the Delta and their underfunded schools, Chinese Americans encouraged a racial distinction for themselves within the “colored” categorization of Jim Crow by advocating for segregated Chinese schools, churches, and cemeteries. Schools were but one institution through which Chinese Americans negotiated race and gender boundaries in the US South. Attention to religious institutions sheds new light on Chinese American experiences in the region in general and Chinese American women’s history specifically. In this chapter, I examine the agency and strategies of two Chinese American women, Inez Lung of Texas and Dancie Yett Wong of Mississippi, during Jim Crow as they negotiated new lives for themselves and their communities through their relationship with the dominant religious institution of their time and place—the Southern Baptist Church (SBC). Church documents reveal its role in increasing access for Chinese Americans to enjoy opportunities based on white perceptions of China and Chinese Americans in the South, while Southern Baptist networks informed the lives of these women and the communities

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they advocated for and represented. Nonetheless, while seeking new occasions to expand outside racial distinctions and gender norms of the day, Chinese American women also experienced race and gender restrictions within the context of Southern society and evangelical Christian practices. For Inez Lung, I utilized Southern Baptist publications and local archival materials to illuminate her life both in Austin, Texas, and transnationally as a missionary in China. While in the Mississippi Delta, Dancie Yett Wong, negotiated a different relationship with the church through her interactions with home missions. Her story offers a window into the daily lives of Chinese American grocery store families as they grappled with more overt and restricted forms of racial discrimination and exclusion. Through an analysis of early twentiethcentury newspapers and fieldwork notes and interviews, especially those conducted by the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Writers’ Project American Guide Series during the Great Depression, I assess Wong’s activities and challenges in raising funds for China war relief and to obtain quality education for Chinese Americans.8 In uncovering the aspirations, choices, and interactions of two Chinese American women with the Southern Baptist Church and the constraints they faced, I provide new research findings on Chinese American women’s history and show the problematical nature and complexity of their lives, in this case, in the racial dynamics of the US South where whites determined their place in the hierarchy.

Southern Baptist Connections in China and in the US South Religious institutions reflected Jim Crow and the white power structure in the region. Given their long-standing mission networks in China, white evangelical southerners considered Chinese Americans to be racially distinct from blacks. Consequently, many white religious southerners sought to help Chinese Americans gain better treatment in America. In turn, Chinese Americans used evangelical networks to advocate for greater inclusion within white southern society in the early twentieth century. In Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, and other parts of the South, Chinese American contact with Protestant and evangelical outreach shaped the terms through which Chinese Americans received uneven access to resources within a southern terrain that heavily adhered to Jim Crow color lines of inclusion and exclusion. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelical churches across the South invited Chinese American families to join Sunday service or Bible study groups. The large and growing membership of Southern Baptists in the late nineteenth century and its history of mission work to China made Southern Baptist churches attune to the presence of local Chinese Americans. While evangelical outreach to Chinese Americans had occurred in other parts of the country since the 1850s, the role of Southern Baptist outreach

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and home mission work played a particularly influential role in shaping how Jim Crow practices affected and defined Chinese American communities in the South. A special interest in sharing the Gospel with Chinese Americans as an extension of work in China stemmed from early practices of some of the first American Baptists to serve as foreign missionaries to China. Reverend Jehu Lewis Shuck spent years in China before turning his interest to domestic Chinese Americans. In 1855, he helped establish the first Chinese Baptist church in the United States located in San Francisco. As the first American Baptist missionary to work in China and as a native Virginian, Shuck held allegiance to the Southern Baptists after the Baptist Convention split in 1845 over the issue of slavery. He proudly represented the Southern Baptists who he felt paved the way for American evangelicals in China, declaring, “Let the brethren bear in mind that the Foreign Board of the Southern Baptist Convention was the first Protestant Board of Missions in the world who ever held property and gained a permanent footing in the interior of China.”9 Shuck built on earlier models of church work in China, which stressed that their missionary efforts to the Chinese were not to “civilize” but simply to educate with the Gospel since he assessed that “for ages, the Chinese had been civilized.”10 Despite Southern Baptist Convention’s founding ideals being complicit with Jim Crow practices, their home missions made space for inclusion of the small communities of Chinese Americans based on the legacy of Chinese outreach overseas in Southern Baptist practices and history. As anti-Chinese sentiments in the United States grew during the late 1860s and 1870s and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers into the country and racially profiled Chinese immigrants as permanent “aliens unfit for citizenship,” religious organizations including the Southern Baptist Convention provided a network of resources for Chinese immigrants through home missions and schools. For example, beginning in 1879, James Boardman (J. B.) Hartwell served as a pastor to an SBC home mission among the Chinese in California. With sixteen years of missionary experience in China, Hartwell was considered “eminently adapted to work in California.”11 He helped to raise funds for Chinese congregations in San Francisco, appealing to Southern Baptist missionary sensibilities by reminding SBC leaders, “Are not the Southern Baptists under obligation to the heathen in America?”12 Even after returning to China twenty years later and serving there until 1912, Hartwell remained an adviser and expert in Southern Baptist missionary work among the Chinese in America. In 1889, a group of Baptists and Methodists were interested in starting a Chinese home mission in Augusta, Georgia, for Chinese laborers who had settled in the area after being contracted to work on the expansion of the Savannah River’s

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Augusta Canal in the 1870s. They wrote to Hartwell requesting advice, encouragement, and Sunday school teaching materials.13 The correspondence demonstrated that larger networks of international and domestic missionary work influenced the message received by Chinese Americans in the South. Home missions to Chinese Americans functioned as extensions of Baptist and evangelical engagement with China as a foreign field. The foreign missionary spirit compelled leaders in other parts of the South to organize Chinese missions as well. When Ira Eavenson, a former missionary to China, moved to the Mississippi Delta in 1928, he immediately took notice of the Delta Chinese. Though the group was minuscule at barely 0.2 percent of the total population, he drew similar assertions about his missionary obligation. He recalled, “The presence of a large number of Chinese merchants and their families made me feel that God was giving me an opportunity to share the Gospel with the same people to whom He had sent me across the ocean.”14 Unable to continue his foreign missionary work due to the increasing anti-Christian social unrest and civil war in China, Eavenson had terminated his position with the Foreign Mission Board and accepted a position as pastor in Cleveland, Mississippi, where he helped to establish the Cleveland Chinese mission school and, shortly thereafter, the Chinese School of Mississippi.15 Ollie Lewellyn of Kentucky had childhood dreams of becoming a foreign missionary to China after hearing legendary stories about white Southern Baptist missionary Charlotte “Lottie” Moon, a highly influential woman in the 1870s and 1880s who helped establish the Women’s Missionary Union and female participation in evangelical mission work.16 Lewellyn moved to Texas to serve as a pastor’s assistant but quickly found her calling among the more than five hundred Chinese in San Antonio, a population that she endearingly nicknamed “my China.” The SBC officially appointed Lewellyn a home missionary to Chinese Americans in 1923, and she served in that role most of her life, establishing the Chinese mission in San Antonio, which eventually became the Chinese Baptist Church. By the early twentieth century, there was a greater presence of Chinese American families in southern cities with the settlement of more Chinese male laborers whose entrepreneurship in laundry, grocery, and restaurant businesses also attracted familial networks to the region. In cities like San Antonio, Augusta, and New Orleans and towns across the Mississippi Delta, a small but visible presence of Chinese American families motivated religious leaders to consider extending their long-standing commitment to China and Chinese people on a local level. The Southern Baptist Convention sponsored the establishment of a Chinese home mission in San Antonio and the Mississippi Delta, appointing formal SBC leaders of these missions, while many other southern Chinese mission schools and services relied solely on local church support.17

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Inez Lung: Building Southern Baptist Church Connections to China Embodying the International Missionary Spirit Unlike the larger Chinese American communities of the Mississippi Delta— Augusta, Georgia, and San Antonio, Texas—the few Chinese Americans in Austin, Texas, or Atlanta, Georgia, lived in relative isolation from other Chinese Americans. Yet the influence of the Southern Baptist Convention and Chinese home mission work continued to shape Chinese Americans’ access to greater inclusion in white religious circles under Jim Crow. As the most prominent Chinese American female missionary in the South, Inez Lung (often referred to as Miss Inez by church members) embodied the transnational impact of Chinese home mission work and, to Southern Baptist leaders, its potential to convert China. Lung’s family, like most other early Chinese American families in the Austin area, traced their local roots to the railroads that were built throughout the western states during the late nineteenth century. Beginning in 1869, thousands of Chinese workers came to Texas, often under three-year contracts, to work on the Houston and Texas Central Railroad, the Texas and Pacific Railway, and the Southern Pacific Railroad.18 Lung’s father, Joe, and uncle Fong had moved to Calvert in the 1880s for railroad work. They turned to laundry and restaurant businesses in 1889 after Joe married Dora Wong, a California-born Chinese American who was employed by a local Jewish family. Inez, the fifth of nine children, was born in Calvert in 1900 before the family moved first to Waco and then to Austin in 1906, where Joe’s restaurant prospered.19 Known for serving simple vegetable and steak dinners for twenty-five cents, it became a staple, offering standard American café food to Austin businessmen and farmers. After a market grew for Chinese food in Austin, he turned it into a formal dining establishment called Lung’s Chinese Kitchen.20 As the family business flourished, Inez Lung became the family’s first child to receive a secondary education and was admitted to a Catholic school, Saint Mary’s Academy.21 Her interest in Christianity grew after attending First Baptist services and Sunday school with her sisters Lula and Anne in 1909. Along with her mother, Lung joined the First Baptist Church. She excelled in academics and expressed an early interest in religious studies and received a scholarship to the University of Texas. She became an active member of the Fidelis Sunday school class, the First Baptist Church’s women’s Bible study group, and furthered her studies with a Fidelis class scholarship to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.22 Lung and her family enjoyed access to many white institutions—the all-white Saint Mary’s Academy; the First Baptist Church of Austin, founded in 1847 by Austin’s Baptist slaveowners; and the University of Texas, which did not admit

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black undergraduate students until 1956.23 Though Austin strictly enforced Jim Crow against “colored” African Americans and Mexican Americans, the white community tolerated the handful of Chinese families, like the Lungs, who operated small businesses—laundries, restaurants, or grocery stores located in the white business district or African American and Mexican American neighborhoods of East Austin. Unlike San Antonio, which received hundreds of Chinese laborers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from railroad work and employment under General Pershing during the Mexican Revolution, Austin maintained a small population of Chinese Americans, capped at four to five families in a city of thirty-five thousand in 1920.24 For the First Baptist Church of Austin, Lung embodied the international missionary spirit of the Gospel. Local white church leaders praised Lung for her religious commitment and encouraged her to consider China as a mission field where she could be most useful. Her obligation and connection to China emphasized both the middle-class, respectable nature of local Chinese Americans and their distinction from other racial groups, namely African Americans and Mexican Americans, who experienced the harshest discrimination in Austin under Jim Crow.25 Yet Lung’s ability to traverse the color line in the SBC mission field was limited. The Fidelis class reported with sympathy that Lung was subject to discrimination when she was rejected as an SBC foreign missionary to China. The Foreign Mission Board (FMB) refused to appoint her in such a position, reasoning that providing an ethnic Chinese a foreign missionary salary in China would cause discontent among Chinese church workers who were being paid far less than the all-white SBC foreign missionaries.26 Despite her education, missionary spirit, experience, and contributions to her local church, Lung was considered not racially qualified—not “foreign” enough—to be officially sponsored as a missionary and Christian teacher in China and to receive the status or salary of a white foreign missionary. The FMB’s decision revealed the SBC’s limits of Chinese American inclusion given their racial distinction.

Serving as a Transnational Missionary in China Showing determination and ambition, Lung eventually obtained a teaching position in China after approaching foreign missionary Mary C. Alexander, who spoke at a church event in Austin in 1926 and taught at Pooi To Baptist Academy, an all-girls Southern Baptist school in Canton, modern-day Guangzhou.27 Alexander offered Lung a local teacher’s salary with no travel expenses paid, and Lung jumped at the opportunity. She asked her parents to fund her travel expenses to China and quickly left to begin her teaching position in 1927.28 Shortly before her departure, the First Baptist Church of Austin and its pastor, George Green, held a farewell party in Lung’s honor, featuring elaborate flower

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and candle arrangements donated by church members and a dinner prepared by the Fidelis class. More than sixty guests joined the First Baptist Church and its Fidelis class to express commitment to Lung and to China as a foreign mission field.29 Lung did not occupy an official position as an SBC foreign missionary, but in many ways, local Southern Baptists sponsored her as their foreign missionary and considered her their local connection to China. During her time in China, Lung sent regular updates to the Fidelis class about her daily life and the challenges her school faced in educating young women in China. In return, the Fidelis class sent small donations and gifts during the holidays to “our Inez over there,” considering Lung’s work an extension of their own beliefs and teachings.30 After seven years abroad, Lung returned to Austin for a two-year furlough, her travel provided for by First Baptist donations. The Fidelis class celebrated her return with a dinner for fifty guests and several toasts that honored the different Fidelis class leaders who had helped sustain Lung’s mission work in China.31 Lung began to receive increased local recognition, encouragement, and sponsorship. From 1934 to 1936, she regularly met with church leaders and filled her weekends with speaking engagements across Texas. Before returning to China, Lung also visited the Chinese mission in San Antonio, demonstrating to home mission supporters the potential that Chinese Americans like herself possessed in contributing to China and mission work more broadly.32 Mary C. Alexander, her colleague and mentor, wrote in the SBC Home and Foreign Fields publication that the history of the Lung family in Austin demonstrated the connection between home and foreign field and “the meaning of the Master when he said: ‘The field is the world.’” Lung, she argued, was “a more devoted, efficient, and consecrated missionary one will have to travel far to find” and whose life story reflected the transnational and limitless message of missionary work.33 Lung was even invited to speak at the annual conference of SBC’s Baptist Young People’s Union (BYPU) in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1935, where she was introduced by Milledge Theron Rankin, a missionary to China and the first SBC secretary of the Orient, who supervised all foreign mission work in China and Japan.34 Despite this honor, the FMB continued to refuse Lung an appointment as an official SBC foreign missionary. Instead, leaders at the Texas Baptist Convention offered to pay for Lung’s travel expenses, and the First Baptist Church of Austin agreed to sponsor her salary as their first foreign missionary.35 Lung returned to China in 1936 as an Austin- and Texas-sponsored foreign missionary and continued to teach at Pooi To during Japanese occupation, political uncertainty, and war in China. She spent twenty more years in Pooi To, which had relocated to Hong Kong during and after World War II. She served as head of the English department, overseeing four hundred students, while remaining an integral part of the First Baptist Church of Austin, which paid her salary until

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her retirement in 1958. Despite Lung’s discriminatory treatment by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign Mission Board, local white evangelical networks in Austin and her service as a foreign missionary to China provided her an opportunity to pursue her religious convictions and sidestep the social inequity of Jim Crow at home. As a Chinese American woman, Inez Lung was able to create a position for herself outside the Jim Crow South by working abroad and within the confines of the SBC.

Dancie Yett Wong: Utilizing Home Missions for Chinese American Inclusion Performing Christian Middle-Class Respectability The driving impulse of evangelical and spiritual conversion was informed by a legacy of mission work to China that marked Chinese people as foreign and outside the fabric of US or southern race relations.36 It also had an impact on the formation of racial hierarchies within American communities through the establishment of Chinese home missions. While Inez Lung helped the Southern Baptist Church fulfill its missionary enterprise in China, other Chinese Americans, such as Dancie Yett Wong, engaged with SBC’s Chinese home missions in their communities to gain greater acceptance among whites by demonstrating Christian middle-class respectability in the context of Jim Crow. The impact of missionary work domestically is a “reflex story” of the social and cultural role that foreign missionary work had on American life and society.37 By operating on a southern racial landscape, Chinese mission work transformed local options for the “colored” or “foreign” Chinese in the South. Chinese Americans who were receptive to missionary efforts navigated a complicated web of racial meanings based on the SBC’s history of transnational missionary work with China and Chinese Americans and their foreignness that distinguished them from their African American neighbors. While the racial categorization of white and colored continued to rely on the “one-drop” rule and phenotypic difference, local Chinese were positioned as a foreign field to white southern missionaries, ushering in opportunities for Chinese economic and social advancement that relied on representations and presentations of Christian respectability. In his study of home mission work among African Americans in the South and Chinese Americans in California, Derek Chang argues that home missions were sites that both articulated national citizenship based on shared religion and rearticulated racial difference in its structure and organizational practices.38 They taught American culture and the English language to “foreign” Chinese families but also required them to embrace local southern middle-class respectability based on Christian values and lifestyle. By fostering space to establish

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racial, ethnic, or cultural difference, Chinese missions in the South also helped a particular type of Chinese American community to develop and grow.39 Dancie Yett Wong moved to the Delta in 1925 after marrying her husband, H. Wong, a grocery store owner in Rosedale, Mississippi. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1905 but spent most of her childhood in Guangdong, China. Her father, who worked in the laundry business, insisted on a Chinese education for his children. After he passed away when she was sixteen years old, she moved with her mother, Lisse Joe, a Chinese American native of San Francisco, and two brothers back to Fort Worth to live with extended family. She attended a white public school in Fort Worth and worked part-time as cashier at her brothers’ restaurants, which eventually expanded to Dallas and Memphis.40 Wong possessed both a Chinese education and a social understanding of Jim Crow practices that earned her respect from the Delta Chinese community and from white southerners who were sympathetic to Chinese American families. Having attended the Baptist Church as a child in China, she aligned herself and her family with the many other Chinese American families who attended Southern Baptist Chinese missions. Wong’s family and home life reflected what Chinese home missions hoped for in regard to Chinese American families. As in other parts of the country, Chinese home missions taught Victorian ideals of home and family, which were meant to establish a path for social advancement for middle-class, educated, and Christian Chinese. As Ira Eavenson explained to readers of Home and Foreign Fields, Chinese home missions provided local Chinese much-needed exposure to “Christian civilization” and “American manhood.” Without the teachings of middle-class Christian values, he argued, the Delta Chinese would learn only about the “low class white men” who frequented African American neighborhoods seeking interracial sex, prostitution, and intimacy with blacks.41 Eavenson respected a Jim Crow color line, which aligned with his own vision of a segregated Chinese mission that encouraged distance between Chinese Americans and African Americans. Similar to missionary and reform work targeting urban Chinatowns, Chinese missions in the South offered Sunday school lessons and home visits to encourage Christian standards of home and propriety ranging from lessons in formal etiquette for church services to proper clothing attire at dinner parties. The Cleveland Chinese mission school volunteers as well as other churches across the Delta, including a Presbyterian church in Rosedale, held classes for Chinese women to learn about standards of cleanliness and food preparation and presentation.42 As Nayan Shah has shown, “the achievement of American cultural citizenship for Chinese immigrants rested on proof that Chinese women were engaged with respectable domesticity and motherhood.”43 Works Progress Administration writer Anne McAlpine visited Wong’s home, interviewed her, and described in

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great detail how she upheld the exemplary standards of middle-class American household culture. Dancie Yett Wong was depicted as an eloquent, refined, and civically engaged mother of three who reflected the “respectable domesticity” that was shaping Chinese interaction with the white Baptist church. She wore a “neat, one-piece, American style, woolen dress, over which was a sweater,” and she smiled with “perfect, pearly white teeth.” Despite being located in the back quarter of a grocery store as most Chinese family homes were at the time, Wong’s home “presented a neat, comfortable and livable appearance—in every respect like the average American home with the exception of Chinese books on the shelves, and the Chinese pictures, photographs, and ornaments.”44 In short, Wong’s clothing and self-presentation along with the materiality of her home decor reflected adherence to standards and styles of modest middle-class American culture. By performing middle-class propriety in home decor, personal manners, dress, and food preparation and presentation, Chinese families like the Wongs consciously chose what Christian respectability meant for themselves and their families. Not all white southerners were in agreement. Annie Louise Stovall, a schoolteacher to the Chinese, also acknowledged that Chinese families performed Christian standards of home and propriety, but she suspected that Chinese families like the Wongs “conform[ed] very much to our ways of dress and acting in public, but in the privacy of their homes they fall back to the ways of doing things in their old country—China.” They used knives and forks, “but when they are alone with no strangers around they always eat with their native chop sticks.”45

Advocating for China War Relief and Chinese American Education Dancie Yett Wong used her relatively respected position to speak openly about discrimination against Delta Chinese, especially in education. During the 1920s in the Mississippi Delta, sympathetic church members who disapproved of local restrictions or mistreatment against Chinese children attending white public schools worked with concerned Chinese parents like Wong to organize what they considered “proper” education for “respectable” or “high-class” Chinese Americans. Wong was a member of the Mississippi Delta Chinese Patriotic Association and the only woman at many Mississippi Delta Chinese fund-raising events to speak publicly during the 1930s. In 1937, Wong had just completed fund-raising for the Chinese School of Mississippi that coincided with the nationwide and local fund-raising effort for China war relief. When Chinese consul Chishan S. Lee visited Greenville, Mississippi, in August 1937, about a month after the Japanese invasion of China, to hold an “inspirational rally for China in her latest crisis,” Wong was the only woman to speak at the event.46 Because discrimination against Chinese Americans was more prevalent in towns like Greenville, the interracial interaction and gathering was especially

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noteworthy. Outside of certain church services and other church gatherings, Chinese and white southerners in Greenville rarely organized together. The fourhour event at the Washington County Courthouse featured speakers, including the city’s mayor Milton Smith and Greenville First Baptist Church pastor Frederick Smith. Wong addressed an audience of three hundred in Chinese, encouraging them to donate to help meet a regional goal of $10,000 for China war relief.47 Her appearance resulted in more speaking engagements, including at several venues in Bolivar County to help raise funds for both the Chinese School of Mississippi and the China relief fund. She also spoke at an event in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and in a radio interview on WREC in Memphis.48 Wong was experienced in articulating her thoughts in a way that would convince her listeners to donate to support both Chinese American education and the China-US alliance during World War II. White church members who supported Chinese American community fundraising also sustained SBC’s home mission work among Chinese Americans throughout the South to influence Chinese American home and family values. In doing so, Chinese home missions helped create two class distinctions among Chinese Americans in the South by encouraging Chinese and white association in ways that would keep them separate from the black population. As observed by WPA writer Ruth F. Walker, there were “two classes of Chinese in the Mississippi Delta—the property owners and those that intermarry with Negroes. The latter lives in the Negro neighborhood, their children play with Negroes and go to the Negro school.”49 The Chinese American community, in struggling for its place in the racial landscape of the South, was divided based on interaction with or distance from either the white church or the black community. Echoing these findings that reflected white views of appropriate and respectable behavior, another WPA writer, Willa Johnson, giving attention to the role of the church, noted: Quite a number of Chinese in Greenville [Mississippi] attend and are members of The First Baptist Church and of these we get a most excellent report. There are two circles of Chinese in [Greenville] between which a decided line is drawn. The set who are 100 percent Chinese do not associate with those who mingle with Negroes or intermarry with them. The children of the first mentioned are not allowed to be friendly with the last mentioned class, so there is, apparently a decided upward step being taken.50

Wong framed Chinese racial restrictions as unjust and irrational and equated Chinese access to white public schools as an indication of equality in citizenship. The US Supreme Court Gong Lum v. Rice decision (1927), however, had recently reaffirmed the Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling (1896) and extended it to the Chinese, declaring them eligible for a public education by

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attending “colored” schools. Wong’s comments about Chinese children being prohibited from attending white schools reveal the multilayered articulation of Chinese racial distinction that shaped many Chinese American arguments for white inclusion in the South during the 1930s. In her interview with McAlpine, she rhetorically asked, Do you know that Mississippi is the only State in the Union which prohibits Chinese children from attending public schools with the American white children? We pay our school taxes, like other citizens, but, when we send our children to school, they are not admitted. . . . Then, they send American missionaries to China. Why don’t they educate the Chinese children who are here, so that they can become potential missionaries? They would not have to learn Chinese, for they have that language already.51

In defining Chinese American citizenship status as equal to whites as taxpayers, Wong disregarded the economic disenfranchisement of African Americans, who also contributed to public funds in the Delta. With no mention of the segregated “colored” African American public schools present and available for Chinese students to attend in the Mississippi Delta during the 1930s, Wong framed prejudice and discrimination against Delta Chinese outside the black-and-white racial construction that organized public educational access. Perhaps based on her own experience in attending white public schools in segregated Texas, Wong drew distance between the local Chinese American plight for equal education and the dearth of educational resources available to African Americans. Though Chinese children socialized with African American children in their shared residential neighborhoods, Chinese American families like Wong’s that affiliated with local white churches chose not to send their children to black schools, assuming a socioeconomic disadvantage, racial stigma, and perceived encouragement of Jim Crow’s chief reprehension—racial mixing with African Americans. Consequently, Wong and her husband demonstrated respectability and excellence when they chose to send their children to New York City and China during the early 1930s instead of sending them to local “colored” schools before the Chinese School of Mississippi opened in 1937. The segregated Chinese School of Mississippi in Cleveland, whose financial board Wong served on as an officer, was an educational alternative for Chinese American children to local African American public schools that received a fraction of the funding allotted to white public schools across the South and did not provide adequate education for university or college-level matriculation.52 As McAlpine explained in her field notes, the Southern Baptist Church had a central role in organizing “respectable” Chinese families during the 1930s. Moreover, Wong and other Delta Chinese parents found the greatest support from local white leaders for Chinese integration by reminding white southerners of

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their evangelical legacy and commitment to sharing the Gospel with the Chinese. Aware of the long-standing local Southern Baptist missionary commitment to China, Wong appealed to evangelical purpose to demonstrate the inefficacy of Chinese restrictions but met with limitations. Wong pointed out how she had to take a stand against the hypocrisy in white southern treatment of the Delta Chinese by refusing to attend her local Baptist church in Rosedale, the town where the Gong Lum case had first gone to trial in 1924 and where Chinese American children were first legally denied admittance to white public schools. Instead, she and her family drove more than twenty miles to Cleveland, where the Chinese School of Mississippi was located, to attend the service and Sunday school at the Cleveland First Baptist Church, explaining that “because although we are all God’s children, I feel that I am not welcome [in Rosedale], since they don’t permit my children to go to school.”53 It was within the church that Chinese Americans like Wong could express discontent with inequality and stretch but not transgress the racial boundaries of Jim Crow segregation that circumscribed daily life and livelihood through laws and cultural norms.

Two Chinese American Women, Two Trajectories Inez Lung’s lifelong focus on China as a foreign mission field ensured that her visibility and presence in white society offered little commentary on southern racial politics throughout the early twentieth century. Lung embodied the universalizing imagery and message of the Gospel for local Austin Southern Baptists, who historically complied with the beliefs and practices of Jim Crow.54 The First Baptist Church of Austin established the Inez Lung Circle, one of many Women’s Missionary Union (WMU) Bible study and social groups. They regularly corresponded with Lung, promoted her mission work, and fund-raised for her travel or supply expenses throughout the 1940s and 1950s.55 Though she was able to attract white allies to advocate for her and, eventually, financially sponsor her as a foreign missionary outside the racial restrictions of the SBC’s Foreign Mission Board, Lung did not advocate for Chinese American equality or rights in Austin, a city reflecting the South’s troubled history with Jim Crow. During her furlough and sabbaticals home, Lung spoke about her life in China at local churches, university organizations, and civic clubs including local chapters of Rotary International. She accepted invitations from churches and organizations in twenty different states and gave almost six hundred talks during her second furlough home from late 1943 to 1946. She also fund-raised for room and building additions at Pooi To from members and organizations within the Texas Baptist Convention during her sabbatical in Austin from 1952 to 1953.56 After thirty years at Pooi To, Lung returned to Austin in 1958. She retired, remained active with the First Baptist Church, and married Wah Foon Lee of

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New Haven, Connecticut, in 1959.57 Chinese Americans like Lung remained outside the public conversation of segregation, unequal education, poor housing conditions, and the civil rights movement despite these issues affecting all communities of color locally and across the nation. With a small but influential white community supporting her academic and religious accomplishments, Lung created a new role for herself as a Chinese American woman. To do so, she worked in China and complied with the formalities of the local Southern Baptist church to earn respect, position, and freedom. In Mississippi, Dancie Yett Wong and other Delta Chinese parents utilized their religious affiliation that fostered community support to advocate for China’s wellbeing and, most importantly, to create a local option for quality education needed for upward economic and social mobility. Despite their success in establishing the school, the Chinese School of Mississippi closed in 1946 as enrollment dwindled given that limited resources—namely, two teachers employed to instruct twelve grade levels—could not possibly provide college-preparatory curriculum.58 While Wong continued to help her husband run the family grocery store in Rosedale, Mississippi, beginning in 1942 she sent her three children to white public schools in Memphis, Tennessee. Pershing, Kellogg, and Dancie all continued on to college, though “Little Dancie,” died unexpectedly when she was nineteen and enrolled at the University of Tennessee.59 Pershing and Kellogg both attended the Georgia Institute of Technology and became renowned master architects in New York City, working with I. M. Pei & Associates for most of their careers. Quality educational access supported by the Chinese home missions afforded Wong’s children the educational opportunities they found later in life. For Wong, the issue of quality education provided her a platform to publicly share her opinions and validate middle-class Chinese American Christian values. The variety in settlement patterns impacted Chinese American community development in the South, but the capacity of Chinese Americans in different southern cities to create and adhere to Christian respectability as a way to advocate for inclusion and socioeconomic mobility demonstrates its strength and usefulness under Jim Crow and its connection to broader national and regional narratives. Like Wong, who stressed her participation in middle-class Chinese American respectability to the SBC, Lung demonstrated her racial distinction as a Chinese American with overt ties to China as her mission field. Both women pushed the boundaries of gender roles in their circumstances and, in their own ways, sought to redefine their racial position under the harsh restrictions of Jim Crow through Christian respectability.

Conclusion The lives and histories of Inez Lung and Dancie Yett Wong that emerged in different parts of the US South serve as a starting point for understanding the

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boundaries that existed for Chinese American community development, racial advancement, and connections with white and African American communities during Jim Crow. Being female also meant navigating gender roles and expectations. Although their choices, opportunities, and interactions with the Southern Baptist Church differed, the overlapping narrative of the institution in both their lives reveals the impact that Christianity and home mission ideology had on Chinese American community development and in maintaining Jim Crow practices throughout the US South. The idea of China and Chinese people as a foreign field in evangelical ideology to expand Christian practices resulted in churches planting missions across the South in Chinese American settlements during the early twentieth century. The Southern Baptist Church helped create a space for white and Chinese interaction, primarily to develop respectable middle-class Christians but also in an effort to limit black and Chinese relations. It also shaped how hundreds of Chinese Americans, being neither black nor white, throughout the South experienced racial inclusion as well as racial exclusion and how Chinese American community development was both supported and constrained to maintain Jim Crow. The lives of Lung and Wong reveal that Chinese racial distinction evidenced from Chinese religious home missions, churches, and segregated schools in the South relied heavily on the Southern Baptist Church and ideas and performance of respectability tied to Christian values. They also expand our understanding of gender forces at work, notably Lung’s and Wong’s agency and their opportunities and limitations as Chinese American women in this region and period. Ultimately, this history provides context for the world in which women like Inez Lung and Dancie Yett Wong lived and in which they were able to advocate for inclusion for themselves and for Chinese Americans in general by stretching the boundaries of Christian respectability, race, and gender during Jim Crow. Notes

1 Frances Alexander, “Miss Chou”: The Biography of Inez Lung Lee (Austin, TX: W. Frank Evans, 1974). 2 Paul Wong and Doris Ling Lee, eds., Journey Stories from the Cleveland Chinese Mission (self-published, 2011), 111–17. 3 In 1924, Rosedale Consolidated School District in Mississippi denied nine-year-old US-born Martha Lum admission because she was of Chinese descent. The Lums challenged the school district in court. The case reached the Supreme Court in 1927, which reaffirmed the state’s ruling that Chinese were “colored,” and as established by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), racial segregation was at the state’s discretion and did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment. Hence, Martha was not denied an education as she could attend a school for “colored” children. 4 Jim Crow refers to the state and local laws in the South that upheld white supremacy by enforcing white and black racial segregation and restricting African American civil rights in voting, housing, employment, and many other facets of everyday life.

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5 Anne McAlpine, “Life History of the H. Wong Family, Rosedale,” Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Writer’s Project, American Guide Series Field Notes, November 29, 1938, 5–6. 6 James Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1988); Leslie Bow, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Sieglinde Lim de Sánchez, “Crafting a Delta Chinese Community: Education and Acculturation in Twentieth-Century Southern Baptist Mission Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 43, no. 1 (April 1, 2003): 74–90; Jeannie Rhee, “In Black and White: Chinese in the Mississippi Delta,” Journal of Supreme Court History (1994). 7 Stephanie Hinnershitz, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 8 Commissioned researchers and writers collected interview and notes from various Chinese American families willing to speak about their family history, Chinese culture, and daily life in the Mississippi Delta as part of the WPA’s broader project of publishing state-by-state cultural and historical guidebooks. 9 A Decade of Foreign Mission, 1880–1890 (Richmond, VA: Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1891), 26. 10 Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South: A People without a History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 15; Richmond Religious Herald, April 1, 1846. 11 William Cathcart, “Early Southern Baptist China Missions,” in The Baptist Encyclopedia, ed. William Cathcart (Philadelphia, 1881), 1080–82. See also John E. Shaffett, The Missionary Career of J. B. Hartwell (Hammond: Southeastern Louisiana University, 1996). 12 J. B. Hartwell to Reverend R. H. Graves, June 16, 1887, Jesse Boardman Hartwell Collection, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archive, Nashville, TN, AR 884, 3/1, 249. 13 J. B. Hartwell to Mrs. A. Smith Irvine, November 19, 1889, December 4, 1889, February 7, 1890, Jesse Boardman Hartwell Collection, AR 884, 3/2, 377. 14 Jack W. Gunn, A Caring Church: A History of the First Baptist Church (Cleveland, MS: First Baptist Church, 1987), 35. 15 Shirley Stone Garrett, “Why They Stayed: American Church Politics and Chinese Nationalism in the Twenties,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 283–310. 16 Regina D. Sullivan, Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2011). 17 Ollie Lewellyn was appointed home missionary to the Chinese in San Antonio in 1923. In the Mississippi Delta, local pastors and former foreign missionaries facilitated SBC support until 1936, when SBC appointed Chinese-speaking and Chinese-educated Shau Yan Lee as home missionary to the Delta Chinese. Una Roberts Lawrence, ed., The Missionaries of the Home Mission Board Southern Baptist Convention (n.p.: Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1936), 23. 18 Institute of Texan Cultures, The Chinese Texans (San Antonio: University of Texas Press, 1981), 5–7; Marilyn Dell Brady, The Asian Texans (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 12–14. 19 Jeanette Hastedt Flachmeier, Pioneer Austin Notables (Austin, TX: Flachmeier, 1975), 35–37. 20 Sam Lung, interviewed by Jean Gilbert, transcript, February 26, 1973, Austin History Center, Austin, Texas, tape 0076; Michael Barnes, Indelible Austin: Selected Histories (Austin, TX: Waterloo, 2015), 87–89.

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21 Many of Lung’s siblings attended Swante Palm School, a white public school, as did many of East Austin’s Mexican American children. Austin’s public schools were segregated with white, African American, and most Mexican American children attending different schools. 22 Alexander, “Miss Chou,” 1–12. 23 V. L. Brooks, History of the First Baptist Church of Austin, Texas (Austin, TX: First Baptist Church, 1923), 5, 11; Dwonna Naomi Goldstone, Integrating the 40 Acres: The Fifty-Year Struggle for Racial Equality at the University of Texas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 41. 24 Institute of Texan Cultures, The Chinese Texans, 14–16; Brady, The Asian Texans, 18–20. 25 Brian D. Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 4–5. 26 First Baptist Church of Austin Fidelis Sunday School Class, A History of Faith in Action: First Baptist Church Austin, Texas, 1847–1970 (Austin, TX: First Baptist Church of Austin, 1970), 24. 27 T. B. Ray, Southern Baptists in China (Richmond, VA: Foreign Mission Board Southern Baptist Convention, 1924), 14. 28 Alexander, “Miss Chou,” 15. 29 “Farewell Party,” Austin Statesman, October 18, 1927. 30 “Class Honors China Visitor with Shower,” Austin American, September 19, 1937; “Austin Has Interests in China,” Austin American, August 23, 1931; “News from Hong Kong, and Miss Inez,” First Baptist Clarion, December 30, 1955. 31 “Miss Lung Is Honored at Courtesy,” Austin Statesman, August 28, 1934. 32 “Miss Lung in San Antonio,” Austin American, October 21, 1934. 33 Mary C. Alexander, “Home or Foreign Missions—Which?,” Home and Foreign Fields, June 1932, 13. 34 Alexander, “Miss Chou,” 45–46; “Inez Lung Talks of Life in China,” Austin American, August 19, 1934; “Fidelis Class Will Honor Miss Lung,” Austin Statesman, May 26, 1936. 35 Alexander, “Miss Chou,” 46; First Baptist Church of Austin, A History of Faith, 24. 36 Anne McAlpine, “Chinese of the Delta-Bolivar County: Rev. Ira D. Eavenson,” WPA Federal Writer’s Project, American Guide Series Field Notes, June 1939. 37 Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker, eds., The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003) 1. 38 Derek Chang, Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 9–10. 39 Prior to church organizing, there was no central or shared social or cultural space. Chinese Americans in the US South were either of too small a population to be settled into an urban enclave Chinatown, or, as small business owners, resided at their shops in various areas across towns to ensure regular business at their stores. 40 McAlpine, “Life History,” 6. 41 Ira D. Eavenson, “Winning Chinese in America,” Home and Foreign Fields, February 1935, 15–16. 42 R. Milton Winter, “Rosedale Presbyterians and the Mississippi Chinese: Changing Concepts of Equality in an Aristocratic Southern Town,” Journal of Presbyterian History 78, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 81. 43 Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 105. 44 McAlpine, “Life History,” 1–4.

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45 A. L. Stovall, “The Chinese in Cleveland,” WPA Federal Writer’s Project, American Guide Series Field Notes, 1. 46 “Delta Chinese Plan for Meet Here on Sunday,” Daily Democrat-Times, August 10, 1937. 47 “Patriotic Plea Made to Delta Chinese Sunday,” Daily Democrat-Times, August 16, 1937. 48 McAlpine, “Life History,” 9. 49 Ruth F. Walker, “Chinese in the Mississippi,” WPA Federal Writer’s Project, American Guide Series Field Notes, 1938, 1. 50 Willa Johnson, “Chinese Living in Washington County,” WPA Federal Writer’s Project, American Guide Series Field Notes, 1938, 6. 51 Johnson, 8. 52 In 1940, Mississippi provided thirteen cents for African American schools for every dollar spent on white schools. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 144. 53 McAlpine, “Life History,” 8. 54 Mark Newman, Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945–1995 (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 1–19. 55 Alexander, “Miss Chou,” 70. 56 “Chinese Missionary Miss Inez Lung,” Gossip!, April 26, 1945, 6; Johnnie Cresens, “Communist Rulers of China Chase Austinite Home Again,” Austin American, September 11, 1952; Alexander, “Miss Chou,” 71. 57 “Lee-Lung Vows Exchanged,” Austin American, June 28, 1959. 58 Wong and Lee, Journey Stories, xvi. 59 Wong and Lee, 109.

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Stepping Onstage and Breaking Ground Asian American Dancers Complicate Race and Gender Stereotypes, 1930s–1960s Mana Hayakawa

Beginning in the late 1930s, American audiences flooded Forbidden City, the Chinese Skyroom, and the Lion’s Den, just a few of the popular San Francisco Chinatown nightclubs that featured the talents of young Asian American performers.1 For more than three decades (1938–1971), Chinatown nightclubs invited tourists, veterans, and locals to an “all-Chinese revue” of comedians, actors, singers, and dancers.2 Although they were not all Chinese—performers were also Filipino, Japanese, Korean, or of mixed heritage with show names that allowed them to pass as Chinese—Asian Americans performed stereotypes of the “Oriental” as a means to attract audiences. Club advertisements enticed visitors to travel to a “mysterious land” and gaze at the “exotic” wonder of Asian performers. Onstage, entertainers fused choreographies alluding to the East with American dance forms. Forbidden City nightclub owner Charlie Low presented seemingly “Oriental traditional” dances such as the fan dance alongside the works of greats like Larry Chin as the “Chinese Frank Sinatra,” Toy Yat Mar as the “Chinese Sophie Tucker,” and Dorothy Toy (born Dorothy Takahashi) and Paul Wing (born Paul Jew) as Toy and Wing, the “Chinese Fred and Ginger” after Hollywood’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The San Francisco shows generated enough demand to produce the Chop Suey Circuit, allowing revues like the China Dolls and Toy and Wing’s Oriental Playgirl Revue to tour throughout North America.3 Despite the reductive representations endured by Asian American nightclub performers, many expressed that their time onstage and later on tour was joyous and uplifting. This chapter considers the experiences of four female Asian American dancers and examines the complex ways in which they simultaneously disrupted and perpetuated Orientalist stereotypes of Asian femininity and sexuality. I build on Arthur Dong’s documentary film Forbidden City USA (1986), the book with the same title (2014), and scholarship by San San Kwan (2011) and Judy Yung (1995) to analyze my own set of interviews with professional dancers Patricia (Pat) Chin, Ivy Tam, Dorothy Toy,4 and Cynthia Yee. These dancers defied conservative expectations that they merely served as dutiful daughters 106

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and wives and instead set out on their own paths to perform and tour locally and nationally. As female entertainers, they took risks, facing rejection from the white entertainment industry and their own ethnic communities, to affirm their talents as skilled and dynamic dancers. Interwoven into their personal stories are experiences of breaking boundaries and pushing social norms regarding body politics, feminism, and Asian American identity. Their pan-Asian interactions also contributed to new networks of friendship and support necessary to navigate challenging situations and asserting female independence. These women embraced every opportunity to perform in nightclubs and later established their own touring groups. Amplifying their voices, this chapter recognizes their resilience and innovation to reimagine new possibilities for Asian American dancers. Unless noted otherwise, all quotations in this chapter are from my interviews that took place in 2012.

“It’s Actually More Fantasy Than Reality”: Choreographies of Chinatown Nightclubs Nearing the end of the Great Depression and preceding World War II, secondgeneration Chinese American entrepreneurs like Charlie Low and Andy Wong envisioned San Francisco’s Chinatown to include a vibrant nightlife and to be a locus for entertainment. Inspired by Harlem’s Cotton Club, these men employed an all–Asian American staff to serve cocktails and hot meals while mostly white patrons enjoyed great music and dance. Unlike the Cotton Club, however, the Chinatown nightclubs were owned and operated by Chinese Americans who catered to the desires of those outside their racial group. Wilbert Wong and Jack Chow opened Li Po Cocktail Lounge in 1937, and Andy Wong opened the Chinese Skyroom nightclub the same year. In December 1938, Charlie Low opened Forbidden City, the largest and most popular Chinatown nightclub. Over the next three decades, approximately nine other Chinatown nightclubs followed.5 The nightclubs were promoted in an effort to revitalize the Chinese and Chinese American ethnic enclave following decades of housing and employment discrimination.6 The club owners, however, did not attract visitors by improving living conditions in the neighborhood, nor did they ignore the area’s illicit history. Instead, these savvy businessmen exploited the image of Chinatown by adding aesthetic embellishments to buildings and dressing their staff in costumes to create a mystical playground. The clubs enticed audiences to “discover the unknown” and fulfill a fantasy in the safety of a familiar city. They also profited from Orientalist beliefs that justified the subordination of the East by establishing that “the Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different.’”7 The performance of Orientalism ignored cultural specificity and conflated diverse identities to a simplified and acceptable representation of “the other.” In this vein, the Chinatown nightclubs and performers catered to an American audience

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unfamiliar with Asia and Asian Americans and relied on preconceptions and stereotypes to make the performance accessible and safe in its foreignness. The Chinatown nightclub’s dinner theater mixed seductive and sometimes playful Oriental-inspired choreography with American song and dance. A dinner show lineup could include an introduction by an overzealous and buffoonish emcee who fumbled about onstage and a rendition of the Chinese sleeve dance by young women vigorously fluttering their arms and creating shapes with their brightly colored silk sleeves. This would be followed by a mesmerizing magic act, a comedic dance number, and a powerful rendition of “Some of These Days” sung by the Chinese Sophie Tucker, Toy Yat Mar. On some nights Noel Toy, known as the Chinese Sally Rand, would flirt with the audience as the Bubble Girl. She would walk through the theater, coyly hiding her naked body behind a large latex balloon. Several Asian American celebrities, including Sammee Tong, Jack (Suzuki) Soo, and Pat Morita, took a turn on the stage before making their Hollywood debuts. The clubs also welcomed the Broadway headliners Toy and Wing, most recognized for their dynamic tap, ballet, and ballroom dance skills, which were featured in several films in the 1930s.8 As many reviewers put it, the nightclub acts mirrored American cabaret “with an Oriental accent.”9 Whether performing Eastern-inspired choreography or Western styles of dance, young, attractive Asian chorus girls were the central draw for the nightclubs. Charlie Low profited from the commercialization of the “Oriental China doll” image. The nightclub dancers performed in revealing costumes that referenced “exotic” Asian fashion aesthetics while maintaining their sweet childlike charm. A popular costume might initially look like a traditional high-collar cheongsam dress but was designed to reveal bare legs through a very high hemline or slits along the sides. Often dancers’ slim bodies were elongated by high heels and tall headdresses of colorful feathers and jewels. Ivy Tam, who first stepped on the stage at Forbidden City as a last-minute replacement for a dancer who could not make curtain call, described her experience: “My first number [was] the theme song from Gone with the Wind. . . . And [my] costume [or rather the prop was] a pink feather, big feather [Gesturing as if she has on a large headdress].” The choreography for chorus girls was often simple but seductive and flirtatious. Pat Chin stated that at nineteen, when she joined the Chinese Vanities, she had no prior dance experience. Her training involved learning to move gracefully through various formations and practicing cabaret-style walking, posing, and gesturing. Cynthia Yee recalled using props such as fans, parasols, and flags to play with the themes of the dance. Their movements accentuated bodylines and curves more than they featured their footwork and dance skills. As the nude Bubble Girl, Noel Toy’s popularity signaled the audience’s sexual desires for and curiosity of the unknown. As Toy explained, club owners exploited a popular myth that Chinese women were built differently, describing

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their vaginas with horizontal openings. While Toy playfully manipulated a translucent latex bubble to cover parts of her body, the band performed a song that alluded to this phenomenon: “Is it true what they say about Chinese women? . . . Do the streetcars run North and South or East and West?”10 To this she flirtatiously responded, “It all depends on the way you look at it.”11 Despite Toy’s playful attitude, the display of her naked body satisfied a troubling desire; audiences asserted not only their curiosity but their right to explore and claim knowledge of another’s body. Toy’s Bubble Girl performance went far beyond a striptease and satiated desires to objectify an Asian female body as sexually deviant and available. In order to generate popularity, the club owners not only relied on stereotypes of the “Orient,” they specifically emphasized the difference between “East and West.” Performing as a stereotype, one can argue that these club entertainers were making a living by perpetuating racial and gender oppression and reifying their “otherworldliness.” American reviewers also confirmed this. Noting the lack of formal training in Western dance forms by some onstage, one attributed the dancers’ missteps to them being “a trifle out of their element in what one may presume are typical Occidental maneuvers.”12 The reviewer assumed the disjuncture was a result of cultural dissonance and did not consider the institutional racism that excludes dancers from accessing a formal dance education. The isolation of nightclubs in an ethnic urban neighborhood also worked to create the illusion of distance despite the actual proximity of the shared public space.13 This distance functioned to alleviate white American anxieties about integration and affirmed the division between Asians and Americans. Such affirmation was sought particularly following World War II as Japanese Americans returned to the West Coast following wartime incarceration, joining African American defense industry workers in major California cities.14 Although more pronounced in Los Angeles than in San Francisco, Asian Americans fought alongside African Americans and Latinos to end race-based housing restrictions in the late 1940s.15 In this period of shifting demographics and heightened racial tensions, Asian Americans were actively involved in movements for racial justice. However, the image of the Chinatown nightclub performers seemed to counter such efforts. As entertainers, they pleased their patrons while at the same time assuring white audiences that segregation was justified. Their cultural performance confirmed that Asians were too different and too foreign to belong in suburban neighborhoods. Emphasizing otherness, the “all-Chinese” revue followed a specific formula: the Oriental body was naturalized as exotic, grotesque, and subordinate; therefore, virtuosity in American dance was viewed as an ironic performance of their inferior bodies.16 The entertainers’ skills were compared to those of their white counterparts, and their expertise was not viewed as a manifestation of their hard work but rather reduced to a novelty act. Attracting audiences under the guise

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of a spectacle of oddities, featured dancers like Dorothy Toy and Paul Wing of Toy and Wing were not credited for their years of training and rigorous rehearsal schedules. Wing was a tap genius with phenomenal footwork and the athleticism to spring off a piano and land in the splits. Toy excelled in ballet, tap, jazz, and various forms of ballroom. She did daring tricks en pointe, propelling herself across stage with incredibly fast pirouettes and leaping and jumping on her toes. Despite their extraordinary talents, they were applauded for their ability to replicate the choreography of American darlings Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Such disregard for their excellence was especially insulting, as Toy and Wing practiced to be “more exceptional” and “ten times better” than white performers to get the attention of booking agents.17 Despite being labeled a novelty act, Asian American performers displayed their capacity to take on multiple embodied practices and disrupt racial and gender norms. Through the mimicry of “Oriental dance” and the mastery of American popular culture, they destabilized the myth of the East-West binary. In order to maintain the fantasy for the audience, the dancers knowingly choreographed sequences gesturing to an imagined Orient. Pat Chin explained, “We did makebelieve Chinese dancing, Indian type dancing where we play an East Indian type girl. It’s actually more fantasy then reality.” Using exaggeration, parody, and humor, the performers demonstrated that the Orient was performed and highly choreographed. Claiming their agency, female Asian American performers played with stereotypes not to affirm them but rather to defuse their influence. Clearly articulated by original Forbidden City dancer Mary Mammon,18 the women were more interested in performing than in upholding stereotypes: “And a bunch of us tried to do it [sing and dance] to the best of our abilities. We didn’t profess to be exotic and mysterious. This is your idea of us. . . . We could be anything we want.”19 Simultaneously, the success of their novelty act depended on their virtuosity and skill to accurately execute American dance forms. The talented, versatile singers and dancers surprised audiences that expected Asians to merely, and perhaps inadequately, imitate black and white American dinner theater. Performers juxtaposed their Eastern-inspired dances with their mastery of Western styles of dance such as eccentric dance, Cabaret, tap, and ballroom dance—many appropriated from African American dance forms—in an attempt to distort racialized expectations of dancers of color. As such, the performance of Oriental stereotypes was not only an exercise of necessity to attract an audience but also a strategy to negotiate the limitations placed on Asian Americans. Although perpetuating stereotypes of the submissive China doll, the nightclubs also provided an opportunity for Asian American women to gain employment and financial independence.20 In addition to the performers, Charlie Low hired Asian American women to serve on the restaurant staff. Although many parents did not want their daughters to work as a waitress in a bar, Forbidden

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City offered employment for women at ten dollars a week plus tips.21 In the mid to late 1930s, this was considerably greater than what Chinese American women earned in the domestic sector; rates were advertised as fifteen dollars a month to be a live-in nanny and twenty-five dollars a month as a full-time housekeeper.22 Nightclub waitresses generated much of their income through generous tips, which only increased with the popularity of the clubs. The tips added up. Gladys Ng Gin left her job as an elevator operator making seventy-five dollars a month, to make more as a waitress at the Chinese Village and later at Forbidden City.23 While waitresses increased their hourly wages with tips, Forbidden City dancers were paid by the day. Featured dancer Jadin Wong worked eight to nine hours and received twenty-five dollars a day in the 1930s.24 Although they earned higher wages than domestic service providers, many performers were dissatisfied with their pay. Dancer and magician’s assistant Bertha Hing asserted, “We were underpaid. The waitresses were getting a lot [more] money from tips and what-not than we did in dancing. But then we loved dancing, and how are you going to dance when there are no opportunities to, except that?”25 As Hing hints, many Asian American dancers accepted their low wages because opportunities to perform were not available, especially for amateur dancers who did not have extensive training. The China Doll club in New York City hired Asian American dancers, but most dinner theater clubs did not invite Asians onstage.26 Trained virtuosic dancers Toy and Wing performed in Chicago before signing with the William Morris Agency in New York City. However, they, too, had to perform in small venues outside the city in order to prove their worthiness as profitable entertainers. Thus, Asian American performers relied on ethnic enclaves to earn an income because of the discrimination they faced in the white entertainment and film industry. In early Hollywood cinema, Asian women were excluded in favor of white women performing fantastical Oriental dances. Many films featured white women in elaborate costumes, making specific gestures to connote Oriental dance. In a scene in the 1943 film Chop, Chop, white female dancers performed onstage, entertaining an audience as Oriental impersonators. They entered in a tight formation, shuffling their feet in unison. Their heads bobbled from side to side as they lightly fluttered fans in each of their hands. Mary Mammon spoke to the issue of white women performing in yellowface as a means to dismiss Chinese women: “There was just no way we could go to Hollywood [which] had a low regard for Chinese American talents. We had [supposedly] bad legs, spoke pidgin English, and had no rhythm.”27 Exclusion and discrimination were practiced in the mainstream film industry and in smaller venues. Outside San Francisco’s Chinatown, Asian American dancers could generally expect to be rejected by a club owner depending on the region’s racial climate. Dorothy Toy described a very difficult experience in New York. On the evening of December 7, 1941, hours after the Japanese Imperial Navy

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bombed Pearl Harbor, Toy and Wing were scheduled to perform in a Broadway theater. Fearing for their safety, they requested that they be sent to small theaters in upstate New York. Compounding the issue, a few days prior, columnist Walter Winchell had identified Toy’s ethnic identity as Japanese. Winchell had made a play on their show’s title, “Kicking the Gong Around,” which was also a song by jazz singer Cab Calloway in which the phrase was slang for smoking opium. Just as the song alludes to Chinatown as a devious and sinful place, Winchell accused Toy and Wing of being cunning and secretive. He revealed there were “two Orientals” performing on Broadway, one Chinese and the other Japanese. They were dancing together but not “kicking each other,” meaning not at war but rather getting along. The theater owner did not want Toy and Wing to leave, but the two insisted. Toy reflected, “Yeah, I had to leave town. I was so embarrassed. Because people are very prejudice[d] . . . I wanted to leave . . . I didn’t want my family embarrassed or anybody embarrassed.” Toy seemed to be embarrassed by the attention placed on her by Winchell identifying her as a Japanese American performing as Chinese. She was not ashamed of her Japanese ancestry, despite her Chinese stage name, but rather she was uncomfortable with Winchell’s accusation that she was hiding and lying about her identity. Despite the risk she faced by antiJapanese rhetoric, Toy wanted to protect her dance partner, her family, and the club owners from any potential violence triggered by her Japanese identity in wartime America. Toy and Wing stayed away from Broadway for a year, abandoning the popularity they had generated over several years of hard work in Chicago and New York. Furthermore, as a result of the Winchell article, a Hollywood studio retracted its contract with the duo. Toy and Wing had high hopes as they would have danced alongside bandleader Kay Kyser in a film. Toy disclosed, “I think I was mad. . . . When you hear something like that, you say, ‘Well, just tell them I’m not going.’ I had pride. You talk about my nationality, that’s what I am. I think I got very angry about that, I didn’t like it.” Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, authorizing the formation of select military areas that led to the incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. Toy’s parents, the Takahashi family, were uprooted from Southern California and incarcerated in the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. Toy, who was in New York at the onset of war, moved to Chicago with her sister, Helen. Their parents insisted that they not return to California in order to avoid incarceration. The two performed as the Toy Sisters while Dorothy’s dance partner, Paul Wing, served in the US Army. Upon their release from Topaz, the Takahashis reunited with their daughters in Chicago. Despite enduring such hardship, confronting discrimination, and recognizing their popularity as novelty acts, Pat Chin, Ivy Tam, Dorothy Toy, and Cynthia

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Yee spoke from a perspective of racial uplift and valued the new experiences they gained as Asian American women and as dancers. They appreciated the opportunity to perform and accepted the terms they worked under. Although each faced backlash from her own ethnic community because of the stigma associated with her occupation as a dancer, the women focused their attention on the independence gained from their careers and the supportive circle of friends developed among Chinatown entertainers. Both Yee and Tam described their time onstage as “a dream come true” despite the fact that some members of the community labeled them “immoral.” All four valued the lifelong friendships they formed as a result of their shared experience of receiving both praise and criticism from the Chinatown community. None regret dancing onstage. Their interpretation of their time onstage did not necessarily critique institutional racism, despite producing their own platform to circumvent an exclusionary system. The dancers did not view their performance as political or resistive but rather took credit for shifting perspectives and opening minds. Challenging misrepresentation and restrictions, Toy and the Chinatown nightclub dancers affirmed their identities as talented, desirable, and independent. They were “rebels against two cultures,” fighting against white American exclusion of Asian American dancers and Asian patriarchal restrictions on their economic mobility as females.28 Although not completely free from the demands of club owners and patrons, Asian American women found ways to assert their autonomy and selfhood. Performers like Noel Toy and Jadin Wong used their quick wit and humor to counter male hecklers and exposed the men’s ignorance and lack of civility.29 Similarly, Pat Chin affirmed her rise in self-confidence as she shifted from perceiving herself as a “plain and boring child” to feeling “gorgeous” as a dancer at twenty-one years old, posing with a bare back as a pinup girl. This level of confidence, self-assurance, and drive informed Chin’s future choices in her career and life.

Identity and Community Formations The dancers’ participation in a pan-Asian American ensemble evoked another interesting paradox. Although ethnic identities were erased in order to promote an “all-Chinese” revue, meaningful cross-ethnic friendships emerged. Performers of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and mixed race heritage belonged in the “show business family,” indicating that the public’s inability to recognize ethnic specificity was not a great issue within their social circle. What was valued was a network of support developed out of common experiences of exclusion and shifting cultural identities. Cynthia Yee had the rare opportunity to grow up in an environment full of entertainers. As a child, she felt drawn to the entertainer lifestyle at an early age and began taking dance classes at the YWCA at the age of eight. In 1952,

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Yee’s mother and stepfather moved into a studio in Low Apartments, owned by Charlie Low’s family. The building also housed the family of Penny and Andy Wong, the owners of the Chinese Skyroom nightclub and the Chinese Vanities performance group. Yee’s mother became friends with Penny Wong and was introduced to “show people.” In 1953, Yee’s family moved to a one-bedroom apartment in a building owned by Leslie Fong, who was married to Dorothy Toy. The residents and visitors were primarily performers. Ah Hing, the magician, lived on the third floor; Dorothy Toy on the second; and her sister, Helen, and her mother on the first floor.30 While Toy and Yee lived with their families, Pat Chin and Ivy Tam lacked the same support. Instead, they relied on their fellow performers to fill that void. According to Chin, showpeople were generous and took care of one another, perhaps because of the exclusion that they felt from others as a result of the social stigma attached to their professions. Such networks of support enabled young women to maintain their careers and raise families. After Tam divorced her second husband, Charlie Low, in 1964, she was twenty-nine years old and a mother of two.31 She found work as a hostess and lived in the Low Apartments. Low’s older sister, who lived in the complex, however, treated Tam poorly and made her feel uncomfortable. When the situation became unbearable, fellow dancer Mary Mammon invited Tam, her mother, and her two kids to live in her home. Similarly, Pat Chin received help from another performer when she was faced with an unexpected life change. In 1955, she underwent dance training with Walter Biggerstaff to learn basic ballet and cabaret choreography in order to be a member of the China Dolls. She became pregnant at nineteen years old and hoped the father of the child would stay, but he made no commitment. Her mother and relatives were not involved at all with her pregnancy. Fortunately, the singer in the China Doll group invited Chin to stay in her home until the baby was born. Chin continued to rely on her show business friends even as a single mother and performer. Their daily interactions and simple gestures demonstrated care and built trust. She explained, “Like Bobby and Genie Chang, they were acrobats. When we were touring, they would drive us to the nightclubs and back. . . . So we didn’t have to worry about taking the bus or taking a taxi.” As young, single mothers, Pat Chin and Ivy Tam were not ostracized from their Asian American communities but embraced instead. Their network of friends, many who shared feelings of isolation from their own families, established an alternative kinship to support one another through difficult personal and financial situations, making it possible for both women to work and raise their families. Cross-ethnic relationships evoked a sense of pride among the performers, but they did not necessarily equate this decision to a political statement for racial solidarity. The dancers stressed that people connected on the individual level rather than purposefully working to resolve tensions between Asian ethnicities. Pat Chin claimed they were pretty “Americanized” and got along because of their

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age, personal interests, and shared experience as performers. Ivy Tam was the one interviewee who stated that she understood why some older Chinese people who survived Japanese occupation might hate Japanese people or Japanese Americans, but she did not have the same opinion. She not only made Japanese American friends in San Francisco but also felt compassion for young Japanese soldiers. She thought, “They probably did not want to go to war either,” and they were only doing what they were told. Cynthia Yee believed that there was no formal recognition of a singular Asian American racial identity. However, cross-ethnic friendships were common, and intimate partnerships formed, especially with Chinese Americans, who were the largest ethnic group among San Francisco showpeople. Dorothy Toy, a Japanese American, married Leslie Fong, a second-generation Chinese American. Arlene Wing, who was Filipino, Chinese, and Portuguese, also married a Chinese American man. Genie Chang, a Mexican American acrobat, married a Chinese man, and her sister Barbara, an exotic dancer in the Skyroom nightclub, also married a Chinese man. Yee explained that as nightclub performers, there was a tight network of trust, which led to strong friendships, and in some cases, marriages. Yee thought perhaps these women of color who were stigmatized for being nightclub dancers felt embraced by the San Francisco second-generation Chinese American community that appreciated their profession and valued their talent. These cross-ethnic networks of support were a departure from ethnicspecific community formations that have been generally recognized by the prior generation and in the American public at large. Historians and sociologists mark a shift in Asian American civic engagement following World War II;32 however, the cross-ethnic friendships preceded the war and continue to the present.

Closing the Doors and Beginning New Careers Most of the Chinatown nightclubs declined in popularity following the end of World War II and closed by the 1960s. Although clubs like Forbidden City tried to lure audiences with partially nude shows, they were not well received by the Chinese American community and also failed to compete with the full-nude shows in the growing San Francisco red-light district on Broadway Street. Additionally, the growing accessibility of the television set led to many more families staying home to be entertained. Dinner shows and theaters lost audiences, and the lights dimmed on the novelty acts of the Chinese nightclubs. The political climate of San Francisco’s Asian American community also evolved during this time as increasing numbers of second- and third-generation Asian Americans joined the antiwar movement, San Francisco State University’s Third World student strike, and other movements for racial and economic justice. The new generation of activists critiqued Orientalist stereotypes and felt the Chinatown nightclubs did little to challenge reductive representations.

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At the end of their professional performance careers, the dancers settled into more domestic lives yet maintained wage-earning work. They followed seemingly heteronormative patterns of marriage and family. In 1957, Pat Chin married and had a second son. When her youngest son enrolled in school, she returned to wage work, first in the hotel industry and then as a staff member of the teamsters’ union. Today she is retired, her oldest son is a surgeon, and her second son is an inspector at the San Francisco airport. Cynthia Yee married and gave birth to a daughter in 1977. She worked in the hotel industry, then opened her own jewelry business, and established her own nonprofit performing arts education organization, Linking Rings, in San Francisco. Ivy Tam raised her children in the Bay Area and worked as a waitress for the next forty years. Her oldest son died at the age of forty, and her daughter had two daughters. Tam proudly shared that both her grandchildren received college degrees from prestigious schools. Tam passed away in 2016, when she was eighty-one years old. In 1962, Dorothy Toy and Paul Wing formed a pan-Asian touring group called Toy and Wing’s Oriental Playgirl Revue. When Paul Wing left the group in 1965, Toy renamed the group Dorothy Toy’s Oriental Doll Revue. Cynthia Yee was only seventeen when she joined the group in 1962. Toy said that she selected attractive girls—like Yee, a trained dancer and former Miss Chinatown—with “good legs,” explaining, “they had to match up against the white girls.” The dancers had to have mastered “the dancing, their routines, the music, the background, everything. They have to be good looking. They have to have the figures. And you can’t have two left feet.” Her standards for excellence paralleled those of the commercial industry as a result of her own rigorous training and experience with Broadway. Toy featured all Asian dancers and sought to prove that such a group could uphold a high level of professionalism. Toy’s group found success traveling throughout the United States as well as Canada, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Japan. By the early 1970s, Toy’s group stopped touring because the demand for such shows changed. She retired from performing in her fifties. She raised two children and later found work as a pharmacy assistant in San Francisco and continued to teach dance to students of all ages. In her nineties, Toy was teaching dance to her hairdresser. Toy’s daughter, Dorlie Fong, proudly stated that her mother took jobs in a pharmacy, as a hostess in a hotel, and in other areas where she lacked formal training because “she always says, ‘I can do it’—that’s the way she is.”

Grant Avenue Follies: Community Ambassadors Despite the nightclub closures, many of the performers remained in the San Francisco area and held tightly to their memories as entertainers. After her time with the Oriental Dolls, Cynthia Yee, a community leader and businesswoman, found success in her jewelry business located in the Empress of China Building

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Figure 6.1. (From left to right) Cynthia Yee, Ivy Tam, and Pat Chin attend an event honoring On Lok senior care center at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District Hotel, February 2012. Photo by and courtesy of the author.

in Chinatown. Stanley Toy, a former Forbidden City performer, happened to be the manager of the building. Because of their shared history, her store became a community hub for former performers. Well networked and deeply committed to Chinatown, Yee organized a long-awaited Forbidden City reunion as a fundraiser for the Chinese hospital in 2003. She reconnected with Pat Chin, Ivy Tam, and other dancers to perform ballroom, tap, and jazz numbers for one night. The show received such great reviews that Yee decided to establish a performance group, the Grant Avenue Follies. Back in their tights and high heels, the Follies dancers inspire each other and their audience to stay active. In 2017, the dancers, ranging in age from sixty to eighty, continue to rehearse several times a week, perform all over the Bay Area,

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and remain very close friends. Yee jokes that the Follies get along because they are all independent women who “don’t have husbands to worry about.” Chin credits Yee for keeping her so busy that she could not fall into depression after losing her husband. Yee does not deny that the group goes through difficult times, including watching their friends go through medical treatment and, in some cases, pass away. However, the group stays together because they love to dance, entertain, and defy assumptions about aging. Most importantly, these women count on each other in times of celebration and sorrow. Their vibrant lives as seniors challenge social norms of age and ability just as they pushed against racial and gendered boundaries as young Asian American female performers.

Discussion and Conclusion Through their friendships and performances from the 1930s to the 1960s, Asian American dancers contested ideologies surrounding Asian American femininity and cultural expectations and developed support networks to navigate shifting understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. This network of friends created pan-Asian interactions that allowed women to share common experiences of racial and gender discrimination and cultural transitions between generations. Performers learned to rely on these networks to form alliances across ethnic groups, build their own supportive community, assert female independence, and gain social mobility despite their complicity in performing Orientalist theater. Their networks fostered reconnections and new lives, including performing opportunities in their senior years. In discussing their life journeys, each narrator shared feelings of having “done good for the community,” and they are clearly very proud of their children. They assert that their decisions to challenge strict rules regarding race and gender prove that success can be achieved despite choosing to dance, wear makeup, wear revealing costumes, and divorce, all things discouraged by many Asian families (as well as non-Asian American families) during their youth. As community ambassadors, Chin claimed, “The Chinatown community needs us now.” Tam agreed: “With time, there is change, and they see us differently.” They are living proof that dissent from mainstream American culture and patriarchy at large can take many forms. Although dance is often associated with objectification, these Asian American female performers have utilized movement to embody cultural conflicts and nuance their self-image in a time of local and national change. Through their creative approach to self-expression and cultural rebellion, Pat Chin, Ivy Tam, Dorothy Toy, and Cynthia Yee have carved out a unique place in Asian American and women’s social history. Recontextualizing Asian American dancers within a history of invisibility illuminates the possibility that these women contributed to changing definitions of race and gender. Despite playing on Orientalism, the revues offered Asian

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Americans, particularly Asian American women, opportunities to perform onstage, celebrate their bodies, travel, have careers, and support themselves, their family members, and others. Chin’s description of the choreography as “makebelieve Chinese dance” indicates a conscious knowing of her own participation in creating a fantasy. Tam supported this idea with her perspective on what made Forbidden City such an attractive tourist destination: If you go to any Chinese restaurant, any Chinese place, you always see that they are wearing their Chinese outfit, and they serve the same kind of food, and they do the decoration almost the same thing. . . . But for the nightclub, it’s totally different. You walk in there, and you see the girls dancing, you don’t see them with their Chinese outfits, we do have Chinese outfits, but we change it. We cut it down and make it look glamorous, a little different. We don’t do Chinese music. I mean everything is our Chinatown. . . . Everything catering to their tastes, but it’s the Chinese doing it.

Tam recognized the level of accommodation she granted her white patrons while also claiming ownership of the creative process. She asserted her cultural identity through her participation in American popular music, dance, and fashion culture. In this way, she inserted her narrative as a transnational Asian American into what was experienced by viewers as visual pleasure. Their identity was much more complex than that of the exotic Oriental. Reducing the dancers’ experience to solely being victims of marginalization does little to establish their role in destabilizing American racism and sexism through their agency to redefine the ways in which Asian American women could exercise their skills and talents and build valuable pan-Asian relationships. The dancers’ claim to space in the public sphere spoke against the enactment of laws such as the Page Act of 1875,33 which criminalized Asian female bodies, deeming them undesirable, contaminated, and predisposed to prostitution. As second- and third-generation Asian Americans trained in Western dance forms, the dancers also challenged notions of authenticity and confronted white American performers in yellowface. The Asian American dancers destabilized racial and gendered stereotypes by emphasizing through their athletic, comedic, and versatile choreography that the docile and submissive Oriental woman is indeed a made-up fantasy. The undeniably virtuosic talents of many performers such as Toy and Wing forced viewers to denaturalize the Asian body and question assumptions of race. Thus, Asian American dancers maintained and complicated Asian American identity during a time when the nation made sweeping changes in immigration and citizenship following World War II. Their narratives complicate notions of racialized and gendered representation, national belonging, and autonomy. Their strong commitment to being visible and desire to remain engaged with their community, to

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create new community formations outside their own ethnic groups, represents a level of fearlessness necessary to challenge social structures and subvert dominant narratives. Notes

Research funding for the chapter was provided by the University of California, Los Angeles’s Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Program. Research was conducted under the faculty mentorship of Valerie Matsumoto. This chapter would not have been possible without her feedback on several early drafts. 1 This chapter is based on the author’s interviews with Patricia Chin, Ivy Tam, Dorothy Toy, and Cynthia Yee in 2012. 2 Lorraine Dong, “Chinese American Nightclubs: A Brief History,” in Study and Discussion Guide of Forbidden City, USA, ed. Arthur Dong (Los Angeles: DeepFocus, 2010), 7. 3 For an analysis of the Chop Suey Circuit, see San San Kwan, “Performing a Geography of Asian America: The Chop Suey Circuit,” Drama Review 55, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 120–36. 4 Dorothy Toy performed with her dance partner, Paul Jew, who changed his name to Paul Wing, and they performed as Toy and Wing. She later married Leslie Fong. She is known as Dorothy Toy Fong, nee Takahashi. 5 Arthur Dong, Forbidden City USA: Chinese American Nightclubs, 1936–1970 (Los Angeles: DeepFocus, 2014), 210. 6 Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 11. 7 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 40. 8 Toy and Wing were featured dancers in the films Happiness Ahead (1934), Deviled Ham (1937), and With Best Wishes (1939). 9 Kwan, “Performing a Geography,” 123. 10 Quoted by Noel Toy in Dong, Forbidden City USA, 127. 11 Dong. 12 P. B. H., “Animal Show, Violinist and a Whistler at Fays,” Providence Sunday Journal, January 31, 1943, quoted in Lorraine Dong, “The Forbidden City Legacy and Its Chinese American Women,” in Chinese America: History and Perspectives, 1992, ed. Chinese Historical Society of America (Brisbane, CA: Fong Brothers, 1992). 13 San San Kwan provides further discussion on racial segregation and theorizes how race defines space and how space defines race. See Kwan, “Performing a Geography.” 14 Brooks, Alien Neighbors, 159. 15 Cindy I. Cheng, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 41. 16 Kwan, “Performing a Geography,” 121. 17 Paul Wing, interview in Dong, Forbidden City USA, 153, Dorothy Toy, interview in Dong, 144. 18 Mary Mammon’s father had the last name Ma and changed it to Mammon when working in the United States. See Dong, 115. 19 Mary Mammon, interview in Dong, 119. 20 Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 202. 21 Yung, 201. 22 Yung, 200. 23 Yung, 201.

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24 Kwan, “Performing a Geography,” 126. For analysis on pay inequity between white, African American, and Asian American vaudeville dancers, see Kwan, “Performing a Geography.” 25 Bertha Hing, interview in Yung, Unbound Feet, 203. 26 In the late 1930s, hotels in New York, California, Ohio, and Florida hosted “Hawaiian Rooms,” inviting mixed race Hawaiian and Asian hula dancers to perform with ukulelestrumming musicians. Similar to the Chinatown nightclubs, the shows catered to white audiences, and dancers ranged in their level of training and mastery of hula. See Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the US Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 27 Yung, Unbound Feet, 203. 28 Dong, “The Forbidden City Legacy,” 143. 29 Dong, 139. 30 Toy’s father fell ill while incarcerated in Topaz and passed away in Chicago. 31 Tam’s children were from her first marriage. 32 Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 121. 33 The Page Act of 1875 was the first federal immigration law to prohibit the entry of “undesirable” immigrants, which it defined as “Oriental” contract laborers, prostitutes, and convicts. The law enforced a strict screening process that targeted Chinese women.

Part III New Cultural Formations, New Selves

Part of growing up Asian American and Pacific Islander in the United States is adapting to cultural assimilation expectations as well as to the US race and gender norms of the time. Part III covers the period from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century. Three chapters explore women’s diverse lives and experiences as second-generation (Nisei) Japanese Americans, mixed race Asian Americans, and Sāmoan Americans, respectively, as they negotiate US racial and gender stereotypes and the cultural and gender ideologies and expectations of their ethnic communities. In the coming together of different cultures and the intersections of other ways of being and doing, the women participate in new cultural formations that broaden their experiences and lead to the development of new selves. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, including nonimmigrants, are often asked, “How come you speak English so well?” Christine R. Yano’s chapter explores the significance of language use as racialized, gendered, and classed practices in Hawai‘i. Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant winners and the first Nisei stewardesses of Pan American World Airway describe how “speaking well,” that is, using “Standard English,” mixed traditional and changing expectations of women’s roles but allowed them to form new identities through professional work, travel, and marriage. As mastering “Standard English” meant worthiness as a US citizen, the women also helped to shape the Japanese American community as American female citizens of color for their community. Since 2000, the US Census has provided boxes for mixed race or multiracial persons to self-identify by checking more than one of the racial/ethnic backgrounds listed, a recognition of mixed race identity and a reflection of changed views toward multiracial Americans. It hasn’t always been this way. Cathy J. Tashiro provides a comparative and historical study of six mixed race women of different Asian ethnic backgrounds born between 1902 and 1982 who were raised in three distinct time periods. Their life stories reveal that historical contexts, transnational experiences, and family and community influences—all reflecting racial hierarchies, localities, stereotypes, and eras—shaped their identities as mixed race while growing up. Tashiro’s life-course analyses show that mixed race identity formation is complex and flexible and that concepts and challenges of being mixed race have both changed and not changed over time. Sāmoans are the second-largest Pacific Islander group in America but are understudied. M. Luafata Simanu-Klutz points out that many Sāmoans have 123

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been American for several generations and are often negatively stereotyped as being on welfare and lacking in higher education to the neglect of successful Sāmoan Americans. This chapter begins to fill a gap by exploring how ancestral ethics and Sāmoanness shaped the lives of four accomplished Sāmoan American women. The women affirm that being both a woman and Sāmoan—with its accompanying ancestral work ethic—and having a sound understanding of the demands of Fa’asāmoa (the Sāmoan Way) and of Fa’a’amerika (the American Way) together contribute to Sāmoan American women’s endeavors to be successful despite being overlooked and underappreciated by both cultures. The histories, agency, and voices of the Asian American and Pacific Islander women in part III reveal multiple ways in which they are changed when different cultural forces meet and provide both opportunities and challenges. Through their choices, the women develop novel cultural ways of being and doing and new selves—sometimes consciously, other times unconsciously—as they move forward with their lives. Their identities also evolve over time and with reflection.

7

“She Speaks Well” Language as Performance of Japanese American Femininity and Social Mobility in Postwar Hawaiʻi Christine R. Yano

“She speaks well.” I grew up in Hawai‘i in the 1950s and 1960s overhearing this kind of comment from my mother, aunts, and others in the Japanese American community regarding nonwhite women whose fluency and ease in speaking English seemed admirable. This comment was not made about haole (white) women, since those women’s English-language ability was taken for granted and, in fact, served as a model. By contrast, the comment “she speaks well” was bestowed upon other nonwhite women who stood apart linguistically as a model for emulation. My mother, aunts, and other Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) women were certainly native English speakers of a sort: Japanese was their primary home language; English was their language outside the home. But teachers, school officials, politicians, and ultimately they themselves did not consider their spoken English as quite up to the model of “Standard English.” Their spoken English might have had a local inflection or been littered with Japanese phrases or included a grammatical error or two or been closer to the local lingua franca developed on plantations with the influx of numerous immigrants from Asia and elsewhere. Hawai‘i Creole English, usually called “Pidgin” in Hawai‘i, filled the neighborhood playgrounds and grocery stores. By contrast with all of the above, the women who “spoke well” met a linguistic mark of distinction and thus set themselves apart from those whose speech was considered locally ordinary or even substandard. This chapter examines this historical linguistic and ultimately political phenomenon through two case studies of Japanese American women in postwar Hawaiʻi—beauty queens and stewardesses—whose very ability to “speak well” created personal and career opportunities that, in turn, helped shape the community. It was an era of impending statehood (1959) and tremendous growth of tourism to Hawaiʻi. Particularly within such a political and economic context, speech became agentive as one of the earliest and most central parts of the general package of gendered and marketable assimilation that included grooming and deportment. “Speaking well” acted as the first step toward performing successfully as an American female citizen and commodity of color. 125

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The chapter’s title gestures toward “speaking well,” specifically using “Standard English,” as a means of (1) upward social mobility; (2) asserting and affirming American citizenship; and (3) establishing a positive, even desirable, public presence. “Speaking well” may not have meant speaking volubly or frequently, but it suggested language that gained notice. Indeed, the highly positive evaluation of “speaking well” bears careful consideration. First, the language of evaluation is always and inevitably “Standard English.” Second, the underlying assumption is that most Nisei (and other nonwhites in the community) do not speak English well. Third, the critical assessment suggests that women, more than men, should speak to a higher standard of English as evidence of their citizenship. It is the gendered nature of the public performance that anchors our story. Fourth, both evaluator and evaluated in my opening remarks are women, suggesting ways by which women task themselves with patrolling the boundaries of language and citizenry. Women are not only the speakers in this picture but, more crucially, the listeners. Fifth, “she speaks well” codes not only language but also gendered dimensions of assimilation. In short, the statement for Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi defines historical expectations and critical evaluations of an ethnic community both for themselves and for the larger postwar society. Through these five dimensions, this chapter examines language as a thickly gendered performance of social class and citizenship for upwardly mobile Japanese American women in postwar Hawaiʻi. I analyze the emphasis placed upon “speaking well” as a gendered locus of assimilation and class mobility. For these Japanese American women “speaking well” meant living well. The study is based on interviews, participant observation, and archival research conducted from 2001 through 2007.1

The Historical Context of “Speaking Well”: English Standard Schools “She speaks well” arises within historically specific, intertwined contexts of not only “speaking well” but, perhaps even more importantly, “listening well.” Speaking so-called “Standard English” acted as a locus of accomplishment linked to race, particularly against the historical backdrop of the English Standard School system in Hawaiʻi. Established in 1924 by petition to the territorial government from a handful of haole mothers who did not want their offspring commingling with children of other races, the system, in its origins, used language as a smoke screen for race. An oral examination determined entrance to designated schools (and classes within some other schools). By the time of its demise in 1960, the English Standard School system included all levels from kindergarten through twelfth grade, with the most important public focus on President Theodore Roosevelt High School, founded in 1932 in urban Honolulu. Because, ostensibly, language was the sole requirement for entry into an English Standard School, nonhaole could enter upon application and testing. But

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this was a dual-tiered system: many haole did not need to pass any Englishspeaking test to enter. In spite of this, nonhaole—specifically children of Chinese and Japanese ancestry whose parents recognized the educational opportunity of the system—did apply and enter the schools upon passing a spoken English test.2 Thus, getting in often engendered great pride among individuals and their families who viewed the students’ acceptance as a matter of prestige and potential future social uplift. The English Standard School system and its testing for entrance were just the tip of the iceberg. The idea of segregation by language and what was called “Standard English” as a social aspiration were pervasive throughout Hawaiʻi. This is the context from which the comment “she speaks well” arose. What is important to note were the different divides based in language. If the divides were only between established and recognized languages—Hawaiian, English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Ilocano, for example—then the practices of listening would not be quite so crucial. However, here the critical divide was between “Standard English” and “nonstandard” Hawai‘i Creole English, Pidgin. The purported vulgarity of what was considered an inferior mode of speech, or simply “poor” or “bad” English, required vigilant policing through listening. Comments of “she speaks well” addressed the processes of that policing—not necessarily by everyone but by those who recognized and desired the social uplift afforded by “Standard English.” That uplift affected both boys and girls, men and women, of course. But the “pass” that local boys got in terms of a certain male camaraderie expressed through Pidgin did not extend to local girls.3 The lessons of listening categorized speech in terms of success and failure. In fact, failure remains an indelible impression upon many adults who grew up during the English Standard School system era. Given the possibility of failure, the commentary “she speaks well” carries particular social force. It points to one who has succeeded in the linguistic public performance that begins in the earliest years of schooling and continues through adult years. But it is more than language that is at stake here. In Hawai‘i, as elsewhere, the conditions of language facility held particular kinds of sociopolitical capital, especially with associations of social class and citizenship. Thus, speaking “Standard English” was not merely a linguistic achievement for nonwhites, it was also a social achievement in terms of class. Speaking “Standard English” could ultimately be interpreted as an indelible public mark of citizenship. Language in polyglot Hawaiʻi acted as a charged site of assimilation. Particularly with programs such as the Speak American campaign established by the Emergency Service Committee comprising patriotic Nisei businessmen and professionals during World War II, nonwhites (especially Japanese Americans) were exhorted to perform and ultimately prove their American citizenship and loyalty through English-language facility.4 These were heady lessons that began with language and extended to future adult lives of marriages and careers in highly gendered terms.

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Racialized and Gendered Performance as Public Achievement There are multiple racialized and gendered dimensions to “Standard English” performance in pre– and post–World War II Hawaiʻi. First, the evaluators for entrance into English Standard Schools and subsequent teachers were primarily haole women, often from the continental United States. Given the crucial nature of the evaluation and the subsequent modeling of students’ speech by teachers, haole women held a crucial role in implementing the system, even as those creating the system itself were haole men. Second, within immigrant families whose children might be tested for entrance, mothers seemed to be most invested in their children’s admission. Charged with their children’s education, and thus potentially the family’s social standing, mothers played a dominant role, applying for their children to take the test, sometimes even encouraging “Standard English” practice at home. Seen through a mother’s lens, English Standard Schools carried the weight of family prestige and accomplishment. Third, although boys and girls were enrolled in equal numbers at English Standard Schools, their attitudes and expectations differed markedly. Even from a young age, boys in English Standard Schools learned to code switch between the “Standard English” of the classroom and the Pidgin of the playground; girls, on the other hand, spoke only and ever “Standard English.” This characterization comes from the recollection of the many former students of English Standard Schools I interviewed. Whereas norms of “local-boy working-class machismo” allowed and even promoted speaking Pidgin for nonwhite boys and men, nonwhite females, by contrast, were judged by peers and their superiors for their public linguistic performance of “Standard English.” In playground terms, “Standard English” was for sissies (or girls). This kind of linguistic divide between the spoken worlds of girls and boys is not unusual. Sociolinguists have long noted what has been called “dialect differences” between males and females in particular societies.5 In this case, what is notable is the link between gendered language differences and notions of assimilation. Let us begin with boys. One possible interpretation may be that within a multiracial society such as Hawaiʻi, nonwhite boys may be kept in their place if muzzled by their own nonassimilated language—that is, Pidgin. The linguistic sissy, then, becomes emasculated by not knowing and maintaining his social place, which is subordinate to haole men. In this way, non–“Standard English” marks the boundaries of the racial-ethnic enclave by keeping nonwhite boys within its confines. From this assimilationist perspective, Pidgin delimits future possibilities, especially for nonwhite boys and men. The position of empowerment and resistance is another possible interpretation, in viewing Pidgin as the lingua franca of the common, nonelite people. Within this context, the nonwhite boy speaking non–“Standard English” performs his own resistance as part of

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an emergent political and social power structure that seeks to break the hegemony of haole. In other words, a certain degree of agency could be read into the code switching of local boys, retaining the freedom of their own language in the playground, even as getting ahead through the “Standard English” channels of education and professions. But what about the local girls?6 The combination of blue-collar father and white-collar (e.g., secretary) mother was not uncommon in Japanese American postwar families. As the expectations for assimilation and thus middle-class status applied broadly and pervasively to females, both white and nonwhite, a comparable working-class femininity did not hold much value in the same way that working-class machismo did. It is not that nonwhite boys were not expected to assimilate and get ahead; many did fulfill these family expectations and did occupy middle-class lives. At the same time, working-class (Pidginspeaking) machismo provided a socially acceptable out for nonwhite boys far more than for girls. By these differently gendered expectations, girls performed their assimilation in a more thoroughgoing manner—language inextricable from their selves. Within this context, nonwhite females (e.g., Japanese American) who made it into English Standard Schools were not only the “good girls” but the “best girls,” whose “Standard English” performed and proved their elite status. Personal and community uplift was enacted through this performance of “goodness”—reflected in language, extended through dress and comportment, and secured through education, middle-class marriages, and for some, careers. Two case studies illustrate that uplift through language for Japanese American women in post–World War II Hawaiʻi: the Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant staged by the Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce and the Nisei stewardess program of Pan American World Airways.

Case Study: Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant, 1950s–1960s The racialized lessons of World War II were not easily forgotten by Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere in the continental United States, even amid the celebrated heroism of returning military veterans. These lessons included language. “Speaking American” and thus “doing American” were part of the public face by which Nisei took up civilian life. “Doing American,” meant establishing Japanese American civic organizations, such as the Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce (HJJCC) in 1949, and its most successful signature event, the Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant, begun in 1953. The pageant quickly became an annual mainstay event of urban both Honolulu and the entire territory of Hawaiʻi. If part of the goal of the HJJCC was to embed itself within the larger community and prove its Americanness, then the HJJCC could find no better representative public event than holding a beauty pageant. Not only were beauty

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contests part of the all-American mediascape, those with nonwhite winners told a metastory of America as the land of plurality. Indeed, the ethnic beauty queen displays carefully tended and curated difference as the badge of both multicultural promise and its success story of assimilation as a founding creed of the nation.7 At stake here was more than the performance of the beauty queen; the Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant also became a performance of the HJJCC. The civic-minded nature of the ethnic beauty pageant positioned the organizers themselves as accomplished citizenry capable of staging an impressive event. The goal of the pageant was pageantry itself, with Japanese Americans in the celebratory public eye, and capably so.8 The women onstage thus proved the male organizers’ worth. Furthermore, the HJJCC represented a gender divide of public accomplishments, beginning with differential educational attainment of men, namely veterans of World War II who could attend college through the support of the GI Bill of 1944. In short, the celebration of Japanese American Nisei war veterans, particularly members of the much-decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion, continued in their subsequent career accomplishments, which were made possible by university degrees. This kind of social uplift became a male domain within the Japanese American community and set up certain expectations for middle-class life (or higher) that included wives of certain performative social stature. And here is where speaking “Standard English” becomes a crucial gendered domain of assessment. Some element of impromptu speaking has always been a part of the Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant. Most typically, in the style of Miss America, toward the end of judging, contestants are asked questions onstage, and their answers are part of the overall assessment. Here is the wild-card moment for which rehearsals cannot fully prepare. This holds true in this pageant as in others. However, given the racial tensions for Japanese Americans in postwar Hawaiʻi, as well as the emphasis on speaking “Standard English” as a proving ground of gendered citizenship, the Cherry Blossom Festival stage spotlights the stakes in answering even a simple question fully, well, without hesitation. A beautiful, immaculately groomed contestant who finds herself tongue-tied stands little chance of taking home the crown. After all, how could such a woman represent a Japanese American community of assimilation? How could she prove her own, and the community’s, worthiness if she is not able to match her speech to that of haole power wielders? Or cannot at least come close? In interviews with Cherry Blossom Festival Queen contestants both of the postwar era and later in the 1990s and 2000s, many say that it was the verbal component of the competition that they found most nerve-racking. The consistency over time with which contestants mentioned this is noteworthy, suggesting that it was more than familiarity with the English language at issue. Rather, it included an approach to verbal expression itself, particularly in a public setting.

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Part of this can be attributed to Japanese culture with its emphasis on nonverbal communication and even silence over speech, although contestants then and now have generally had little direct contact with Japan in spite of their ancestry.9 Part of this can be attributed to personality, with many contestants calling themselves “shy.” And even here, one can invoke Japanese culture (or its stereotypes) in its valorization of less verbally assertive, more group-oriented behavior.10 The cultural axiom “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down” can extend to verbal expression so that the more garrulous can be denigrated. The model may not be haole females, who may say too much too readily, so much as the Japanese ojōsama (upper-class female), who is in an American setting that requires her to speak publicly but to do so with restraint. These elements suggest an approach to verbal expression that is measured and even elegant in its calm fluency rather than frenetic and boisterous. Thus, the compliment “she speaks well” and its verbal evaluation within something like the Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant points not only to “Standard English” but also to its culturalized, gendered performance that mixes social class and citizenship. Although this may hold true for other beauty pageants, what is significant here is the fact that “speaking well” may run against the gendered, cultural, and sociolinguistic norm for Japanese Americans. Consider one representative Cherry Blossom Festival Queen from the postwar era: Carole Saikyo, the fifth queen, reigning from 1957 to 1958, and a graduate of Roosevelt High School (an English Standard School), who, at the time of her crowning, was a freshman at the University of Hawaiʻi. Although the queens represent a variety of experiences and backgrounds, especially for the time period that I am examining here, Saikyo is considered by many of her generation to be an important template not only for the elements discussed below but also for her eventual lifestyle. Saikyo married a son from a prominent Japanese American business family and took up the role of upper-middle-class housewife, active in Japanese American–linked volunteer organizations such as the Japanese Women’s Society and Kuakini Hospital, with their focus on care for the Japanese American community and elders.11 For many Nisei, Saikyo epitomizes the Cherry Blossom Festival Queen not only for the way she looks but also for the way she speaks. She is tall and fair complexioned with round (double-lidded) eyes, a high-bridged nose, and dimples. She stands erect and moves gracefully. And perhaps what is most notable is her speech, which is deliberate, whisper soft, and meticulously enunciated. Even when seated next to her, one has to lean in to hear her speak. Listening to her voice, one is struck by the degree to which she sets herself apart: in contrast to the jangly rhythms of everyday discourse, filled with slangy dropped phrases, Saikyo’s speech is measured and composed. A listener entering her orbit has to readjust to the steadily paced utterances of “Standard English.” In interview, she discussed ways in which she was brought up differently from other girlfriends,

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groomed, as it were, to be queen. And this grooming included lessons of control, tending to her public image from an early age, whether in speech, behavior, or dress. Saikyo recalled: Some of my girlfriends, the group I ran around with, they were very impulsive and very spontaneous, and so a lot of times when we were walking home from Roosevelt [High School] going to the bus stop or going to the YMCA for our [social club] meetings, they would be singing their hearts out, and here I was, like, “I don’t think I can do that.” And so they used to get angry with me, you know, they’d say, “Carole, let down your hair and just yell!” and I said, “No, I can’t do that.” But that’s the type of reaction where things were instilled in me that I shouldn’t do. I had to be very ladylike, I guess. So I was very mature and very old at my young age. I was more like going on twenty-nine. I think I would have loved to just sing my heart out. And wear grubby clothes. And this is why today I find it very difficult to wear grubby clothes to go out shopping or just to go to the drugstore or to the market. . . . This is me. I mean, I’m always dressed in case I should meet somebody I know. . . . I think it maybe is the upbringing from my mother.12

Saikyo’s upbringing included “Standard English”—emphasized by her mother, tutored at Roosevelt High School, and further refined at the University of Hawaiʻi. Additionally, it was evaluated within the context of the Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant, an essential part of which is the presentation of the queen to the public as representative of the Japanese American community, and as a quintessential part of the role of upper-middle-class Japanese American wife, including her involvement in charity organizations. “Standard English” afforded Saikyo the prominence of wearing a queen’s crown, which also became the mark of accomplishment for a whole community. The irony is that once selected, the Cherry Blossom Festival Queen hardly spoke, at least publicly. Instead, she smiled and waved. Granted, in the process of smiling and waving, Saikyo and other queens understood the practices of the spotlight. The Cherry Blossom Festival and its queen performed to various audiences that included the local community in Hawaiʻi; other Japanese American communities, such as in Los Angeles, where she appeared as part of the Nisei Week Festival; and in Japan, where she toured as the Japanese American beauty queen. Although none of the queens of the 1950s and 1960s went into politics, others took up roles on the stage or as active members of the community. Later queens became lawyers, entrepreneurs, and heads of nonprofit community organizations. They all understood that their status as Cherry Blossom Festival Queens— enabled in part by “Standard English”—preceded and followed them wherever they went, and as such, they carried the mantle of the Japanese American community upon their shoulders.

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Case Study: “Nisei” Stewardesses with Pan American World Airways, 1950s–1970s My other case study, of Nisei stewardesses, positions Japanese American women on an even broader postwar global stage through a prestigious American corporation, Pan American World Airways. Once again, “Standard English” fluency enabled the spotlight by which she represented not merely herself but the community of Japanese Americans as well as, inevitably, the Japanese woman. In 1955 Pan American World Airways took the unprecedented move of purchasing the world’s largest fleet of commercial jet aircrafts—twenty Boeing 707s and twenty-five Douglas DC8s—thus thrusting the aviation industry into the Jet Age. In that same year, the company embarked on a new program of recruiting Japanese American flight attendants to service first their Japan routes and eventually their signature round-the-world flights in a newly created “Japaneselanguage” position. These two events intertwined as part of a strategy of developing global tourism by an American airline company intent upon capturing a burgeoning market of international travel.13 In the 1950s Pan Am led all other airlines in the world in prestige through its global routes and the promise of service embodied in its slogan, “The World’s Most Experienced Airline.” Proving that slogan became an on-board performance: at the beginning of every flight, impeccably groomed stewardesses from different, primarily European countries would provide announcements in their native languages. Pan Am’s 1955 decision to include Japanese as part of this boast grew out of Japan’s own tentative global entry into the world of business and travel. As with other stewardesses, language was only part of what was at stake. The addition of the “exotic” Asian woman to its fleet of stewardesses complemented immeasurably Pan Am’s Jet Age status and claim. Furthermore, even if Japanese was the language designated for recruitment, what was even more critical was high-functioning facility in English, the language of most of Pan Am’s passengers. Although initial recruitment began in California, the company found that many Japanese Americans there were reluctant to take such a public stage. Recruitment efforts in Hawaiʻi fared better. Recruiting took place on the University of Hawaiʻi campus and in advertisements in both English- and Japaneselanguage newspapers. By March 1955, what was called Pan Am’s Nisei stewardess program was fully launched with the hire of seven Japanese Americans, of which five were from Hawaiʻi: May Hayashi, Ruby Mizuno, Louise Otani, Katherine Shiroma, Masako Tagawa, Jane Toda, and Cynthia Tsujiuchi. (Note that “Nisei” became a shorthand moniker for the women rather than a strict demographic, particularly as some of the women were not second-generation Japanese American. This held particularly true as the program continued to include not only

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Japanese Americans but other Asian women and their languages such as Chinese in later years).14 The hiring of Japanese American women was not merely a corporate event. The Japanese American community and Territory of Hawaiʻi also celebrated Pan Am’s program, embodied in these women. No less than Governor Samuel Wilder King took part in the inaugural ceremony, presenting each stewardess with a lei. There were photo ops everywhere, but none with greater impact than the group shot: seven Japanese American women, identically clad in their Pan Am blue serge uniforms, their caps at a stylish angle, holding white gloves, black leather bags slung over their shoulders, striding in step in their black high heels in front of a building with the broad sign in characteristic upper-case slanted font: pan american world airways.15 There was much to celebrate. For one, Japanese Americans had been placed center stage in the development of global tourism by the nation’s most prestigious airline. The irony of this taking place only ten years after the end of World War II formed the backdrop of such an extended sense of national accomplishment. Second, women in particular garnered and held this notable spotlight. Like the Cherry Blossom Festival Queen, the Nisei stewardesses showed ways by which women—particularly attractive ones who spoke “Standard English”— could be effective public brokers of interracial and community relations. Third, Pan Am’s program singled out Hawaiʻi as the site of this global development. The Nisei stewardess program placed Hawaiʻi in a very particular spot, not only as the major tourist destination that it was rapidly becoming but as an important hub of the industry, with its location as the Japanese-language base. Language was the basic contradiction surrounding the program. Although Pan Am said that it was recruiting for a newly created Japanese-language position, the actual Japanese linguistic requirements were vague. Not all the women Pan Am hired could speak Japanese fluently. In interview, several of them admitted that their knowledge of Japanese was rudimentary: after all, the wartime practice had been to suppress Japanese language and emphasize speaking English. Pan Am hired them anyway and provided Japanese language instruction as part of the basic training. One woman disclosed that at the time of hire, she could only count from one to ten in Japanese. Another woman demonstrated the way in which she wrote out in romanization the on-board Japanese-language announcements on pieces of paper and read them during flights. Clearly, Pan Am officially hired these Japanese American women for Japanese language, but unofficially, they were hired for the exotic look and hospitality that they lent the airplane cabin. Although Pan Am did not specify English language facility as a minimum requirement for hiring stewardesses, the corporation required a high level of English for all its employees, whether as part of the ground crew or in the air.16 In short, “Standard English,” more than Japanese, provided the minimum entry point for these women into such globe-circling positions.

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Ironically, in 1955, when Pan Am began this program, very few Japanese even traveled abroad. Under the American occupation and later the postwar government, Japanese international travel was restricted first to government officials and government-sponsored students and later, in 1950, to businessmen. That travel ban was not lifted until 1964 with the advent of the Tokyo Olympics. At the advent of the Nisei stewardess program, there was no real need for Japanese language on planes, even the ones that traveled to Asia. Pan Am’s Japanese-language position held little rationale except to provide a convenient means to exoticize the cabin with the presence of Asian women. The Nisei stewardesses thus occupied a somewhat decorative role and were treated differently from the other stewardesses. The most obvious example was the round-the-world flight for which Pan Am was famous. Pan Am Flights 001 and 002 circumnavigated the globe over the course of several days. Most stewardesses flew one or two legs of the circumnavigation, with crews changing at different ports, but Nisei stewardesses stayed with the plane the entire route, generally working from port to port until the plane completed its round-the-world route. On board, they were considered the workhorses, sometimes relegated the lion’s share of galley work instead of being allowed to interact with passengers, as dictated by the pursers. During layovers, they found that some white stewardesses objected to rooming with them. For the women I interviewed, however, such prejudicial treatment was offset by the many advantages of flying the globe for a prestigious company. Many viewed even the negative experiences as part of the lessons in worldliness—that is, living in a world beyond Hawaiʻi, learning to stand up for themselves, and facing discrimination, all the while traveling the globe amid Pan Am glamour. That worldliness proved a balancing act of assertiveness and acquiescence, of speech and silence, of grit and grace. For the duration of the Nisei stewardess program from 1955 to 1972, these women were among the first nonwhite flight attendants in the company’s employ. As pioneers of the airline, they broke through the racial barrier of the period. These Japanese American women did so not as a matter of asserting their civil rights but as part of their own personal strategy of seeking new opportunities and experiences. This personal strategy coincided with Pan Am’s business strategy to secure domination of international travel. In this way, Pan Am’s Nisei stewardesses did not challenge norms so much as extend the concepts of gendered service and Jet Age, American-led cosmopolitanism. In aspects of their personal lives, however, they exceeded social bounds. Most of them flew for a short while, retiring upon marriage, as was expected by their families and community and company rules. But some of them inadvertently became career women, much to their surprise— flying well into late adulthood and marrying late, not at all, or not to Japanese men. This personal strategy took them far beyond their expectations. Some of them became so inured to the lifestyle of the travelling professional that included mobility and freedom from routine that they found it difficult to quit.

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May Hayashi, from the first pathbreaking group of Japanese American women, is an example. Hayashi attended English Standard Schools, graduating from Roosevelt High School, ran for Cherry Blossom Festival Queen in its first year in 1953, and flew for Pan Am as part of the inaugural group of Nisei stewardesses in 1955. Hayashi was not only part of all three institutions but, throughout her young adult years, placed herself at the forefront of them. She is not alone and represents well the interconnected threads between language, public performance, gender, and personal initiative. Hayashi flew for Pan Am briefly, from 1955 to 1957. By company rules at the time, she flew only as long as she remained unmarried. Previous to her Pan Am employment, she had attended the University of Hawaiʻi and had flown for about one and a half years with the local interisland Hawaiian Airlines, which was when she was spotted by a Pan Am executive. Hayashi recalls the excitement of that first group of Nisei stewardesses and her learning experience: Being the very first group of Nisei stewardesses, we were celebrities, and were honored by the Territory of Hawaiʻi. Governor King winged us, and there was a great reception at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel for us. And the newspapers, every one of them, covered us. I believe the news also went to South America, worldwide, ’cause I received some letters from these young men there. I think there were a lot of lessons taught. Like being independent. Living with people, like on trips, you’re rooming with different people. Every trip is different. And when you get to the hotel, they treat you so royally, because you’re in a Pan Am uniform. And they just worship you! I thought it was glamorous. . . . It was the people that you meet. The different types of people, . . . the different cultures. You had to learn all this. And learn how to serve meals formally. It was just such a learning experience for me. . . . And most all, you know, it made my parents proud, too. That I was one of the first girls from Hawai‘i to fly for Pan Am.17

Hayashi’s experiences with Pan Am merged with her own identity: the doors to this employment, opened in part through her “Standard English” speech, combined with her initiative in making the stewardess identity her own. The personal impact of her Pan Am employment was heightened by her pathbreaking role and her celebrity status. For her employment of only two years, Hayashi became the poster girl of the Nisei stewardess, photographed in Japan in numerous settings for promotional Pan Am materials, adopting the persona of the worldly traveler while working hard. The life lessons of her experiences, culled from partaking of the Pan Am lifestyle, became indelible marks of personhood for Hayashi. Her continuing allegiance to Pan Am has made Hayashi one of the most active members of the Honolulu chapter of World Wings International, the organization of retired flight attendants with the company.

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Although she did leave the company to marry a man who eventually became a judge, living comfortably and well in suburban Honolulu, Hayashi views her Pan Am years as some of her best. Part of it was inhabiting a social frontier for Japanese American women amid Jet Age possibilities. She represented the Asian woman on board, serving with a smile, confronting some stereotypes while defying others. Though the group was “complimented” by Pan Am executives as “subservient,” Hayashi positioned herself to partake of service with a smile with pride, even as she collapsed at home, exhausted from the effort.18 She viewed the company as her personal teacher, even as she understood the limits of that teaching. Part of this indelible identification with Pan Am came from flying/ working at a young age, traveling the world when her peers at home were getting married or commuting to office jobs. Part of it was knowing that her parents and community took pride in her as a Pan Am Nisei stewardess. She did them good. That she was able to represent them (including family, friends, and community) enhanced the processes by which she occupied her position. And that process included, quite centrally, her facility in “Standard English” as part of the public presentation—her linguistic finishing school—without which she would have never been hired. Indeed, Hayashi is one who has built a rich life for herself, her family, and inevitably, her community, which expressed pride in her based fundamentally upon “speaking well.”

The Legacy of “She Speaks Well” “She speaks well” provides crucial commentary within an era of pervasive and enforced assimilation, especially for Japanese Americans. The dawn of a new era marked by global feminism, political consciousness of ethnic revitalization movements, and the rise of local Hawaiʻi-based identity, including the celebration of Pidgin as a bona fide lingua franca, would have to wait another decade or two. And yet, within the strictures of assimilation, the Japanese American women discussed here found opportunities for their own empowerment. That they did so not in opposition to existing gendered norms and ideals but very much within it speaks to the time period. These were not rebels, at least not overtly. Rather, they were exemplary “good girls”—speaking well, dressing well, often marrying well. The modeling of their lives placed them beyond the norm, leading and representing a community by example. These Japanese American women aced assimilation. And they did so specifically by speaking well—that is, speaking “American,” placing themselves (and the Japanese American community) in the public eye. This study is unique with its focus on language and Asian American women. And yet it is language that so often encapsulates the very performance of assimilation. My argument goes further to analyze ways by which language encapsulates

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performance of gendered identity, particularly during the first two decades of the post–World War II era, which were fraught with such a public spotlight upon Japanese Americans. “She speaks well” demonstrates ways by which Japanese American women within this period performed “being good”—that is, being an upstanding, (upper) middle-class, American female citizen and even a brand for the tourist market. The audiences for this performance were multiple: the larger American public in Hawaiʻi and beyond (including national-global corporations such as Pan Am); the growing tourist industry; other ethnic groups in Hawaiʻi; Japan itself, glancing at Japanese Americans as familial conduits for global citizenship; the cautiously public Japanese American community; other Japanese American women for whom these women acted as models; and, ultimately, men. For each of these audiences in postwar Hawaiʻi, “speaking well” provided the pedestal of gendered achievement in moral, aesthetic, economic, and political terms. Here lies the good, the beautiful, and the powerful—at least within the time period and in a gendered framework. Equally important, “speaking well” provided a platform for these Japanese American women to engage in a public life of their own making, creating new opportunities/careers for themselves, and provided them new choices in their personal lives. Those personal choices included marrying soon-to-be prominent Japanese American husbands for some and marrying non-Japanese Americans, marrying late, or not marrying at all for others. Speech thus constituted both the Japanese American women and their publics, acting as a central proving ground in postwar Hawaiʻi for citizenship, economic status, and identity. Notes

1 This work draws upon newly analyzed material from my two previously published studies, Christine R. Yano, Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai‘i’s Cherry Blossom Festival (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006); Yano, Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 2 Judith R. Hughes, “The Demise of the English Standard School System in Hawaiʻi,” Hawaiian Journal of History 27 (1993): 67. 3 The memoir of Ted Tsukiyama—one of the most notable products of the English Standard School system, a celebrated World War II veteran, the first Japanese American to graduate from Yale Law School, and an eventual spokesman for his generation—for example, is written in “Standard English” but includes quotes of conversations with his fellow male friends, all of which he writes in Pidgin. Ted Tsukiyama, My Life’s Journey; A Memoir (Honolulu: Watermark, 2017). 4 Roland Kotani, The Japanese in Hawaii: A Century of Struggle (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Hochi, 1985), 104. 5 For example, Edward Sapir, “Text Analyses of Three Yana Dialects,” American Archaeology and Ethnology 20 (1923): 263–85; John Bradley, “Yanyuwa: ‘Men Speak One Way, Women Speak Another,’” in Language and Gender, A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Jennifer Coates and Pia Pichler (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 13–19; Edina Eisikovits, “Girl-Talk/ Boy-Talk: Sex Differences in Adolescent Speech,” in Coates and Pichler, Language and

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Gender, 38–48; Penelope Eckert, “Gender and Sociolinguistic Variation,” in Coates and Pichler, Language and Gender, 57–66. Eleanor C. Nordyke and Y. Scott Matsumoto, “The Japanese in Hawaii: A Historical and Demographic Perspective,” Hawaiian Journal of History 11 (1977): 165. Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 162. See also Shilpa Dave, “‘Community Beauty’: Transnational Performances and Cultural Citizenship in ‘Miss India Georgia,’” Literature Interpretation Theory 12 (2001): 335–58; Nhi T. Lieu, “Remembering ‘the Nation’ through Pageantry: Femininity and the Politics of Vietnamese Womanhood in the Hoa Hau Ao Dai Contest,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (2000): 127–51; Shirley Lim, “Contested Beauty: Asian American Women’s Cultural Citizenship during the Early Cold War Era,” in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 188–204. Yano, Crowning the Nice Girl, 77–80. Takie S. Lebra, “The Cultural Significance of Silence in Japanese Communication,” Multilingua; Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 6 (January 1987): 343–57. For example, Terence Rogers and Satoru Izutsu, “The Japanese,” in People and Cultures of Hawaii; A Psychocultural Profile, ed. John F. McDermott Jr., Wen-Shing Tseng, and Thomas W. Maretzki (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980), 87–88. Both organizations have close ties to the Japanese American community. The Japanese Women’s Society was founded in 1954 as a primarily Nisei women’s organization of wives of politicians, businessmen, and doctors associated with Kuakini Hospital. Kuakini Hospital began as the Japanese Benevolent Society in 1892 to assist the medical needs of the ethnic community. The first Japanese Charity Hospital opened in 1900, and a larger facility was built in 1917 with donations from the Japanese government. During World War II, the US military occupied the medical facility and renamed it Kuakini Medical Center (informally known as Kuakini Hospital) after the street on which the building was located. Carole Saikyo, interview with the author, December 18, 2001, Honolulu, HI. Also quoted in Yano, Crowning the Nice Girl, 108–9. Yano, Airborne Dreams, 2–4. The corporate history and background that follow condense the story as told in Airborne Dreams. See Yano, Airborne Dreams, appendix, 183–86, to trace Pan Am’s hiring of other women of color and nationality, from European stewardesses in 1946 to Hispanics in 1950, Caribbean women in 1963, and African Americans in 1965. This iconic photograph can be found in Yano, Airborne Dreams, 66. Christine R. Yano, “A Japanese in Every Jet: Globalism and Gendered Service in the Jet Age,” in Assembling Japan: Modernity, Technology, and Global Culture, ed. Griseldis Kirsch, Dolores P. Martinez, and Merry White (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), 50. May Hayashi Tsukiyama, interview with the author, May 11, 2005, Honolulu, HI. Yano, Airborne Dreams, 104. See Arlie Hochschild’s classic monograph on service work and its toll on workers, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

8

History, Identity, and the Life Course Mixed Race Asian American Women Cathy J. Tashiro

“A White American Revolutionary” Decluttering in preparation for a recent move, I unearthed a box of old letters and journals buried in my basement, where I found an ambiguous passage written in early 1969 in which I seemed to be referring obliquely to myself as part of a white American revolutionary movement. I found this astonishing. It had been years since I had thought about that period of my life. I have no memory of thinking of myself as white. I also have no memory of thinking of myself as mixed race at that time, though I routinely do now. That concept was not available to me as a mixed Asian American growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s in rural upstate New York, in towns with no other racial minorities, where “race” referred to “black” or “Negro,” and people of mixed race were typically associated with the term “mulatto.” I knew I was different but didn’t have the language for what I was. However, as the history and demographics of this country changed, beginning shortly after my journal entry, I have thought of myself as a minority or person of color or person of mixed race or Hapa or Asian American based on the circumstances, context, and evolving language available at the particular time for someone like me: a mixed Japanese American/white woman. Why might I have thought of myself as part of a white revolutionary movement? History and context are everything when it comes to mixed race identity. In 1964, I graduated from high school and headed off to New York City to attend Barnard College and Columbia University. Though apolitical up to that time, I quickly became swept up in the antiwar sentiments that were engulfing college campuses in response to the Vietnam War. I became part of what I thought was a revolutionary movement to upend traditional power relationships. I participated in the Columbia University strike of 1968 that protested Columbia’s plan to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park, one of the few parks accessible to the low-income, predominantly African American and Puerto Rican populations in Harlem and Morningside Heights. During the strike, I was a member of the Math Commune, self-named by those in Math Hall, which was considered the most radical of the buildings. The black students had their own building, and the Young Lords, fighting for Puerto 140

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Rican rights, were just beginning to come on the scene. I remember very few Asian Americans in the strike. It was months before the full emergence of the Asian American movement on the West Coast and before the construct “Asian American” became widely used. Asian Americans were still called “Orientals.” Virtually all of my Columbia comrades were white and primarily Jewish. Thus, my self-identification reflected the reality of the particular political and historical moment in which I found myself. The evolution of my own sense of identity from that time made me curious about how other mixed race Asian American women experienced identity over the course of their lives. I was particularly interested in how prevailing historical conditions shaped identity. This chapter explores the identity development of mixed race Asian American women through their own voices and in different historical contexts. It draws upon two qualitative studies of people of mixed race. It also profiles six women from those two studies who were born between 1902 and 1982, spanning an eighty-year age difference, thus providing a unique opportunity to assess the ways that historical context, especially in young adulthood, influenced the experience of being a mixed race Asian American woman. The three women from the first study in this chapter, whom I will refer to as the “older women,” were in their twenties in the 1920s, 1940s, and 1960s, respectively. I focus on their twenties because I found that to be a fertile age in identity formation. Doing so also provides a point of comparison with the women in the second study, who were of similar age when I interviewed them and whom I refer to as the “younger women” here. How race and mixed race were determined in their growing-up years, the context of their families and environments, and how they identified themselves at that time and over time are central to this study. I also share here elements of my own identity transformation as a mixed race woman in relationship to my interviewees.

Mixed Race Women as Participants in Oral Histories The first study used focused life histories, which can provide the opportunity to study a subject of interest, in this case racial identity, within the context of the interviewee’s life story. It was conducted in California between 1994 and 1996, when I interviewed older people (most were over fifty at the time) of mixed African American/white and Asian American/white ancestries.1 Doing focused life histories of older mixed race adults provided rich narratives demonstrating the extent to which mixed race identity was shaped by historical circumstances at key points in the respondents’ lives. All the parents of these interviewees formed unions before the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling, which struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage that still existed in many states. The first question I asked them, “Tell me how your parents got together,” yielded extraordinary stories of subterfuge, danger, and familial disruption.

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In including aspects of three older mixed race Asian American women’s life histories from the first study,2 I have intentionally selected women who were born in different decades and who represent a range of Asian ethnicities. Their lives indicate that the experience of being a mixed race Asian American woman has been inextricably tied to historical time and place. Historical events and constraints, particularly during their coming-of-age years, profoundly influenced their identity formation. I include what I know of these women from when they were in their early twenties, like I do with the younger women in the second study. The second study, conducted in Seattle in 2004, involved focused interviews with mixed race people and parents of mixed race children. Although the study’s primary purpose was to examine experiences and beliefs about health and illness in relation to mixed race, questions of identity and related stressors inevitably arose. I include here what three young mixed race Asian American women had to say about identity and the stresses of being mixed race. All three were between twenty-two and twenty-six years of age when I interviewed them. The quotations in this chapter are drawn from my interviews, and all names are pseudonyms to protect confidentiality. I use the interviewees’ terms to describe the ancestries of their parents.

Mixed Race Asian Americans in Historical Context Mixed race Asian Americans are not a recent phenomenon, as historical accounts document Asian intermarriage in the United States from at least as early as the nineteenth century.3 Interracial relationships between Asian immigrants and Mexican Americans and African Americans have a long history.4 In my research, I have been most interested in hearing from people whose very being transgressed the color line surrounding whiteness, the boundary of most concern in legal statutes and social practice in the United States. Each person discussed in this chapter had one white parent and one Asian or Asian American parent, which is currently by far the most common Asian American racial mix. Laws against interracial marriage (antimiscegenation laws) in the United States, which primarily prohibited people of color from marrying whites, existed at the state level for many decades and provide a fascinating sketch of fluctuating attitudes. These laws were not as consistent for Asians as they were for African Americans, and part of the difficulty in categorization was related to shifting concepts of race and whiteness. For example, Asian Indians were considered white in several cases between 1910 and 1920, but not white in 1909, in 1917, and after 1923.5 Why was this important? Dating back to 1790, citizenship for immigrants was restricted to “white persons” only. The ability to own land and a host of other rights were restricted to citizens. And beginning in 1907, if a native-born woman married a noncitizen, she would be forced to relinquish her

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citizenship and risked deportation to her husband’s country of origin, a situation that affected the life of Jane Murakami, one of the older women in this chapter, and her family. Laws against Asian and white intermarriage increased between 1920 and 1950.6 Varying beliefs about what “race” different Asian ethnic groups belonged to contributed to a lack of consistency regarding Asian and white marriages. For example, it was not clear whether Filipinos were included in the prohibited categories of “Negroes, mulattos, or Mongolians” in California, and the law was challenged in 1933 by Salvadore Roldan, a Filipino who wanted to marry a white woman. Roldan held that as a Filipino, he was Malayan, not Mongolian. Though Roldan won his case, his success was short-lived, as the law was quickly amended to prohibit whites from marrying members of the “Malay race.”7

Being a Young Mixed Race Asian American Woman in the Early to Mid-Twentieth Century Two of the three older women, Janet Chiang and Jane Murakami, were born in the first quarter of the twentieth century, one of whom (Janet) was born and grew up in China. The third, Mary Ignacio, was born in 1944, which is roughly contemporaneous with my own year of birth. I discuss a bit of my own life in relation to hers in a later section.

“Because We Grew Up Western Style” Born in 1902 and ninety-four years old when I interviewed her at her nursing home bed in San Francisco, Janet Chiang was a lovely lady who did not look very Asian to me. Though bedridden and suffering from poor hearing and vision, she spoke with animation, clarity, and humor about growing up in prerevolutionary China. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a series of treaties were signed between China and various Western nations and Japan to open ports and cede territory, whereby native-born Chinese were treated as inferiors and citizens of the occupying nations had extraordinary power and latitude. With her Danish customs-worker father and Chinese mother, Janet lived with a certain ease due to her father’s status as a white European. She emphasized repeatedly that she grew up speaking English and followed Western customs, though she also spoke three Chinese dialects, “but not well.” She was born in Shanghai, lived there until age nine, and then moved to Tianjin, which she described as a better place to be Eurasian (the common term for persons of mixed Asian and white descent in Asia at the time). This is not surprising given that Tianjin had many foreign concessions. Attitudes toward Eurasians varied by region and the dominant occupiers. In Shanghai, the United Kingdom and the United States merged their concessions

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to form the Shanghai International Settlement. While working in Shanghai, Janet remembered seeing in the newspaper that “a British firm wanted a stenographer, and in the newspaper, and at the bottom it said, ‘no Eurasians need apply.’” At age twenty-two, she married a Eurasian man, a customs worker like her father. A Chinese/European couple friendly with her parents had introduced them because they thought it would be a “nice match.” Caroline Lowe, also Eurasian and an old friend of Janet’s from China whom I met when interviewing Janet, stated, “See, nowadays it doesn’t make any difference whom you marry, but at one time they wanted you to marry in your own race. So when you’re Eurasian, what do you do? Marry a Eurasian.” Because Janet’s husband had an American father, the couple was able to come to the United States with their daughter in 1947. Janet never worked and talked with humor about having to learn new skills, because “you know, in China, you don’t do anything. You have a cook to do the cooking, you have a house, you have all the servants. . . . When I came here, I didn’t know how to cook, I didn’t know anything.” Janet never wavered in her identification as a Eurasian, attributing that identity—with a certain amount of pride—to having grown up “Western style.” She unconsciously seemed to equate Eurasian to Western. Unlike many of her US-born counterparts, significant numbers of people of mixed Asian ancestry in China at that time allowed for the development of a separate Eurasian strata of their own, a “race” as Caroline put it. Cultural norms encouraged Eurasians to marry other Eurasians. Like Janet, Caroline and another older mixed race Chinese-born woman I interviewed also married Eurasian men. Although Caroline and Janet lived comfortable lives with servants, this was not the case for all Eurasians. Caroline said in reference to discrimination toward Eurasians, especially by the British in China, that there was a tendency to think Eurasians were all from low-class families, unlike her family because her Chinese father was an engineer. What Janet and Caroline described was their complex positioning in the racial hierarchy of prerevolutionary China. As Eurasians, they were more privileged than the majority of their Chinese counterparts yet not fully accepted by Westerners because of their Chinese ancestry. Both Janet and Caroline identified as Eurasian because that was what was determined for them in the racial hierarchy of colonial China.

“I’ll Swear I’m Japanese, but I’m an American Citizen, Just like You” Born in America to a Japanese father and German American mother in 1916, Jane Murakami had a life-changing experience in her twenties when she was sent to an incarceration camp with her Japanese American husband. In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced removal, exclusion, and incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry on the West

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Coast. Some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were sent to remote “camps” to live under armed guard in appalling conditions. Her father had come to America with the great wave of Issei (first-generation Japanese Americans) who emigrated from Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the era of the Meiji Restoration in Japan (1868), during which the Japanese government embarked on a modernization program and imposed a tax on farmers. Many farmers lost their livelihoods as a result, and when the government released its prior restrictions on emigration, many sought to find their fortunes elsewhere. This began with contract labor in Hawaiʻi, but it soon spread to the US continent. My Japanese great-grandfather cut sugarcane in Kauaʻi and was part of this early group. Jane’s mother, the daughter of German immigrants, had a farm in Sonoma County, California, where she and Jane’s father had met and fallen in love. However, as Jane says, “In those days, my mother lost her US citizenship because she married my father. You couldn’t marry an alien in those days. That was terrible. So she lost her citizenship.” Recall that beginning in 1907, even US-born women who married noncitizens could lose their citizenship. Because he was a Japanese immigrant, Jane’s father had difficulty finding stable work. He did what he could, including working for the author Jack London, “cooking and doing things around the house.” Eventually he established a Judo studio in San Francisco and taught the San Francisco and Berkeley police. “But then the war started, and we were all put in camps,” Jane said. Jane described discrimination directed toward her in school. “Up to high school, I mingled among Caucasian girls. But if they had a party, sometimes I was invited, sometimes I wasn’t. . . . You could feel that prejudice. It was very strong.” Her family managed to send Jane to Heald College in San Francisco where one of her Japanese friends taught her how to cook rice, which she had never learned at home. At that point in her life, she didn’t care about who she was: “I was just Jane, and that was it. It didn’t bother me. I was proud of my name.” She just felt she was an American. In spite of or perhaps because of how hard she had to assert that she was American, being American was one of the primary ways Jane identified. Jane fell in love. Because of California’s antimiscegenation laws, she had to swear that she was Japanese in order to marry her Japanese American husband, who had been born in California. She told off the clerk who married them, stating that her husband was “as American as you are.” Three days after their marriage, the couple was sent to Tanforan and later Topaz concentration camp for persons of Japanese ancestry. In spite of all the constraints she faced, Jane exhibited considerable agency for a woman of her times. While in Topaz, she became the secretary to the residents’ co-op. She was assigned to take the minutes of board meetings, despite

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not speaking Japanese, and the meetings were largely in Japanese. When English was spoken, she wrote everything down, constructed minutes, and turned them over to her boss. He wrote them, and I typed them, and so one day I said, “Toby, you know, you’re getting nineteen dollars and I’m only getting twelve. I don’t think that’s fair, because I’m doing all your work.” So he said, “Well, I’ll see if I can get sixteen for you,” and I said, “No, I’m doing all your work for you.” So he got me nineteen. I got nineteen dollars a month.

After they were released from the camp, Jane and her husband lived for a time in Chicago, eventually returning to California, where her husband established a business, which she was proud to have run since his death. Jane identified culturally as an American, and said she truly identified as an American Japanese.

Being a Young Mixed Race Asian American Woman during the 1960s and 1970s The 1960s–1970s in America saw a flourishing of new social movements and increased protection for racial minorities. Interestingly, the interviewees in the first study who were young adults in this period described more complex and seemingly contradictory dimensions of identity than the oldest women like Janet and Jane. Their lives were on the cusp of great transformation. In response to immense pressure from the civil rights and other progressive movements, there was a flurry of legislative reform in the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act (1964), Executive Order 11246 (1965) establishing affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Loving v. Virginia case (1967) prohibiting laws against interracial marriage, the Fair Housing Act (1968) addressing discrimination in housing, and the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) ending quotas on immigration from non-European countries. Those of us who came of age during this period experienced a profound shift in legal and social attitudes toward racial equality. Having lived through the repression of the 1950s and early 1960s, we saw the beginning of a massive, though incomplete, transformation in the nation. Mary Ignacio, a mixed Filipina born to a Filipino father and mother of English, French, German, and Scottish heritage, was the closest to my age of the women I interviewed in the first study. Her mother was a nurse and her father a kitchen worker who waited on the nurses’ tables. Mary grew up in the Bayview area of San Francisco. In her childhood, it was a predominantly white neighborhood, becoming more multicultural as she was growing up. Today the neighborhood is diverse. Mary was close to her mother’s white family and knew very little about her father’s Filipino relatives because he had few family members in the United States. As a mixed race couple, Mary’s parents had difficulty finding

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housing and chose Bayview “because there had been another [racial] incident already that had hit the paper that had blown over with a Filipino family moving into the neighborhood.” Born in 1944, she said a few things about her early identification that resonated with my experience (I was born in 1946). When I asked how she thought of herself when she was a little girl, she replied, “Because of my mother’s family—I think I was raised white. I mean, that’s what I think of.” Nonetheless, Mary repeatedly referred to feeling “different.” “I think that in general I felt white, . . . but I knew I wasn’t. I didn’t look like it. I thought of myself as different.” Mary also referenced feeling Filipino, Asian, brown, and mixed, among other ways of identifying. Her response about not identifying as Filipino reminds me of how I felt as a young mixed race Japanese American: “When asked, I usually told people I was half Japanese, but when we visited my grandparents on my father’s side in the summer, I knew I wasn’t Japanese.”8 Like Mary, I had always felt “different,” but at that time and place, in a small town in upstate New York, I didn’t know why except that my appearance set me apart from the other families in my town. Culturally, both Mary and I had grown up with limited contact with our Asian relatives. One difference between Mary and me was that she spent most of the late 1960s and 1970s in England. She says, “When I was in college, I had thought, ‘I want to live in another country,’ but I couldn’t speak any languages. . . . I thought England might be a good place because they speak English.” Her experience of being racially ambiguous in England worked in her favor, as her exotic looks, guitar playing, and resemblance to folk singer Joan Baez got her positive attention. Although she described the news coverage of US events in England as being at least as good as if not better than in the states, experientially, Mary missed a transformative time in American history. While Mary was in England, I moved from the East Coast, where I had experienced revolutionaries as being white and Jewish, to the San Francisco Bay Area. Many people I had known in college had gone there, attracted by its image as a place of freedom and ferment. There, for the first time in my life, I encountered a critical mass of Asian Americans. Seminal events also contributed to my sense of self as an Asian American and person of color, most notably the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, resulting in the first Ethnic Studies Departments in the nation in 1969 and the rise of the Black Panther Party. Revolution was in the air, and the fight for the rights of people of color, in the United States and internationally, was central to the movement. This period was a key turning point for me in my selfidentification as a person of color, though, at that time, the idea of identifying as mixed race had not yet become something that people even talked about. In contrast, Mary stated that her sense of herself as a person of color happened relatively late in her life. Specifically, when working with people of color,

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she noticed how they treated her differently and with more trust than they did her white coworkers. The difference between our lives at a transformative time and place in US history are mirrored in how and when we identified as people of color. Mary expressed complex and sometimes contradictory dimensions of identity. Culturally, she felt primarily white, but she said she truly identified as mixed or Filipino in terms of the fourth dimension of identity, which I call racial self-identification (discussed below), that is, how people say they truly identify.9

Being a Young Mixed Race Asian American Woman in the New Millennium The women from my second study grew up in a very different legal and social climate from the older first group. For example, I recruited them online through the listserve of a mixed race organization, something that would have been inconceivable when the women in the first study were their age. None of their parents had had to break the law to marry, as they had been born between 1978 and 1982, well after the US Supreme Court Loving v. Virginia case (1967) struck down all antimiscegenation laws. Some had immigrant parents who had come after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which eliminated prior racial restrictions on Asian immigration. Several had taken classes in or even majored in ethnic studies, a field that did not exist when I was an undergraduate and had majored in what was then called Oriental studies (now Asian studies) at Columbia University. All were college educated, and many gained increased awareness of issues of race and ethnicity through their academic experiences. These were advantages that people my age and older could never have anticipated in our wildest dreams. When I interviewed them in 2004, people of mixed race had been officially acknowledged for the first time through the landmark policy change in the 2000 US Census allowing respondents to “check all boxes that apply” for the race question. With all these changes, the mixed race Asian American population, the majority of whom have a white non-Asian parent, has grown rapidly, numbering more than 2.9 million.10 Consequently, I wondered whether the conundrums of being mixed race that had been experienced by earlier generations had been resolved for them. Unfortunately, I found this to be far from true, as the interviews with Claudia Banks, Ashley Desai, and Theresa Ancheta (all three of different Asian ethnicities) reveal.

“Wondering Where I Fit” Claudia Banks was born in Seattle in 1982, eighty years after Janet Chiang, the oldest person I interviewed in the first study. Like Janet, she was born to a Chinese mother and white father. Her mother was an immigrant and her father native born. Both were well educated with professional careers, and Claudia was a college

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graduate. When I interviewed her, she was the same age that Janet Chiang had been when she had married her Eurasian husband in China. In contrast to Janet, who always felt Eurasian, Claudia felt like she had gone through a lot of identities. Growing up in a multicultural environment in Seattle, Claudia was most influenced by the demographics of whatever school she attended. She “kind of [went] through the gamut of feelings.” In grade school, most of her friends were black, and she never thought about it. In middle school, most of her friends were white, though her high school was “pretty diverse.” People rarely guessed what she was, and she described “wondering where I fit, overcompensating to prove I’m Asian, and what does it really mean to be Asian?” She also felt there were advantages to being mixed, such as seeing things from different sides and not being stuck in one perspective. She really wasn’t aware of race within her own family, only when she went out. She had a lot of relatives on her mother’s side who spoke Cantonese, and she learned to speak some Chinese, but lost a lot of it in school because her mother wanted her to be able to fit in. She felt the loss of the language as she began getting older. College pushed her into being more ethnically aware, more so than high school had. She described a lingering sense of insecurity that she was “not enough of something.” Being mixed was “a blessing and a curse,” something that she could never get away from. She described her identity as “fluid,” always changing, and said that it never felt really comfortable. She felt a lot of pressure to fit in and “be what people expect me to be.” She felt stressed that several times people said “stuff ” to her they wouldn’t say to a full-blooded Asian and made jokes about Asians. “They think ’cause I’m not fully Asian, I’ll make an exception for them.” And it was not just about Asians; she would respond to people saying something derogatory or negative about any racial or ethnic group. Being mixed was a huge issue for Claudia in dating. A white boyfriend was always trying to “separate what was Asian and what was white.” He would make jokes and talk about how exotic she was: “You could be Native American.” Her response: “Do you want me to be? Does this make you feel like you’ve dated a lot of different ethnicities?” Not surprisingly, she said, “Overall, I don’t date much.” She felt more Asian at Chinese cultural events with her family, yet at times could feel white and left out. With white people, she felt like an “other”: “I don’t feel at home here.” Where she did feel at home was hanging out with her family. It felt normal, and, she said, “I’m not thinking about all that stuff. I don’t want to look at my parents like that.” She expressed a lot more fluidity and situational variation in how she felt racially and culturally than the oldest women in the first study did.

“You’re Not Really Indian ’Cause You Weren’t Raised by an Indian Mother” Ashley Desai was twenty-six years old when I interviewed her, around the same age Jane Murakami had been when she was sent to Topaz concentration camp

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during World War II with her husband. Ashley described her mother as European American and her father as a South Asian immigrant. She definitely felt like her identity had changed over her lifetime. When she was younger, there were few South Asians where she lived, and her mother told her she was white. It wasn’t until Ashley started working for a South Asian organization that she began identifying differently, and she liked the term “mixed race” because it validated all that she was. She also explained her parentage as a way of identifying herself. Ashley experienced a high degree of cultural conflict within her family. Her Indian grandmother did not really accept her son marrying outside the culture, and Ashley’s parents divorced after a long marriage. For a time, her grandmother lived with the family and exposed Ashley to traditional ways of healing, and her father took the children to cultural festivals when they were younger. Her grandmother eventually returned to India because she “felt she lost her family to America,” according to Ashley. She described her mother as attributing the struggles of her marriage to cultural issues, which caused Ashley a lot of pain, a sense of having to split herself in her loyalties. As a young adult, she described a strained relationship with her mother, who Ashley felt had negative reactions to almost anything Indian. Ashley was coping not only with issues of mixed race but also with conflicting cultural expectations. She felt South Asian in terms of her extended family, family expectations, and obligations. With white people, “either they don’t get it or don’t realize they don’t or become overly interested. There are assumptions about family and what your role is.” Yet, since she grew up mostly with her mother, she felt acculturated to white American culture. Referring to the complexity of her position, she said, “I don’t think I have the language to explain it.” She knew what to do with Caucasian traditions; with the South Asian ones, it didn’t always come naturally. Yet she said critically, “American individualism is so extreme. With South Asians, it’s more a part of a group.” When Ashley was younger, most of her friends were white because she was tracked into a mostly white school. At her interview, she described mostly making friends with the South Asian people at work. Initially she had some anxiety about being accepted by a South Asian organization, but over time she became more comfortable. Still, she said, “It can be hard if you’re the only mixed race person.” She thought it would have been different if she had grown up around other South Asians. Interestingly, she was able to talk about being mixed with a woman from India who had similar issues because her parents were from different regions of India with distinct cultural, ethnic, and religious characteristics.

“Oh, You’re Mestiza, Not Really Filipina” Theresa Ancheta was twenty-four when I interviewed her. Born to a German mother and Filipino father who grew up in Hawai‘i, she identified as both

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Filipino and Caucasian/German. Growing up, she didn’t have much exposure to Filipino culture because her father was more influenced by the culture of Hawai‘i. She described being told, “Oh, you’re mestiza, not really Filipina.” “Mestiza” is a commonly used term for people of mixed ancestry in places colonized by the Spanish, such as the Philippines and Latin America. For Theresa, being called a mestiza implied that she was less than, or not enough, Filipina, and suggested that being full-blooded Filipino was better. This affected her sense of belonging. Theresa recalled a humiliating experience in a college diversity workshop, where the participants were told to step into a circle if they were white and out if they were of color. “I couldn’t step one way or the other.” The facilitator told her that she had to choose. She wept and stated angrily, “I don’t like it.” She said, “You feel like you’re not really a minority.” When asked how she identified, she said that if “mixed” was an option, she would check that; if she could choose more than one, that was what she did. When there was only one choice, it was hard. Growing up, Theresa had more connection to her German side. She felt frustrated because if there were groups empowering people of color, she didn’t really feel like she could be part of that group, even if she might want to be. Her appearance and how others saw her were an issue: “Sometimes I think everyone thinks I’m white, then someone comes up and speaks to me in Spanish.” Or they might think she was Native American or Italian. “I’d almost rather have them mistake me as something of color,” she said. When I asked why it was important to her to be seen as a person of color, she said, “Because it’s how I accept myself; I don’t want to deny my Dad.” Having recently married a Filipino man, she found it ironic that having their future children identify as Filipino was more important to her than to her Philippines-born husband, whom she described as very Americanized. Joining a mixed race organization definitely made her feel legitimized.

Mixed Race Identity: Contexts and Historical Eras The oral histories of my first study, conducted in the mid-1990s, reveal that mixed race identity is multidimensional and influenced by a variety of historical and contextual factors. Five distinct dimensions of mixed race identity emerged in that research in response to my interview questions: “What makes you feel more white?” or “What makes you feel more Asian?” They were: 1 Cultural identity (one’s core values and ways of being in the world) 2 Ascribed racial identity (how one was identified by others) 3 Racial identification to others (such as when filling out a form calling for one’s racial classification) 4 Racial self-identification (how one truly identified) 5 Situational racialization of feeling11

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However, there were subtle differences in the interviewees’ responses based on their age and historical era. The oldest interviewees, like Janet Chiang and Jane Murakami, tended to respond in simpler fashion to my questions about identity, and their racial self-identifications were less fluid. I believe that this was because they came of age when fewer identity options were available for mixed race people. Conversely, those who were closer to my age and had experienced key events of the 1960s such as the Civil Rights Act and the struggle for ethnic studies on college campuses at seminal moments in their development described more complex dimensions of identity as more options became available to them. Related questions are how mixed race identity might change over the life course and how aging itself might be experienced by people of mixed race. Now that I am the age that several of my respondents were in the first study when I interviewed them, I can confirm, at least for myself, that identity can change with changing history. The journal passage I referenced in the beginning of this chapter brought that home to me. The younger women who were interviewed in 2004 described changes in identity too, many of them contextual, based on where they had lived, who they went to school with, where they worked, familial ties, and exposure to ideas about race and ethnicity in college, where there were ethnic studies classes and a critical mass of students of color, unlike the campuses of the pre-1970s. More than a decade has passed since I interviewed them, and I wonder how they identify now and how having had a mixed race president of the United States for eight years might have influenced their feelings about being mixed race. With their increased numbers and legitimacy, what did I discover about the state of mixed race Asian America in my encounters with these younger women? I found that though much has changed for mixed race Asian American women, some fundamental things have not, most notably the manifestations of what I call the ideology of race as biologically real and fixed and society’s lack of ease with the concept of a racially blended identity.12 The ideology of race has its unique American manifestations in the rigidity of the color line surrounding whiteness and is also expressed internationally as Western superiority, which permeated the environment for the older mixed race Asian American women who grew up in Asia. Has the ideology of race receded in importance for younger mixed race women in a “postracial” society? The answers to that question are decidedly “mixed.” One prominent theme among the younger women who grew up in the 1990s was a sense of not being sure where they belonged. There was a sense of rarely feeling fully comfortable except in situations like Claudia Banks described, when she was with her family, where mixed race was normalized and taken for granted. There was a lingering insecurity about not being enough of something. Consequently, the discovery of the possibility of a mixed race identity and working with other people of mixed race in a mixed race organization were liberating experiences.

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There was a relentlessness to their awareness of difference and of how others might see them, what I call ascribed identity—the identity people “put on you”: “People rarely guess what I am.” “Are you hapa?” “I wonder what people are thinking about me.” As Ashley Desai said, “One of the hardest things about being mixed is not having the power to decide what you can be—it’s up to others to decide if you’re South Asian enough.” Interestingly, none of these young women talked about wanting to be seen as white; rather, much of what they discussed was about wanting to belong with people of color. One important difference between the younger and the older women was the degree to which they felt they had to prove their authenticity to claim the Asian side of their heritage. This makes sense considering the cultural changes that have taken place since the 1960s with the rise in ethnic pride and status. However, the fundamental problem of where they belong and the abiding power of the ideology of race, with its binary mutual exclusivity of the “races,” continue to plague mixed race Asian American women regardless of whether white is considered better or whether color is. Given US society’s prevailing belief in race as fixed, the nation is uncomfortable with and lacks the vision of being able to conceive of both/and instead of either/or. With the younger women, the emotional temperature of the discussion would rise when I asked the seemingly innocuous question, “Looking back on your life, what has been the impact of being of mixed race on your sense of well-being?” Participants frequently teared up as they responded. Their responses were deeply evocative for me as I thought to myself, “How can this not have changed?” Here they were, a generation younger than me, young enough to be my children, and they were confronting many of the same core issues experienced by myself and the older interviewees. I think part of why I am so moved by these moments is their intergenerational quality; I saw them, I saw myself as a young woman, and I was profoundly saddened that thirty or so years later, they were experiencing many of the same forms of dislocation that I had. At the same time, I must acknowledge that the emotion is mine and that these young women have many more resources available to them, particularly around the naming of mixed race, which did not even exist as a concept when I was their age.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have provided snapshots of six mixed race Asian American women at particular moments in personal and historical time. By locating them when they were at similar ages, I hope to have shown how historical circumstances and location, including transnational experiences, as well as the particularities of families and communities influence the experience of being mixed race. Their voices and recollections reveal their efforts to negotiate their

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lives in worlds that did not and do not fully acknowledge the complexity of race and mixed race. They also show how a life-course approach that considers women at different stages of their lives, or, as in this study, asked women to reflect on earlier phases of their lives, increases our understanding of the changing nature of their identity formation. Much more research is needed on this population, and on Asian American women whose mixed race heritage includes being African American, Latino, Native American, Middle Eastern, or other ethnicities. The younger women I interviewed may now have mixed race children of their own with even more complicated identities. I would particularly like to see longitudinal research that follows people over the course of their lives, revealing the particular ways that life experiences, time, and historical events influence mixed race identity over the life course and how mixed race identity is negotiated as the racial landscape becomes ever more complex. Notes

1 I interviewed older people because I was dismayed at the ahistorical character of much of the mixed race scholarship, which tended to be based on surveys of high school and college-age people of mixed race. 2 More about these women can be found in Cathy J. Tashiro, Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed Race Americans (New York: Routledge, 2013). 3 Emma Jinhua Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 30. 4 For example, Karen Isaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 1988). 5 Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 67. 6 Gabriel “Jack” Chin and Hrishi Karthikeyan, “Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asian Americans, 1910– 1950,” Berkeley Asian Law Journal 9 (2002): 1–40. 7 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 330. 8 Tashiro, Standing, preface. 9 Tashiro, 59–77. 10 US Census Bureau, “ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates: 2011–2015 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates,” American FactFinder, https://factfinder.census.gov, accessed July 23, 2017. 11 Tashiro, Standing, 63–77. 12 Tashiro, 10–11.

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Ancestral Ethics and Sāmoanness Explaining the Contemporary Sāmoan American Women M. Luafata Simanu- Klutz

Since our grandmothers and great-grandmothers moved to America for better education and employment opportunities in the mid-twentieth century, many of us, Sāmoan American women, have made significant strides personally and professionally wherever we reside regardless of place of birth, level of education, politics, or socioeconomic status. Consciously or subconsciously, we generally believe that, without abandoning our ancestral ethics and Sāmoanness, our successes are due to two major factors: (1) a belief in being both Sāmoan and woman and (2) a sound understanding of the demands of Fa’asāmoa (Sāmoan culture) and the American society into which we are born or to which we are sent by the obligation to take care of ‘āiga, family. I am one of these women; I was born in American Sāmoa and a US national but became a naturalized US citizen in order to sponsor my foreign-born parents and two of my children from Sāmoa two years after migrating for my graduate education in Hawai‘i in the 1980s. Given this background, I take a reflexive, existential approach in this chapter, exploring examples of Sāmoan women who are successful because, they argue, they hold a strong sense of both systems, particularly their ina’ilau a tama’ita’i, Sāmoan proverbial women’s work ethic.1 In fact, at the completion of a project, this ancestral reference is constantly employed by leaders in Sāmoan communities in the United States, where group projects often depend on women for completion. The focus of this chapter is to portray the lives of Sāmoan women in the American diaspora and how we have fared in a place that is, for all intents and purposes, anathema to Sāmoan notions of power, wealth, and worship and to Sāmoan understandings of the interplay between aganu’u (universal values and principles) and aga’ifanua (local interpretations and manifestations of such). Sāmoa’s aganu’u, commonly known as Fa’asāmoa (the Sāmoan way), continues to be framed by ancestral or indigenous references, and we, as agents, transport them wherever we travel.2 Ancestral beliefs continue to define and explain contemporary Sāmoan women’s profound sense of obligation to family and our ability to strive to improve the standard of living in both diasporic and ancestral homes. By obligation, I mean that as sisters and daughters, Sāmoan women are socialized into an a priori position of tending to our families as 155

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caregivers to aging parents and as support for siblings’ families regardless of geography or time. For many generations, since migration to the United States, Sāmoans have been negatively stereotyped by the dominant group as impoverished, living in low-income housing, dependent on federal and state welfare systems, and lacking in higher education. Indeed, according to the only formal study done on Sāmoans in Hawai‘i, federal and/or state statistics reveal that Sāmoans are largely unemployed and therefore limited to rentals in housing projects in depressed economic zones where education is subpar, most children are either dropouts or on noncollege tracks in high school, and most Sāmoan women tend to end up in low-paying jobs in the service industry.3 Though this study is more than three decades old, negative stereotypes emerging from its publication linger. There are few, if any, published scholarly studies on the middleclass and professional Sāmoan women and men in various fields to counter this negative image, though professionals compose a significant portion of the present-day Sāmoan community. In this chapter, on the other hand, I argue that Sāmoan women reject being construed as lacking and strive to achieve and set goals to be successful because we carry with us ancestral beliefs and models, particularly those affecting politics and work. It is these ancestrally established roles that define our Sāmoanness—our conscience and humanity, albeit difficult to sustain, particularly in a cash-dependent society. Our sense of Sāmoanness has withstood the pressures of both national and ethnic problematics, which are often at odds with each other at various points of intersection. One thing is clear, however: when a Sāmoan woman travels, she carries with her not just her immediate family but her whole culture, her Fa’asāmoa. Driven by obligation to self and others, we have been able to recognize the tools for success— such as education, employment, and health—and values like love, courage, and honesty that transcend ethnic or national labels. Some of us have been bestowed with chiefly titles as rewards for our service. While this is not a prerequisite for success in America, it can certainly intersect with success when true chiefly attributes (humility, kindness, generosity, etc.) are employed. Sāmoa’s fa’atamāli’i (chiefly or respectable behavior) is best displayed through these attributes. To explore how ancestral ethics and Sāmoanness shape the lives of contemporary Sāmoan American women, I utilize oral histories and interviews I conducted to explore four life histories of Sāmoan American women, including my own and my mother’s, focusing on the agency of these women in their remarkable achievements in the United States. The women’s stories discussed in this chapter are a step toward uncovering gaps in the history and contributions of Sāmoan American women and a testimony to the power of ancient legacies as structures of their encounters or intersections with people from

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other cultures.4 They are not necessarily representative of all Sāmoan American women, but it is my hope that their stories and this preliminary study will encourage further research on Sāmoan American women.

Locating Sāmoa As a consequence of Western colonialism, the 1899 Tripartite Convention, which included Great Britain, the United States, and Germany, cemented the division of the islands between the United States and Germany, along the 171 west longitude parallel. Great Britain exchanged its right to gain a piece of Sāmoa for German real estate in the Solomon Islands and West Africa. In 1900, American and German flags were raised on the islands of Tutuila and ‘Upolu, respectively, thus marking the beginning of the colonial era. The Sāmoan archipelago was missionized in the early 1800s when the London Missionary Society (LMS) of England dropped anchor at Sapapāli’i in August 1830. The conversion of the archipelago to Christianity was an overnight success. Reverend John Williams, Reverend and Mrs. Barff, and a few Tahitian and Rarotongan pastors were well received, and the LMS—today the Congregational Christian Church of (American) Sāmoa—has remained the largest denomination across both American Sāmoa and Sāmoa. Methodist, Catholic, and Mormon denominations are the other traditional churches.5 American Sāmoa, the only United States territory south of the equator, comprises the easternmost islands of Ta’ū, Ofu, and Olosega—this is the Manu’a group. Approximately forty minutes west on a Cessna plane are the islands of Tutuila and Aunu’u. Pago Pago, the territory’s capital and the center of government and commerce, is on Tutuila. The two atolls, Swains Island (also known as Olohenga) and Rose Island (or Muliava), are part of the territory. While the former is inhabited with historical ties to the Tokelau Islands north of Sāmoa, the latter is a US national reserve for birds and other wildlife. American Sāmoa is an unincorporated territory of the United States under a deed of cession, which stipulates that in exchange for the use of the Pago Pago harbor as a fueling station for the navy fleet going to and from the Southern Hemisphere, the Sāmoans would keep their Fa’asāmoa, or Sāmoan Way, and their matai, or chiefly system, as well as their rights to customary land and titles. This agreement between American Sāmoa and the United States can only be altered by an act of the US Congress. To date, American Sāmoans are the only remaining US nationals. They have access to free entrance to US states and territories and rights that are protected under the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights, except for the right to vote in local and national elections. To become a US citizen, American Sāmoan US nationals must live in a US state or other US territory for three consecutive months before applying for naturalization. A substantial percentage of American Sāmoans are content to keep the status quo, especially

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since applying for citizenship is very expensive. American Sāmoa’s population was 61,161 in 2014.6 West of the 171-degree longitude is the Independent State of Sāmoa, which was a German colony until the start of World War I in 1914 and was subsequently a trust territory of the League of Nations after World War I and then a mandate of the United Nations after World War II, both times under New Zealand’s management. In 1962, Western Sāmoa became the first Pacific island colony to regain its independence and adapted the British parliamentary system to include the retention of its chiefly system. One had to be a chief to run in the legislative elections or to vote. In 1990, universal suffrage was instituted, and voters could (and still can) vote at twenty-one years of age; still, only chiefs can run. Sāmoa’s economy has shifted from agriculture to tourism. In 1997 Sāmoa dropped “Western” from its name and is now officially called the Independent State of Sāmoa, or Sāmoa, as distinct from American Sāmoa. Sāmoa’s population, which is sustainable due to emigration, was 197,401 as of March 2018, and the male-to-female ratio is almost at par.7 Out-migration for the people of Sāmoa is mainly to New Zealand. Migration to the United States requires a visa and sponsorship by a US relative or institution. There are more Sāmoans currently living abroad than at home, and the same is true of American Sāmoa. Mass migration to America from American Sāmoa did not begin until the 1950s, when the US Navy ended its administration of the territory and the Mormon church provided passage for many Sāmoans to Hawai‘i. Most navy families settled in Hawai‘i, though some moved to the US continent and eventually established churches where they could worship in Sāmoan. The Mormons largely settled in Lā‘ie on O‘ahu’s North Shore, the seat of Brigham Young University– Hawai‘i and later the famous tourist attraction the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC). In the 1960s, more Sāmoans emigrated for school and job opportunities. Today, the largest population of Pacific Islanders in the US continent is Sāmoan; the first- and second-largest populations of Sāmoans are in California and Hawai‘i, respectively.

The Originals: Ancestral Models Sāmoan American women reflect a balanced manifestation of both Sāmoan and American values and work ethics. These women have expressed a sense of “Sāmoanness,” of an ancestral imprint of mythical and legendary pasts manifested in the collective known as Fa’asāmoa. Sāmoanness is ancestrally constructed, and knowing how the originals established values and beliefs allows for a wellrounded comfortability with both traditional and modern aspects of life. These ancestral models are popularly cited at Sāmoan events and are memorialized in the stories below. Women appear to have dominated Sāmoa’s mythological past. Tilafaigā and Taemā, female Siamese twins; Nāfanua, the war goddess; and

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Salamāsina, the first Tafa’ifā (ruler bestowed with all four paramount titles of Tui Ātua, Tui Ā’ana, Nato’aitele, and Tamasoāli’i) have remained prominent in the Sāmoan consciousness, with the latter two as popular namesakes for many daughters. I highlight their significance in shaping daily life then and now. The Siamese twins from the village of Falelātai on Sāmoa’s main island of ‘Upolu are believed to have swum everywhere across the Pacific and were responsible for introducing Sāmoa to its tattoo traditions. At some point in their swimabouts, something happened that separated them, and one day, Tilafaigā decided to return to Falelātai to care for their parents. Taemā, on the other hand, swam on to Tutuila, which became known as the motu, or island, of Taemā. Two significant historical events are attributed to them. First, they devoured the men at Namō, a subvillage of Solosolo, for ridiculing the twins’ appearance, an event that was memorialized as the taeao or aso na i Namō in oratory. Second, when Tilafaigā swam back to ‘Upolu, she met Saveasi’uleo, the half man–half eel with supernatural power, who she did not know was her uncle. He deliberately took her as wife. This event is considered ‘upu popo, or forbidden knowledge, and is often whispered of when cases of incest are known. Evidently, while Tilafaigā was with child, she learned the truth, and when she miscarried, she buried the fetus, hoping Saveasi’uleo would not notice. However, he found the grave and revived the baby, whom he named Nanā i fanua, or hidden in the soil (hence the contraction and popularized name Nāfanua).8 Nāfanua grew to be a formidable force with supernatural tendencies. She is popularly known in recorded missionary and colonial archives as the goddess of war and she was instrumental in the restructuring of Sāmoa’s political order. Nāfanua fought many wars on behalf of relatives including the Taua o Pāpā, “Wars of the paramount titles” (the titles are Tui Ā’ana, Tui Ātua, Nato’aitele, and Tamasoāli’i), which she demanded as prize for winning their wars. Later, Nāfanua’s orators, Tupa’i and ‘Auva’a, gave the paramount titles to their sister, So’oa’emalelagi, to return to their districts. Known for her political prowess, So’oa’emalelagi decided to bestow all four titles upon her niece Salamāsina, who was the daughter of Tamaalelagi and the Tongan princess Vaetoefaga. Salamāsina became the first Tafa’ifā, the sovereign who would hold the four paramount titles and have jurisdiction over all the districts of ‘Upolu and their affiliates from the other islands.9 For at least five hundred years since her reign, her heirs have held on to the titles, albeit none has held all four since Mālietoa Vainu’upō, the paramount chief or king of Sāmoa who embraced John Williams and Christianity in 1830. During Salamāsina’s reign, Sāmoa experienced relative peace. Whether one’s immediate Sāmoan lineage is traced to either American Sāmoa or the Independent State of Sāmoa, nineteenth-century ethnology indicates a genealogical webbing of relatives across the archipelago; thus, it is safe to say that every Sāmoan has blood connections to the above women and others from the mythical past.10 Sāmoan American women in politics, community organizing,

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university faculties, medical professions, sports, and the arts continue age-old roles, responsibilities, and legacies. But perhaps the ancestral model that is constantly in the minds of Sāmoans is Sināleana, whom I credit with giving us our work ethics, the blueprint of how we carry out our roles and responsibilities.

E au le ina’ilau a tama’ita’i: The Women’s Thatches Will Always Reach the Rooftop—Ancestral Work Ethics The model for work ethics and principles originated in a cave at the border of Faleālupo and Tufutāfoe on the island of Savai’i. There, Sināleana (hereafter Sina) and her āualuma, organization of the sisters and daughters of a village, challenged a suitor of the chiefly class and his ‘aumaga, organization of brothers and sons,11 to a thatching contest whose object was to cover the dome-shaped roof of Sina’s new house with thatches the following day.12 Using sugarcane leaves, each group would thatch half of the dome-shaped roof before sunset. If the visitors won, they would take Sina with them; if they lost, they would be killed. The men did not know, however, that the sun did not linger along the horizon when it reached Sina’s village but immediately sank into the waves, rays and all, instantly pitching the island into complete darkness. The women arose at sunrise and worked quickly to complete the thatching on their half of the roof. By the time the men awoke, the women were halfway up the dome, and before the sun sank, they had reached the top before the men. Sināleana won, and news of the men’s fate spread quickly across the Sāmoan Islands. Since then, women have been reminded that against all odds and barring extreme circumstances, they would always reach the ultimate top; they would always strive to achieve their goals.13

Contemporary Thatchers Today, Sāmoan architecture is a mixture of traditional and modern materials. Sugarcane-thatched roofs are a thing of the past, replaced by tin or tiles, yet the metaphor of thatching as a model of women’s work ethic, that is, ina’ilau a tama’ita’i, continues. With urban migration for jobs in both public and private sectors, village girls no longer plant sugarcane patches, flax, or mulberry bushes. Formal education and the lure of “clean” jobs reduced the number of women who could still weave different kinds of mats or make siapo, or tapa cloth. Other rooftops (akin to a glass ceiling) have beckoned, and Sāmoans are very proud when one of their own breaks mainstream barriers and reaches the top competently. Anecdotal data suggests that the ina’ilau a tama’ita’i is obvious when at least one Sāmoan woman is educated and achieves a position often regarded by mainstream society as unreachable by us even if the number who do so is demographically small compared to other groups. For instance, Tulsi Gabbard became the first Sāmoan American member of the US Congress when she was

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elected in 2012 as the US representative for the Second Congressional District of Hawai‘i, and in 2014 ‘Aumua Amata Coleman Raddewagon of American Sāmoa became the first woman elected as delegate to the US Congress from American Sāmoa. The life stories of other contemporary thatchers that follow illustrate how traditional values and hunger for a better future for their families continue to guide Sāmoan American woman.14

My Story I was born in America Sāmoa but raised in (Western) Sāmoa. The accident of my birth allowed for a smooth entrance to Hawai‘i for graduate school. I arrived in Honolulu on August 16, 1986, a bright-eyed and eager thirty-something armed with an East-West Center (EWC) scholarship for graduate school at the University of Hawai‘i’s College of Education. I found the EWC to be a microcosm of the world and was honored and humbled to be among many amazing scholars from the United States, Asia, and the Pacific. I sensed a brighter future for myself and my three children. My plan was simply to get the graduate degree and return home to take care of my children and two aging parents. I was dating my second husband at the time, and when my family joined us in the summer of 1987, we were married, but for a variety of reasons, the plan changed, and the return home was forgotten. Such serendipitous decisions had unintended consequences, some joyful, others challenging. My husband and I were both EWC students, and our stipends were barely enough for seven people. Fortunately, my teaching credentials came in handy, and I was able to find gainful employment with companies marketing technical assistance to education institutions across the American Pacific. Then there was the immigration challenge. Thankfully, I was a US national, and applying for naturalization was quite effortless. My children automatically became US citizens, and my parents got their green cards three years later. My husband was in a doctoral program, thus he did not have much earning power. Nonetheless, I managed to earn a decent salary when I graduated in order for us to find an affordable rental in Hawai‘i Kai on the island of O‘ahu, where we would welcome an addition to our family, a precious baby girl. Sadly, seven years after moving to Hawai‘i, my father passed away. In 1996, we moved to our own house in Kaneohe. Today, I am an associate professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, all the children are dispersed across the US continent and New Zealand, the second marriage ended, and only my mother and I remain in our residence in windward O‘ahu. America is now home for these reasons: first, pragmatics dictate that in spite of the high cost of living in the fiftieth state, the weather is ideal for two aging women; second, old age comes with multiple chronic ailments, and neither American Sāmoa nor Sāmoa has appropriate medical facilities to accommodate

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our health issues; finally, we and Sāmoa have all undergone numerous changes, some of which are incompatible with each other’s current psyches. Sāmoa will always be home in our hearts, but Hawai‘i is the residence that best meets our needs and wants, a place where we can be both Sāmoan and American. Of the former, my mother and I are actively involved in fa’alavelave, or obligatory economics, in Sāmoa and Hawai‘i. The adjustment to life on O’ahu was also riddled with psychological and social challenges. For me, in particular, the biggest barrier I had to break through was being essentialized as nothing but a stereotypical Sāmoan—fat, stupid, and violent—despite my graduate degrees and my university faculty position. It was difficult to stay calm in the face of frontal attacks, but what was most frustrating was when my colleagues talked past and above me, all the while smiling through it. If there was an even bigger challenge for me, it was that of sustaining the will not to be lured into self-fulfilling prophesies and become guilty as charged. As a member of a minority group labeled by education, health, social work, legal research, and the media as at risk and delinquent, being Sāmoan in Hawai‘i in the final decades of the twentieth century was challenging and nothing to write home about, especially during my early years there. I was able to confront these challenges through my poetry: Tofiga Carved in predestination, a tofiga leaves home in search of altruistic riches. S/he carries the burden of a high school diploma, and crosses Mother Ocean into the crispness of a wintery Honolulu dawn. But s/he’s too late for the tradewinds. Kilauea vog palls. The variable kona winds entangle. Rain falls and turns kona dust to clay— And the dream into a simmering delusion.15

In spite of the stereotypes against Sāmoans, my mother and I managed to rise above them by working harder. We were teachers by trade, and finding teaching or education-related jobs was not difficult. In the 1980s, the University of Hawai‘i’s Sāmoan program welcomed my mother, ‘Aumua Mata’itusi Simanu, as a lecturer to teach Sāmoan respect and ceremonial languages, a position she held for more than twenty years until retirement at age ninety-two in 2013. At the same time, I landed jobs with nonprofit organizations serving the educational needs of the American Pacific and later earned a doctorate in Pacific history and became a faculty member at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, teaching

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Sāmoan literature, respect and ceremonial languages, and history, with many publications in the field. In other words, we, as migrant and immigrant women fresh off the plane about thirty years ago, arrived with the appropriate tools to adapt to a new landscape. As a career educator, I have managed to raise a family, obtain a doctoral degree in history, survive a divorce, and succeed in achieving tenure with promotion to associate professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. There are many Sāmoan women like me who have achieved academically and professionally, and some have done so through grit and love of family; their stories portray a successful juxtaposition of Fa’asāmoa and Fa’a’amerika, the American Way, in their pursuit of a better future for themselves and their families.

Susie Ruta O’Brien Alofaituli I met Susie Ruta O’Brien Alofaituli through her son Brian Alofaituli, who was doing doctoral studies in history at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He willingly agreed to share his mother’s story for this publication. Susie confirmed the inclusion below when she traveled to Honolulu for Brian’s dissertation defense in April 2017 and graduation in December of the same year. Susie left American Sāmoa for San Francisco in the early 1970s with the goals of completing high school and getting a college education. At age twenty, she left San Francisco State University to start a family with her husband. As her son Brian Alofaituli shared, her mother claimed that “getting married too early was a ‘bad idea.’” Nonetheless, she remained married for more than forty years, and she struggled through it, taking care of a family that included many of her husband’s relatives. It was not the life she had imagined, but her strong faith in God and the female models from her family helped her plan a future for her children. Susie is of Sāmoan and Tuvaluan origins—her mother was from Aunu’u, but she grew up a proud Sāmoan girl in the village of Fagatogo in American Sāmoa; her father was from Funafuti, Tuvalu. She and her husband were founding members of the Sāmoan Congregational Christian Church in Carson, California. Her love of reading and motivation to seek more income to support a growing family resulted in self-study to become a real estate agent. She could not afford to attend real estate classes, but she succeeded in obtaining a license, and in no time, she bought a house and was instrumental in helping her congregation purchase property. She left real estate to work in manufacturing and sales and was mentored by the owner of a small sign company. Susie eventually climbed the corporate ladder and became president of a popular sign company. Today she is the proud owner of Quality Image, Inc. When I met Susie at Brian’s dissertation defense, she was exactly as I had imagined her from her son’s description. She walked and talked with confidence and courage. She hosted a postdefense gathering on Brian’s behalf that was a

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combination of traditional Sāmoan protocol and champagne. Proud of her son’s achievement, she spared no resources to show her and her family’s appreciation of our support for him. It was at this function that I thanked her for sharing her life story. Apparently, her journey as CEO of her company was not easy, particularly since she was, as she said, “the only woman president in the sign industry at the time, and men hated me. But they learned to respect me because of my business knowledge and the fact that I would finance them when they struggled.” Susie claims that it took her about thirty years for her American dream to come true and that it required hard work, family, endless prayers, and God. Her résumé also includes being a board member of the National Office of Sāmoan Affairs as well as the City of Carson Finance Board; she also provides advice and shares her expertise to help local Sāmoan churches and businesses. Additionally, Susie hopes to hire more women in her company. “Through it all,” she reiterates, she has stayed committed to “God, Fa’asāmoa, her husband, and investing in [her] children.” Susie hopes to return to college and complete the degree that she started many years ago.

Galumalemana Vao’au Leītuala Taiā’opo Tuimaleali’ifano Galumalemana Vao’au Leītuala Taiā’opo Tuimaleali’ifano (hereafter Taiā’opo) is the daughter of what Sāmoans call Tama a ‘Āiga, a title akin to that of a king or duke in British society.16 In America, however, no one cares what one was in the old country; what counts is that one is willing to restart without the comforts of status, rank, or wealth prior to arrival. Taiā’opo arrived in Hawai‘i in the early 1980s, young and single, with a passion to succeed and help her family back home. She found employment in the food industry. Later that decade, she met ‘Aumua Mata’itusi Simanu, a lecturer at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. The older lady provided her with genealogical links and an apprenticeship on ceremonial language and culture. ‘Aumua became familiar with the Sāmoan community in Hawai‘i through Taiā’opo’s eyes, and Taiā’opo apprenticed with ‘Aumua, learning how to use Sāmoan respect, ceremonial language, and culture. They traveled together through the community, and she soon gained the respect of the male chiefs. She and ‘Aumua were a force with their creative oratory, courage, and generosity. At the same time, she was mapping herself into local politics and business. In the early 2000s, Taiā’opo joined Linda Lingle’s campaign for governor of Hawai‘i. Lingle soon noticed Taiā’opo’s leadership and community-organizing skills by her successful organization of rallies and get-out-the-vote drives in the Sāmoan community. Lingle became governor for two terms from 2002 to 2010, and once in office, she appointed Taiā’opo as a commissioner on the State Housing Board. Governor Lingle has long been gone from Hawai‘i, but Taiā’opo is still employed in the State Housing Department, where she has become a force in

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bridging the gaps between housing personnel and tenants. There, she has shown non-Sāmoan staff a different approach to helping low-income people; she was herself a former tenant at Kam IV Housing until she was able to afford lodgings elsewhere. In a recent conversation, she claimed that she measured her success through how frequently she was stopped by tenants who thanked her for helping them resolve their housing issues with the state. She is the first Sāmoan to work in such a post in the state government, and she proudly shares multiple moments when she has had to insist that the staff treat people of different ethnicities and national origins humanely. At the same time, she has challenged the expertise of degree holders regarding how to treat staff and clients. At sixty-seven years of age, Taiā’opo travels to and from Sāmoa to attend to family fa’alavelave, or obligations. She has an entrepreneurial spirit and is sought after for advice by other Tama a ‘Āiga. She lives by example and is often a leader in meeting public expectations of people of royal status. Her roles as government employee on the one hand and as chief on the other have placed her in the midst of government and grassroots events. Her 2017 trip to Sāmoa was to organize her huge extended-family gathering for the swearing in of her cousin Tuimaleali’ifano Va’aleto’a Sualauvi II as Sāmoa’s new head of state. To the ‘Āiga Tauā’ana, he is the Tama a ‘Āiga, and Taiā’opo’s role at the affair was as the feagaiga, managing the feasting and gifting on behalf of the brother and the whole family.17 While Taiā’opo might have started in semiskilled employment, her commitment to family and nation urged her forward and made possible a success story that is appreciated by many Sāmoans and others.

Tōfā ‘Aumua Mata’itusi Simanu Generally, visitors to the United States from foreign countries can stay for a limited time.18 This was not the case with ‘Aumua Mata’itusi Simanu, who is my mother and who traveled with my children to Hawai‘i in the summer of 1987 for a vacation. Thirty years later, she is still in Hawai‘i and celebrated her ninetyeighth birthday in February 2019. A retired educator from (Western) Sāmoa, ‘Aumua was still strong enough in her late sixties to come out of retirement and work again to support our family. She thrived as a lecturer of Sāmoan respect and ceremonial languages at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa until retirement in 2013 at age ninety-two. The extent of her education was as a teacher trainee in Sāmoa at the outbreak of World War II, and under the New Zealand administration, she became a pioneer, blazing the trail for leadership positions for women in the education department. She was the first woman to become a school principal in (Western) Sāmoa and the first to become a school inspector. She worked at the Department of Economics in the Sāmoan government after retirement and would have become the first female judge for lands and titles had the courts not urged her to get a matai, or

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Figure 9.1. Photo of author, M. Luafata Simanu-Klutz, and her mother, ‘Aumua Mata’itusi Simanu, in 2002. Courtesy of author.

chiefly title, higher than the one she was currently holding. Her response to this prejudicial suggestion was to take a vacation in Hawai‘i. Our family did not intend to stay in America, but plans changed, and she realized that she needed to work to help us with living expenses. ‘Aumua trained many Sāmoan sons and daughters from American Sāmoa and Hawai‘i on language and culture. She published three books, which have become classics that are sought after by Sāmoans globally: Sāmoan Wordbook, O si Manu a Ali’i: A Text for Advanced Study of Sāmoan Language and Culture, and O Fāiā Fa’atūmua o Sāmoa mai Tala o le Vavau.19 Perhaps just as significant has been her ability to transform many matai, traditional chiefs, into a more informed and skilled group both in oratory and in facilitating culture. Yet she was often alienated by her male counterparts. ‘Aumua was not deterred, and in her gentle voice and deep knowledge of the Fa’amatai (chiefly system) she wore her teacher’s hat and instructed even the most cynical of men. Across her thirty years in Hawai‘i, she has received resolutions and accolades from the State Senate, Honolulu’s city and county mayor, and university leaders for her significant contributions to the Sāmoan and University of Hawai‘i

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communities. While her rank at the university never improved—she remained a nine-month lecturer—she produced her internationally acclaimed publications and taught according to her calling. She did not need a degree to work since her expertise derived from having lived life as a Sāmoan in both Sāmoa and Hawai‘i. To her, the ina’ilau a tama’ita’i is invaluable. It is what has also made her a dedicated voter who has not missed an election since becoming a naturalized citizen in the early 1990s. ‘Aumua lives with me in Kaneohe, and she is still writing books and attending church when her frail body allows. Yet far be it from me to create an impression that our family is unique. Many an immigrant from Sāmoa since the mass migration in the 1950s arrived with basic knowledge of English and Sāmoan and a clear understanding that moving to the United States was to achieve a “better” future for the family in both America and Sāmoa. For the first and second generations particularly, this is an obligation that must be met at all times and at all costs. From a Sāmoan traditional perspective, success in the diaspora does not mean achieving a middleclass and individualistic existence; it means understanding both cultural systems in terms of context, tools, and resources to share with family in Sāmoa. This would be achieved with attributes such as alofa (love), fa’amāoni (honesty), and lototele (courage).20 What this means is that one does not have to exchange one’s ethnic belief system for a national one; rather, one can synchronize the best of both. ‘Aumua and I demonstrate how our skills in teaching and knowledge of both the contents and contexts of the literature and oral traditions in both English and Sāmoan made our adjustment to American life possible. In this mix has been a belief in ancestral knowledge and traditions as blueprints of certain skills and processes such as the ina’ilau a tama’ita’i, ladies’ proverbial work ethic with origins in a thatching competition between men and women.

Who or What, Then, Is a Sāmoan American Woman? Discussion and Reflections The life stories of four women in this chapter illustrate that a Sāmoan American woman may be American Sāmoan, Western Sāmoan, or local US born. Susie, Taiā’opo, and ‘Aumua are models of how one does not have to be distracted from living in a multicultural society by being purist and dogmatic about one’s ethnic identity or become reduced in stature and validity by being different. Rather, the Sāmoan American woman, like her counterparts from other groups, is someone who cannot be explained and compared in binary terms; she is neither traditional nor Western but a composite of multiple pasts. She may be multiethnic and multiracial, rural or urban raised, foreign or local born, homemaker or career woman, church deacon or average church member, wife, mother, sister, daughter, or granddaughter. She is also modern in terms of what she wears, eats, and is contracted to do. As a member of a family to which she is obligated

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from birth, her successes belong to the collective; her failures become a collective embarrassment, and her tragedies are everyone’s responsibilities. When she receives an award, it is Sāmoa’s award. When she travels far and near, she is imprinted as a daughter and sister of her parents and brothers, respectively. She may be from American Sāmoa, Sāmoa— the independent islands that were formerly a serial colony of Germany and New Zealand—or American born and raised as a member of the second, third, or fourth generation in the United States. A Sāmoan American woman can be a citizen through birth or naturalization, a permanent resident with green card status, or a US national. And although a US national does not have the right to vote in local and national elections, she is still a Sāmoan American in my view since she has access to all the other rights (protected under the United States Constitution) and has decided to set up house in the states.21 Acclaimed Sāmoan poet, novelist, and scholar Albert Wendt, muses that “inside us [is] the dead,”22 no matter the place and time; in other words, the ancestors are in our psyches whether we like it or not. For Sāmoan daughters, sisters, and mothers, our “-ness” is our psyche embedded in our obligation to serve the family first and foremost. Sāmoa’s women are socialized from the moment of consciousness that their bonds to parents and siblings are an assurance, or insurance, that in a reciprocal sense, sharing resources when one is in need will ensure support at a later time. Regardless of our modern composition genetically or socially, as long as we have been touched by Fa’asāmoa, the Sāmoan way, we are compelled. Many of us who married or are still married to non-Sāmoans can speak to this as a key reason why breakups occur, since to care for just one’s husband and children is to die multiple deaths of guilt and shame when not participating at times of fa’alavelave, obligatory events, when we must share resources, meager as they may be, with relatives in need. It is not a myth that in places where there are high concentrations of Sāmoans, many factors have contributed to certain negative perceptions, which to a large extent have kept many men and women from higher education or gainful employment. Yet spend some time at a church compound on Sunday, and you may find a congregation of multiple generations of Sāmoans worshipping, eating, and planning together in comfort and cheer; women are seen as the movers and shakers in decision-making and are responsible for keeping the church running regardless of any position up, down, or across the hierarchy. For these women, internal and external oppression from within their gender, ethnic, or religious groups on the one hand and from the institutions of learning and work on the other could not distract them from the fulfillment of their roles and responsibilities that were established in antiquity as fai’oa (creators of family wealth) and pae ma le ‘āuli (peacemakers and keepers of kin reputations and obligations) as measured largely by their ability to meet their filial and affinal obligations. I take a tack that suggests that by seeking knowledge of what

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constitutes the collective body or psyche of a people, stereotypes may be avoided, and perhaps, in the final analysis, perpetual issues or problems may be more the result of negative stereotypes rather than actual beliefs and practices of a certain people. It is against statistical truths that the stories in this chapter are provided; for this I am unapologetic simply because the negative research about Sāmoans obfuscates the multiple success stories. For this chapter, I insist that anecdotal narratives or life stories are so much more representative of truth at the grass roots. Most of the Sāmoans in America have managed to defy stereotypes. It is a privilege to participate in this venture to give voice to the wonderful achievements of Sāmoan American women that have gone unnoticed or were masked by social science, medical, educational, and legal research that often reduces smaller minority groups into negative soundbites such as “at-risk” populations with high rates of “juvenile delinquency,” “incarceration,” or high school “dropouts.” However, the most important factor, which is often ignored or unthought of, is that these women reflect a balanced manifestation of both Sāmoan and American values and work ethics. Notes

1 See my dissertation, “A Malu i Fale, ‘E Malu Fo’i i Fafo, Sāmoan Women and Power: Towards an Historiography of Changes and Continuities in Power Relations in le Nu’u o Teine of Sāoluafata 1350–1998 CE” (PhD diss., University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2011). 2 For a comprehensive understanding of Sāmoan indigenous references, see Tamasa’ilau M. Suaali’i-Sauni et al., eds., Su’esu’e Manogi: In Search of Fragrance: Tui Ātua, Tupua Tamasese Tupuola Efi and the Samoan Indigenous Reference (Apia: Center for Samoan Studies, National University of Samoa, 2009). 3 See Robert W. Franco, Sāmoans in Hawaii: A Demographic Profile (Honolulu: East-West Population Institute, East-West Center, 1987). 4 I found LinkedIn, www.linkedin.com, to be an excellent site for finding women I knew or had heard of. 5 For an eye-witness account of the advent of Christianity in Sāmoa, see John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands (London: J. Snow, 1837). 6 City Population, www.citypopulation.de. 7 World Population View, http://worldpopulationreview.com. 8 In Sāmoan lāuga, the orator’s farewell at the end of the speech bids the audience or participants a safe trip home by recalling a saying or adage memorializing a similar parting in the Vavau, or Sāmoan antiquity. 9 It is unlikely that all the heirs to the four titles agreed with this development; this was probably the first time that had happened since Pili’s geopolitical division of ‘Upolu into the districts of Ātua, Ā’ana, and Tuamāsaga. 10 For a detailed study of Sāmoa’s genealogies and mythical past, see Augustin Krämer, The Sāmoa Islands: An Outline of a Monograph with Particular Consideration of German Sāmoa: Constitution, Pedigrees and Traditions, trans. Theodore Verhaaren, reprint (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000). For Salamāsina’s fictionalized history, see Augustin Krämer, Salamāsina: Scenes from Ancient Sāmoan History and Culture, trans. Brother Herman (1923; Pago Pago, American Sāmoa: Association of the Marist Brothers’ Old Boys, 1958).

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11 Led by the sa’o’aumaga, high chief ’s brother or son, as leader of the untitled men’s organization. 12 A thatch is a roofing material made of sugarcane leaves bent over a three- to four-inch-long wooden rod. It was the women’s job to make the roofing materials while the young men and, in some cases, young women attached them with sennit line by line going up to the rooftop. 13 See my poem “On Being Samoan, On Being Woman (E au pea le Ina’ilau a Tama’ita’i),” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23, no. 2 (2002): 19–21. Other literary representations of Sāmoan women include Sia Figiel’s award-winning book Where We Once Belonged and Lani Wendt-Young’s Telesā trilogy. 14 I call these narratives life stories rather than oral histories to reflect a personal preference. I first learned of this genre of stories from an anthology housing stories of women as mothers and sisters in their families in Sāmoa. See Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop, ed., Tamaitai Samoa: Their Stories (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1998). 15 This is a revised version. The original was published in Nora Schubert Kanemura and Evelyn Wong, eds., Tatou Tusitala, Let’s Write Stories: An Anthology of Samoan Writings 1, no. 1 (Honolulu: Sāmoa Fealofani Club, 1998). Here, the subject was a male. I’ve included both genders as indicated by “s/he” pronoun. “Tofiga,” /tɘh finga’/, means the person chosen by family or parents to carry out certain roles or duties. 16 To prepare this story, Taiā’opo lodged with us one night a week for a few weeks. 17 The head of state is technically Taia’opo’s cousin, however, any male relative is referred to as a brother. The technical equivalence is tausoga/tow (as in how) + songa, which is akin to brotherhood or sisterhood but gender neutral, and it is certainly more inclusive to refer to a male cousin as brother and a female one as a sister. 18 I wrote her life story for an MA in Pacific Islands studies at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2001 when she was eighty years old. At the time of writing this chapter, she is ninety-eight. 19 ‘Aumua Mata’itusi Simanu and M. Luafata Simanu-Klutz, Sāmoan Wordbook, ill. Regina Meredith Malala (Honolulu: Bess, 1998); Simanu, O Si Manu A Ali’i: A Text for the Advanced Study of Sāmoan Language and Culture (Honolulu: Pasifika/University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002); Simanu, O Fāiā Fa’atūmua o Sāmoa mai i Tala o le Vavau (Honolulu: National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2011). 20 ‘Aumua Mata’itusi Simanu popularized this with her students at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and recently through a video conversation about Sāmoa’s feagaiga, or sacred covenant. It is available at BreadfruitOpenSpaces, “The Feagaiga,” YouTube, August 8, 2016, video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWC0BkbXCFw. 21 She can become a citizen if she resides in the United States for six consecutive months. 22 Albert Wendt, Inside Us the Dead: Poems 1961–1974 (Auckland, New Zealand: Longman Paul, 1976); also available at www.poemhunter.com.

Part IV Wartimes and Aftermath

Since the 1890s, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been enveloped in wars, empire, militarization, and colonial occupations that include the Philippines, World War I, World War II, Korea, Southeast Asia, and various Pacific Islands, illustrating the global dimension of their histories. As a consequence, new arrivals to America as war brides, immigrants, and refugees significantly impacted US society and changed national and ethnic group demographics. Part IV covers the post–World War II era to the early twenty-first century. Three chapters provide fresh views of the consciousness, experiences, and activities of different ethnic groups of Asian American women and the intersectionality of gender and generations with a focus on the aftermath and legacies of World War II and US wars in Southeast Asia. They also show aspects of their lives that the women hold in common, especially their resilience in surviving, their agency in remaking their lives, and their activism for racial and gender equity in US society and their own communities. While World War II was being fought in Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, Japanese Americans on the West Coast, two-thirds of whom were US citizens, were incarcerated from 1942 to 1945 without due process by the US government. Alice Yang’s chapter features the perspectives, voices, and actions of Japanese American Nisei women in their work in the 1980s civil liberties campaign to obtain redress for the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Finding their voices following mass incarceration and during the 1960s and 1970s social movements in the United States, they fought for redress with their testimonies, letters, and political mobilization. Nisei women also denounced stereotypes within their ethnic organizations and in greater US society that restricted women’s leadership roles. They continue to protest racial profiling and work to ensure civil liberties for all in the post-9/11 era. Yến Lê Espiritu assesses the legacy of the US wars in Southeast Asia from the perspectives of Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese women as they engaged in creative forms of survival and resistance during wartime, in refugee camps, and in resettlement. Faced with the destruction of their daily lives and families as well as dislocation, the women exercised their agency, flexibility, and skills to create new worlds, meanings, and opportunities for themselves and their families. Their stories share both their hidden and overt injuries from displacement and other losses and their joy in persisting through unspeakable hardships and everyday survival practices. 171

Part IV Wartimes and Aftermath

Since the 1890s, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been enveloped in wars, empire, militarization, and colonial occupations that include the Philippines, World War I, World War II, Korea, Southeast Asia, and various Pacific Islands, illustrating the global dimension of their histories. As a consequence, new arrivals to America as war brides, immigrants, and refugees significantly impacted US society and changed national and ethnic group demographics. Part IV covers the post–World War II era to the early twenty-first century. Three chapters provide fresh views of the consciousness, experiences, and activities of different ethnic groups of Asian American women and the intersectionality of gender and generations with a focus on the aftermath and legacies of World War II and US wars in Southeast Asia. They also show aspects of their lives that the women hold in common, especially their resilience in surviving, their agency in remaking their lives, and their activism for racial and gender equity in US society and their own communities. While World War II was being fought in Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, Japanese Americans on the West Coast, two-thirds of whom were US citizens, were incarcerated from 1942 to 1945 without due process by the US government. Alice Yang’s chapter features the perspectives, voices, and actions of Japanese American Nisei women in their work in the 1980s civil liberties campaign to obtain redress for the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Finding their voices following mass incarceration and during the 1960s and 1970s social movements in the United States, they fought for redress with their testimonies, letters, and political mobilization. Nisei women also denounced stereotypes within their ethnic organizations and in greater US society that restricted women’s leadership roles. They continue to protest racial profiling and work to ensure civil liberties for all in the post-9/11 era. Yến Lê Espiritu assesses the legacy of the US wars in Southeast Asia from the perspectives of Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese women as they engaged in creative forms of survival and resistance during wartime, in refugee camps, and in resettlement. Faced with the destruction of their daily lives and families as well as dislocation, the women exercised their agency, flexibility, and skills to create new worlds, meanings, and opportunities for themselves and their families. Their stories share both their hidden and overt injuries from displacement and other losses and their joy in persisting through unspeakable hardships and everyday survival practices. 171

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Linda Trinh Võ examines the resistance and resilience of six 1.5-generation Vietnamese American women who grew up in Southern California with new opportunities gained from their mothers’ generation but who now bear the family legacy of wartime and resettlement. Engaged in new professions, they gain motivation and support from their parents’ and grandparents’ struggles, hopes, and sacrifices and in their Vietnamese culture. As a new generation of leaders in the Vietnamese American community, they experience criticism based on conflicting political differences as well as gender and generational expectations from their families, their communities, and US society while also gaining admiration for their accomplishments. Part IV highlights women’s wartime and postwartime agency to survive, whether in the United States or Southeast Asia. It also focuses on immigrant, 1.5and second-generation women’s activities and experiences. The chapters reveal that the passing of time, alternative opportunities, and generational experiences inform women’s perspectives, initiatives, and choices and provide for a reassessment of their gains and losses. In seeking redress; confronting displacement, resettlement, and trauma; and resisting other injustices, the chapters discuss women inventing new lives and identities through innovative forms of activism and professional pursuits that also reflect their cultural heritage and support their ethnic communities.

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Memories of Mass Incarceration Mobilizing Japanese American Women for Redress and Beyond Alice Yang

In 1981, Merry Fujihara Omori told a US federal commission investigating the causes and consequences of Japanese American mass incarceration about the pain she still felt after being unjustly imprisoned during World War II.1 Omori, who had been confined at the age of thirteen, denounced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for imprisoning her behind barbed wire for the crime of being “born an American of Japanese descent.” Omori explained, “The reason for my removal to a concentration camp was not a question of national security.” Rather, she declared, “Military necessity was a convenient excuse” for “racial discrimination, overtly practiced and fully sanctioned by a government sworn to protect the rights of all its citizens, regardless of race, color or creed.” She continued, “Not only did the government fail to protect my rights, but they saw fit to take them away.” Forty years later, Omori demanded government redress for Japanese Americans’ wartime suffering and the violation of their civil liberties.2 Omori was one of hundreds of Nikkei (individuals of Japanese ancestry) who testified at these hearings, many for the first time, about the legacy of mass incarceration and the need for redress. They publicly recounted how the camps uprooted communities, ripped apart families, and damaged the physical and mental health of individuals. The commission concluded that the imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, including 75,000 US citizens and immigrants ineligible for citizenship due to race-based naturalization laws, was a “grave injustice” caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”3 The commission recommended redress, and after extensive lobbying by the ethnic community, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, providing an official apology, individual payments of $20,000 to surviving former detainees, and the creation of a public education fund. Three generations participated in this campaign to obtain redress. This chapter focuses on the Nisei (second generation), specifically women like Merry Omori, and analyzes how they overcame racial and gender subordination to protest against mass incarceration. While a few women were longtime activists, many others experienced a “political awakening” during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. The civil rights, antiwar, ethnic pride, and women’s movements sparked a reevaluation of racism, sexism, and protest against the US government. Nisei 173

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women who had denied or repressed painful memories of the camps purged themselves of a sense of shame that had silenced much of the ethnic community for decades. Reflecting on the wartime ordeal ultimately proved cathartic and empowering as public accounts of family anguish and personal identity problems intensified women’s anger at the government and strengthened their commitment to the redress movement. Interviews with women activists, government testimony, and women’s voices drawn from secondary literature and memoirs shed light on how these women were mobilized to fight for redress and postredress civil rights campaigns.

Preredress Activism These Nisei women criticized how patriarchy and racism had discouraged women’s activism. They noted that immigrant parents, the Issei, often celebrated daughters for being otonashii (quiet or docile). Noriko Sawada’s mother praised “the wisteria blossoms which people admire because they hang their heads low” and warned her that people would spit on her if she acted like a peony and held her head up high.4 Rose Ochi’s mother thought it was “unbecoming for a lady to show that she has brains and to be so outspoken.” Ochi’s mother warned her that if she went to college “no one would want to marry her and her life would be a waste.”5 This emphasis on silent and obedient daughters, poet Mitsuye Yamada noted, often “conditioned” women to choose “invisibility” over confrontation.6 Some notable women, however, refused to abide by patriarchal constraints and publicly denounced mass incarceration during the war. Caryl Omura, along with her husband, James, contested the constitutionality of mass removal at the 1942 Tolan Committee hearings.7 Shizuko Shiramizu, the Nisei widow of a sergeant killed in Italy, filed a 1944 suit challenging continued exclusion from the West Coast and argued that authorities could not claim that Japanese Americans posed a military danger. She rejected a government exemption because she wanted to “restore the rights of her race which she felt had been improperly taken away.” While the exemption made the case moot, the publicity surrounding Shiramizu’s settlement forced officials to formulate a policy to end exclusion. Mitsuye Endo then successfully tested the legality of continued exclusion in a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, declaring she was a law-abiding and loyal citizen who had been held illegally and against her will. Endo also could have left camp earlier but refused to accept the restrictive conditions attached to an application for “indefinite leave.” The Supreme Court rewarded Endo’s perseverance by affirming in December 1944 her right to move freely throughout the United States.8 Other Nisei women participated in debates about the controversial 1943 loyalty questionnaire that officials designed to recruit Japanese Americans for the military and to facilitate leaving camp. Question 27 asked whether they would

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serve on combat duty or in other ways while question 28 asked them to “swear unqualified allegiance” and “forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor.”9 Some women responded “no” and “no” to protest civil liberties violations or to keep the family together. After joining the progressive Nisei Young Democrats and studying Nazi fascism and Japanese militarism, Chizu Iiyama decided to respond “yes” and “yes” even though she recognized the injustice of her incarceration at Topaz. While she understood why some Japanese Americans would protest the violation of their civil liberties by becoming “no-nos,” she became concerned that some angry men at a camp block meeting were coercing people into replying “no-no.” Urging people to think about how their responses would affect their future plans in either the United States or Japan, Iiyama caused pandemonium by daring to present an alternative view. One man blamed her father for sending her to college so that she might “think she knows something.” While others gave her sympathetic nods or told her they were glad she had spoken, no one supported her in public, and some suggested they beat her up or even kill her. Ostracized because of her outspokenness, she had to eat at her brother-in-law’s block because her own block’s kitchen staff refused to serve her.10 Consequently, Iiyama left camp at the first opportunity and moved to Chicago and then to New York. Becoming a political and civil rights activist while raising her children, she helped organize the Nisei for Wallace campaign in 1947 to support Henry Wallace as the Progressive Party presidential candidate. She joined a “beach-in” to desegregate a Lake Michigan beach, participated in poll-watching and door-to-door canvassing, petitioned against the nuclear arms race, and picketed stores that refused to hire minorities.11 This political experience laid a basis for her grassroots redress activism as she spoke publicly about her camp experiences, petitioned and wrote letters, and lobbied members of Congress. Aki Kurose, another nontraditional Nisei, was raised by a mother who supervised an apartment house and managed the apartment’s boiler room. Aki’s father worked as a porter, and on the weekends he made jelly rolls for their African American, Chinese, and Jewish neighbors in Seattle. After leaving camp to attend a Quaker college, she returned to Seattle, became an activist within the Congress of Racial Equality, and campaigned for black employment and fair housing. Influenced by her pacifist parents, she also joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, enrolled her six children in a Freedom School, participated in civil rights and antiwar demonstrations, and became a redress activist in the 1980s. In 1999, one year after her death, Seattle honored her legacy as a peace activist and a teacher of nonviolence and social justice by renaming a middle school after her.12 Yuri Kochiyama became the most famous Nisei woman activist of the 1960s after Life magazine photographed her cradling Malcolm X’s head as he lay dying in 1965. After leaving camp, Kochiyama had moved to Harlem, organized school

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boycotts to improve inner-city education, and protested discrimination against African American and Puerto Rican construction workers. She became friends with Malcolm X, attended his Organization of Afro-American Unity Liberation School, and was in the audience when he was shot. After his death, she worked with other militant black nationalist groups such as the Republic of New Africa, protested against imperialism and militarism in Vietnam, became a leader of the Asian American movement, and campaigned for the release of political prisoners. In 1981, she testified about the injustice of the mass incarceration in Washington, DC, and supported calls for black reparations.13

Impact of World War II Mass Incarceration on Women’s Postwar Opportunities Although there were a small number of activists before the 1970s, changes in family and community life during and after the war laid a foundation for women’s self-reliance and independence. Acute personnel shortages caused camps to hire college-age Nisei women as secretaries, nursing assistants, and teachers’ aids. Regulated wage rates gave men and women equal pay for the same work, causing some daughters to make more money than their parents.14 An increase in social activities and a lessening of parental control in camp, symbolized by mess hall dining replacing family meals, also fostered greater autonomy. Greater numbers of Nisei women took advantage of social and political leadership roles that were denied in predominantly white high schools. While some women remained in camp to take care of young, sick, or elderly family members, others left to pursue college and work opportunities in the Midwest and East. Many of these college students were raised by immigrant women who also were educated and independent and had worked as the family breadwinner.15 After leaving camp, many found they could get white-collar positions as clerks, typists, and stenographers.16 The number of professional Nisei women also increased between 1940 and 1950 from 4.4 percent to 9.2 percent. Employment in these sectors continued expanding during the ’50s and ’60s so that by 1970, well over half of all working Nisei women were in white-collar professional, managerial, clerical, or sales positions.17 Yet women who took advantage of these postwar educational and occupational opportunities didn’t forget the anguish that mass incarceration had inflicted on their families. More than two-thirds of the community eventually returned to the Pacific Coast, and while some reclaimed businesses and property, others discovered they had lost everything. Many Nisei women testified about their parents’ financial and emotional problems after leaving camp. Formerly proud farmers and proprietors had to accept whatever menial jobs were available, and many became gardeners. Since most Issei men were in their late fifties and sixties when they left camp, they found it particularly difficult to start over.

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Although Chiye Tomehiro found work after camp, she suffered silently as she sensed her parents’ humiliation because of their dependence on her income.18 Many Nisei women also continued encountering, both at school and at work, the pervasive racism that had forced Japanese Americans into camps. When Gladys Ishida Stone matriculated at the University of Chicago in 1944, she was interrogated for an hour by an FBI agent who was suspicious of her interest in majoring in international relations.19 Case Western Reserve along with Yale and Johns Hopkins rejected Kiyo Sato-Viacrucis’s nursing school application by explaining, “We cannot have anyone of your ancestry around the patients.” She wrote back that her brother had joined the military and was “fighting to uphold democratic principles” and she “could not understand why institutions in their standing would have such policies.” Case Western then accepted her, but when she later applied for a job at the Frontier Nursing Service, the director wrote, “People are not ready to accept foreigners.”20 In San Francisco, Noriko Sawada answered a newspaper ad for an employment agency without suspecting that they refused to hire Asian Americans. Arriving at the agency, she naively suggested, “Here’s your ad, and here I am, and aren’t we lucky?” She couldn’t understand why they kept insisting that they didn’t have any jobs available. After repeatedly showing them the ad and offering to pay ten cents for an application, she was curtly informed that her services were not wanted.21 Housing discrimination also reminded Sawada of the stigma associated with the mass incarceration. While campaigning for a 1948 initiative prohibiting restrictive covenants, she encountered a white woman who asked her whether the proposal would allow her to move into the house next door. Sawada responded by saying, “Yes. Right now, the exclusion applies to Asians, blacks, and possibly Jews. They’re allowed to live in these fine houses as servants but not as owners.” The woman then looked at her and said, “Weren’t you in one of those prison camps? I don’t want to live next door to an ex-con!”22 Such incidents prevented women like Sawada from affirming a positive ethnic identity. After the war, many Nisei, associating their Japanese heritage with the mass incarceration, attempted to “stay away from Japanese things.”23 Sawada’s fear of being identified as Japanese was exacerbated when camp officials advised internees leaving camp to avoid speaking Japanese in public, to abstain from living next door to other Japanese Americans, and to refrain from congregating in groups of more than five. Trying to hide her ancestry, she changed her name from Noriko to Nikki and married white labor activist Harry Bridges of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (one of the few unions to support the organization of returning Japanese Americans) in part because she believed a white man could “protect” her. Despite being red-baited, Sawada continued to feel more secure in her identity as “Harry Bridge’s wife” than she did as a Japanese American who had been imprisoned.24

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Sawada Bridges later spoke about this tendency to blame her ancestry for her confinement as one of the negative consequences of mass incarceration. She joined a chorus of women who described blaming themselves rather than the government for the wartime injustice. Social worker Amy Iwasaki Mass told the commission that the “pain, trauma, and stress of the incarceration experience was so overwhelming we used the psychological defense mechanisms of repression, denial, and rationalization to keep us from facing the truth.” Unable to acknowledge the government’s betrayal, many Nisei suppressed and buried “natural feelings of rage, fear, and helplessness.”25 Comparing former internees to abused children, Mass concluded that Nisei “chose the cooperative, obedient, quiet American façade” to cope with racism.26 Rose Ochi also testified about internees’ tendency to “apologize for being victims.” Characterizing Japanese Americans as the “gomen nasai people” who “tread lightly as if unwelcome,” Ochi concluded the incarceration resulted in the silencing and “castration” of the “psyche of the Japanese American people.”27

Breaking Their Silence Many activists credited the civil rights, antiwar, and ethnic pride movements of the 1960s and 1970s with helping them finally speak about the wartime suffering and with transforming their views of the incarceration. African American campaigns against segregation made Japanese Americans reevaluate the racism that had created the camps. No longer blaming themselves, they saw the mass incarceration as part of a longer history of racial discrimination. Hearing black and Latinx protesters proclaim pride in their heritage made them wonder why they had tried to assimilate and prove themselves worthy of equal treatment. Watching antiwar demonstrations led others to recognize that they could agitate for political change and hold the government accountable for the suffering they and their families had experienced. Protests by assertive Nisei women in antiwar groups like Asian Americans for Action in New York City exposed other women to study sessions and demonstrations. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga credited these activists with “turning her head around” and making her angry about US anti-Asian racism in Vietnam and in the camps.28 Then she heard Michi Nishiura Weglyn talk about her 1976 book Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps. Weglyn, a former Gila River inmate and fashion designer, debunked government claims that the camps were produced by “military necessity” and documented officials’ misconduct in developing and implementing the mass incarceration.29 The two became friends, and Weglyn encouraged Herzig-Yoshinaga to expand her research at the National Archives, which she had first begun out of curiosity about records on her family.30

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After moving to Washington, DC, and retiring as an office manager in the late 1970s, Herzig-Yoshinaga used her clerical and managerial skills to organize and index millions of document pages by date, subject, and exact location in boxes consuming nearly every inch of her home. The commission hired her and paid tribute to her and Weglyn for providing key evidence that mass exclusion and detention was motivated by racism.31 These two self-trained researchers substantiated the commission’s recommendation of $20,000 per person that became the basis for the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) proposal for legislative redress. Herzig-Yoshinaga also provided evidence for the more confrontational $27 billion class-action lawsuit by William Hohri and the National Council for Japanese American Redress, demanding $220,000 per individual, which was heard by the Supreme Court and made JACL’s legislative proposal seem a more modest alternative. She also found critical evidence and testified in the coram nobis cases that set aside the wartime convictions of Fred Korematsu in 1983 and Minoru Yasui and Gordon Hirabayashi in 1986.32 While Herzig-Yoshinaga was first inspired by antiwar protesters, other Nisei activists confronted painful memories of the incarceration because of Sansei (third-generation) activists’ persistent calls to break decades of silence.33 Sponsoring pilgrimages to camps and Day of Remembrance programs, these Sansei activists helped Nisei exhume past memories. Sue Kunitomi Embrey joined a 1969 Manzanar pilgrimage because she thought it would be an adventure to return to the site. But for a month afterward she had nightmares about the camp. Reading scholarship on the history of discrimination against Asian Americans helped Embrey come to terms with her painful past and realize “mass incarceration was not just an isolated case” but was “all due to racism.”34 The next year she became cochair of the Manzanar Committee to organize more pilgrimages, make public presentations about the mass incarceration, and campaign to make the camp a state historical landmark and then a national one.35 Mei Nakano also praised the “women’s liberation” movement for encouraging Nisei women to question traditional gender roles. There was “an emerging realization that being a wife and mother was not enough. While those were ‘sacred duties,’ they also had a duty to themselves.”36 As her children required less attention and her family achieved a more secure socioeconomic status, Nakano sought fulfillment in activities outside the home.37 She joined a growing number of Nisei women who assumed new community roles during the 1970s, volunteered in Japanese American senior centers, protested redevelopment projects in Little Tokyo, lobbied against discriminatory housing laws, participated in nuclear disarmament demonstrations, supported political candidates, and in a few cases even ran successfully for political office.38 Nakano campaigned to repeal Title II of the 1950 Internal Security Act (the Emergency Detention Act) authorizing the establishment of detention centers

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for suspected spies and saboteurs without due process. Rallying against this Cold War measure because it effectively justified the wholesale incarceration that Japanese Americans had endured, she gained valuable political experience by writing letters to representatives, distributing information, and leading workshops before the act was repealed in 1971.39 Honored by the JACL for her contributions, Nakano realized she “had some power in this world” and could fight successfully for political change. She began speaking out against government policy in Vietnam and Cambodia and talked about the injustice of mass incarceration before her son’s high school government class.40 Breaking her silence about the camps heightened Nakano’s outrage at the injustice. After students in her son’s class gave her an ovation, she dedicated herself to speaking about the camps to different community groups. As a high school library assistant, she was appalled to discover that a state-required history textbook never even mentioned the removal and incarceration while other books called the camps “relocation centers” and implied that inmates had “just moved there” for “recreational purposes.” She subsequently helped establish JACL curriculum guidelines to correct such misrepresentations. Noriko Sawada Bridges found that facing camp memories was ultimately therapeutic. Encouraged to take pride in her ethnicity and to “get back to her roots” by civil rights and antiwar activists, Sawada Bridges returned to college at the age of fifty-three. When asked to write a few stanzas of poetry about herself, she realized how much of her identity had been shaped by the ordeal of mass incarceration. Writing her poem “To Be or Not to Be, There’s No Such Option” helped release long-repressed feelings about the racist rationale of mass incarceration. Reading the poem before the commission, she communicated the identity problems and sense of rejection many Nisei experienced when America banished “my foe-tinged face” and forced them into concentration camps. Confronting memories of collective suffering caused by the incarceration and sacrifice of Nisei soldiers, “brothers” who died in battle “to gain for us Liberty already guaranteed us by the Bill of Rights,” Sawada charged that government leaders were “Dwarves—dwarfed by the size of my brothers’ Sacrifice.” Recounting both her pain and anger in poems not only helped Noriko Sawada Bridges purge a sense of shame and experience a personal catharsis, it also gave her the confidence to declare publicly her pride in her identity as a Japanese American woman.41

Activism for the Sake of Family and Community While the redress movement benefitted from women who became activists before the 1980s, it also stimulated a transformation among more traditional women and helped to reconfigure Japanese American politics, culture, and community. Many women who might have hesitated to assume a political role for themselves as individuals felt compelled to support the campaign for the sake

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of other family members or the ethnic community. Anthropologist Sylvia Junko Yanagisako has noted that Nisei sex role constructs assigned males to the economic and political domain and assigned females to the domestic and affective domain.42 Responsible for organizing family gatherings and maintaining communication between kin, Japanese American women were thus more likely to be familiar with the pain that mass incarceration had caused family members and were natural candidates to vindicate individual family members and redeem family honor by attacking the injustice of the mass incarceration. While many women activists were initially afraid of appearing in public, anger at the way family members, particularly children, suffered during the war gave them the strength to testify before the commission. Mabel Ota testified that her daughter had been permanently injured because of negligent medical care at Poston. When her labor started one month early, Ota went to the hospital but was not examined by a doctor until twenty-eight hours later and was told he could not perform an operation (presumably a cesarean section) because there was no anesthesiologist in camp. Using “huge forceps,” the doctor had difficulty “yanking” out Ota’s baby daughter.43 After seeing a large scab on the back of her daughter’s head (which became a permanent bald spot), Ota believed her daughter suffered brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation during the delivery. Although Ota became the “first Asian woman principal in California,” she could never really savor this “success” because she constantly worried about her developmentally disabled daughter who suffered from grand mal epilepsy.44 Other women developed a “feminist consciousness” after testifying on behalf of their families. Kiku Hori Funabiki exemplified women who stepped into the public spotlight out of concern for their families and then agitated on their own behalf against both race and gender discrimination. Preparing to speak before the government forced her to “reach down and purge repressed feelings about that dark chapter.” According to Funabiki, “Writing nightly at the kitchen table allowed the emotional floodgates to open,” and she cried for the first time while remembering the FBI taking her father away in handcuffs after Pearl Harbor.45 Like other women, Funabiki found that sharing heartbreaking memories also gave her the strength to face public officials. Hearing others’ suffering moved her to write her first poem, “Silence, No More,” which she read before Congress. Funabiki’s poem described “forty years of silence” and “forty years of anger, pain, helplessness shackled in the hearts of Issei, Nisei, Kibei” (secondgeneration Japanese Americans educated in Japan). The poem explained that Japanese Americans would no longer submit to racial oppression or conform to a model-minority stereotype and demanded that the government apologize and compensate victims of mass incarceration.46 While renouncing Japanese ideals of enryo, giri, and gaman (which she defined as deference, obligation and endurance), Funabiki did not deny her ethnic heritage, but refused to subsume “immigrant” values to “American” values.

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She celebrated the “invincible human spirit” that gave Japanese immigrants the courage to survive “cruel indignities, injustice and the final humiliation of mass exile behind barbed wire for the crime of being Japanese.” Proclaiming pride in being Japanese American, Funabiki explained how her parents’ spirit of gambaru (which she translated as their willingness to fight, maintain hope, and persevere) had contributed to America by exemplifying a generation’s courage and persistence to survive great hardships.47 Exhibiting this legacy of gambaru, Funabiki warned Congress that denying financial reparations for “the flagrant breach of our constitutional rights” would “set a dangerous precedent by eliminating safeguards to future generations of Americans.”48 Funabiki and other Nisei women made vital contributions to redress by speaking about the camps, writing letters, and mobilizing social networks. Listening to testimony intensified Tsuyako Sox Kitashima’s outrage, and she “got really generated” and became an activist.49 Confident that redress could succeed if Japanese Americans “persevered and stuck together as a community,” she made her San Francisco apartment the local National Coalition for Redress and Reparations office and personally collected and mailed thousands of letters.50 As executive director of the JACL Legislative Education Committee, Grace Uyehara went outside JACL formal processes and used her personal contacts to establish an effective lobbying campaign. Her 1987 “action alerts” provided JACL members throughout the country with updates on redress progress and suggestions for letters and visits to politicians that shepherded the bill through Congress.51 Karen Narasaki, JACL’s Washington, DC, representative, also credited Cherry Kinoshita for spending “countless hours assisting me in organizing JACL’s grassroots effort” to gain redress appropriations in 1992 by lobbying the Washington state delegation and organizing a Heart Mountain reunion letter-writing campaign of almost five hundred letters.52

Denouncing Gender Discrimination Like other female civil rights activists, some Nisei women also began denouncing gender discrimination. Cherry Kinoshita lobbied for a 1978 resolution at the JACL national convention that declared “women members have encountered as great, or greater, discrimination than they find in the general community as to their capabilities, their leadership potential, and their rights and responsibilities.”53 The resolution pointed out that in 1977 there were no female national officers and that only one of twenty-three national committee chairs was female. Furthermore, only two out of eight district governors and only seventeen out of 104 presidents were women.54 While the antisexism resolution passed by a margin of 48–17, a resolution to eliminate women’s auxiliaries and to boycott states that did not pass the Equal Rights Amendment both failed.55

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The defeat of the auxiliary and ERA resolutions made more women aware of the need to change both men’s and women’s views of gender roles within the JACL. Mei Nakano and Chizu Iiyama established a Women’s Concerns Committee in March 1983 to “awaken the JACL to the realities of sexism, especially within the JACL.”56 Including three generations of women and a few men, this small group promoted dialogue about the changing role of women in the Japanese American community and in general, provided information and resources about women’s issues, and supported female candidates for local and national JACL elections.57 Embracing male leaders’ criticism of them as “radicals,” Nakano and Iiyama began writing a Pacific Citizen column calling for gender equality.58 Nakano characterized Japanese American sexism as “more deeply ingrained, more pervasive, more subtle, and therefore more pernicious and difficult to root out” than mainstream American sexism. JACL, Nakano argued, “perpetuated the notions of male superiority and dominance, making believers out of almost everybody, including women.”59 Calling for greater recognition of women’s contributions, in 1983, the committee presented skits satirizing a “typical” chapter meeting where women did all the work sponsoring an installation dinner—writing letters, calling members, and preparing food—while men took all the credit as “emcees.”60 The committee also denounced Asian mail-order bride catalogs, produced a resource directory of women’s businesses and organizations, and sponsored workshops on employment rights, sexual harassment, job discrimination, and maternity leave. In 1985 they held a conference on “confronting the trauma of relocation, sudden illness, and widowhood” and developed workshops on women’s networks and leadership styles. The committee held a 1987 conference celebrating women’s achievement in art, literature, dance, theater, and music.61 Buoyed by the positive responses of hundreds of workshop participants, the committee then sponsored a historical exhibit at the Oakland Museum honoring the “Strength and Diversity” of three generations of Japanese American women. Originally presented in 1990, the exhibit traveled throughout the country to great acclaim and was seen by thousands of people.62 In 1992, committee members and other JACL women organizers helped Lillian Kimura become the first female JACL national president and won passage of several pro-women resolutions. Losing in 1980, the outspoken Kimura had been criticized as the Bella Abzug (a famous New York Congresswoman and feminist) of JACL by Nisei men who were “scared of having women assume leadership positions.” Kimura’s 1992 acceptance speech paid tribute to the JACL women who “continued to be the backbone of the organization” and recognized many individual women for their contributions.63 The convention that elected her also adopted resolutions condemning sexual harassment, supporting family leave legislation, and championing a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. Proclaiming that women “manage more on a consensus basis,” Kimura vowed to restructure JACL as a “bottom-up organization,” sponsored workshops on racism and sexism, and helped the organization affirm support for same-sex marriage.64

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Figure 10.1. Chizu Iiyama and Kiku Hori Funabiki, members of the women’s committee that organized the “Strength and Diversity: Japanese American Women, 1885–1990” exhibit at the Oakland Museum in 1990. Photograph by Steve Murray. Permission authorized by the author.

Post-9/11 Activism Nisei women continued serving as community leaders after the government’s response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, raised fears that Muslims and people of Middle Eastern ancestry might be subjected to the same discrimination that Japanese Americans had experienced during World War II. They reminded the public about the injustice of mass incarceration to ensure that civil liberties would not be sacrificed in the name of national security. At a Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress candlelight vigil in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, Lillian Nakano proclaimed that a primary goal of redress was to ensure that such an injustice “never happens again.” Japanese Americans who “experienced that hatred and incarceration” had a “responsibility to speak out against it at every opportunity” and “to make our country and our government more sensitive and responsive in the treatment of Arab and Muslim Americans, and for that matter, to any group of people who may be singled out unjustly because of their skin color or religious belief.”65 Yuri Kochiyama told the audience at a San Francisco peace vigil that right after 9/11, the Arab American Discrimination Committee reported more than two hundred cases of hate crimes, including vandalism and six deaths, and warned, “This is only the beginning unless we (meaning everybody) can stop this racial profiling.” Japanese Americans, she declared, must remember the hatred after Pearl Harbor and feel “kinship with the Arab and Muslim people who are the newest targets of racism, hysteria, and jingoism.”66

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Nisei women continued to warn against racial profiling and to call for the defense of civil rights during the Obama and Trump administrations. In 2016 Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga told Pacific Citizen readers that despite acknowledging “it was a mistake to treat us in World War II the way they did,” the Patriot Act “says anybody under suspicion of disloyalty can be apprehended and be held for indefinite detention.” Horrified that President Obama had signed a renewal of the Patriot Act, she felt it imperative “to let our young folks know this exists” and that Muslims could be the next victims of mass incarceration, especially under the newly elected President Trump.67 Haru Kuromiya, spoke to hundreds of people at the 2017 Los Angeles Day of Remembrance Program commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Executive Order 9066. The ninety-year-old recalled being a teenager after Pearl Harbor and watching her father and uncle being taken away by the FBI before she was removed and incarcerated at Manzanar. Reunited at an “enemy alien” camp at Crystal City and held until June 1946, her family returned to Riverside only to discover their home had been “trashed and the community was hostile”: “Looking back to those years, the hardest part was losing our freedom. . . . Looking up and seeing the ubiquitous tall guard towers, guns pointed toward us. Wondering when we can go home again. Not knowing what lay ahead was painful.” After sharing these memories, Kuromiya proclaimed, “I sincerely hope no one will ever be imprisoned like that again because of the color of their skin or their religion.”68

Conclusion These Nisei women activists hope the ultimate legacy of redress is a commitment to combat all forms of injustice, including racism and sexism. In her essay, “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism,” noted author Mitsuye Yamada argues that Asian Pacific women can “affirm our own culture while working within it to change it.” Identifying herself as “a child of immigrant parents, as a woman of color in a white society, and as a woman in a patriarchal society,” Yamada proclaims that Asian Pacific women can simultaneously promote ethnic solidarity and critique gender discrimination: “This doesn’t mean that we have placed our loyalties on the side of ethnicity over womanhood. The two are not at war with one another; we shouldn’t have to sign a ‘loyalty oath’ favoring one over the other.”69 During and after the struggle for redress, increasing numbers of Nisei women became conscious of the need to simultaneously combat racism and sexism before they could become activists. These women would agree with Yamada’s declaration above.70 While changes in women’s work and family roles laid a foundation for women’s assertiveness, the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s played a vital role in helping women overcome ethnic and gender identity problems. Increasing numbers of women, once socialized to be quiet and invisible, realized they could lobby effectively for social and political change. Publicly

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proclaiming their anger at the discrimination their families endured and mobilizing to ensure the injustice was neither forgotten nor repeated, women activists discovered their ability to critique both racism and sexism. Denouncing sexism within redress organizations, the Japanese American community, and mainstream American society, activists then promoted awareness of women’s achievements and contributions. They helped to supplant racist and sexist stereotypes of Asian women as “passive and submissive victims” with the image of women who displayed pride in their ethnic heritage even as they called for the removal of patriarchy from that heritage. They showed that Japanese American women, who had a long history of actively supporting their families and the community, could demand rights for themselves as Japanese Americans and as women. Many initially viewed their activism as an extension of their roles as wives, mothers, and daughters supporting other family members. In the process of breaking the silence about family encounters with racism, however, these women also exposed a history of women’s agency that challenged patriarchal gender assumptions. They helped to organize pilgrimages to former camp sites and played critical roles as researchers, grassroots activists, and leaders in a class-action lawsuit and legislative lobbying efforts. As they assumed greater leadership roles within the community, they reminded the public of the history of mass incarceration and redress to ensure that the wartime injustice was not repeated, to denounce racial profiling, and to defend the civil rights of all American men and women. Notes

1 Ten years ago, I used “internment camps” to refer to the sites run by the War Relocation Authority that imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II even though the term technically applies only to Justice Department camps for people viewed as “enemy aliens.” Given the revival of concerns about government detention of “enemy aliens” and Michelle Alexander’s scholarship on the racial profiling of the “mass incarceration” of African Americans, I now believe “mass incarceration” is the appropriate terminology. See “Terminology,” Denshō, https://densho.org, accessed October 2, 2017; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New, 2012). 2 “Testimony of Merry Fujihari Omori,” Commission on Wartime Relocation and Mass Incarceration of Civilians (CWRIC), Chicago, September 22, 1981, CWRIC files, National Archives and Records Service. 3 CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Mass Incarceration of Civilians (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1982), 18. 4 Noriko Sawada Bridges, interview with the author, San Francisco, May 10, 1990. 5 Rose Ochi, “Onna No Kuse Ni: Things My Otoo-San Never Told Me,” Pacific Citizen, July 27, 1984. 6 Mitsuye Yamada, “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1981), 39. 7 US Congress, House, Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, 77th Congress, 2nd Session, 1942, 11229–33. 8 CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 231–32.

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9 Cherstin M. Lyon, “Questions 27 and 28,” Densho Encyclopedia, http://encyclopedia. densho.org, accessed June 10, 2017. 10 Chizu Iiyama, interview with the author, San Francisco, May 4, 1990. 11 Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Mass Incarceration and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 206. 12 Gail M. Nomura, “‘Peace Empowers’: The Testimony of Aki Kurose, a Woman of Color in the Pacific Northwest,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 3 (2001): 75–92. 13 Diane C. Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 14 Mei Nakano, Japanese American Women: Three Generations, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, CA: Mina, 1990), 146. 15 Leslie A. Ito, “Japanese American Women and the Student Relocation Movement, 1942– 1945,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 21, no. 3 (2000): 5. 16 Nakano, Japanese American Women, 189–90. 17 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, Warbride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 85–87. 18 CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 296. 19 CWRIC, 101. 20 Kiyo-Sato Viacrucis, testimony, CWRIC, San Francisco, August 12, 1981. 21 Noriko Sawada Bridges, interview with the author, San Francisco, May 10, 1990. 22 Bridges interview. 23 Amy Iwasaki Mass, “The Psychological Effects of the Camps on Japanese Americans,” in Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress, rev. ed., ed. Roger Daniels, Sandra Taylor, and Harry Kitano (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 160. 24 Bridges interview. 25 Amy Iwasaki Mass, testimony, CWRIC, Los Angeles, August 6, 1981. 26 Daniels, Taylor, and Kitano, Japanese Americans, 160–61. 27 Rose Ochi, testimony, CWRIC, Los Angeles, August 6, 1981. 28 Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview with the author, Falls Church, VA, June 2, 1989. 29 Yang Murray, Historical Memories, 244–49. 30 Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, “Searching for the Truth,” US-Japan Women’s Journal, English supplement, no. 2 (1992): 52. 31 CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, xxix, 455. 32 Thomas Y. Fujita-Rony, “Destructive Force: Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga’s Gendered Labor in the Japanese American Redress Movement,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 24, no. 1 (2003): 38–60. 33 Arthur Hansen and Betty Mitson, eds., Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation (Fullerton: California State University, Fullerton, 1974), 167; “Testimony by William Furutani,” Amerasia 8, no. 2 (1981): 104. 34 Hansen and Mitson, Voices Long Silent, 189. 35 Sue Kunitomi Embrey, interview with the author, Los Angeles, February 25, 1998. 36 Nakano, Japanese American Women, 198. 37 Mei Nakano, interview with the author, Sebastopol, CA, September 8, 1990. 38 Nakano, Japanese American Women, 200–201. 39 Nakano, 195. 40 Nakano interview; Yang Murray, Historical Memories, 259. 41 Noriko Sawada Bridges, “To Be or Not to Be: There’s No Such Option,” courtesy of the author; Noriko Sawada Bridges, testimony, CWRIC, San Francisco, August 12, 1981.

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42 Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, “Women-Centered Kin Networks and Urban Bilateral Kinship,” American Ethnologist 4 (1977): 219. 43 Mabel Ota, testimony, CWRIC, Los Angeles, August 4, 1981. 44 Ota testimony. 45 Kiku Hori Funabiki, Day of Remembrance Presentation, Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, February 24, 1990. 46 Kiku Hori Funabiki, testimony, United States Congress, Hearings on H.R. 3387, 98th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1985), 763. 47 Funabiki testimony, 767. 48 Funabiki testimony. 49 Nakano, Japanese American Women, 203. 50 “Reparations: Our Victory,” East Wind (Spring/Summer 1989): 36. 51 Esther Scott and Calvin Naito, “Against All Odds: The Japanese Americans’ Campaign for Redress” (Cambridge, MA: Kennedy School of Government Case Study, 1990), 16–17. 52 Karen Narasaki, “Redress: A Grassroots Effort,” Pacific Citizen, October 16, 1992. 53 Resolution 25–5, Affirmative Action in JACL, Seattle Chapter, JACL, adopted April 19, 1978, cited in Pacific Citizen, December 18–25, 1992. 54 Resolution 25–5. 55 This proposed amendment to the US Constitution declared that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” Equal Rights Amendment, www.equalrightsamendment.org, accessed February 10, 2018. 56 Lia Shigemura, “Women’s Committee,” Pacific Citizen, April 8, 1983. 57 Mei Nakano, “JACL Women’s Concerns Committee,” Northern California–Western Nevada–Pacific District Council, courtesy of Mei Nakano. 58 Mei Nakano, “Who We Are, What We Are and Why,” Hokubei Mainichi, June 25, 1987. 59 Mei Nakano, “A Different Light,” Pacific Citizen, July 1984. 60 “Women’s Workshop Looks at Nikkei’s Sex Roles,” Pacific Citizen, May 6, 1983. 61 The 1986–1987 Japanese American Resource Directory, courtesy of Kiku Hori Funabiki; titles and descriptions of these workshops courtesy of Mei Nakano. 62 Evaluations of the “Strength and Diversity” exhibit, courtesy of Mei Nakano. 63 Richard Suenaga, “JACL’s 32nd Biennial Convention,” Pacific Citizen, August 14, 1992; “Lillian Kimura Continues to Inspire Youth,” Pacific Citizen May 4–17, 2012. 64 Gwen Muranaka, “Kimura Administration Begins to Shape Course of Organization,” Pacific Citizen, October 30, 1992. 65 Lillian Nakano, “Statement Delivered in Little Tokyo,” September 28, 2001, reprinted at www.aamovement.net, accessed December 3, 2001. 66 Yuri Kochiyama, “Japanese Americans Express Solidarity to Arab and Muslims,” Nichi Bei Times, September 22, 2001. 67 George T. Johnston, “Talk of a Blanket Ban on the Immigration of Muslims to the US and the Possible Creation of a Muslim Registry Has Many Revisiting the Injustices Set upon JAs 75 Years Ago,” Pacific Citizen, December 16, 2016, www.pacificcitizen.org, accessed February 22, 2017. 68 J. K. Yamamoto, “LA Day of Remembrance Draws Huge Crowd,” Rafu Shimpo, March 7, 2017, www.rafu.com, accessed June 7, 2017. 69 Mitsuye Yamada, “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back, 73. 70 Yamada.

11

Refugee Lifemaking Practices Southeast Asian Women Yến Lê Espiritu

When the Khmer Rouge (Cambodian Communists) captured Phnom Penh in April 1975, Ra Pronh was just twenty years old. For the next four years, under Khmer Rouge rule, Ra endured hard labor, near starvation and a forced marriage. After the Vietnamese forces toppled the Khmer Rouge in January 1979, Ra, her husband, and their newborn daughter wandered the forests of western Cambodia for approximately eleven months before they finally crossed into Thailand to enter a UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) refugee camp. Ra spent the next six years in overcrowded and destitute refugee camps in Thailand and in the Philippines, where she gave birth to another daughter and two sons. Even after being granted asylum and resettlement in the Bronx in 1986, Ra’s struggles continued as she battled poverty, crime, and multiple housing displacements.1 Scholarly and popular accounts of Southeast Asian refugees tend to exclude refugee women like Ra, opting instead to highlight refugee men and their military service. The marginalization of refugee women’s narratives is especially prevalent in the Hmong case, given the emphasis on Hmong men’s alliance with the US military via the Secret War in Laos.2 Addressing this gender gap, this chapter centers refugee women from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, detailing how they have created their worlds and made meaning for themselves and their families. Specifically, it focuses on how they have engaged in complex and creative forms of survival and resistance in three different but interlinked contexts: in wartime, in refugee camps, and in resettlement. By most accounts, Southeast Asia was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive wars between Western imperial powers and the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. US military involvement in the region in its proxy wars against communism globally displaced millions of Southeast Asians from their homes, killing many more. As a consequence, Southeast Asian refugees are associated with highly charged images of poverty, violence, and statelessness—an unwanted problem for asylum and resettlement countries. With some notable exceptions, social scientists have generally interpreted the refugees’ experiences within a deficit model, reducing them to targets of disciplinary social service and mental health agendas.3 In this chapter, I move away from this “damage-centered” research that reinforces a one-dimensional notion of refugee 189

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communities as “depleted, ruined, and hopeless” and toward a “desire-based” research that accounts for “the hope, the visions, the wisdom of [their] lived lives and communities.”4 Focusing on the rich and complicated worlds of Southeast Asian refugee women, culled from existing oral histories and interviews, I show how they constitute “intentionalized beings” who labor to have resilient, productive, and heroic lives even in displacement.5

Women’s Experiences during Wartime During the wars in Southeast Asia (1955–1975), Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese women became the spoils of war: they were not just killed but also raped and sexually abused—a fact that has been largely erased from historical accounts.6 Given the devastating personal losses that Southeast Asian women endured during the war, scholars have largely linked their mental health—their psychological trauma, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder—to their wartime experiences.7 Accordingly, Southeast Asian women have been described primarily in terms of “poor, illiterate refugees in need of being saved.”8 However, even in the midst of war, people are always more than victims of their circumstances; they are also desiring subjects with both simple and complex needs and wants. This section discusses the multiplicity of Southeast Asian women’s experiences during wartime—the personal costs, to be sure, but also the unexpected moments of joy and opportunity. War is not exclusively a matter for men or a masculine domain. Instead, it is a complex process that relies in part on gendered beliefs, often working in tandem with and through racial beliefs.9 During the Vietnam War, as the US government contemplated intervening in Vietnam’s civil war, US print media began to publish stories and images of Vietnamese women designed to make US intervention palatable to the public.10 At the time, Vietnamese women were recognized globally as powerful participants in Vietnam’s civil war—as volunteers repairing roads and bridges, as soldiers operating antiaircraft guns, as doctors working on the frontlines—and yet American journalists and government officials often inscribed them “within an orientalist discourse of femininity, irrationality, and backwardness.”11 To make Vietnamese women, and therefore the Vietnam War, acceptable to the American public, US print media framed Vietnamese women’s bodies as exotic and hyperfeminine, fitting them into the preexisting tropes of Asian women as prostitutes, war brides, and dragon ladies.12 Below are two examples of the media’s framing of the politically powerful and glamorous Madame Nhu, the de facto First Lady of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963, as a “dragon lady” and hence dangerous: Perhaps the most extraordinary personality in the Ngo dynasty is Ngo Dinh Nhu’s wife. Mme. Nhu is a beautiful, gifted, and charming woman; she is also grasping,

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conceited, and obsessed with a drive for power that far surpasses that of even her husband.13 Beautiful in a strawberry pink ao dai, the dark-eyed lady seemed as gentle as a kitten. But when she launched into her speech in a high-pitched staccato voice, her words had the bite of an outraged tigress.14

Racialized and sexualized images of Vietnamese women thus became “tools to explain, justify, criticize, or create sympathy for the war.”15 The efforts to reduce Vietnamese women to “feminine, irrational, and backward spokeswomen of Vietnam” laid the groundwork for the eventual representations of Vietnamese women as one-dimensional victimized subjects in the war.16 The wars in Southeast Asia, which repeatedly displaced families and pushed them to be on the move, forced women, and not only men, to actively bear responsibility for the war efforts through their everyday practices. During the peak of the Secret War in Laos, Hmong men suffered the highest casualty rate among all the groups involved in the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. For Hmong women, US secret bombings and guerrilla warfare permeated their everyday lives, turning them into de facto civilian “soldiers”—unwilling participants in the war who did the labor of sorting, mourning, and burying dead bodies and of keeping family members safe. They thus took on the task of constantly moving the family to stay ahead of the fighting and Communist persecution. This unrootedness constituted the “Hmong diasporic condition” whereby “Hmong women and families lived their lives on the edges of the escape paths in makeshift shelters constructed with banana leaves to shield the rain.”17 As a Hmong woman described her family’s precarious life in Laos during the war: We couldn’t live in any secure place to raise any pigs or chickens to eat. With the bombing on vegetation, the animals were sick and we couldn’t raise or eat them. . . . We struggled a lot when you talk about refugee life. They dropped rice for us to eat but we didn’t have anything to eat it with. We just ate so we wouldn’t starve, . . . . you must bring a pot and a knife so that you can use it to find and cook food wherever you go. When the group leader decides that we’ll stay there, then everyone will go cut down bamboos and trees to build shelter. . . . We’ll live there for a while, but if Communists come then we have to move again.18

While displacement created untold hardships for women, it also disrupted familial and community authority, opening new paths for some women and girls to resist cultural expectations and to adopt new ways of being. Wartime anarchy thus enabled more women to unshackle themselves from family discipline and to make more independent choices about dating, friends, and work.

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As an example, during wartime in Saigon, the chaos of war allowed some Vietnamese women to upend sexual mores by having affairs with men outside marriage.19 Trí Nguyễn related that his mother had a brief but passionate affair with a wealthy married man immediately before and after the Fall of Saigon. One can imagine her conflicting emotions at the time: the sadness of losing a country mixed uncomfortably with the sweetness of an illicit relationship. As Trí voices these conflicts, I know that’s a big piece of her life during the war, but she doesn’t want to talk about it, so I still don’t know much about the war. Everything is so vague, and it’s hard to ask my mom questions about it. How can I bring it up without bringing up bad memories?20

Wartime demands also provided some women with unexpected job opportunities that freed them from gender- and class-based constraints. Due to the urgent need for medical support during the war, nurses were among the first group of Hmong women to be formally educated and to establish themselves as professionals.21 Hmong women and girls flocked to nursing to escape agrarian life and to improve their social and class standing; more than 3,500 Hmong women became village health workers throughout Laos during the war.22 Consequently, these women embraced the war because it provided them opportunities that they would not have had otherwise to improve their education and socioeconomic status—and to have fun and be financially independent.23 The young single women’s newfound independence irked elders and male peers, who charged that formal education and working among soldiers would lead the women to engage in sexual deviancy.24 Another example of unexpected opportunities for women was the sex industry that sprang up in Saigon to serve American servicemen during the war. While the sex industry is replete with abusive encounters, it is important to note that some Vietnamese “bar girls” remembered the war as, comparatively, “the best time of their lives” because it gave them unexpected freedom: “freedom from the drudgery of domestic work, from the dominance of husbands and fathers, and from the expectations of their culture.”25 Born and raised in poor villages in Vietnam, these women chafed at the traditional gender roles that they were expected to fulfill. For most of them, the prospect of an impending marriage— and a looming life of drudgery—drove them to leave home and head for Saigon, where they worked in the many bars and clubs catering to American soldiers.26 According to these women, normal social distinctions blurred or collapsed in wartime Saigon, which allowed them to refashion themselves as single, independent, and moneyed women in the city.27 Dislodged from their village communities and families, the women did not face the same social sanctions as did the Hmong nurses. Young girls and women who engaged in prostitution could

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earn one hundred dollars a month, four times what male Vietnamese officials earned at that time.28 They thus recalled their wartime experiences in Saigon as “one of good times, and camaraderie, and the exhilaration of being young and free in the city.”29 Wartime conditions also compelled and enabled women to patch together nonnormative, and at times less oppressive, families for themselves and their children. In the case of the Vietnamese bar women, when their American boyfriends reneged on their marriage promises or failed to acknowledge their offspring, the women became each other’s trusted families, protecting one another from predators and serving as surrogate mothers for each other’s children. In so doing, they (re)created a tight-knit network of the familial assistance that they had lost when they moved away from their villages.30 More generally, in the face of devastating losses of lives, women labored to generate new social ties for themselves and their loved ones. The fifteen-year war in Laos killed thirty thousand Hmong, 10 percent of the population, leaving behind tens of thousands of Hmong orphans and countless widows, single mothers, and separated women who were without direct family support. For the Hmong refugees who escaped into Thailand, the Mekong River crossing was traumatic, resulting in an untold number of deaths and family separations. Youa Yang recounts that her family, pursued by Communist soldiers, split up right before they crossed the river, resulting in the tragic death of one of her uncles.31 To survive, Hmong women had to constantly rebuild families and communities for themselves and for each other—through adopting, fostering, remarrying, living together, and supporting one another.32 In the Cambodian killing fields of the 1970s, considered one of the most brutal mass atrocities in human history, Cambodians were left with fewer resources to reassemble their personal and social lives. The Khmer Rouge seizure of power in April 1975 unleashed genocidal policies and practices that destroyed family structure, which extensively impacted gender relations and women’s lives. Under Pol Pot, many women were raped and killed; others were removed from their families and forced into unwanted marriages—a form of gender and sexual violence that legitimized forced sexual relations.33 Ra Pronh described the fear and ambivalence that she experienced on her “wedding night”: “I don’t want to go to his house. But if I don’t go, I think they’re going to kill me. . . . I want to cry. I want to close my eyes because I don’t want nobody to see me.”34 The Khmer Rouge brutality was most severe in the Northwest of Cambodia, where entire families were summarily executed. By 1977, in one northwest region, “there were no more males in the village except for the base peasants.”35 With the acute death rate of men, starvation, hard labor, illness, and execution, female Cambodian survivors, such as Mrs. Tech, struggled on their own under the most daunting circumstances to save their children and to hold their remaining families together:

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I was a single mother with four sick children. I carried all my sick children by turn, running from one place to another to find a place free from the Khmer Rouge. . . . I needed to find money to support the children. . . . I escaped to the Thai border, where I set up a little business to make some money. When I arrived, all my energies were almost gone, and the two children who were with me were very sick too. . . . We were admitted and then sent to Khao-I-Dang hospital by ambulance. . . . It had been extremely difficult to escape. I have felt sorry and sick ever since.36

Stripped of any degree of safety, women did everything they could to stay alive, including stealing food for their children, smuggling and bartering, burying evidence of their family status, and faking their class or ethnicity.37 Tragically, many women perished because they gave up their meager rations to feed their families or were killed for stealing food for their families.38

Women’s Experiences in Refugee Camps The living conditions of the refugee camps in Southeast Asia varied considerably depending on the resettlement status of its residents. There were two major types of refugee camps: the refugee processing centers that focused on the rehabilitation of refugees bound for resettlement and the closed camps and detention centers that warehoused rejected refugees and treated them as little more than the living dead. For the most part, refugees who arrived prior to the mid-1980s had a much higher chance of moving on to resettlement than those who came after, when the world’s attention had largely shifted away from the plight of the refugees. As a result, the rejected refugees became “the forgotten ones.”39 Across Southeast Asia, the protracted refugees lived in prisonlike camps encircled by barbed wire and armed military guards.40 In the closed camps, such as the Hei Ling Chau and Chi Ma Wan camps in Hong Kong, asylum seekers were packed in “something akin to industrial shelving”:41 The camps were composed of “huts” made out of metal containers. Each hut contained approximately 20 three-level bunk beds which were constructed using metal frames and thin plywood boards. Each level counted as a unit which was partitioned from its neighboring unit by a wooden board and drapes. The bottom levels were usually allocated to families, meaning that a family of three, four, or even five had to live in an 8’ x 6’ x 3’ cubicle. The middle cubicles were usually allocated to couples, and the highest cubicles to single men or women.42

Living in triple-decker cubicles the size of a twin bed, or on six- to eighteensquare-foot mats on the crowded floor, camp dwellers “[had] absolutely no privacy.”43 All daily activities, even the most intimate, were conducted in public. The refugee camp environment thus inflicted serious and often lasting wounds

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on refugee families as they struggled to maintain family life under very trying conditions: lack of privacy, mass meals, regimented routines, uncertain futures, and changing gender and generational dynamics. For young women, sexual harassment was rampant, made worse by the close living quarters and lack of privacy. Young women also had to fend off sexual assault from the local police and officials. At the prisonlike Khao-I-Dang (KID) refugee camp, operated by the UNHCR and the Thai army, Thai soldiers routinely terrorized and sexually violated Cambodian refugee women.44 Fearing ostracization by their families and communities, many Cambodian women who had been raped often dealt with their shame by keeping silent; “sexual abuse was the one kind of unspeakable experience they would not discuss.”45 As a Cambodian American aid worker said, “Cambodian women face many problems, but rape is the worst of all of them. In Cambodia, girls are compared to flowers that can wither at a hurtful touch, like the rose and the jasmine.”46 Vietnamese American Suzie Xuyen Dong Matsuda exhibited the same reticence when she confided that as a young woman without family, she was subject to sexual abuse in the camp: “There’s several incidents but I am not going to share here. I overcome that, but it . . . really did take a toll on me.”47 In the camps that housed people for longer stays, refugees out of necessity institutionalized many aspects of their daily life. For example, in the Palawan camp in the Philippines, Vietnamese residents established a governing body, the Vietnamese Refugee Council, which had jurisdiction over the internal affairs of the camp. The principal goal of the council was to create a “small Vietnam” in situ; a unique ritual was “the weekly flag ceremony at which the flag of the former Republic of South Vietnam was raised, the old national anthem was sung and the chairman of the VR Council spoke to the gathered camp population to make announcements and to exhort the Vietnamese to uphold Vietnamese values.”48 This nation-building ritual was gendered, since most members of the council were former male officers of the South Vietnamese military who, in diaspora, embodied the fallen nation and the opposition to communism professed by the majority of the refugees.49 In the same way, given the valorization of Hmong men as military heroes,50 Hmong refugee women had a difficult time gaining leadership positions in refugee camps.51 In 1992, in the refugee camps of Thailand, even though Hmong women made up more than half of the camp population, not one woman held an administrative position or was on any decision-making committee. Women were also underrepresented on staff, filling just 7 percent of the refugee-hired positions for the UNHCR and the three largest nongovernmental organizations.52 On the other hand, the daily exigencies of camp life and the goals of international relief organizations—to save women and children—empowered women vis-à-vis men. In the processing centers in Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, as relief workers sought to “civilize” Cambodian refugees through

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public-health campaigns, schools, and women’s organizations, they appeared to be more sympathetic to Cambodian female clients than to male ones, “ma[king] women key agents in these lessons of clientship.”53 For their part, forced into the role of sole family caretaker, Cambodian women had to figure out how to get what they needed from the aid and service agencies to ensure the survival of their children.54 Because women were more dependent on handouts than men, who could more easily engage in smuggling, trade, and construction work, they actively built patronage relations with relief workers and strategically attended language classes and religious services in exchange for access to food, goods, and services. In families where men were present, women’s increased access to Western institutions and corresponding decreased dependence on and deference to men widened the fissure between husbands and wives and destabilized the traditional family arrangements. As an example, given their strengthened position vis-à-vis men, some women retaliated against their husbands’ polygamy by taking lovers of their own.55 Hmong women also strengthened their economic position by parlaying paj ntaub, a traditional form of embroidery designed and stitched by women, into a source of income. In the Thai refugee camps, with the help of international relief workers, Hmong women began to market their embroidery to international buyers. Over the years of their stay in the camp, paj ntaub evolved from simple animal and human shapes into more elaborate representational story cloths that illustrate the traditional Hmong tales, the old ways of life in Laos, and more recent war and exodus stories. In Laos, paj ntaub was traditionally reserved for women; in the camps, men contributed by penciling the initial designs on the cloth. Given their precarious status as protracted refugees, Hmong women used the story cloths not only as a commercial enterprise but also as a vehicle by which to convince Western audiences of their legitimacy as Communist-fleeing refugees.56 Bound by their shared fate, confined in a crammed environment, and with ample time to spare, many refugees developed intense kin-like relationships with each other. A quick internet search for “Southeast Asian refugee camps” produces numerous photographs of inhabitants of all ages posing with large groups of friends or families. Eyes bright, smiles wide, arms linked, their warm intimacy radiates through the computer screen. Mary Hoang Long, a refugee from Vietnam, described a typical day’s activities for her family at Phanat Nikkhom refugee camp: I volunteer, I work for the office for interview with new people come to the camp. My sister, she volunteers to teach at the preschool. My cousin, he volunteers and teach soccer and table tennis for the minor kids. On the night, we go to two theaters. . . . One theater always had ghost movies and one theater for the drama movies and we can go to the movies in the night or we can dance. Yeah, and so fun.57

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Other quiet rituals punctuated the passing of each day of camp life: “After a hard day at work, women usually get together in the shade of trees near their home. Talking about the past and sharing their dreams of resettlement in a third country are favorite social habits of the stateless Vietnamese in the Philippines.”58 As a Vietnamese refugee who spent two years at Galang refugee camp in Indonesia exclaimed, “It wasn’t luxurious but we were happy. Everybody helped each other. It was very social. . . . There are a lot of good memories there. . . . God, I miss those days!”59 These celebrations, both the boisterous and quiet ones, are a testament to the depth of the refugee spirit—to their ability to tap out a rhythm of life to interrupt, however briefly, the monotony of their suspended existence.60 These examples suggest that in the very space of despair and chaos of refugee camps, many refugee women and their families managed to create new and meaningful social relations that endured long after their departure from the camps.

Women’s Experiences in Resettlement A crucial difference between immigrants and refugees is their differential relationship to the state. While immigrants are not closely monitored by the state after arrival, refugees are processed by layers of government policies and programs designed to both assist and control them.61 The inadequacy of US resettlement policies has adversely shaped the economic and social well-being of Southeast Asian refugee communities.62 Emphasizing economic self-sufficiency, US refugee placement policy initially dispersed the refugee population to all fifty states in an effort to speed their assimilation and to minimize any negative impacts on local communities.63 This “scatter” policy stripped the refugees of invaluable ethnic community support, thereby decreasing the availability of resources to refugees at a time when they were most in need of them. Over the strong objections of resettlement workers and sponsors, many refugees eventually left their place of initial resettlement and migrated to other states to join their compatriots, producing large refugee concentrations in numerous states, especially in California and Texas.64 When the Southeast Asian refugees began arriving in large numbers in the 1980s and 1990s, US federal and local resettlement agencies strained to fit them into the existing economic, political, and cultural systems of underresourced communities that could not accommodate them. They were resettled en masse in “hyperghettos”: inner-city neighborhoods that warehouse the poorest of the urban poor. For these refugees, resettlement in the United States has often meant “continued violence, uncertainty, itinerancy.”65 The one-size-fits-all approach to refugee policies botched resettlement efforts. Lavinia Limon, the executive director of the US Committee for Refugees, explained the failed effort to resettle Cambodian refugees:

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The Cambodians are manifestly the greatest failure of the refugee program in this country. . . . Mistake No. 1 was that we didn’t treat the Cambodians as different. The scope and breadth and depth of what they endured—the only thing you can compare it to, was the Jewish Holocaust.66

Moreover, as the majority of Cambodian refugees were poor, less educated, and from rural areas, they were particularly ill prepared for the demands of urban life.67 Even as US resettlement workers preached economic self-sufficiency, they did not establish concrete and workable policies to assist refugees in becoming self-supporting. Instead, social workers instructed poor Southeast Asian refugees to apply for livable-wage jobs that did not exist or did not match the refugees’ skill sets. In the postindustrial economy of the 1980s and 1990s that was marked by increased feminization of labor, refugee women with limited education, skills, and English fluency often congregated in female-intensive low-wage industries, such as garment and microelectronics manufacturing.68 To support their families, many Southeast Asian refugee women relied on public assistance. Vietnamese, Lao, Hmong, and Cambodian refugees represented the largest per capita race or ethnic group in the country receiving welfare. In 1990, in California alone, they registered welfare-dependency rates of nearly 80 percent.69 The major federal welfare program for needy refugee families was AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). A woman-centered program, AFDC provided benefits directly to women, thus tipping the balance of familial power toward them, strengthening their role in caring for the family and making household decisions. The fact that it was women who received the government’s monthly checks undercut male authority, already reduced due to the inability of many men to secure viable employment.70 In the poor areas of Oakland, California, many Cambodian households became de facto female-headed households, not only because they had no surviving male head but more so because women were better integrated into the system of government-provided financial aid and health coverage.71 Some women also turned to state agents—in the form of social workers, police, and judges—for help with domestic disputes.72 However, dependence on the welfare state has its costs, including having to learn the right story and language in order to fit the state’s “controlling narratives about being a refugee and a welfare recipient.”73 Thus, in seeking to use the law to resolve domestic disputes and discipline their wayward husbands, Cambodian women had to tacitly agree to, or at least not to disagree with, the social workers’ projection of domestic abuse onto Cambodian culture, which was described variously as “traditional,” “authoritarian,” and “patriarchal.”74 In effect, Cambodian women mitigated private patriarchy by becoming subjects of public patriarchy—of state agents who espoused white middle-class social and cultural norms.75 Following the mandate of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), social workers insisted that the refugees use public welfare programs—specifically

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cash assistance and food stamps—only as stopgap measures. However, as federally funded resettlement assistance programs ended, and un(der)employment persisted, most of the refugees had to remain on public assistance into the 1990s, at times illegally supplementing their meager welfare checks with off-the-books menial jobs such as piecemeal sewing.76 Challenging the myth of the “welfare cheat” who unfairly profits from public assistance, Rorth Pronh, a Cambodian American youth organizer, described her family’s substandard living conditions while on welfare: There are nine people living here. It’s not enough space. We can’t afford to get any furniture. . . . This is what we gotta live through because we’re on welfare. And they say welfare is supposed to help us. It’s not. It’s not at all. Because if it was, we wouldn’t be living in these [types] of conditions.77

Forgotten by refugee agencies and left to linger in the welfare system, a large segment of Southeast Asian families was entering a third consecutive decade of welfare dependency when President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), replacing AFDC with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).78 TANF introduced “workfare,” mandatory work programs that required welfare recipients to work thirty hours a week and limited the total number of years for which they could receive welfare to five—demands that disproportionately affected homebound women with young children who had to scramble for childcare while toiling in no-wage city-approved jobs or low-wage dead-end jobs.79 The American welfare state succeeded in reducing the number of public assistance caseloads through pushing poor women into dead-end jobs, expelling them from the welfare rolls, penalizing them for violating the work requirement, and curtailing their personal choices. Six years after the passage of PRWORA, in California, Southeast Asian welfare cases decreased from 53,805 in 1996 to 31,155 in 2002—a 42 percent drop.80 Within ten years, nationally, the welfare reform measures had reduced the number of poor single-mother families served by 63 percent.81 Southeast Asian refugees and their children strenuously fought what they perceived to be punitive and gendered welfare reform measures. Distraught women, assisted by their children who served as interpreters, flocked to community organizations and immigrant rights groups, seeking assistance. In countless testimonies at welfare reform hearings, court cases, and social service forums, Southeast Asians angrily spoke out against what they perceived to be a series of US broken promises. Centering their experiences as refugees, they linked their despair over welfare reform to their stories of war trauma and to US irresponsibility.82 A recurring narrative told a story of two acts of US betrayal: the first act of betrayal occurred when US troops pulled out of Southeast Asia in the 1970s, and the second act when the government removed welfare—the only form of economic

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security for the refugees. In one of the most desperate and direct condemnations of welfare reform, Hmong refugee Chia Yang ended her life, leaving behind an audiotape attributing her action to her despair over impending economic insecurity: She “could not bear the pain of starvation or that of having to watch her family suffer once again.”83 In short, Southeast Asian refugee women viewed welfare loss as yet another act of US betrayal; their testimonies indicated that they believed they were entitled to welfare benefits, given the role of the US military in inducing their displacement in the first place.84 For the majority of Southeast Asian refugees, the war did not end with resettlement. Refugee women, especially the elderly, reported a significantly higher level of war-related psychological distress than their male counterparts. Of all the Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants in the United States, Cambodian women are among the most in need of mental health care. As Rong detailed her anguish: “I lost my entire family, I have no parents, aunts or uncles, no grandparents. How can there be any happiness, that way?” Another, Noun, said, “How can there be any relief? I lost a husband, a son, seven brothers, and both parents. I am the only one left—like a lone reed.”85 Many Cambodian women have been afflicted with a form of mysterious blindness, which has been explained as a physical manifestation of their retreat from sight and sound and into themselves.86 At a Los Angeles eye clinic, fifty-four Cambodian women over age forty suffered psychosomatic blindness over a three-year period in the late 1980s. Close to 80 percent of this group had lost at least three members of their families, often in their presence and often to arbitrary killings.87 Elder Hmong women who lived through war’s violence and multiple displacements linked their difficulties navigating life in the United States to the trauma they experienced during war. As two elder Hmong women explained, their hearts and minds were “constantly at war” even when they no longer heard gunfire.88 Despite their reliance on public assistance, Southeast Asian refugee women have resisted the welfare state’s attempts to curtail their reproductive rights through the imposition of family planning. For three decades, Cambodian mothers, many of whom lost their own children to starvation, disease, and war during the Khmer years, have defied attempts by the welfare state to regulate their bodies and limit their right to have more children.89 For them, exercising their reproductive rights was about ensuring the replenishment and survival of their family. However, cognizant of the importance of maintaining good relations with state workers who control access to needed medical services, Cambodian women did not actively resist family planning pressures, opting instead to quietly disregard medical advice, oftentimes by feigning ignorance. As an example, Asian American nurses who worked with Cambodian refugee women reported that their instructions on reproductive health were often met by silence. Through their strategic passivity and silent resistance, Cambodian women deftly

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negotiated a space “for making their own [reproductive] decisions and yet still eliciting the bureaucratic attention that helped secure medical access.”90

Conclusion In this chapter, we have assessed the legacy of the US wars in Southeast Asia not in the words and deeds of American state officials and public media but in the creative, improvised, and defiant life-making practices of Southeast Asian refugee women. We have examined how the women have created their worlds and made meaning for themselves and their families—in wartime, in refugee camps, and in resettlement—with particular attention to the alternative forms of life that they have generated on the social margins. While wartime exigencies devastated many aspects of women’s lives, including disrupting familial and community authority, they provided nontraditional women with unlikely opportunities to escape gender expectations and to invent new ways of being and living. In refugee camps and in resettlement, women’s increased access to Western institutions, such as international relief agencies and welfare offices, and their corresponding decreased dependence on and deference to men widened the fissure between husbands and wives and destabilized the traditional and unequal family arrangements. The lives—and contributions—of Southeast Asian refugee women underscore the importance of examining gendered displacement from the knowledge point of the forcibly displaced, which takes seriously the hidden and overt injuries and also the joy and survival practices that play out in the domain of the everyday. As Ra Pronh, the Cambodian refugee woman whose story opens this chapter, expounds on the importance of listening to and learning from refugee stories, “I’ve gone through a lot. . . . I want people to know my story. Everything I did—I want people to know it.”91 Notes

1 Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 1–5. 2 Ma Vang, “Rechronicling Histories: Toward a Hmong Feminist Perspective,” in Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women, ed. Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, and Ma Vang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 29. 3 Vang, 32. 4 Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79 (2009): 409, 417. 5 Sherry Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995): 187. 6 Gina Marie Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010). 7 Vang, “Rechronicling,” 32.

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8 Chia Youyee Vang, “Rethinking Hmong Women’s Wartime Sacrifices,” in Vang, Nibbs, and Vang, Claiming Place, 59–60. 9 Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, “Introduction: Militarized Currents, Decolonizing Futures,” 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), xxvii; Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 10 Diem-My T. Bui, “Reporting on Madame Nhu in the Viet Nam War: Representations of the Gendered Other,” Positions 20, no. 3 (2012): 851–75. 11 Karen Gottschang Turner, with Phan Thanh Hao, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998); Bui, 870. 12 Bui, 859. 13 Bui, 862. 14 Bui, 863. 15 Bui, 853. 16 Bui, 871. 17 Vang, “Rechronicling,” 41. 18 Vang, 42. 19 Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 154–57. 20 Espiritu, 155. 21 Dia Cha, “Women in the Hmong Diaspora,” in Diversity in Diaspora: Hmong Americans in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mark Edward Pfeifer, Monica Chiu M, and Kou Yang (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). 22 Vang, “Rethinking,” 68. 23 Vang, 60, 73. 24 Vang, 73. 25 Mai Lan Gustafsson, “‘Freedom. Money. Fun. Love.’: The Warlore of Vietnamese Bargirls,” Oral History Review 38, no. 2 (2011): 308, 313. 26 Gustafsson, 320. 27 Gustafsson, 321. 28 Susan Ruth Travis-Robyns, “What Is Winning Anyway? Redefining Veteran: A Vietnamese American Woman’s Experiences in War and Peace,” Frontiers 18, no. 1 (1997): 145–67. 29 Gustafsson, “Freedom,” 308. 30 Gustafsson, 323. 31 Vang, “Rechronicling,” 46. 32 Sucheng Chan, “Scarred, Yet Undefeated: Hmong and Cambodian Women and Girls in the United States,” in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura (New York: New York University Press, 2003). 33 Tang, Unsettled, 139. 34 Tang, 140. 35 Khatharya Um, From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 36. 36 Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 46–47. 37 Ong, 47. 38 Um, From the Land of Shadows, 32. 39 Brian Doan, The Forgotten Ones: A Photographic Documentation of the Last Vietnamese Boat People in the Philippines (Santa Ana, CA: VAALA, 2004).

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40 Larry C. Thompson, Refugee Workers in the Indochina Exodus, 1975–1982 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010) 217. 41 Peter Hansen, “Thanh Lọc—Hong Kong’s Refugee Screening System: Experiences from Working for the Refugee Communities,” in The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the Boat People, ed. Yuk Wah Chan (New York: Routledge), 87. 42 S. S. Law, “Vietnamese Boat People in Hong Kong: Visual Images and Stories,” in Chan, The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora, 123–24. 43 J. M. Diller, In Search of Asylum: Vietnamese Boat People in Hong Kong (Washington, DC: Indochina Resource Action Center,1988), 50–51; Project Ngoc, The Forgotten People: Vietnamese Refugees in Hong Kong: A Critical Report (Irvine: University of California– Irvine, n.d.), 8. 44 Ong, Buddha, 53–54. 45 Ong, 61–62. 46 Ong, 113. 47 Lena Nguyen, “Oral History of Suzy Xuyen Dong Matsuda,” Vietnamese American Experience Course Oral Histories, November 26, 2012, University of California, Irvine Libraries, http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu. 48 Adelaida Reyes, Music and Vietnamese Refugee Experience: Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 26–27. 49 Espiritu, Body Counts, 75. 50 Vang, “Rechronicling,” 29. 51 Cha, “Women.” 52 Cha. 53 Ong, Buddha, 65. 54 Ong, 148. 55 Ong, 62–63. 56 Jeannie Chiu, “‘I Salute the Spirit of My Communities’: Autoethnographic Innovations in Hmong American Literature,” College Literature 31, no. 3 (2004): 51–53. 57 Nina Mai Thi Long, “Oral History of Mary Hoang Long,” Vietnamese American Experience Course Oral Histories. November 13, 2012, University of California, Irvine Libraries, http:// ucispace.lib.uci.edu. 58 Doan, The Forgotten Ones, 32. 59 Don Hardy, “Galang: Fate of the ‘Boat People,’” 1991, www.twogypsies.com, accessed June 3, 2013, site has been removed. 60 Reyes, Music, 26–27. 61 Chan, “Scarred,” 263. 62 Soo Ah Kwon, Uncivil Youth: Race, Activism, and Affirmative Governmentality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 111. 63 Carol A. Mortland and Judy Ledgerwood, “Secondary Migration among Southeast Asian Refugees in the United States,” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 16, nos. 3/4 (1987). 64 Mortland and Ledgerwood, 297. 65 Tang, Unsettled, 54. Refugees from Southeast Asia arrived in the United States in two major waves. The first came soon after the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and consisted mainly of educated professional Vietnamese whose former occupations and skills—as well as their experiences with Americans during the war years—eased their economic adaptation to American society. The second wave of refugees, peaking in 1980, were primarily Cambodian and lowland Lao and Hmong peasants and ethnic Chinese Vietnamese merchants. 66 Kwon, Uncivil, 111–12.

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67 Kwon, 112. 68 Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 87. See also chapter 13 by Krittiya Kantachote and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas in this volume. 69 Eric Tang, “Collateral Damage: Southeast Asian Poverty in the United States,” Social Text 62, no. 18 (2000): 55. 70 Ong, Buddha, 141, 148. 71 Ong, 135. 72 Ong, chapter 6. 73 Ong, 141. 74 Ong, 167. 75 Ong, chapter 6. 76 Tang, Unsettled, 77, 81. 77 Tang, 120. 78 Barbara Vobejda, “Clinton Signs Welfare Reform, Turns Programs over to States,” Washington Post, August 16, 1996, 2. 79 Tang, Unsettled, 82. 80 Michael Truong, “Welfare Reform and Liberal Governance: Disciplining CambodianAmerican Bodies,” International Journal of Social Welfare 16 (2007): 258–68. 81 Olga Khazan, “How Welfare Reform Left Single Moms Behind,” Atlantic, May 12, 2014. 82 Lynn Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 54–55. 83 Fujiwara, 70. 84 Fujiwara, 54. 85 Um, From the Land of Shadows, 212. 86 Um, 212. 87 Patricia Rozee-Koker, “Blinding Horrors: Cambodian Women’s Vision Loss Linked to Sights of Slaughter,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1989. 88 Vang, “Rechronicling,” 47. Also chapter 26 by Shirley Suet-Ling Tang, Kim Soun Ty, Linda and Thiem in this volume. 89 Ong, Buddha, 117. 90 Ong, 115. 91 Tang, Unsettled, 21.

12

“Defiant Daughters” The Resilience and Resistance of 1.5-Generation Vietnamese American Women Linda Trinh Võ

The foundational scholarship on Vietnamese American women has focused on first-generation refugees who arrived in 1975 and on later waves who came in the following decades.1 This generation was directly affected by colonization, war, trauma, displacement, and resettlement. Contrary to the racialized stereotypes of them as merely victims of war or as helpless refugees waiting to be rescued, this first generation has been far from passive, participating in acts of resistance, direct and indirect, on multiple fronts.2 Additionally, an emergent 1.5 generation has come of age in the United States, inheriting this legacy of struggle and opposition from their grandmothers, mothers, and aunts. Compared to the first generation, this younger generation is presented with expanded opportunities.3 Their socialization in the United States and fluency in English have afforded them more occupational choices, exposure to a variety of possible pursuits, and wider access to resources than the earlier generation. However, the lives of the younger generation are still marked by the constrictive gender expectations within their ethnic communities and the larger society.4 This chapter examines the resolute resilience and resistance of six 1.5-generation Vietnamese American women to understand the personal and career challenges they faced and the factors that influenced the choices they made to forge their own paths. They reside in Southern California, which has the largest population of Vietnamese in the diaspora, and this generation has now come of age, emerging as innovative, groundbreaking leaders in their professions. Using their agency, they are challenging and shifting gender and racial ideologies and transforming communities as activists, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, and nonprofit leaders.5 These 1.5 women have had to balance conflicting expectations from their families, communities, and the larger society. In educational settings and in the workplace, many find that following traditional norms can be counterproductive to their educational and career advancement as well as in their community advocacy work. They continue to negotiate their identities as the children of refugees and immigrants, at times resisting community constraints and internal infighting while simultaneously coming to terms 205

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with this history and selectively embracing its legacy. Although I personally know or have worked directly or indirectly with most of these women in various community projects over the years, I selected them principally based on their visibility as public figures and for their accomplishments in their fields. In addition to secondary resources, this study incorporates primary interviews that use their real names and archival materials from a variety of sources to collect their life stories and perspectives.6

Imprints of the Past There are multiple ways in which the contours of the war and its aftermath are embedded in the lives of the 1.5 generation, born in Vietnam or the refugee camps but socialized in the United States. Vietnamese Americans, who comprise almost two million, are touted as “model-minority refugees,” representing the quintessential rags-to-riches American Dream saga. The assumption is that they arrived as downtrodden refugees and, with meager resources or none at all, have been able to rebuild successful lives and gleaming Vietnamese American ethnic enclaves. Under this veneer, there is a community that still faces complex social problems and continues to contend with unbearable losses, unresolved political turmoil, and internal personal conflict, including the transmission of intergenerational trauma. The separations caused by the impact of war and migrations imposed immeasurable strains on relationships and families. These disruptions, along with the pragmatic strategies of survival, dislocated many gender role expectations, which were destabilized during the earlier period of resettlement in the United States.7 As a consequence of war, displacement, and resettlement rupturing traditional gender attitudes and practices, the first generation was far from passive in Vietnam or in the United States. Girls growing up in traditional households are often expected to be deferential to their elders, especially to male figures. As adults, they are often expected to fulfill traditional gender roles, placing priorities on marriage and motherhood. In Vietnam, necessity dictated that women take on nontraditional roles in the struggle for Vietnamese nationalism and the rebuilding of the nation, even by engaging in direct and subversive combat roles. With males fighting, imprisoned, or killed, women were forced into self-sufficiency by sustaining agricultural production, laboring in occupations, and operating businesses while simultaneously caring for their families and children. During the tumultuous period of the war in which millions of Vietnamese lost their lives or were injured, these women also made life-altering decisions to migrate to safer territory in their homeland and eventually to escape as refugees under incredible duress, and countless numbers endured indescribable emotional and physical hardship as well as sexual violence. The younger generation inherits the fortitude of the first generation; however, 1.5-generation experiences can differ vastly depending on how old individuals

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were when they arrived and where they settled as well as their family’s method of migration, socioeconomic background, and access to resources. While some were mature enough to comprehend the hardships their parents faced, many only have perceptions of these experiences through the lens of a child, and others were too young to directly observe their intimate imprint. Additionally, depending on their socialization, the 1.5 generation may be bilingual and bicultural, working closely with Vietnamese communities, while others are not fully fluent and have limited contact with coethnics, so the parameters of this category are seemingly porous. The women who are the focus of this chapter used their agency to further challenge traditional gender roles by being inventive self-motivators, asserting their voices, and enacting dissent, each in her individual way.

Forging Their Own Legal and Creative Paths The 1.5 generation of Vietnamese American women are affected by a fractured past, but rather than have it confine them, some have shown their resilience by incorporating it into their career paths. Two women, Lan Cao and Kim LuuNg, were directly shaped by their families’ legacies, which propelled them to enter the legal professions, but they also found creative outlets in the literary and culinary fields, respectively. Lan Cao, author and law professor specializing in international business at Chapman University Law School, received her degrees from Mount Holyoke College and Yale University. Her parents sent her to the United States to live with a family friend during the last days of the war, and they later rejoined her. She acknowledges how much easier it was for her to rebuild a new life and adopt different viewpoints than for her parent’s generation: Whereas I came at 13, I was much more adaptable. When I learned English and became much more assimilated into American culture, I was able to have the ability to look at Vietnamese culture not just from an insider’s point of view, but from an outsider’s point of view. So there are things I don’t like, let’s say, about Vietnamese culture, that I would not feel like I would have to replicate. Whereas if you are coming as somebody who is 50, 60, you’re trapped inside that culture, and you see it as the insider would.8

Cao’s father, one of the highest-ranking officials in the South Vietnamese military, and her mother, who came from a prominent land-owning family and was a successful entrepreneur during the war, actually encouraged her independence: My parents were very modern. . . . They did not raise me as a typical Vietnamese. They encouraged questioning. They allowed me to challenge them, as long as it’s done politely without rolling the eyes, shrugging the shoulders, having a

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certain body posture. If you show courtesy and you have a respectful voice, you are allowed to challenge, and that’s not necessarily the Vietnamese way.9

In an interview posted online that was conducted by her twelve-year-old multiracial daughter, Harlan, Cao admits that watching her parents wrestle with a civil war and rebuild their lives influenced her expectations of her daughter: If there’s a political crisis, . . . the only thing that is the best thing to give to your children is an education because nobody can take your education away from you. Your education consists of your freedom of thought, your freedom to be critical, meaning you can question what you learn. That itself is a very important skill. It’s called critical thinking. All that is what parents should give to their children, not money, not houses, not property, because all of those can go. . . . So as a result, I never went through my life thinking, okay, my goal is to have this . . . material thing, this house, this car. It was never that. So it’s to do what I want to do and to have control of my own time. So I love to write. . . . Now I teach law, which is exactly what I want to do.10

Cao credits her father’s Buddhist faith for giving him the ability to learn “about how to trust and how to live with betrayal”: If you come as a refugee with nothing, and you had a lot in Vietnam, it’s a very big psychological shock. . . . So there’s a lot of mental toughness you have to have, meaning no matter what shock you went through, no matter what trauma you went through during the war, no matter what you have lost, you have to have the mental stability to start over and to succeed, . . . to have [a] stable life. . . . It’s a daily thing to have mental serenity, because any one of us could have gone insane. . . . So that’s what I’m most proud of [that] I did not collapse.11

These observations and experiences of survival have shaped her own capacity to be an outspoken scholar and author, contesting popular misinterpretations about the Vietnam War and its aftermath as well as the misconstructions of the Vietnamese people in fictional and nonfictional narratives. Most notably, she authored one of the first Vietnamese American novels, Monkey Bridge, about a mother-daughter relationship, and also The Lotus and the Storm, about a refugee family, which contains some autobiographical details.12 Kim Luu-Ng, a human rights attorney and restaurateur, escaped Vietnam when she was a toddler with her siblings and parents as “boatpeople” refugees in 1979.13 She explains the impact the war had on her, especially her ethnic Chinese father, who served in the South Vietnamese army and was tortured when he was captured during the war:

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My father only fought in a war for one year, but the battle lasted throughout his life. . . . My dad was fiercely anti-Communist and was willing to give up his life, as well as the lives of his children, his elderly mother, and my mother for a life without repression, starvation, corruption, and he always said to me that he would rather die than see me and my sister forced to survive and sell our bodies. And although I was just a toddler, I’ve lived with the consequences and the legacy of that [Vietnam] War.14

She conveys not just the war’s emotional toll but the physical consequences, since both her parents died young of rare cancers: Whether that has to do with the Agent Orange, the napalm, I don’t know. Whether that has to do with the violence, the torture, I don’t know. And whether that has to do with the stress and the trauma of losing your country, and your people, and your culture, and your language, and your identity, I don’t know. There are many unanswered questions.15

Although Kim Luu-Ng is an accomplished attorney, educated at the University of Southern California and University of Pittsburgh, and a restaurateur on her own terms, her family’s history has cast a perceptibly long shadow on her career: My family’s refugee legacy has in many ways dictated the choices that I have made in my career. For my parents, it was their dream to see me become a successful corporate lawyer. In their eyes, working in the corporate world meant a good income and giving face to the family. Thus, I felt tremendous pressure from my father, who believed in the power of the law to protect and uphold freedom and liberty. To him, my success as an attorney defined his own success and made the escape out of Vietnam worth it.16

Before her father passed away from pancreatic cancer, he conveyed to her that perhaps he placed excessive pressure on his children, freeing her to leave corporate law and switch to public interest law, helping victims of torture. She joined the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles as an attorney to provide comprehensive immigration and social services to survivors of torture, then continues this work with her own law practice. She speaks about those she assists: They face great odds to escape to this country alive and then they challenge the system head on to seek freedom, safety, and security for themselves and their families. Their strength resonates deeply with me because that is what compelled my parents to risk our family’s lives to flee Vietnam.17

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Representing and advocating for torture survivors who continue to suffer great injustice is personally meaningful, but it comes at a price: “After the excitement of trial wanes and the adrenaline subsides, I face one of the most challenging aspects of my career: how to self-sustain when working with such emotionally tolling issues.”18 She knows the effects of compassion fatigue, depression, and burnout that accompany the intense responsibilities, especially in light of the Trump administration’s policies against immigrants and refugees. Along with her husband, Chinese-Singaporean chef Bryant Ng, she formerly co-owned The Spice Table and currently co-operates Cassia restaurant in Los Angeles, both featuring Southeast Asian cuisine, which have been highly praised by restaurant critics, with the latter becoming the first restaurant outside the New York City metropolitan area to receive a New York Times starred review. Luu-Ng’s mother was an excellent home cook who created fond culinary memories for her children in their crowded Los Angeles apartment, and some of her recipes are reinterpreted and served in their fine dining establishments. Combining her interests and as a constructive outlet, she and her husband cofounded LA Chefs for Human Rights, organizing fund-raising events at Cassia for nonprofit organizations supporting immigrant, low-income, and homeless populations. Both Cao and Luu-Ng were influenced by their family predicaments as refugees, and this foundation shaped their career trajectories and creative endeavors.

Establishing Entrepreneurship on Their Own Terms Some 1.5-generation Vietnamese American women, including Diep Tran and Bao Tranchi, are investing in unprecedented entrepreneurial enterprises, in some cases compelled by selectively relying on their family’s business legacy. Like Luu-Ng, a younger generation of Vietnamese American food entrepreneurs is transforming the industry using family recipes or knowledge acquired from family commercial ventures but infusing them with their own creations and aesthetics and catering to a wide range of devoted fans. In Los Angeles, chef Diep Tran, after graduating from college, spent a decade doing nonprofit social justice work before becoming co-owner of the Blue Hen restaurant in Eagle Rock, and then in 2009 opening up critically acclaimed Good Girl Dinette in Highland Park. Following the end of the war, Tran’s father had been imprisoned and her mother had passed away trying to escape Vietnam. In 1978, when she was six years old, Tran left Vietnam as a “boatperson” refugee with relatives. In order to support the family, her grandparents, uncles, and aunts started Pho 79 in 1982 in the Little Saigon area of Orange County and at one point had chain outlets, so she spent her childhood in the restaurant business.19 Tran’s restaurant slogan is “American diner meets Vietnamese comfort food,” and she focuses on using organic and locally sourced foods and produce on her vegan-friendly menu. She notes the generational differences, explaining that

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her aunts and uncles, “opened up their restaurant to feed their community, as defined by them, by ethnicity, by the hamlets they grew up in [in Vietnam], by their association with the Catholic church. I opened up the Dinette to feed my community, how I define it.”20 She elaborates on what “community” means to her: I feel like they [media interviewers] always ask something about my heritage. It’s always coded as my “community,” and they always talk about it as it being an ethnic community. And they don’t know that I opened up the Dinette, really, for dykes, you know? . . . I just wanted a space that reflected how I live my life, and how many people live their lives. So, in that way, that’s a dyke space. I wanted to create a space that redefined what that was. And to illustrate what is happening everywhere—it’s just that we don’t talk about it or think about it that way—is that queers are just woven into the fabric. They’re not assimilated; they’re just part of the community. I didn’t [do] it to be fetishistic.21

She dislikes media questions that essentialize her sexuality or stereotype Vietnamese people and culture or, for that matter, “Vietnamese” food, which she considers to be regionally diverse: “Where are you from?” “Are you French trained?” “Do you speak Vietnamese?” Anything with “my country,” all that stuff. The question doesn’t harm me, it’s what I have to do to answer that question that’s harmful to me because it’s almost like I have to put on a conical hat [that Vietnamese farmers wear].22

Tran’s grandparents lost their profitable businesses when forced to migrate from North to South Vietnam as the country was partitioned in 1954 and had to forfeit their businesses again in 1975 when the war ended. Her grandmother, who had refined culinary talents, was a harsh pragmatist who created feelings of both aversion and respect in her granddaughter: “And maybe I disavowed my childhood. . . . I just thought I was a different person, without any context, then I opened up the restaurant, and there were so many things that were like my grandmother.”23 She elaborates on the impact of her grandmother’s culinary inheritance: With every dish for a long time, I remembered that time when she said [about my cooking], “Everything is crap, no one will like it.” . . . I kind of began to appreciate my grandmother a little bit more. She gave me [a love for cooking], so how can you begrudge that? So now I acknowledge the grandma in me.

Drawing upon this, she explains that younger generations who are defining their own course have to contend with the past but do so on their own terms:

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I also dealt with my family where the like older generation doesn’t want to relinquish control, doesn’t want to listen to what the next generation has to say. When you have this breakage in lineage in a way, is that the newer generation, we don’t get to inherit a restaurant or knowledge or whatever, it gets truncated and we kind of have to build again.24

Tran has been credited for helping to revitalize Highland Park, a modest immigrant neighborhood, and integrating the vibe of the neighborhood into the design of the space and food: I grew up in immigrant neighborhoods, and I love the dynamics of that. It’s not too manicured. I love that it’s real working-class, because that’s my community. . . . My goal was always to open a neighborhood restaurant that serves sustainable cuisine, at a price point that is not out of reach. It could be an everyday experience for people, or an indulgence if you just got paid, depending on your economic bracket.25

However, she has also been an outspoken critic regarding combatting the underlying racism against and devaluation of ethnic restaurants as well as the exploitation of immigrant laborers: I watched my aunts and uncles work 16-hour days, only to charge cut-rate prices for their food. . . . I’ve been told flatly by Yelpers, customers and food reviewers that my restaurant is too expensive “for Vietnamese food.” . . . My relatives, like so many immigrant entrepreneurs, did what they had to do with their restaurant to survive and created a business model that worked for their time. That business model became the dominant model. . . . And these [cheap eats] lists make it difficult for immigrant businesses—and I include my own here—to break out of the trope that equates communities of color with cheap food and cheap labor.26

After nine years, rent increases prompted Tran to reconsider her future as a restaurateur. Ultimately, she decided to close her restaurant in 2018, which was announced in a Los Angeles Times article, a testament to her culinary influence, and will focus on other ways to advocate for better wages for workers and a new food venture. Like Tran, fashion and costume designer and entrepreneur Bao Tranchi articulates how she embraces her family’s history but also delineates her distinctiveness. She is the youngest of nine children in a family that arrived as “boatpeople” refugees when she was a toddler and grew up in Granada Hills in the San Fernando Valley, a predominantly white suburb north of Los Angeles. Tranchi recalls the challenges of being one of the few Vietnamese or even Asians in her school: “It was hard. I remember growing up and all you just wanted to do was be blonde and blue-eyed.” Although she outgrew this racialized yearning, when

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asked by a reporter if she ever desired to be a “traditional Vietnamese girl,” she unwaveringly responded: No, because there are tons of other girls who can play that role and they’ll play it really, really well. I couldn’t do it even if I tried. I’ve always known since I was a little girl that I was just different. . . . You just have to love who you intrinsically are, else what are you going to do, “Grow up the rest of your life hating yourself?” What a waste of a wonderful gift we’re all given. . . . It’s not just being a traditional Vietnamese girl, it’s just being a traditional girl, I don’t even think I’m a traditional girl. I know I’m very headstrong. I’m opinionated. I move with my own waters.27

Trained at the Otis College of Art and Design, Tranchi designs clothing that she describes as a “high-end luxury brand [that] redefines how we worship and display the female form” and has been worn by top Hollywood entertainers. She maintains that she designs for women of all shapes and sizes and recognizes that confidence is essential in fashion, something she relied upon as a refugee with meager resources who did not fit the mainstream perceptions of attractiveness: It means to have a self-awareness of your own beauty. It’s not about what you’re wearing but it’s more about being in touch with how the clothes make you feel. Clothing can be truly transformative that way. . . . The only mistake is when you don’t own what you’re wearing, or when you look like you’re being styled. It’s not about showing off a particular brand, or creating your whole fashion identity off of pop culture—that’s not personal style. Wear what you want and enjoy it. That energy creates a confidence that emanates deeper than anything you could wear. Confidence is the most powerful thing in a woman’s closet.28

Tranchi speaks of her family’s influence on her creative and entrepreneurial acumen, and she credits her grandfather, a prosperous importer in Vietnam, and her father, who worked as a draftsman in the United States. Accompanying her mother to the garment sweatshops in Los Angeles as a child and sitting next to her while she sewed also affected her career choice. However, it is her parents’ courage to endanger their lives and start life anew that emboldens her to embrace chancy ventures and start her own fashion line. In some ways, her fierce determinism and individualism are counterbalanced by the lingering attraction of filial responsibility: I would love to say that I feel like in my heart I know I’ve made my parents proud because they sacrificed everything to bring us over here. . . . My mom and dad’s spirit, . . . they risked everything, gave up everything in their homeland, [and] came over here. . . . [They had] two cents in our pocket [and] nine kids, . . . don’t speak a word of English. . . . I’m just so glad that at least I can bring some sort of honor to them.29

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Countering racialized and sexualized misperceptions, Tran and Tranchi take risks as entrepreneurs and build on their families’ business expertise with enterprises that reach beyond their ethnic communities and garner national profiles. Tranchi adds that the 1.5 generation faced incredible adversity, but younger generations of US-born Vietnamese Americans are seemingly more complacent. She contends that they should have more “fight and passion,” remarking, “We had it so tough building our own identity. You know growing up, there was no Vietnamese pride, no Vietnamese power, it was none of that. It was very much . . . build your own strength.” She wants them to “celebrate being Vietnamese”; however, they also should aspire to “build an identity outside of the Vietnamese community and outside of bonding together” and have the determination to “celebrate being an individual who’s got a voice . . . by doing things that people respect and enjoy and love and want to see and hear. I think that’s what is powerful. There’s no easy route, there’s no easy path. You just got to do the hard work.”30

Engaging in Nonprofit Advocacy Their Way The 1.5-generation Vietnamese American women are using their bilingual and bicultural skills to directly improve the Little Saigon community in Orange County through their nonprofit work. In so doing, they have to negotiate the oftentimes controversial and divisive politics of the community, and they each have to overcome obstacles as community workers, but they are undeterred. Ysa Le, a University of Southern California–trained pharmacist, was born in 1970 in Saigon, Vietnam, and left at age thirteen. Her parents emigrated from North to South Vietnam when the country was partitioned in 1954. Her father, who had a degree in English, taught college journalism, worked as an attaché to the deputy prime minister, and was imprisoned in the reeducation camps after the war. Her mother earned a nursing degree from the United States in the early 1960s and returned to Vietnam to teach. With her three children, her mother tried unsuccessfully to escape eleven times by boat, and they were thrown in prison after several of their attempts. After her father’s release, they were able to immigrate to France in 1983 because her grandfather had worked for the French government. Given the shortage of nurses in the United States, her mother was able to find a job working as a school nurse, and the family immigrated to the United States in 1985. Her father was editor in chief of the largest Vietnamese American newspaper, Nguoi Viet Daily News, and founded the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA), a voluntary nonprofit organization in Orange County, in 1991. After her father’s passing in 1999, Le joined VAALA in 2000 and strove to expand her father’s legacy. She became the executive director, a volunteer position, and transformed it by supporting traditional art exhibitions and musical performances with contemporary artistic productions, including VietFilmFest

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(formerly the Vietnamese International Film Festival), to appeal to wider audiences: It’s fun and it’s my passion right now. I get to meet a lot of artists and a lot of . . . interesting people of different walks of life. I got to learn more about the community as well by organizing these events. And I truly believe that arts could reach to different generations [and] different ethnicities. . . . The more events I organize, the more people I know, and I think my life gets richer.31

Under her leadership, VAALA, which is led predominantly by a core group of women, has bridged the generational gap by bringing together elder and younger generations of volunteers and attendees: Specifically as a Vietnamese American, I think in the aftermath of the [Vietnam] War, the portrayal of Vietnam and Vietnamese people has been narrowed to “the war” by the mainstream media. Many of the artwork created by the mainstream artists would only focus on their own stories, leaving the Vietnamese people in the background with no voices of their own. All this would create [an] urge for community art organizers to present a diversity of stories from our own experience. Our diversity, in turn, would enrich the American experience and history.32

Being fully bilingual has enabled her to collaborate on transnational projects that “serve as a platform for people of Vietnamese descent to share their stories,” which can include traditional and contemporary artists in Little Saigon, across the country, in Vietnam, and in other countries. While many consider Little Saigon to be merely a place for cheap eats, Le advocates for the community to further invest in supporting the arts: “I think Little Saigon needs to have more arts, more cultural attraction because after you eat a bowl of pho [Vietnamese soup], you like to see something interesting. I wish we have a gallery or a museum in Little Saigon.”33 She has encouraged engagement with and participation in the arts as producers, funders, and consumers, adding, “The second generation or 1.5 generation should be building that. I think that it’s important to keep our culture, to show our culture, and to have something that we all keep proud of, it should [be] beyond the food.” However, organizing cultural events can be contentious, as Le remarks on a 2009 VAALA art exhibition, F.O.B. II: Art Speaks, which was protested by Vietnamese American anticommunist groups for the content of selected artwork and led to a forced early closing of the exhibition: The exhibit we did in 2009, it sparked controversy. . . . All we wanted to do is to say look at the relationship [between] art and politics in the community. . . . The exhibit created a lot of dialogues in the community in different generations how

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we view art. . . . We don’t want to generalize different generations either [because] within the generations . . . [there are] different opinions. . . . [In the] exhibit we also examined different kind of politics, [not] just politics in the community, not just communism. We also explored politics in terms of like sexuality and [in] terms of general politics in the US.34

This younger group of Vietnamese activists, mainly women, was publicly and privately chastised by protesters, including elder male veterans, for being “disobedient and disrespectful daughters.” Although this was a trying time for her and VAALA organizers, it was a pivotal moment in which they stood their ground and contested the constrictive politics of the community.35 Likewise, Tricia Nguyen, the CEO of Southland Integrated Services (formerly Vietnamese Community of Orange County, founded in 1979), also serves the community, but on a compensated full-time basis. Born in 1975 in Saigon, Vietnam, she came to the United States with her family as a refugee when she was eleven years old. Attending college away from home at the University of California, Riverside was transformative, giving her the independence to veer away from her premed major to classes in anthropology, sociology, and psychology. To the dismay of her father, who expected her to become a doctor, she received her master’s in public health at the University of California, Los Angeles. After her father’s passing from fibroid cancer, she was the caregiver for her mother, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and her brother who was twelve years younger. Balancing caregiving with commuting to school and multiple jobs left her depressed and contemplating suicide, an experience that inspired her career choice. Working as an Orange County health educator with the Vietnamese community across different disease areas for seven years was invaluable in teaching her how to navigate a bureaucratic system and work with mainstream entities. Her perseverance also gave her experience working with a wide range of the Vietnamese population, as she explains, “At the beginning when you graduate at 22, you want to change the world. You want to make a difference. And then when you work so hard and you didn’t understand the system, . . . so I think I learned how to survive and the politics of the work.”36 Nguyen’s mother and grandmother wanted her to follow more traditional gender roles and encouraged her involvement in the Vietnamese youth group at the Buddhist temple. Her lifelong leadership role in the temple facilitated her fluency in Vietnamese and augmented her abilities to gain rapport and trust with the elders, skill sets she would later utilize in her community engagement work. Similar to other younger-generation women, she still notes the difficulty communicating with male elders, such as her father, who was formerly in the South Vietnamese military and accustomed to subordinates obeying his orders. She uses the analogy of having to accept decisions by the community, even when they are seemingly irrational, as analogous to having to listen to her father when

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she disagreed with him: “And a lot of times when I asked my dad, I’m like, ‘It doesn’t make sense.’ But he could not explain it to me. He’s just like, ‘Just do it! I’m your dad, I’ll telling you to do it!’”37 Nguyen has been the CEO of Southland for almost a decade after replacing the founder, who retired in 2006. The organization provides assistance to immigrants and refugees by offering citizenship classes, job skills training, and social services. It later added a social services site and a health center, the Southland Health Center (formerly Asian Health Center), which also provides dental and physical health as well as mental health services prevention and outpatient counseling programs to the uninsured or underinsured.38 Although Nguyen was prepared to handle the responsibilities of restructuring the organization, in the early years, she was oftentimes overwhelmed by the interpersonal conflicts. She credits the board members for supporting her decisions, which included restructuring the board, broadening services, serving more diverse clients, and streamlining policies, which enabled the growth of the organization. She was also able to win over community members, even those who initially questioned her authority through a gender and age bias: “They look at you like, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re not even that old. You’re just barely married, barely have a kid, so what do you know?’”39 Drawing from the earlier obstacles she faced, Nguyen now adopts a healthier, calm, and optimistic demeanor. Although she describes herself as “being very direct,” she had to make some accommodations in her leadership style in order to be more collaborative: “Our community’s not very cohesive, so many different groups bashing on others. I find that I’d rather be standing behind and just do like the quiet direct services. . . . I don’t mind doing the brunt, the daily work.”40 She continues to be motivated with a passion to provide the needed services to community members; however, she is pragmatic about how difficult it can be working with the older generation: “I’ve been in the community for so long. And I think for us, all of us are leaders in different ways. . . . I wish that one day we can collectively come together and actually do things in the bigger scope.”41 She hopes to see more Vietnamese Americans enter the public health professions in a wider range of specialties. Additionally, like the other 1.5-generation women, she would like to see an increase in the involvement of younger coethnic leaders who do not have self-serving agendas but who can work together collectively and will actually advocate for policies that will benefit not just the Vietnamese American community but also the broader population.

Conclusion The 1.5 generation may never fully comprehend the lived experiences of the first generation, who faced unimaginable physical and emotional trauma and made incredible sacrifices. For the first generation, the war is etched onto their bodies

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and souls, making it hard to imagine the Vietnamese American experience without the backdrop of the war. Major challenges persist when the lingering effects of the civil war and its aftermath continue to create a survivalist mentality and ideological divisions within Vietnamese American families and communities. The loss of status and displacement they experienced as refugees compel some elders, including male ideologues, to clamor in an attempt to reestablish themselves, with some resorting to tactics of gender intimidation. The level of acrimony and incivility within the community can be alienating and can persist in stifling dissent. For the 1.5 generation, this turmoil does not necessarily consume or encumber their lives, but the manifestations of this history and its remembrances are aspects that may figure in their choices and undertakings. The 1.5 are opting to use their agency to establish steadfast pathways for themselves, contribute to their communities as they define them, and make an impact on the larger US society. The six Vietnamese American women featured in this chapter—legal and creative forces Lan Cao and Kim Luu-Ng, entrepreneurial leaders Diep Tran and Bao Tranchi, and nonprofit community workers Ysa Le and Tricia Nguyen—are representative of the 1.5 generation of resilient and resistant “defiant daughters.” The refugee flows have basically ceased, although Vietnamese are still arriving as immigrants, albeit in smaller numbers, so demographic growth will occur with the US-born generation, already evident with an emergent third generation. Investing in future generations and contributing to the collective healing process means maintaining a delicate balance of having an inclusive and dialogic agenda that acknowledges that individual voices and identities are in constant motion.42 Defiant Vietnamese American women have been labeled as “unconventional” and may be dismissed as “false” or “inauthentic” Vietnamese and are sometimes vilified for their deviance. Rather than silencing the diversity of Vietnamese American experiences and expressions, including those who identify as queer, non-Vietnamese speaking, and multiethnic or multiracial, the 1.5 generation women who are the focus of this chapter illustrate the need to reimagine the collective narrativization of Vietnamese America in Southern California and in other localities. Notes

1 Nazli Kibria, Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 2 Yen Le Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, nos. 1–2 (2006): 410–32. 3 This is similar to other Asian American women’s experiences; see Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 4 See Nhi T. Lieu, The American Dream in Vietnamese (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011); Lan P. Duong, Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012). 5 On the younger generation, see Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III, Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (New York: Russell Sage, 1998);

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Sucheng Chan, ed., The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation: Stories of War, Revolution, Flight, and New Beginnings (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). I am especially indebted to the six women who gave me permission to share their stories and who strengthened the chapter by reviewing it. Linda Trinh Võ, “Managing Survival: Economic Realities for Vietnamese American Women” in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail Nomura (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 237–52. Harlan M. V. Cao and Lan Cao, interview, First Days Story Project: Voices of the Vietnamese Refugee Experiences, American Experience StoryCorps, PBS, www.pbs.org, accessed October 15, 2017. Cao and Cao interview. Cao and Cao. Cao and Cao. Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997); Lan Cao, The Lotus and the Storm (New York: Viking Penguin, 2014). Kim Luu-Ng, interview with the author, and Tram Le, video, Alhambra, CA, May 26, 2017. Kim Luu-Ng, transcription of “PBS—Listen Live: Stories of The Vietnam War” talk, Hollywood, CA, October 6, 2017, shared with author. Luu-Ng, “PBS—Listen Live.” Kim Luu-Ng, “Letter to a Young Public Interest Attorney,” Los Angeles Public Interest Law Journal 2 (Spring 2010): 249–53. Ng. Ng. “5 Questions for Diep Tran,” Los Angeles Times blog, October 31, 2011, http://latimesblogs. latimes.com, Accessed August 3, 2017. Steven Stern, “Based on an Old Family Recipe,” New York Times, June 7, 2011, www.nytimes. com, accessed August 5, 2017. Tien Nguyen, “Q&A with Good Girl Dinette’s Diep Tran: The Politics of Breakfast + Fielding Questions about One’s Heritage,” LA Weekly, June 6, 2013, www.laweekly.com, accessed August 5, 2017. Nguyen. Farley Elliott, “Good Girl Dinette’s Diep Tran on Winning Over Highland Park,” Eater LA, October 2, 2014, https://la.eater.com accessed August 15, 2017. “Beyond Pho,” The Migrant Kitchen, season 2, episode 4, KCET, https://www.kcet.org, accessed December 15, 2017. Elliott, “Good Girl Dinette’s Diep Tran.” Diep Tran, “Cheap Easts, Cheap Labor: The Hidden Human Costs of Those Lists,” NPR, February 12, 2017, www.npr.org, accessed August 3, 2017. Bao Tranchi, interview by Kristine Sa, Up Close & Personal, part 1 of 4, YouTube, October 30, 2009, video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_mvetiP_EY, accessed November 10, 2017. Agatha Nowicki, “The Designer Dialogues: Bao Tranchi,” The Lady Loves Couture (blog), August 29, 2016, https://theladylovescouture.com. Bao Tranchi, interviewed by Kristine Sa, Up Close & Personal, part 4 of 4, YouTube, October 30, 2009, video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3oXU4DQar8, accessed November 10, 2017. Tranchi interview, part 4. Ysa Le, interviewed by Andy Le, Santa Ana, CA, November 10, 2012, Viet Stories: Vietnamese American Oral History Project Collection, University of California, Irvine, http://vaohp. lib.uci.edu, accessed August 10, 2017.

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32 “Going Against the Grain: Ysa Le,” Against the Grain Productions, December 16, 2010, www.againstthegrainproductions.com, accessed December 27, 2017. 33 “Going Against the Grain.” 34 “Going Against the Grain.” 35 Lan Duong and Isabelle Pelaud, “Vietnamese American Art and Community Politics: An Engaged Feminist Perspective,” Journal of Asian American Studies 15, no. 3 (2012): 241–69. For more on political and generational frictions, see Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012). 36 Tricia Nguyen, interviewed by author with Laureen Hom, video recorded, Garden Grove, CA, February 17, 2017; this interview is part of a report by Linda Trinh Võ and Laureen Hom, Transforming Orange County: Assets and Needs of Asian Americans & Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in Orange County (Orange County, CA: Asian Americans Advancing Justice—Orange County, 2018). 37 Nguyen interview. 38 Now less than 60 percent of those they serve are Vietnamese, and the rest are Korean, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Latinx, Caucasian, and African American. 39 Nguyen interview. 40 Nguyen interview. 41 Nguyen interview. 42 See also Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011).

Part V Globalization, Work, Family, Community, Activism

Part V considers women’s work experiences from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century. Since the 1970s, as part of global economic competition, women worldwide have been joining the paid labor force in greater numbers and migrating from less developed states and internal poor sectors, namely rural areas, to industrialized countries and local developed sectors, especially cities. Asian and Pacific Islander women are part of this international movement of workers and the “feminization of labor” as they pursue higher wages, new opportunities, and upward mobility in the United States, aided by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and elsewhere. The four chapters in part V examine the activities, roles, and situations of different ethnic groups of Asian immigrant women in America in the gendered global labor force and the impact of emigration and work on their identities, families, communities, and activism. The first chapter provides an overview of the women’s workforce participation post1970s, followed by three chapters on Chinese, Taiwanese, and Filipina women, respectively. Krittiya Kantachote and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas explore the lives of three categories of working Asian immigrant women of various ethnic groups in the United States since the 1970s, namely low-wage unskilled laborers, smallbusiness entrepreneurs, and professionals. Although in a precarious position regardless of their work category, the immigrant women are firm in their motivations, initiatives, and sacrifices. They emigrate mostly to support families back home but also for socioeconomic mobility for themselves. Over time they find personal satisfaction in their new identities. Margaret M. Chin discusses the historic role of Chinese immigrant women in apparel work in New York City generally, and in the garment shops of Chinese small-business owners in Manhattan’s Chinatown specifically. From 1950 to 2009, they created new lives as sewers, mothers juggling work and family, friends with coworkers, union members, and strikers. Even as they give voice to their increased power in the home and with extended family as well as their improved view of themselves and their possibilities, Chinese immigrant women’s agency is constantly tested against global competition in the garment industry and the 9/11 attacks that closed their factories. Maria W.  L. Chee’s chapter considers transnational family life for nonworking-class, educated Taiwanese women in the 1980s and 1990s. After immigrating to America for their children’s education, the women and children 221

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generally stayed while their spouses returned to Taiwan and sent money to support the family. The women positively voiced their agency in supporting a transnational family existence but expressed that they had borne more of the costs than their spouses, such as sacrificing their careers and being the primary parent. Their experiences provide new understandings of the gendered conflicts and hardships of migrating for socioeconomic mobility despite the women’s more advantaged class position in this case. Asian immigrant women are a notable part of the global division of labor in today’s care industry. Since the 1950s, large numbers of Indian, Korean, and Filipina nurses, physicians, and other health care professionals have been “recruited” to America. Joy Sales offers a fresh perspective on care work and health care workers by considering how Filipinas in Chicago make decisions about and are changed by their work lives as nurses and domestic caregivers. “Revolutionary care” is the name she gives to their deliberate activism in opposing the corporatization of health care, restrictive immigration policies, and other activities to improve the quality of caregiving and the well-being of workers and those they serve. Their voices and experiences expand our knowledge of Asian American women in the US Midwest. The findings in part V demonstrate how different ethnic groups of women workers share common experiences in the global economy despite their distinct histories, class differences, work lives, and locations. From the women’s standpoint, they find opportunity in filling a labor need to gain economic security and advancement for themselves and their families. They also become empowered under global capitalism to resist racism, xenophobia, sexism, and classism and to redefine their identities, gender roles, family and community relationships, and place in their families, the workforce, and US society.

13

Precarious Labor Asian Immigrant Women, 1970s–2010s Krittiya Kantachote and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

The post-1965 labor migration of Asian American women has taken place in the context of global economic restructuring, a macrostructural process that over the past four decades has integrated national economies into a single global labor market. From advanced capitalist nations like the United States to developing nations such as Thailand and the Philippines, countries trade goods and services, export products to achieve a viable economy, and depend on multinational corporations and foreign direct investments to increase domestic productions. The result includes vast movements of capital, people, and cultural formations across the globe.1 This chapter situates the labor market incorporation of Asian immigrant women in the larger context of globalization, specifically examining three categories of workers—unskilled laborers, entrepreneurs, and professionals— and their opportunities and challenges. We establish here the precarity, that is, the instability, confronted by the three groups by describing how each in its own way provides “cheap labor” to the US economy—meaning, the costs of their labor are cheap acquisitions for US society and/or the conditions of their employment are below prevailing labor standards. Nevertheless, despite being exploited as cheap labor, these women see opportunities for socioeconomic mobility for themselves and their families and find personal fulfillment.

Global Restructuring and the Rise of Precarious Labor The development of a single global market economy has led to a decentered global labor market consisting of multiple consumer markets in different regions of the world. At the same time, it has resulted in the relocation of production. Under globalization, manufacturing activities, such as garments, automobiles, and high-technology products have moved from advanced capitalist countries such as the United States to newly industrialized nations such as China, India, and Thailand. Consequently, manufacturing employment fell by 28 percent between 1990 and 2015.2 To remain competitive, domestic producers must compete with foreign producers more than ever to find low-cost resources (e.g., labor and materials), reduce production costs, and maximize profits.3 223

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The decline in manufacturing jobs has coincided with the rise of service jobs in the United States, many of which are as precarious. Service workers in temporary positions suffer a wage penalty, are less likely to be unionized, and face a decrease in workplace benefits.4 Indeed, the nation has experienced an increase in both skilled and unskilled service occupations since the 1970s. Asian immigrant women have responded to the demand for both types of workers, albeit with a concentration in the lower end of the service sector. Asian professional women, particularly in health care, help fill the demand for skilled workers, providing a low-cost source for receiving countries, such as the United States. Specialized skilled services (e.g., legal, financial, accounting, and consulting) in economic centers, notably New York City and Los Angeles, generate a need both for highly trained experts, some of whom come from abroad, and for low-wage service workers to maintain the lifestyles of professionals.5 Employers in the United States keep costs down in personal service jobs by hiring people with few qualifications, including immigrants and others with less education and pay them low wages.6 The vulnerability of Asian immigrant women, who face social, political, and cultural barriers (e.g., language), makes them a target group to fill various low-wage positions. Entering the twenty-first century, a combination of macrostructural forces, including the intensification of neoliberalism (the commitment to a free market whereby entrepreneurs are liberated to trade freely in the market and state intervention is minimal),7 and the decline of institutional protection for workers has resulted in the precarity of both low- and high-skill jobs in the United States. Wages are stagnant, jobs are insecure and provide few benefits, workers have little control over their work activities, and retirement is elusive. How do Asian immigrant women fare in the sociopolitical climate of worker insecurity?

An Overview of the Labor Market Activities of Asian Immigrant Women Since the 1930s, women have for the most part outnumbered male migrants in the United States. In 2010, 51 percent of foreign-born people were female.8 The shift from a male- to a female-dominated flow of immigrants took place with the introduction of family reunification as an immigration criterion, beginning with the War Brides Act of 1945. This law facilitated the entrance of more than two hundred thousand Asian war brides, fiancées, and children.9 This trend continued with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, or Hart-Celler Act, which ended four decades of Asian immigration restrictions, increased the annual immigration quota to twenty thousand for each Asian country, and adopted preferences for those with specialized training. This law radically changed the composition of the Asian population by gender and level of educational attainment with the direct recruitment of skilled workers. Taking advantage of the priority given to family-based migration, these workers, in turn, have sponsored the migration of their relatives, with some holding professional credentials and

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others less skilled and educated. Most Asian immigrants enter the United States via family preference categories.10 Consequently, the Asian population in America grew exponentially, from 3.5 million in 1980 to 6.9 million in 1990 to 10.2 million in 2000 to 14.7 million in 2010.11 The 2008–2012 American Community Survey Five-Year Estimates indicate that on average 66 percent of Asians in the United States were foreign born.12 This flow is also dominated by women like the larger US immigration trend. India is the notable exception, where men constitute a slightly higher proportion than women due to the demand for their skills in science and technology.13 Approximately 75 percent of professional Asian immigrants who entered the United States between 1988 and 1990 migrated with their families. In fiscal year (FY) 2000, 70 percent of H-4 visas (granted to spouses or children of H visa holders including H-1B nonimmigrant visa holders—those who perform a skilled “specialty occupation”) were issued to those from Asia, implying that most professional Asian immigrants came to the United States with their families. By FY 2010, 79 percent of H-4 visas were granted to Asian spouses and children and reached 91 percent by FY 2015.14 While many Asian women enter the country as “secondary migrants” to create or reunite a family, they also enter as primary migrants who later sponsor the migration of family members. This is especially true of Filipinas. The heavy recruitment of nurses spurred the primary migration of women in this community.15 Regardless of their mode and time of entry into the United States, Asian immigrant women actively participate in the paid and unpaid labor market out of economic necessity. They contribute to the family income and maintain dual-wageearning households to make up for their husbands’ earnings, especially in the case of low-income families, which are generally lower than those of native-born men (“native” in this chapter refers to all US born). In 2014, 53.3 percent of Asian women sixteen years and over were employed.16 As table 13.1 indicates,17 the percentage of labor force participation of Asian immigrant women in the United States compared to native Asian women varies by ethnic group. “Asian American” refers to those who are native born, and “Asian immigrant” women are those who are foreign born. Table 13.1 Labor Force Participation of Asian American and Asian Immigrant Women (by Percentage), 2008–2010 Native Born

Foreign Born

Chinese 57.7 58.9 Filipina 63.0 69.1 Indian 55.0 55.1 Japanese 54.4 41.1 Korean 55.1 51.1 Vietnamese 59.8 60.5 Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey (averages for the combined years 2008– 2010). See Mary Dorinda Allard, “Asians in the US Labor Force: Profile of a Diverse Population,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2011, www.bls.gov.

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Notably, the rate of labor force participation above among Filipina immigrant women far exceeds that of the general female population (Asian 58.2 percent and non-Asian 59.1 percent) and is much higher than in the Philippines, where women’s labor force participation was 50 percent in 2010.18 Their higher labor force participation can be attributed to various reasons, including their motivation to migrate to the United States for employment, their better command of the English language, and their higher concentration in wage labor than other Asian ethnic groups. Greater proficiency in English provides Filipinas with other employment avenues rather than self-employment as small-business entrepreneurs, which is more predominant among other Asian groups. It is likely that the rate of labor market participation for other Asian immigrant women is undercounted because the assistance they offer as wives in family businesses is potentially not recognized as an official paid labor activity. The generally high level but also diverse range of educational attainment within and across Asian ethnic groups has implications for their employment. In 2015, around 30.6 percent of the total US population age twenty-five and over had completed either a bachelor’s degree or a graduate/professional degree.19 In contrast, the level of educational attainment of Asian immigrant women in the six largest ethnic groups is significantly higher, except for Vietnamese (table 13.2). Southeast Asian refugees also have a much lower percentage of tertiary education completion than the general population. The relatively high educational attainment of many Asian immigrant women is due in part to the selective recruitment process of the 1965 and 1990 Immigration Acts. These women are either the primary immigrants or the spouses of highly educated professionals. Table 13.2 Asian Immigrant Educational Attainment of Bachelor’s Degree or Higher by Gender (by Percentage), 2015 Male

Female

Chinese

54.8

49.7

Filipino

44.7

50.8

Indian

80.8

72.5

Japanese

64.0

42.7

Korean

56.5

43.2

Vietnamese

27.0

22.9

Cambodian

18.9

16.8

Laotian

14.9

13.4

Burmese

22.8

21.9

Thai

38.2

37.5

Source: US Census Bureau, Selected Population Profile in the Unites States: Educational Attainment, American Community Survey 2015, https://factfinder.census.gov, accessed January 15, 2017.

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Filipina, Chinese, and Thai women occupy a wide variety of jobs in the labor market. Other Asian ethnic groups are more highly concentrated in particular occupational categories, for instance, Koreans in self-employment and Vietnamese in low-wage employment. In some ethnic groups, the labor market incorporation of women is bifurcated. For example, 33.2 percent of employed Thai female migrants are in management, business, science, and arts occupations, and 34.4 percent are in service occupations.20 This contradicts the common depiction of Southeast Asian immigrant women as mostly disadvantaged low-paid workers in dead-end jobs with limited financial security and upward mobility.21 Although the generally high level of educational attainment of many Asian immigrant women has allowed them to seek a wider range of occupations than other post-1965 immigrants, namely Latina and Caribbean women, the educational capital of Asian immigrant women does not necessarily mirror the characteristics of their labor market incorporation. Skilled Asian immigrant women have been forced to turn to lower-skilled occupations because of restrictive measures against foreign-trained professionals as well as language barriers, resulting in downward economic mobility in the United States.22 Underemployment is a quintessential way that Asian immigrant women provide “cheap labor” for the skills that they bring to the US labor market. For example, many Filipinas migrated with some years of college but are employed as domestic workers.23 In some cases, professional women are not given the opportunity to utilize their skills. Those entering with an H-4 visa as a dependent spouse of an H-1B nonimmigrant visa holder are ineligible to participate in the labor market. While a recent change in law enables certain H-4 visa holders to file for employment authorization, they can only do so if the H-1B nonimmigrant has already started seeking employment-based lawful permanent resident status.24 It is estimated that 100,000–150,000 migrant spouses, many of whom are women from India and whose husbands are in the information technology industry, are unable to seek employment despite their high educational attainment.25 To further illustrate their labor market incorporation, we provide an overview of Asian immigrant women as low-wage workers, small-business entrepreneurs, and professionals.

Low-Wage Workers Letty is a Filipina caregiver in Long Beach, California, who at seventy-eight years old does not foresee her complete retirement anytime soon.26 She came to the United States in the 1980s, first working as a nanny in New York and then switching to elder caregiving. The slower pace of caring for an elder suited her old age, she explained. Letty would like to return to the Philippines “for good” but lacks the savings necessary to do so. Instead, she must continue to work part-time on

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the weekends as she cannot survive solely on the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) she receives from the state, which is a welfare benefit that hinges on her continued residence in the country. SSI recipients who leave the United States for more than thirty days would lose this benefit.27 Asian immigrant women like Letty fill the labor market need for low-wage work in service and manufacturing. In the global cities of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, they include garment workers, masseuses, and domestic workers. In rural areas, they work in agriculture and meatpacking plants. Of lowwage Asian immigrant workers, Chinese female migrants are overrepresented in the bottom rungs of the garment industry. They are concentrated in the ethnic enclaves of Chinatown, where the access of potential immigrant entrepreneurs to a pool of coethnics as a source of cheap labor is secured by the steady flow of new migrants. Overworked and underpaid, immigrant seamstresses are usually paid by piece rate and often lack overtime pay as well as health insurance and other work compensations. These jobs are often unsafe (e.g., exposure to hazardous materials), monotonous, and require few skills. Hence the importance of union shops that provide women garment workers with more financial security, flexibility, and benefits.28 In the Midwest, meatpacking plants have been known to rely on the low-wage labor provided by Southeast Asian refugees. For Vietnamese and Laotian women in the 1980s, packing plants were often their best option for employment as the work requires few skills (e.g., jobs are set up as mechanized assembly work), provides better pay than other available low-skill employment, and is shunned by the Anglo-American men who traditionally dominated the industry. This remains true today, as one turkey processing plant in South Dakota attributes its success to the ability to recruit recent refugees from Myanmar.29 Asian immigrant women are also concentrated in low-wage service employment, including in the informal sector (e.g., domestic workers), the formal sector (e.g., hotel housekeepers, restaurant workers, and certified nurse’s aides), and ethnic economies (e.g., manicurists and restaurant workers).30 Providing lowwage service is difficult work. Domestic work such as the elder care provided by Letty may require twenty-four hours of labor.31 Trinidad, a sixty-eight-year-old domestic worker in Rome, describes a daily routine that generally reflects those of her Filipina counterparts in Los Angeles.32 I begin at seven in the morning. I change her, feed her, give her all of her injections and medication. Then I clean the apartment. When you take care of an elder, the first thing you have to have is patience. If you don’t have it, you won’t last. For example, when you feed her, it can take up to an hour. . . . But taking care of an elder like this one is better than a mobile one. Those ones are demanding. You wipe them already then they want you to wipe them again. They have no shame. These types are better . . . you just move them around from the bed to

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the chair. You have to just clean her bed everyday because it will smell like pee around the house if you don’t. . . . I wake up at four in the morning just to check that the woman is still alive. Then if there is no problem, I sleep until a little bit before seven and I am done with her by nine. . . . I sleep around midnight or one in the morning.

Despite their nonstop labor, elder caregivers seldom take a day off because of the tremendous dependence of their elderly patients.33 Asian immigrant caregivers are more heavily concentrated in this labor market sector in certain cities. According to the Pilipino Workers Center, immigrant Filipina workers dominate elder caregiving in Los Angeles in both personal (private home) and industrial services, such as nursing homes.34 In the Filipino immigrant community, recent women migrants frequently turn to domestic work because of their limited options in the labor market.35 Other groups of Asian immigrant women provide low-paid services in ethnic economies. Nail salons and massage businesses operated by ethnic entrepreneurs primarily rely on other immigrant women to offer an affordable luxury to a wider range of consumers. Visitors to New York or Los Angeles will notice the abundance of nail salons operated by Korean and Vietnamese women as well as massage businesses operated by Thai and Chinese women.36 Because of the fierce competition among ethnic business owners, many pay workers no more than the minimum wage. Thai massage therapists in Los Angeles often were paid minimum wage, or ten dollars an hour, in California in 2016.37 They also must have a license, which requires the investment of money and time for their training. It may take some time before a therapist can pay off the money borrowed from family and friends for their training. While working as a therapist is considered more flexible than garment factory work (they can, to a certain extent, choose their own schedule but with the approval of the business owner), at the same time it means job insecurity as many employers choose to pay therapists a flat rate of half the service price. For example, if the service is forty dollars an hour, the worker will get twenty dollars. A therapist could go home without pay if she is without customers during her shift. They also depend on tips, which are never guaranteed, resulting in their fluctuating and inconsistent take-home pay. Finally, because therapists are considered by most massage business owners to be part-time workers or independent contractors, they are often excluded from health insurance and other benefits.

Small-Business Entrepreneurs Immigrants are often disadvantaged to compete against the native born in the primary labor market because they are not always able to use their educational and occupational capital, face language difficulties and discrimination, and are

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unfamiliar with American cultural practices.38 To avoid low-wage jobs like those performed by Chinese garment workers or Filipina hotel housekeepers in San Francisco, immigrants with financial and ethnic resources may choose to become small business entrepreneurs to better negotiate the segmented US labor market. In doing so, they take advantage of the business know-how of their human capital (e.g., high levels of educational attainment) and ethnic resources (e.g., rotating credit associations) that make available the financial capital required to open a business.39 Kittima, a Thai massage business owner in Los Angeles, California, who is in her early thirties, left Thailand after finishing a vocational degree. She came to the United States in 2006 to further her education but was sidetracked by the opportunity to earn money immediately. During her first seven years in the United States, following the suggestions of coethnics, Kittima worked in Thai restaurants without a permit for some time prior to getting her green card (“got forty-five dollars per day and no tips”) and then massage places. Though earning no more than minimum wage in the ethnic enclave, she saved enough to eventually open her business.40 As a business owner, Kittima earns not much more than what she did as a worker. For this reason, it often crosses her mind to close her business and return to wage labor. Still, she opts to keep her business afloat due to its promise of economic mobility. Contemporary Asian immigrant workers like Kittima contribute to the economic development of global cities in a crucial way. Their small businesses spur economic growth. For example, a variety of immigrant Asian ethnic groups provide convenient services, such as dry cleaning, to the growing professional class and run subcontracting shops that are part of the informal manufacturing economy. As small entrepreneurs, they generally operate two types of small businesses, those that fill markets avoided by large corporations due to the risks of crime and poverty, such as liquor stores in low-income neighborhoods, and those that expand markets by making goods and services accessible and affordable to a wider consumer base, for example, nail salons. Many businesses are not in ethnic enclaves (e.g., Koreatown) but instead cater to a larger urban clientele. Opening a business in an urban area is more affordable for prospective entrepreneurs than the safer area of the suburbs. High levels of crime and poverty have made many urban neighborhoods ghettos and barrios—what Jennifer Lee calls “vacant niches,” meaning local economies perceived as high-risk areas and accordingly abandoned by large corporations—as potential retail markets.41 Taking advantage of these neighborhoods, Koreans have franchised gasoline stations and opened groceries, liquor stores, dry cleaning shops, and retail shops of Asian manufactured goods (e.g., clothing, wigs, and hair accessories) in these “high-risk” markets.42 Although they have more resources and advantages than contemporary Asian immigrant women in low-wage manufacturing and service employment, many

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small-business entrepreneurs depend on cheap labor as well.43 The maintenance of such businesses requires long hours. Lisa Sun-Hee Park found that the majority of children of Asian immigrant entrepreneurs reported their parents working an average of seventy hours a week.44 Small ethnic businesses also rely on the unpaid labor of wives and children and are unlikely to survive without family labor, most importantly the labor of women. While often unrecognized, the work of women in small businesses also suffers from a gendered hierarchy that relegates the “less-skilled” and more monotonous work to them. For instance, men often take over the managerial tasks (e.g., accounting) that are required in the daily operation of small Korean businesses.45 What of the businesses operated solely by women? A new niche in beauty and health services emerged in the 2000s dominated by Asian immigrant women. Korean and Vietnamese women are concentrated in nail salons. Thai women are highly represented among beauty and health service operators in Los Angeles, many of which operate as massage businesses. In 2010, there were 167 such businesses comprising up to 9.08 percent of the total Thai businesses in Los Angeles.46 In 2016, there were almost seventy massage places owned and operated by Thai women in Los Angeles County alone.47 This is one of the few business sectors dominated by Asian immigrant women as managers and operators. However, the ownership and operation of these businesses do hinge on the provision of cheap labor by coethnics. This is also the case for long-term health care facilities operated by Filipina immigrant women who likewise depend on the affordable labor of other Filipinas.48 Finally, studies show that successful entrepreneurship does not result in gender equality relations at home. Many women confront the “double day.” They keep long hours in small businesses but are still expected to perform the bulk of domestic chores in the household.49 Though operating a small business holds a higher social status than doing low-wage work, these immigrant women workers share certain insecurities including inconsistency in their earnings, nonguaranteed benefits, and finally nonguaranteed recognition of their profit contributions.

Professional Women The United States, like other advanced capitalist countries, seeks professional workers due to a labor market shortage particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and in health care. This is an institutionalized structural problem that has been mended in part by the migration of Asian professionals, including women. Recent Asian immigrants have helped fill the professional labor force shortage, for instance, the H-1B temporary worker visa. In FY 2013 and FY 2014, of all beneficiaries (initial employment and continuing employment), 80.5 percent of the 286,773 and 83.6 percent of the 315,857 H-1B petitions approved, respectively, went to immigrants from Asia. In FY 2014, 69.7

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percent, 8.4 percent, and 1.6 percent of all H-1B visas granted that year went to India, China, and the Philippines, respectively.50 Due to the direct recruitment of Asian professionals, the percentage of Asian American scientists and engineers increased from 2 percent in 1970 to 7 percent in 1990 and 18 percent in 2010.51 Men are the notable beneficiaries meeting this demand. In 2010, 13 percent of Asian men worked as scientists and engineers compared to 5 percent of Asian women.52 Yet we should not overlook the presence of women among professional migrants from Asia. Falguni is a physician from India who migrated to the United States as the wife of an executive in 1988. After passing the Foreign Medical Graduate exam, she found herself facing a segregated labor market. All her applications for prestigious hospital internships were turned down. Facing a bifurcated labor system that limited her options and opportunities to the less desirable destination of inner-city hospitals, she trained as a resident in a “community hospital.” Falguni now maintains a private practice, but she still confronts the continued devaluation of her training. For instance, the College of Physicians does not recognize any of the awards she received in India. Regardless of her various hurdles, Falguni, like many other Indian doctors in the United States, has found a financially rewarding niche in the US medical profession.53 Migrants from India, Korea, and the Philippines have also long responded to the demand for foreign-trained nurses in the United States.54 Their entry has notably ebbed and flowed with labor market demands since the 1960s with their migration currently in a hiatus due to the expiration on December 2009 of the H-1C visa, the visa assigned to migrants responding to a health professional shortage area in the country.55 Since then, Asian immigrant women, the main beneficiary of the H-1C visa, have been left to compete with other H-1B visa seekers (other professionals such as engineers and computer specialists) from all over the world.56 The process of labor migration for professionals is neither easy nor convenient. Many foreign-trained nurses, for example, initially enter as temporary workers. During this time, while they are eligible to sponsor their spouses and unmarried children under twenty-one years of age (H-4 classification), their dependents face red tape and cannot work in the United States immediately.57 As Asian women health professionals enter the United States as the principal immigrant, they are in a strong position to modify traditional patriarchy.58 This may result in tensions in the family as it denies men a breadwinner status.59 According to Yên Lê Espiritu, many husbands of Filipino nurses assume more household chores and childcare responsibility in their wives’ absence.60 Providing a more nuanced picture, Sheba George found varying patterns of gendered divisions of labor in the households of Indian migrant nurses. George recognized that some men revolted against women’s greater income-earning power by rejecting housework or performing less housework than their wives.61

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Outside the cost of their education, foreign-trained nurses invest a tremendous amount of money to secure employment in the United States. Some relieve the sponsoring medical facility of the costs of their recruitment and bear most of the costs of their labor placement. In 2000, migration to the United States could cost Filipina nurses as much as $7,000, which is usually deducted from their pay.62 This debt binds them and leaves them vulnerable to the sponsoring facility. The precarity, meaning insecurity, confronted by Asian professional women is slightly different from their counterparts who operate small businesses or provide low-wage labor. While utilizing their skills, they still are likely to experience underemployment, displacement magnified by the glass ceiling, and lower earnings than their native counterparts. Most significantly, they are concentrated in less desirable areas that are rejected by native workers, such as rural areas in need of teachers or medical professionals where they are at risk of facing isolation or poor neighborhoods in urban areas.63

Conclusion Asian immigrant women have a high rate of labor market participation and a diverse range of educational attainment levels. From the 1970s to the early decades of the twenty-first century, they can be found in a wide variety of occupations in the US labor market, both cross-ethnically and within ethnic groups. As a result, it is difficult to categorically address their labor market incorporation in a singular framework that is inclusive of the diverse range of their labor market activities. Asian immigrant women are active participants in both the paid and unpaid labor force. Among the latter, especially if working in family-owned enterprises, their labor, talent, and expertise are crucial to the survival of the family business yet are often underrecognized by society in general. By surveying the labor market activities of recent Asian immigrant women and by viewing these activities as processes embedded in global restructuring, we argue that they provide cheap labor in the US economy in myriad ways. The concept of “cheap labor” is loosely interpreted to mean that US society can acquire their labor “cheaply” or that their employment conditions are below usual labor standards. This definition applies to unskilled workers, ethnic entrepreneurs, and professionals. For instance, it is applicable to the experiences of Filipina nurses whose training did not come with any financial costs to the United States, to the Thai women who operate small businesses for long hours, and to the Chinese immigrant women who predominate as garment workers in various cities in the United States. As low-wage workers, entrepreneurs, and professionals, women workers have unequal levels of social and economic mobility and face different opportunities and constraints. While they may share the opportunity to earn more than they would in their countries of origin, an elder caregiver such as Letty, a massage

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business owner such as Kittima, and a doctor such as Falguni cannot be considered equally displaced by the capitalist system in the United States. Falguni, despite working her way through various structural barriers, has been able to utilize her education while Letty and Kittima have not. Thus, the understanding of their labor market activities should not discount their differences in access to opportunities. Asian immigrant women participating in diverse areas of the labor market are valued human resources who are too often invisible in the nation’s economy. They confront precarious labor conditions such as inconsistency in wages, nonguaranteed work benefits, and the absence of job security. Professionals also face barriers in having their credentials recognized and advancing in their fields. Although deemed a “cheap labor” force to the United States, they must be recognized as making major contributions to key economic enterprises, to local and community endeavors, and to national needs. Without nurses from abroad, for instance, many Americans would be left with limited access to caregiving and at a much higher expense. Moreover, the women’s income is often critical for their families’ well-being. Asian American women are actively engaged in the labor market, yet they must operate within the context of global restructuring and its constraints on their opportunities. Without question, their labor and skills are important contributors to the nation’s economic prosperity and to their own selfdevelopment and family support. Notes

We are grateful to the Thai and Filipina women who shared their life stories with us and the Thai and Filipino communities for providing us with invaluable information. 1 David Held, David Goldblatt McGrew, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), chaps. 3–5; George Ritzer and Paul Dean, Globalization: A Basic Text, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). 2 Marc Levinson, “US Manufacturing in International Perspective,” Congressional Research Service (2017): 1–16. 3 Ritzer and Dean, Globalization, chap. 7. 4 Arne L. Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s (New York: Russell Sage, 2011), chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6. 5 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New, 1998); Sassen, “Global Cities and Survival Circuits (2002),” in The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on Development and Global Change, 2nd ed., ed. J. Timmons Roberts, Amy Bellone Hite, and Nitsan Chorev (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2015), 373–90. 6 Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, 117. 7 Ritzer and Dean, Globalization, chap. 4. 8 Marion F. Houstoun, Roger G. Kramer, and Joan Mackin Barrett, “Female Predominance of Immigration to the United States since 1930: A First Look,” International Migration Review 18, no. 4 (1984): 908–63; Katharine M. Donato and Donna Gabaccia, Gender and

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International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age (New York: Russell Sage, 2015), chap. 6. Judy Yung, “Appendix: A Chronology of Asian American History,” in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women, ed. Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 423–31; Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015). Bill Ong Hing, “Asian Immigrants: Social Forces Unleashed after 1965,” in The Immigration Reader, ed. David Jacobson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 144–82; Catherine Lee, “Family Reunification and the Limits of Immigration Reform: Impact and Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act,” Sociological Forum 30, S1 (2015): 528–48. US Census, We the Americans: Asians (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1993); Jessica S. Barnes and Claudette E. Bennett, The Asian Population: Census 2000 Brief, US Census Bureau, 2002, 1; Elizabeth M. Hoeffel, Sonya Rastogi, Myoung Ouk Kim, and Hasan Shahid, The Asian Population: 2010 Census Briefs, US Census Bureau, 2012, 3. Karthick Ramakrishnan and Farah Z. Ahmad, “State of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Series: A Multifaceted Portrait of a Growing Population,” Center for American Progress, 2014, 30. The Rise of Asian Americans, Pew Research Center, 2012, 5. Calculation based on “Nonimmigrant Visas Issued in FY 2000, FY 2010 and FY 2015,” Nonimmigrant Visa Issuances by Visa Class and by Nationality, US Department of State, https://travel.state.gov, accessed January 16, 2017. Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Anna Romina Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). BLS Reports, “Labor Force Characteristics by Race and Ethnicity, 2014,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015. Mary Dorinda Allard, “Asians in the US Labor Force: Profile of a Diverse Population,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2011, www.bls.gov. In table 13.1, “native born” are people born in the United States or its outlying areas, such as Puerto Rico or Guam, or who were born abroad to at least one parent who is a US citizen. Allard; “Labor Force Participation Rate, Female (% of Female Population Ages 15+) (Modeled ILO Estimate),” World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org, accessed November 17, 2016. US Census Bureau, Total Population: Educational Attainment, 2015 American Community Survey, https://factfinder.census.gov, accessed January 15, 2017. US Census Bureau, Thai Population: Occupation, 2015 American Community Survey, https://factfinder.census.gov, accessed January 15, 2017. According to Linda Miller Matthei, half of immigrant women enter low-wage employment in operations and services because they lack educational credentials and have few employment skills. See Matthei, “Gender and International Labor Migration: A Networks Approach,” in Immigration: A Civil Rights Issue for the Americas, ed. Susanne Jonas and Suzie Dod Thomas (Wilmington, NC: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 77. Examples are provided by Ester Chow, “Asian American Women at Work,” in Women of Color in US Society, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 203–27; Bandana Purkayastha, “Skilled Migration and Cumulative Disadvantage: The Case of Highly Qualified Asian Indian Immigrant Women in the US,” Geoforum 36, no. 2 (2005): 181–96. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work, 1st ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), introduction.

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24 “H-1B Specialty Occupations, DOD Cooperative Research and Development Project Workers, and Fashion Models,” US Citizenship and Immigration Services, https://www. uscis.gov, accessed November 19, 2016. 25 Narayan Lakshman, “For Indian Women in America, a Sea of Broken Dreams,” The Hindu, July 5, 2016, www.thehindu.com. 26 Pseudonyms are used in this chapter to preserve participant confidentiality. 27 Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 188–89. 28 Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum, Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Margaret M. Chin, Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). For a fuller discussion of the experiences of and benefits for Chinese women sewers in union garment shops from their perspectives, see chapter 14 by Margaret M. Chin in this volume. 29 Janet E. Benson, “The Effects of Packinghouse Work on Southeast Asian Refugee Families,” in Newcomers in the Workplace: Immigrants and the Restructuring of the US Economy, ed. Louise Lamphere, Alex Stepick, and Guillermo Grenier (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 109; “South Dakota Town Embraces New Immigrants Vital to Meat Industry,” PBS NewsHour, July 2, 2016, www.pbs.org. See also Christine Marston, Kyle Anne Nelson, and Michelle Behr, “Invisible and on the Margins: A Demographic Profile of Emerging Refugee Populations in Northern Colorado,” International Journal of Migration and Residential Mobility 1, no. 3 (2016): 253–68. 30 Ivan Light, Georges Sabagh, Mehdi Bozorgmehr, and Claudia Der-Martirosian, “Beyond the Ethnic Enclave Economy,” Social Problems 41, no. 1 (1994): 65–80. 31 Charlene Tung, “The Cost of Caring: The Social Reproductive Labor of Filipina Live-In Home Health Caregivers,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 21, nos. 1/2 (2000): 72. 32 Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, 1st ed., 159. 33 Tung, “The Cost of Caring,” 76. 34 Personal correspondence with Pilipino Workers Center staff, May 2014. 35 This is caused by a combination of their undocumented status, their inability to use their training and work experience from the Philippines, and the ethnic niche in caregiving that has developed in the Filipino migrant community from the large flow of nurses into the United States. See also chapter 16 by Joy Sales in this volume. 36 Miliann Kang, The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 37 “State of California: Department of Industrial Relations: Minimum Wage,” Department of Industrial Relations, www.dir.ca.gov, accessed November 21, 2016. 38 Jennifer Lee, “Striving for the American Dream: Struggle, Success, and Intergroup Conflict among Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou and James Gatewood (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 280. 39 Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965–1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Xiaoyu Wu and Teresa D. Hutchins, “Immigrants Financing Immigrants: A Case Study of a Chinese-American Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCAs) in Queens,” New York Economic Review (2015): 21–34. 40 Kittima, interview with author (Krittiya Kantachote), Los Angeles, November 2016. 41 Lee, “Striving for the American Dream,” 284. 42 Jennifer Lee, Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Kyeyoung Park, The Korean American Dream:

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Immigrants and Small Business in New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chap. 3. Yên Lê Espiritu, “Gender and Labor in Asian Immigrant Families,” in Gender and US Immigration: Contemporary Trends, ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 81–100. Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 46. Pyong Gap Min, Changes and Conflicts: Korean Immigrant Families in New York (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998), chap. 4. Thai Business Statistics in Los Angeles, Thai American Chamber of Commerce of California, 2011, 32. Sereechai, Thai Yellow Pages (Los Angeles: Sereechai, 2016). Jennifer Joy Pabelonia Nazareno, “The Outsourced State: The Retraction of Public Caregiving in America” (PhD diss., University of California, San Francisco, 2015). Pyong Gap Min, “Changes in Korean Immigrants’ Gender Role and Social Status, and Their Marital Conflicts,” Sociological Forum 16, no. 2 (2001): 301–20; Espiritu, “Gender and Labor,” 81–100. “Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers Fiscal Year 2014 Annual Report to Congress October 1, 2013–September 30, 2014,” United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, February 26, 2015, www.uscis.gov. Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg, “Scientists and Engineers,” in New American Destinies: A Reader in Contemporary Asian and Latino Immigration, ed. Darrell Y. Hamamoto and Rodolfo D. Torres (New York: Routledge, 1997), 166; Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2013, National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2013, 8. Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering, 8. Excerpt from Purkayastha, “Skilled Migration and Cumulative Disadvantage,” 181–96. Sheba George, When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes. “H-1C Registered Nurse Working in a Health Professional Shortage Area as Determined by the Department of Labor,” US Citizenship and Immigration Services, www.uscis.gov, accessed November 19, 2016. Leo-Felix M. Jurado and Dula F. Pacquiao, “Historical Analysis of Filipino Nurse Migration to the US,” Journal of Nursing Practice Applications & Reviews of Research 5, no. 1 (2015): 4–18. “Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupations.” Yên Lê Espiritu, Filipino American Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). George, When Women Come First. Espiritu, “Gender and Labor,” 81–100. George, When Women Come First. Information obtained from informal interviews conducted by author (Rhacel Salazar Parreñas) with recruitment agencies and prospective migrants in the Philippines between January and July 2000. Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, “The Political Economy of Capitalist Restructuring and the New Asian Immigration,” in The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring, ed. Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Chen (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 3–35; Lora Bartlett, Migrant Teachers: How American Schools Import Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes.

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The Backbone of New York City’s Chinatown Chinese Women and the Garment Industry, 1950–2009 Margaret M. Chin I never had a job in Hong Kong, and really because I needed to help with family expenses, I went to the garment shop. Work was long hours. But when I got the check, I started to feel good. I enjoyed that I didn’t have to rely on my husband for every expense or every single family decision. I could spend and make decisions on my own. Working really opened my eyes. —Mrs. K.

Immigrants have been vital to the New York City fashion industry since the end of the nineteenth century. The garment industry, in turn, has had many incarnations over the decades and is always remaking itself, adapting to the changing needs of the city and its immigrants. Mrs. K., quoted above, like most garment workers, experienced an incredible change in family dynamics once she became a New York City Chinatown seamstress. For more than a century, Chinese women, and similarly, many women of Jewish, Italian, and Latin heritage, gained more independence once they started earning wages for themselves. The history of late twentieth-century Chinese immigrant women in Manhattan’s Chinatown and the new lives they created for themselves, their families, and community is an integral part of the industry’s rise and decline in New York City. This chapter examines the lives of Chinese women who worked in Chineserun factories in Chinatown from 1950 to 2009. During that time, New York City not only had the designers—who created everything from glamourous wear to ordinary attire—but also skilled Chinese women sewers. They once comprised the majority of apparel workers, playing a vital role in the Chinatown garment industry and as members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). Drawing from field notes and interviews with nearly 190 Chinese women garment workers from three studies that I conducted from the 1990s to 2009, I discuss their agency and economic role outside the family. This allowed them to negotiate a new balance between work and family and to gain respect and power within their households and with other relatives. In turn, this also influenced their parenting, increased their income, and helped the community’s economic development. I also explore the ways in which union activities 238

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enhanced their personal and work lives. Unless otherwise cited, the quotations in this chapter are drawn from the three studies. The identities of the interviewees remain confidential, and pseudonyms are used here.1

A Brief Ethnic History of the Garment Industry The garment industry has cycled through many changes over the years. Since the mid-1800s immigrants were a critical necessity for its development in New York City. The workforce changed from Eastern European immigrants in the 1880s to today’s Asians and Latinos. Equally significant is the shift in the workforce from men to women as the industry became more mechanized. In addition, some ethnic group members transitioned from worker to owner, utilizing coethnics as their labor force. Immigrant women, however, were the strength of the industry. As early as the 1890s, there were Jewish “shops” housed in tenement buildings. The more enterprising of the first Eastern European Jews became contractors and hired members of their families or coethnic acquaintances from the old country.2 Coethnic owners and workers had their own set of tensions, as their relationship might be simultaneously beneficial and exploitative. Many Jewish women left the industry when homework was outlawed;3 Jewish employers instead hired Italian women who were readily available to work outside their homes. They quickly became the second-largest group in the garment industry.4 Manufacturers hired workers with fewer skills, including more sewers from different ethnic backgrounds, after adopting a Fordist production assembly-line model that divided the process of sewing a garment into separate tasks. Employers started to recruit differently, such as in newspapers, rather than by word of mouth through coethnic friends and relatives.5 This changed the industry’s character as it no longer depended on a coethnic workforce. After World War II, shortages of Jewish and Italian workers created opportunities for members of nonwhite ethnic groups and American-born racial minority groups, including blacks, Puerto Ricans, and some Chinese Americans. The apparel industry was secure, well paying, for the most part unionized, and often the only industry that would hire members from these groups. Even though garment manufacturing as a whole was declining in the United States and New York City, the departure of Jews and Italians, and then blacks and Puerto Ricans (when the civil rights movement created better opportunities for them), still left plenty of work for Chinese, Koreans, and Latinos.

Chinese Immigrants and the Chinatown Garment Industry There were very few Chinese women in New York City before World War II because the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act had all but barred Chinese women from immigrating. In 1940, there were six Chinese men for every one Chinese woman

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in the city. After World War II, many Chinese women arrived under the War Brides Act of 1945, which permitted the wives of members of the US armed forces to enter the country from 1945 to 1953. Chinese American men had served in both segregated and nonsegregated units during the war. In the early years, these war brides comprised 82 percent of Chinese immigrants to the United States. By 1960, there were about twelve thousand Chinese women in New York City (37 percent of the total Chinese population). Anyone walking in Chinatown in the 1960s and thereafter would not be able to avoid young children and families. As Chinese immigration increased, the two-parent family became the predominant form in Chinatown, replacing the earlier primarily male Chinese society. After the passage of the Hart Celler Act in 1965, New York City’s Chinatown grew tremendously. From 1966 to 1970, an average of five to seven thousand Chinese (from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) settled in the city each year, and the number increased even more dramatically after 1970. The new arrivals were more diverse, consisting of blue-collar workers, many of whom were college educated and capable of being entrepreneurs. The availability of an eager-to-learn and mostly female workforce, along with capital, managerial skills, and Chinatown space, allowed more garment shops to open. The combination of money and skills from the middle class and large numbers from the working class needing jobs fueled the garment industry. Among the Chinese who became small-business entrepreneurs in the industry, husband-and-wife couples were the dominant owners of Chinatown garment shops. They, in turn, hired their coethnics. Starting in the 1970s, their business prowess easily tripled the number of factories and breathed new life into the industry. After learning the day-to-day routine and acquiring management skills, some of the women, formerly garment workers, easily transferred their knowledge and their own capital into entrepreneurial gain with their husbands. As one interviewee said about her husband, “He would have no idea how to run this factory without me. I taught him everything he knows. I just needed his help in negotiating with the manufacturers.” Another worker turned owner was a forelady of a garment shop whose organizational expertise profited her previous employer. Ms. A noted that these couples helped transform the industry into a “quicktime” business (discussed below), where garments are produced on demand. The apparel industry remained robust until the 1990s. The city attracted prominent design houses because it had the communication and financial connections to facilitate the marketing of fashion products globally and locally. The city also had a sizable population willing to buy such products and plenty of immigrants who could produce them. At the industry’s peak in the 1980s, Chinatown alone had more than five hundred shops with more than twenty thousand workers. Not until the mid-1980s did a large-scale exodus from the industry begin because of increased overseas garment manufacturing competition.

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In the 1990s, Koreans entered the industry as entrepreneurs and quickly opened more than two hundred shops, hiring Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Dominicans, and Chinese as garment workers. These were not union shops, as they hired a mix of undocumented and documented workers. Many were surprised to see the Chinatown coethnic Chinese employers and unionized Chinese employees working alongside midtown Manhattan’s noncoethnic and nonunionized Korean-owned garment shops, but there was just enough work for both groups.

Chinese Immigrant Women, Dual-Income Families, and the Garment Industry Native-born Chinese men and women first entered the garment industry during the 1940s and 1950s as both sewers and garment shop owners. Few Chinese women interviewees said they worked in Jewish or Italian garment factories or knew of other Chinese women who did so. The Chinese female population grew to thirty-two thousand by 1970, and by 1980, sixty thousand of them were living in the city.6 In the twenty-year span, the Chinatown neighborhood expanded and became a haven for families and dual income earners. Since most of these women needed to work to supplement the family income, they were a ready labor supply for anyone needing workers.7 The first Chinese to own garment factories in the Chinatown Manhattan area were ambitious. In 1950, Chinese owned just three or four shops. By the mid1950s, there were about fifteen garment shops on the Lower East Side and in Chinatown. The owners were the American-born sons and daughters of Chinese parents who were laundry and grocery shopkeepers.8 These early factories sought to duplicate the success of their Jewish neighbors on the Lower East Side and to provide opportunities for American-born Chinese and their new brides entering the country. Mrs. W., one of the oldest interviewees, said that “their parents provided funds for some of the second generation (both sons and daughters), while some of the sons used their GI benefits to start the shops.” All the early garment shops in Chinatown were unionized. By 1969, one study found 23 percent of Chinatown residents working in the garment industry with more than thirty-five shops.9 By 1979, 60 percent of Chinatown residents worked in the garment industry, which had grown to about 275 shops. As immigration grew, the proportion of workers grew as well. The Chinese owners easily recruited their coethnics via word of mouth; in turn, the women were very willing to take these “good” jobs.10 The garment shops expanded along Canal Street and Broadway, reaching into Little Italy along Mulberry and Elizabeth Streets, and extended into the Lower East Side and along East Broadway and Allen Street. From the late 1960s to the 1980s, the majority of Chinese women could walk to their factories, making it

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especially convenient for balancing family duties, which included dropping off kids at schools and activities, buying groceries, and accessing other services.11

Finding Work and Working Flexibly Newly arrived Chinese women realized that they needed to work to contribute to the family income. Luckily, most knew of a family member already in the industry. Mrs. L. said, My aunt mentioned that there were seats open in her factory. Even though I didn’t know how to sew, I wanted one of the seats. She also told me that she would teach me how to sew. Two days after I arrived in NYC, I found my way to her shop.

Those who recruited a sister, a cousin, or a niece into the garment shops were often willing to train their kin in the new skill of sewing whole garments.12 The newest workers were paid by the piece and sometimes by each whole garment sewed. For example, if the piece was a skirt, she was paid two dollars per skirt. If she was just learning to sew and it took her a whole day to learn how to make that skirt, she would earn two dollars a day. Outsiders were appalled to learn that a garment worker earned a mere two dollars a day. However, Mrs. L. felt differently. On my first day, sewing was not easy. The machine had to be at the right speed; the thread had to be wound at the correct tension; I needed to maneuver the cloth under the needle at the correct angles to get the pieces together. [Whenever I made mistakes], I pulled apart my seams and corrected my mistakes. . . . When I finished, I was so happy to have made the garment. Although I got very little money for making one garment, I was very proud that I learned.

Of course, shop owners profited the most with piece rates. They did not waste any extra wages on slower sewers, especially beginners like the worker above. Women considered how to manage this exploitative payment schedule by reckoning the intrinsic flexibility in the system with demands on their lives. In the Chinatown factories, women were paid for the number of garments completed at a per-garment or piece rate, which enabled the women to choose to sew more or less depending on their family needs. While piece-rate wages have long been regarded as less desirable than hourly wages, women, especially young mothers who need flexible hours, took advantage of them. It was a calculation the women made, where work and family duties would be managed and not neglected. For example, Mrs. K. and her husband would work flexible, compatible, or shift hours such that their children would be cared for since there were few childcare facilities. Mrs. Y. used the hours to manage her children too:

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My children’s grandparents aren’t here and their father works into the evening. I usually only work the hours they are in school. I drop them off in school in the morning and then I go pick them up at 3 p.m. and we go grocery shopping together on the way home. In emergencies I bring them to the shop with me, but they are too young. I have six-year-old twins, and they are a bother in the factory. I sew fast enough and make enough in those six hours.

Moreover, the garment workers understood that they would not be penalized if their children were sick and they needed to stay home instead of work. Women who could make it into the shop would start sewing where they left off. On most days, Mrs. C. drops off her kids at school, heads into work, picks her kids up, goes home for family dinner, and then leaves her kids with relatives in the early evening to return to work to complete a few more hours of piece-work sewing. Most other women drop their kids off with relatives before work, come into the garment shop by 8 a.m. and leave at 5 p.m. Their relatives are in charge of babysitting, including dropping kids off and picking them up at school and afterschool programs. Mrs. W. added, “If I had to choose, I would rather have piece rates. As a mother with few childcare centers near me, I can choose what I need as my children grow. Next year, I plan to work longer. My kids will be older and can go home by themselves.”

Income, Benefits, and Changing Family Dynamics For the majority of Chinese immigrant women, income from garment work was crucial for a family’s survival, and many of them were grateful. Mrs. L. told me, “Without the garment industry, I can’t imagine how my family survived.” Garment work was one of the only jobs that was accessible to the immigrant community and provided the protection of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. Few Chinese men were in the garment industry. Most worked in Chinese restaurants that were not unionized and cash based. Chinese women realized that their union jobs were not only a means to earn an income but provided health insurance, paid vacation days, sick pay, and supplied documents for income tax, banking, and other benefits for themselves and their families. Thus, the women’s jobs were vital and much more than a second income. Working outside the home and earning money also changed family dynamics. Women felt empowered and comfortable in making family decisions. They were more liberated and had more autonomy even in choosing how they wanted to spend their own hard-earned money. Many of them enjoyed the ability to shop for their kids and to buy necessary and disposable items whenever they wanted. However, some women confessed in interviews that their husbands did push back with domestic abuse. A few husbands even demanded that their wages be handed over. No doubt these women had a difficult fight for equality in the

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household. New work patterns in the settlement country and new connections to financial and immigrant institutions often contribute to conflicts and power shifts in the family.13 Even though the women’s income and health benefits were a significant contribution to the household, most women still had a second shift of unpaid domestic work in the evenings when they returned home from a full schedule at the garment factory. Most of them reported that their husbands did not contribute to household duties. It was a women’s job to take care of the children and all the domestic duties. Only a few of the husbands understood the second shift and helped out with the children and household chores. Mrs. O. explained: You’ve seen the dresses I’m making. They are difficult with fabric that is hard to handle. This pattern is difficult. . . . On average I can only make thirty a day, even rushing because I need to get home. There is too much to do at home with cleaning and cooking to come back. I am too exhausted to sew this pattern.

However, many husbands realized that the garment work their wives did was at least as important as their own labor. They credited their better lives and those of their relatives in America to the work their wives obtained in the garment industry. Mrs. C. explains: When I left Hong Kong, I knew I had to work hard in the garment factory but I didn’t know that working would give me more confidence and independence because I could spend my money as I wanted. I also didn’t know that working also meant that I would also have obligations to my relatives because my work income proved that they had backing and funding for their immigration. My husband and I would argue about which relative can and should immigrate. Ultimately it was my choice because I earned the funds that were [documented for income tax and] in the bank accounts. I never had so much power before.

The women were usually paid with checks rather than cash (as their husbands were in the restaurant business). Mrs. C. was surprised at the amount of influence and authority she wielded when the funds she brought home were used to provide Affidavits of Support to indicate financial responsibility for relatives immigrating to the United States and those applying for permanent residency.14 She explained: My husband’s sister is always bringing over food and visiting at every holiday. Really at every chance she has, she brings gifts and shows her gratitude to me. My husband tells me that without my documented income and savings bank account, his sister would never have been able to immigrate to the US. I think they feel very indebted to me. Working really changed my family relationships. I feel matched to my husband and in-laws in how we make decisions for our family.

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They learned how to handle finances through their own income records, including banking and checking accounts and other financial statements. These documents also allowed them to get mortgage credit to buy their first homes.15 The Chinese women were proud of and astonished by the new circumstances that gave them tremendous power in the family.

The Benefits of Joining the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union was a significant force in the industry; in turn, its fortunes were tied to the Chinese women sewers. Chinese membership in the ILGWU grew despite declines in other locals in New York City. By 1971, Local 23-25, with membership that was mostly Chinese, became the largest affiliate of the ILGWU and remained that way through 1995. At that time, the ILGWU and Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) merged to become the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). In 2004, UNITE merged with Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union to become UNITE HERE. Chinese women were recruited directly into the union by their bosses because the English-speaking, mostly white union organizers negotiated directly with the English-speaking manufacturers and English-speaking Chinese contractors, bosses, and owners. This practice relegated the Chinese women workers to an afterthought. Moreover, the patriarchal attitudes of the union leaders and the contractors meant that they were comfortable in pushing the women into the background. Unionization helped both employers and employees. For the most part, there were no complaints about the union until the Chinese workers realized that they lacked a voice in the ILGWU. Employers solicited work from the manufacturers who would give work to unionized shops, where the women then automatically received union benefits and garments to sew. This unprecedented organizing practice left many Chinese women believing that the union stood for health and dental insurance and little else. In fact, the women often confused their Blue Cross cards with their union membership cards.16 Even so, the women wanted to be members and were proud to carry the “union card.” Mrs. W. said that the “union card was important to them because health and dental insurance was crucial for their young families.” Being a union member boosted the life chances of a garment worker’s whole family. Over time, individual members learned that the ILGWU was also a social union, sponsoring Christmas parties, English classes, singing groups, and even trips to Bear Mountain, a local resort area. Mrs. K., a seventy-year-old Chinese woman and former sewer, told me, “Who would complain? We also got vacation pay . . . and even money if someone in our family died. Everyone signed up.”

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However, it wasn’t all bread and roses because when there were union take backs or new demands, few Chinese women had jobs within the union hierarchy to effect change. Even though Chinese women made up an increasing share of the industry’s workforce in New York City, it was not until after the 1982 Chinatown strike, described in the section that follows, that they moved into leadership positions in the ILGWU.

The New York City Garment Industry in Crisis and the 1982 Strike The uprising of twenty thousand in 1909–1910 was the largest strike by women in US history. The women organized to raise their wages, limit hours, increase safety, and eliminate workplace indignities. For example, the strikers demanded that although they worked the line as “unskilled” workers, women should be paid as well as the “skilled” male workers, arguing that their work was just as complex. As a result, over time, the women won their demands and began leading a number of the ILGWU’s committees. This strike changed the face of the ILGWU and marked a new chapter for labor in New York City.17 The 1982 Chinese garment workers’ strike is another landmark in labor history, one that labor leaders and historians view as similar to the 1909–1910 uprising. To everyone’s surprise, Chinese women took to the streets to protest the working conditions in the Chinatown garment factories, all of which were Chinese owned. More than twenty thousand Chinese workers, mostly women, attended two rallies and then left their seats to strike in Chinatown to pressure Chinese employers to sign a new union contract.18 It was the largest labor strike in Chinatown’s history. Prior to the 1982 strike, the New York City garment industry was beginning to face competition from out-of-state nonunion garment shops as well as imported clothing. To hold costs down, manufacturers who did not want to unionize contracted their operations to the US South, seeking a cheaper nonunionized workforce in hopes of undercutting the Chinatown union wages. By 1980, Chinese garment shop owners or contractors complained that they were only intermediaries making barely any money after paying their workers. Why should they sign a deal with the ILGWU again? The “union” manufacturers were squeezing every cent out of them. To counter the decline of unionized garment work and to increase earnings, garment shop owners took in work from nonunion manufacturers, something that the midtown garment shops were already doing. Chinese garment shop owners often competed with one another to win bids from both “union” and “nonunion” manufacturers for sewing work at the lowest possible cost. This created tension between the ILGWU, workers, and garment shop owners. The ILGWU manufacturers’ search for cheaper labor and larger profits had a huge impact on Chinese factory owners and workers. The more the manufacturers

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lowered their prices, the less the Chinese factory workers and owners would earn. The Chinese factory owners believed the union was reneging on their promise to keep wages adequate and assuring sufficient union work for their shops. In return, the garment shop owners guaranteed that Chinese women workers would join the union.19 However, conditions changed so rapidly during the 1980s that manufacturers could no longer promise enough work for Chinese unionized garment factories. By 1980, men’s and women’s clothing imports had reached 51 percent from a low of 6.9 percent in 1959.20 The New York City garment industry faced both the challenge of imports and competition from manufacturing in the nonunion South.21 At the same time, rents and utilities rose in the Chinatown area, increasing costs for both garment shop owners and workers. The rapid increase in immigration since the 1970s created a simultaneous demand for apartments and other real estate in the Chinatown area. This added to the tension between the ILGWU, workers, and garment shop owners. With these conditions as the backdrop and the union contract about to expire in 1982, the Chinese women workers feared that the coethnic garment shop owners would not renew, depriving them of medical coverage, pensions, and other benefits that came with union membership. The Chinese workers did not wait for the union to respond. Worker-organizer Katie Quan’s sentiments reflect those of the workers in general: “You’re talking about—here go my medical benefits, what’s my family supposed to do? I’ve worked 19 years and next year I get to retire. You’re saying I can’t collect my pension. Forget this.”22 Of course, the Chinese owners and contractors appealed to the workers’ shared coethnicity. Except this time, coethnicity did not have any special benefits for the Chinese workers. When the contractors refused to sign the union contract, the workers did everything in their power to inform everyone of the dire straits they would be in without the union. They also pushed the ILGWU leadership to take a stronger stand against the Chinese owners. On June 15, 1982, an unprecedented number of workers attended the Local 23-25 membership meeting to call for a strike.23 Members spoke up during the meeting and wrote an open letter in the China Daily News: Just think about the time when workers did not have a union. They did not have any guarantee and benefits. Only when they had a union was their livelihood guaranteed. Although for years terms in the union contract have not been as desired, members’ health, wages, and benefits were, in a degree guaranteed.24

Some contractors started to buckle as more workers and members of the Chinatown community at large came out to support the strike. On June 24, an estimated fifteen thousand workers carrying signs turned out for the rally. Workers such as Shui Mak Ka spoke, and their voices were broadcast on closed-circuit TV

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and radio. To thunderous applause, she quoted Mao Zedong, “It is not yet spring, unless all flowers blossom.”25 On July 15, the strike deadline, Chinese garment workers filled all of Columbus Park and spilled north toward Canal Street and out the sides toward the heart of Chinatown and the Civic Center. Frightened by the workers’ militant actions, the garment contractors signed the union contract quickly. The sixweek-plus dispute was over, but not without the organizational skill of the now exhausted Chinese women garment workers. A worker described that day as one of the most significant in her life. She traveled to Chinatown early carrying her one-year-old daughter on her back and holding the hand of her five-year-old son: “Never before did I see the sky was so blue and the day so bright. . . . I felt so powerful when I was marching with the crowd.”26 For the first time, Chinese women were recruited directly as employees, and the union started to explicitly recognize the needs of Chinese workers and their families. Although they also rose in the union ranks, Chinese women continued to be excluded from the top leadership positions of Local 23-25 despite being the majority of the membership. In the 1980s and 90s, the ILGWU instituted more services for Chinese garment workers. The union established a Campaign for Justice and later Worker’s Centers that addressed many of the Chinese immigrant women’s demands, including those of nonunion members and undocumented workers. It provided English classes and training to improve their sewing skills. The women sought these opportunities out to advance themselves. Mrs. N., a union member, attended the center specifically “to learn how to be a sample maker and to improve her skills.” Other Chinese sewers focused on English language classes and immigrants’ and workers’ rights. Mrs. N. also learned that “all workers have a right to work for a minimum wage, and we can’t let anybody work for pennies.” It would be a few more years before the union broke ground on a small childcare center for the workers. Even outside the factory floor, the ILGWU played a major role in Chinese women’s lives by providing social spaces for them to engage in larger aspects of US society and to learn more about American life through the union social activities. A number of workers from the 1990s mentioned singing with the chorus and going on trips with their coworkers. Workers who were not yet citizens especially valued the ILGWU Immigration Project and its program to help them gain US citizenship. Mrs. W. recalled that in 1990 she started taking immigration classes: “I could never study by myself, I would fall asleep after work. Only when they started these classes did I get my citizenship. It was much easier to practice with a friend. My children were not that helpful—especially since they had their own homework.” In short, the union acknowledged Chinese women workers’ importance. It offered activities that engaged them in human and civil rights education and

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organizing where they were taught what it meant to be a global worker and the need to look out for other workers’ rights too.

“Quicktime” and the Garment Industry By 1992, imported clothing comprised 60 percent of US retail sales, up from 10 percent in 1984. In the early 1980s, computer technology was sophisticated enough to determine which items were the most popular in any store for the week, particularly in chain stores like Macy’s. Inventory programs could also determine exact sales for the week and approximately how much inventory had to be ordered for the following month. To sustain itself, the industry reinvented itself by fulfilling “quicktime” orders, replenishing popular items quickly so that manufacturers wouldn’t have to wait for overseas production and shipment.27 The New York City garment industry was smaller in the 1990s but was able to hang on due to the adaptability and flexibility of the industry.28 Quicktime also helped satisfy the demand for trendy items that might be popular only for a short time with customers. Chain stores and manufacturers couldn’t afford to send their orders overseas and wait a month or two for their most popular items to be replenished. Moreover, manufacturing a small number of these garments was not a high priority for overseas garment factories. Production schedules might not be able to absorb these new and small runs of items. For these reasons, a certain amount of local production was necessary to fulfill these quick orders, and Chinese-owned garment shops in New York City fit the bill. Within a matter of days, they could sew the requisite number of required garments and have them delivered to stores. Even in the 1990s, Chinatown still had almost 350 unionized shops and about seventeen thousand Chinese workers. In helping to remake the apparel industry, Chinese women sewers were able to support themselves for another decade.

The Shop Floor and Camaraderie Work in the garment industry went beyond supporting Chinese women’s families. It extended their social networks and built social capital for themselves and others. The factory experience facilitated camaraderie and sociability among workers from China and Hong Kong, which often helped to build understanding across their differences as Chinese immigrants. The women arrived at work early together, often worked late into the night when it was busy, and went out to the restaurants for dim sum when it was not. Before the machines started, the women would spend time chatting. While they talked, they unpacked their lunches and placed them by the rice cookers provided by their employers. They set up their stations with bottles of warm tea

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and snacks. They gathered bundles of clothing to sew, discussing the techniques required to finish the items quickly. Mrs. N. said, Of course, we want to make as much as we can and leave. When your cousin or friend works next to you, you can always show them how to sew a dress quicker or you can ask them to show you. Sometimes you need to sew the short seams to put together the dress and sew it all together, instead of piecing the little pieces. Other times, another way is faster.29

Conversation would turn to kids and spouses over and over again. Mrs. C. said all the women with whom she worked “knew about the wedding of our friend Lai’s daughter. Every day, we would hear news about the restaurant, the food, the guests, the dresses, and eventually the honeymoon plans. It was like we were all planning the wedding together.”30 During school holidays there would be numerous kids in the shops. If the kids didn’t want to play with the other kids, the moms would insist that they help sew. Mrs. S. added that “any child can help their mother. Kids can go get thread and bring bundles around.” If the factory owners’ kids were there, they might play together. You would also see kids congregating in the owners’ offices, where they ate, played, and did homework.

The Decline of the Chinatown Garment Industry Chinatown and its garment shops were located just ten blocks (about a half mile) from the World Trade Center. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, no work, not even quicktime work, could be completed for at least three months. When trucks could not move clothing in and out of Chinatown after the attacks, manufacturers with overseas connections shipped their sewing work there. Compounded by the 2008 recession, it was simpler to have garments sewn overseas. With improved computer tracking and project management software, manufacturers realized that overseas production could also be timely and cost effective. As a result, many Chinatown factories went out of business. At least a quarter of Chinatown’s workforce became unemployed. These women had deep community connections, and when disaster and recession hit Chinatown, they felt the impact.31 After the 2008 recession, fewer than fifty garment shops remained. They tended to be of mixed ethnicities, located in midtown Manhattan or in Sunset Park, Brooklyn’s garment district. As early as 2002, women started to look for jobs outside the garment industry that offered health, vacation, and pension benefits. The women’s own social networks led them to restaurants and small businesses in Chinatown, but these jobs paid them too little and lacked union benefits. Most wanted to work as home health attendants or in the hotel and hospitality service sector. Fortunately, some Chinatown community centers organized training programs for these sectors.32

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Chinese women faced many obstacles as they moved into these new industries. They encountered a wholly different noncoethnic hiring process, where they needed to speak English, fill out job applications, and be interviewed. Second, they had to learn customer service—how to interact with customers, converse with them, and offer assistance. These new industries forced women to rely less on their coethnics and more on skills that required English and traveling outside their enclaves. Once again, the women showed their agency in seeking new and different ways of working that ultimately had a huge impact on the Chinatown neighborhood.33 With more women working outside the community, many started to move out.

Conclusion New York City no longer produces garments in great quantities, even though it is still a thriving center for fashion creativity and a hub for sewing innovation. In 2017, the industry was once again remaking itself as politicians sought to locate a “campus” for apparel work, including businesses associated with cloth, zippers, buttons, and pleating. Designers are still headquartered in the city, including those who are immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants. Alexander Wang, Derek Lam, Jason Wu, Anna Sui, Vivienne Tam, Vera Wang, Naeem Khan, Sandy Liang, and newcomer Public School all have their design houses in New York. And while large sewing shops in Chinatown and midtown Manhattan have disappeared, small sample shops that create garments for designers are still recruiting Chinese and Latina women workers.34 Today, we see a Chinatown with fewer Chinese families where women once walked to work. However, the legacy of the garment industry remains. It provided dependable work for at least two generations of Chinese Americans. It transformed gender roles by allowing women more independence. The women gained self-confidence and respect from spouses and other family members. The income helped them to buy homes and send children to college. Working on the factory floor gave them a lifetime of friends along with a tightly knit supportive community. Being a union member broadened their life experiences. The legacy of Chinese women garment workers and their struggle for dignity and just treatment is forever etched into the history of Asian American socioeconomic mobility and New York City’s garment industry. Notes

1 The chapter draws from three published studies using historiography, interviews, participant observation, and ethnography of immigrants in the apparel industry. It also includes new data from my fieldnotes and unpublished interviews. The first study, Sewing Women (2005, 2015), supported by grants from National Science Foundation (NSF) and Social Science Resources Council (SSRC) and completed in the 1990s, compared Asian and Latino contractors and workers in New York City, namely Chinese coethnic sewing shops in

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Chinatown and the more diverse Korean contractors who hired Mexican, Ecuadorian, and Dominican workers in the garment district. Fifty-seven of the 112 workers I interviewed were Chinese. The second study, “Moving On” (2005), was commissioned in 2002–2003 by the Russell Sage Foundation to specifically understand the impact of the September 11, 2001, attacks on Chinatown where the garment industry, in particular, was devastated. Close to one hundred Chinese garment workers were interviewed. The third study, “Changing Expectations” (2013), funded by the Ford Foundation and completed in 2008–2009, examined labor organizing as Chinese women left jobs with “shop floors” and gained employment as home care and hospitality workers dispersed individually in people’s homes. It involved interviews with thirty women. Margaret M. Chin, Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry (2005; New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 9. Homework is work brought home to complete rather than done in a factory. Nancy Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 161. Chin, Sewing Women, 72. Min Zhou, Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 44. Chin, Sewing Women, 72. Chin, 17. Chinatown Study Group, Chinatown Report (New York: Columbia University Library, 1969). Xiao Lan Bao, Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City 1948–92 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 58. Bao, 59. Margaret Chin, “Moving On: Chinese Garment Workers after 9/11,” in Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11 on New York City, ed. Nancy Foner (New York: Russell Sage, 2005), 194. Nazli Kibria, Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Sheri Grasmuck and Patricia R. Pessar, Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). An Affidavit of Support is legally enforceable; the sponsor’s responsibility usually lasts until the family member or other individual either becomes a US citizen or can be credited with forty quarters of work (usually ten years). “Affidavit of Support,” US Citizenship and Immigration Services, www.uscis.gov. Chin, “Moving On,” 199. Chin, Sewing Women, 113. Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side 1890–1925 (New York: Monthly Review, 1985), 254. Bao, Holding Up Half the Sky, 175. Bao, 183. Bao, 215. Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum, Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Bao, Holding Up Half the Sky, 203. Bao, 204. Bao, 205. Bao, 206. Bao, 212.

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27 Roger Waldinger, Through the Eye of the Needle: Immigrants and Enterprise in New York’s Garment Trades (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 95. 28 Zhou, Chinatown; Jan Lin, Reconstructing Chinatown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Chin, “Moving On.” 29 Margaret M. Chin, “Changing Expectations: Economic Downturns and Immigrant Chinese Women in New York City,” in Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age, ed. Nilda Flores-González et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 123. 30 Chin, “Changing Expectations.” 31 Chin, “Moving On,” 188. 32 Chin, “Changing Expectations,” 126. 33 Chin, “Changing Expectations,” 127. 34 Valeria Safronova, “A Debate over the Home of New York’s Fashion Industry,” New York Times, April 25, 2017.

15

Women’s Agency and Cost in Migration Taiwanese American Transnational Families Maria W. L. Chee

On a rainy morning in 1994 in Taiwan, Liu drove her husband to the airport to catch a plane for California. Caught in traffic, they missed his flight. He told her to go back and that he would take the next available flight out. On the way, Liu stopped by an eatery to grab a bite. When she reached home and opened the bedroom door, Liu screamed, “Ahhhh!” at top volume, seeing a pair of big feet at the end of her bed. It was her husband! Liu, her husband, and their children lived their family life in the transnational space astride Taiwan and the United States. Having grown suspicious of her fidelity while they spent weeks apart across the Pacific Ocean, her husband had returned by taxi to spy on her. This chapter focuses on women in non-working-class transnational families that originated in Taiwan and immigrated to California in the 1980s to 1990s mostly for their children’s opportunity in academic education. Typically, one spouse and child(ren) lived in the United States while the other worked in Taiwan and sent remittances to support them, which is unlike most transmigrants elsewhere who send remittances to their countries of origin. Pierre Bourdieu posits that the French of various social class backgrounds actively acquire taste and cultural practices that mark them as members of their class without consideration of the larger political economy and historical specificity.1 I extend Bourdieu’s concept of social class reproduction to transnational space by examining the agency of women in Taiwanese American transnational families, especially as they negotiate their role within the family. To generate data, I conducted two surveys in Southern California from 1999 to 2000 and thirty-five semistructured interviews with women from 1999 to 2001.2 At the time of the interviews, the women’s ages ranged from the forties to the sixties. Of these women, one had received a doctorate and another a master’s degree. Sixteen possessed bachelor’s degrees from Taiwan, two from the United States, and eight had completed junior colleges in Taiwan; only seven had finished high school without higher education. Before emigration, eighteen were homemakers and sixteen worked in professional or nonmanual occupations. One was a nurse’s aide. These largely educated and non-working-class women 254

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were not required to migrate for income in stark contrast to working-class or impoverished women transmigrants from Latin America or poor countries.3 The following interviewees identified certain benefits to the transnational family arrangement: Chi’s young teenage daughters fared better in school after migration, Wah’s son eventually made it to an Ivy League university, Lily proudly mentioned her daughter’s and son’s graduation from university. Chu, Kate and Yeh cherished relief from extra housework caused by their husbands’ presence. Ying experienced independence and growth from having to make decisions in her husband’s absence, and May avoided obligations to care for her parents-inlaw. But most women elaborated on their frustrations, compromises, and challenges. I focus here on the cost to their personal and professional lives in creating and sustaining a new family formation across the Pacific Ocean. I also present a range of their lived experiences and give them a voice. Given my sample, this study does not represent all women in Taiwanese American transnational families. All names used here are pseudonyms to ensure anonymity.

Immigration from Taiwan to the United States Formerly called Formosa and originally inhabited by Austronesians, Taiwan is separated from southeastern China by the Taiwan Strait. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch colonized Taiwan, but it came under Chinese sovereignty in 1683. Pioneers from China’s coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong settled on the island. In 1895, China lost the First Sino-Japanese War and ceded Taiwan to Japan. With Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Taiwan was handed to the Kuomintang (KMT, the Nationalist Party of China) in 1945. After the Chinese Civil War, Mao Zedong’s Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 while the opposing KMT headed by Chiang Kai-Shek evacuated to Taiwan, where the KMT governed as the Republic of China (ROC). Today Taiwan’s population of twenty-four million consists of four major ethnic groups: the Minnan (by far the largest group) and the Hakka—both of whom are descendants of the early settlers—the mainlanders who came with the KMT evacuation and their local-born offspring, and the indigenous Austronesians. Mandarin has been the official language and the language of education since 1949. International relations became more complicated after 1971, when the United Nations ousted the ROC in favor of the PRC as a member. In 1979, the United States severed official ties with the ROC to establish diplomatic relations with the PRC, and other countries followed suit. Such geopolitical dynamics impacted national politics in Taiwan and gave rise to ethnic strife with the Minnan and Hakka on one side and the Mainlanders on the other. Altogether, everyday civic life became more challenging. In the second half of the twentieth century, Taiwan experienced rapid economic growth and industrialization making it one of the “Four Asian Tigers”

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along with Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea. This “Taiwan Miracle” was made possible in part by its highly skilled, educated, and disciplined workforce in the global political economy. Taiwan’s strong economy provided opportunities for many of its citizens to achieve middle-class status. Why, then, did some of them choose to immigrate to the United States? Immigration from Taiwan to the United States has been influenced by educational opportunities, political and economic conditions in Taiwan, and specific policies of both countries. It started in the 1950s as Taiwanese sought graduate studies mostly at East Coast institutions.4 Several subsequently found employment in the United States while a few others came as entrepreneurs. Many later became naturalized citizens, eligible for sponsoring relatives to immigrate under the 1965 US Immigration and Nationality Act (hereafter 1965 Immigration Act), which favors family reunification, skilled labor, and professionals. Beginning in the 1970s, but predominantly in the 1980s and 1990s, most newcomers arrived as sponsored kinfolk, especially after Taiwan’s liberalization policy in 1987, which allowed larger outward capital movement and more exit permits. Yee explained as follows: My husband’s brother came and lived here. His wife’s brother was the first to immigrate. This brother A became a citizen and sponsored his sister B (my husband’s brother’s wife). Sister B and her husband C (my husband’s brother) became citizens and sponsored his parents D (my husband’s parents). These parents D then sponsored my husband E and I am the wife of E.

These immigrants had access to migration networks shared within the family via kinship of the wife or husband due to the legal status of their immigration, whereas Mexican undocumented migrants resort to gendered social networks for assistance before and/or after migration.5 And couples rely more on the wife’s network than the husband’s for migrating from Mexico to the United States.6 Many Taiwanese entrepreneurs also came on the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa under the US Immigration Act of 1990.7 Attracted by a suburban lifestyle, educational opportunities, and business potential and prompted by the active promotions of real estate agencies, arrivals from Taiwan began concentrating in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles called San Gabriel Valley beginning in the late 1970s. Over time, their residential and commercial sprawl extended to the entire Valley from west to east.

The Formation of Transnational Families Because they perceived political instability in the 1970s and for other reasons, some Taiwan citizens asked their naturalized American relatives to sponsor their immigration through the 1965 Immigration Act’s family reunification provision.

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The process, mostly through petitions by siblings with American citizenship, often took ten years for approval. The interviewees cited various causes for their departures: to join family members, to avoid problems with parents-inlaw, for business or career opportunities, or because of the security threat from China and Taiwan’s national political tension, but most came for their children’s education. In comparison, the majority of Latin American working-class women and educated Filipina nurses as well as domestic workers migrate for productive labor and economic gains.8 Further, Mexican migrants adopted transnational practices to improve social status by providing tangible materials and remittances to families in Mexico.9 Sixty percent of my interviewees formed transnational families for status attainment or social class reproduction by advancing their children’s education versus women who came for their own personal gain.10 Kate commented, “If there were no children, there would have been no need to move here.” Kai asserted, “I came for my child’s education.”

Children and Their Educational Future Education is the quintessential determinant for occupation and social status in Taiwan. The more advanced the level of education completed, the higher one’s first job and salary, which, in turn, influence future occupational opportunities and income.11 Taiwan’s high-ranking government officials and legislators are generally highly educated, and several have doctorates from American universities.12 But education in Taiwan is a pyramid system that eliminates students as they rise in grades. After the ninth grade, all students take a citywide examination that governs further schooling. First, it positions students in the academic track for university or in the vocational track for technical job training. Second, those with higher scores are admitted to prestigious high schools known for academic excellence. In the twelfth grade, students sit in a grueling examination for university or technical college eligibility, and each institution administers its own entrance exam. In general, Taiwan society reveres educational excellence, and academic education commands higher prestige than vocational training. Many students attend tutoring classes late into the evening after regular school hours. The highly selective process and rigorous examinations often stress out students and parents alike. Some of the women’s children lacked academic aptitude yet displayed talent in the arts. Still others suffered from the pressure of heavy schoolwork demands and requested to be sent abroad for schooling. Tai reported her son’s experience: “He is artistically inclined. He had attended art classes since he was young, but artistic students did not have much career future or opportunity in Taiwan. He would have more opportunities in the United States.” Chi explained her daughter’s situation: “My older daughter had been a slow learner

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since kindergarten. Her school performance was still less than mediocre in the eighth grade. To avoid being tracked into vocational job training, we decided to take both girls to Los Angeles.” In most cases, the entire family immigrated to California for better educational prospects for the children. After immigration, and due to language barriers, nontransferable professional qualifications or licenses, underemployment, the glass ceiling, or lack of sufficient networks, many husbands returned to Taiwan for higher salaries and more advancement opportunities. In some families, the mother accompanied the children to study in the United States while the father continued to work in Taiwan. In fewer cases, the wife worked in Taiwan and commuted for reunions in California, where the husband worked and lived with their children. Thus, they formed Taiwanese American transnational families.

Women’s Agency Migration often involves generational conflicts or gender politics; it is not always a collective strategy and goal for the entire family.13 Ethnic Chinese Singaporean husbands have been known to make unilateral decisions to perform professional work in China, resulting in transnational families, especially when the wife earns a lower income.14 Eight of my thirty-five interviewees (22.8 percent) indicated a joint migration decision as a couple while sixteen (42.8 percent) followed the husbands’ sole decisions, some against their own will even if they had enjoyed high-paying professions in Taiwan. Some families immigrated as a result of unanimous consensus or a democratic process of voting among members. Five women (14.3 percent) determined to migrate independently. Robert O. Blood and Donald M. Wolfe’s classic resource theory argues that one’s contribution of resources determines spousal power relations and that decision-making continues to serve as a major indicator of marital power.15 Others point to structural factors or ideologies in the larger society that affect marital power distribution.16 Notwithstanding their labor market participation and income contribution, women’s position and gendered role in Taiwan remained traditional in the 1980s and 1990s due to patriarchy, which was supported by society and the state. Power often rests with husbands who make the major decisions.17 Moreover, the experiences of the interviewees involve the individuals’ circumstances and social and cultural milieus. The forces are embedded in the power relation between genders or within the extended family, which, in turn, reflect the dominance of the socioeconomic hierarchy or structural ideology of the society in which they live. Five women unilaterally decided to emigrate. Why were they so empowered? Kai’s situation offers a new perspective that challenges classic resource theory and its assumptions as well as the dictate of structural ideology.

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Women’s Spousal Power Kai’s sister had come to the United States for graduate studies and became an American citizen in the 1980s. After visiting her sister in California and liking it, Kai discussed migration with her husband. He owned successful businesses in Taiwan and had no intention of leaving. Kai thought, “So many people want to migrate to the United States yet cannot. I have such an opportunity, so why not?” She simply asked her sister to sponsor her and her two children without the husband. When it was approved in 1997, Kai moved to Southern California with her son, while the older daughter continued to attend university in Taiwan, where her husband remained to manage his business. The daughter came to California during school holidays, as did her husband for reunions every few months. The resource theory cannot explain Kai’s authority. She had been a full-time homemaker since her marriage and contributed no income to earn her power. In patriarchal Taiwan, Kai, as a woman, should not have such ability to initiate the international migration. Then how? Income contribution does not necessarily gain the wife power if it is not appreciated by the husband who sees her income as a threat or burden.18 Some wives of Dominican immigrants stay home instead of working in order to elevate family status; hence, a wife may garner more power as a homemaker.19 Both the resource theory and the “economy of gratitude” concentrate on the sources of power between the couple and on individual effort.20 Kai’s power in this major decision did not originate from the husband’s gratitude for her homemaking, although it may have played a role. Her authority arose primarily from the elite socioeconomic and political position of Kai’s natal family in society. Kai was born into a prominent family in her hometown. She held a university degree, reflecting her family’s higher socioeconomic position. Her own father had completed university in Japan while her grandfather was a city official. Kai’s marriage to her husband resulted from the careful arrangement of both families, which had comparable standing and background. The prestige and status of her natal family strengthened her footing in her own nuclear family. Kai exuded an air of regal confidence and authority. She said, “My husband might have biological needs or might have started a second little family, but I know he won’t abandon this family that I lead. Home is where I live. I have faith in his family.” For Kai, her power arose from her natal family as well as the reluctance of her husband and his own natal family to displease her and her father’s family. That power enabled Kai’s active and authoritative agency in forming her transnational family with her husband in Taiwan. Lilian Traeger and Kate Young assert that wives have limited influence on the decision to migrate in a patriarchal environment.21 The cases of Kai and May (below) challenge their conclusion as well. Some women such as May actively persuaded their husbands to ultimately agree to their desire to migrate, even though the husbands dominated in a patriarchal society. May was the first woman to marry

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into her husband’s family. Following tradition, she performed her expected duty to take care of his parents. Though, later, more women married into the family, her charge continued. May said, “I wanted to get away from the obligation to my parents-in-law. I’d done my share, let the other daughters-in-law take care of them.” Prior to migration, May worked as a bookkeeper while her husband served as the major breadwinner. She needed her husband’s financial support to live in the United States. May resorted to persistent persuasion and appealed to her husband’s aspirations: housing prices were reasonable in Southern California by comparison, so they could sell their house in Taiwan and then purchase a big new one in a suburb to bolster their standing among friends and relatives; additionally, the educational system in Taiwan was too competitive for their two daughters, and K–12 public schooling was free in the United States. Eventually, her husband consented. He worked in Taiwan to support his wife and daughters, who moved to live in Southern California.

Women’s Cost For transnational families living astride Taiwan and the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, women absorbed most of the costs incurred for the benefits that the family gained. The professional women voiced their struggles over the disruptions in their careers due to the migration. In Taiwan, highly educated women are more committed to their careers than those with a high school education.22 They insist on keeping their dual roles of mother and paid professional, which permeate both the private and public spheres.23 Chinese/Asian American women have also worked both inside and outside the home by necessity.24 Married women’s participation in Taiwan’s labor market rose from 31.9 percent in 1979 to 45.1 percent in 1994, the period of this study.25 Yet the patriarchal society, then and today, for the most part continues to see the husband as the main provider while women are accountable for their children’s school performance.26 Further, a wife’s career development comes second to the husband’s.27 Society expects women to fulfill traditional roles such as mother and wife, whether they do paid work or not. The interviewees contended with gender roles and responsibilities in the transnational space, where they were far less able to combine mothering and paid work due to language barriers, different job qualification requirements, insufficient local experience, or the distance between home and work across the Pacific Ocean.

Money Worries, Underemployment, and Transpacific Shifts Wah is one of the highly educated women who gave up her professional job before retirement age to accompany her child to the United States for education, and she sustained internal conflict:

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I was well-known and respected. I was efficient, hardworking and energetic. I retired early. I gave up my career. I felt empty. I felt that I had nothing left. All of a sudden I was good for nothing. I felt contradictions and struggles. I was a successful professional, well-respected, a modern woman. But when it comes to my family, I am expected to do all the domestic chores.

Kay had complied with her husband’s resolve to migrate in the late 1990s for their two children’s academic education despite her adamant objection. She was a department manager at a financial institution in Taiwan, where all her natal family members and close friends lived. She and her husband quarreled repeatedly over the issue, and he finally threatened her with divorce if she did not agree to migrate. Taiwan’s legal system in the 1990s both reinforced and constituted a patriarchal structure: in the case of a divorce, the father retained custody of all children, and the children had to reside with the father. One husband admitted, “Actually, I gave her no choice!” Kay said, Look at me now. I gave up my profession, the whole past, the life style, friends, family, everything, to come to a different environment and culture. It is as if everything you did in the past became nothing. So you worked for nothing and you have to start from ground zero here. It is hard establishing yourself. . . . I felt empty.

Kay’s lack of personal income caused her monetary concern: “When I had no income, I felt no security. It affected my spending as a consumer.” Two years after immigration, she obtained an entry-level position to resume some earnings at a local bank founded by immigrants from Taiwan. Yen shared Kay’s worry. Yen’s nursing license in Taiwan was not transferable to the United States to qualify her for the same occupation, so she became a fulltime stay-at-home mom after migration: We used to have two incomes. I never had to think twice if I wanted to buy something. I have not been working since I came here. Now we have to carry two mortgages with one here and one in Taiwan and we have to prepare for the children’s university education. Now I have to be thrifty.

After four years as a homemaker in California, Yen secured a clerical position at a local travel agency. In addition to the loss of their higher income and the disruptions in their career trajectories, both Kay and Yen became underemployed. Women who worked in Taiwan and flew back and forth expressed different experiences from those who lived in California, as they endured physical exhaustion juggling paid work and household responsibilities across the Pacific. In the early 1990s, Lily’s husband decided to migrate for their children’s education, but Lily was reluctant to give up her high-ranking well-paid job in Taiwan.

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They also needed her earnings to cover the annual tuition fees of $30,000 for the older child at a private university. A former graduate student in the United States, her husband landed a position as an engineer while Lily flew back and forth for nearly six years until both her son and daughter completed their university education. The following is her taxing schedule: I would leave Taiwan Friday evening after work [to fly to California]. Before I left home in California I cooked lots of food and stored them in the fridge and I cleaned up the whole house, then I took the latest possible flight to arrive at Taiwan about six a.m. Tuesday. I rushed home to wash up then went straight to work. One time I could not fall asleep Tuesday or Wednesday night. The third day I worked straight through and after work I fainted on the street.

The stress from a career interruption, the loss of a profession and income, and the maintenance of both home and paid work across the Pacific all exerted tolls on women’s emotional and physical well-being. Yet, the women endured the challenges of the transnational family in the effort to improve their children’s prospects for academic education.

Raising Children Largely Alone Several women expressed the trials and tribulations of raising children alone, which included physical and mental hardship as well as discipline problems. They were de facto single parents. When I interviewed Diane in 2000, her husband had been flying back and forth between Taiwan and California every few months for eight years. She explained: He came back here like back to a motel. The children grew up without their father and any social life. I came home from work exhausted so I just wanted to rest. When I had to take them out I did not enjoy it. The children had no social skill. They became loners, and I became a loner, too.

Stay-at-home moms also related mental stress. When Wen’s husband returned to Taiwan, forming a transnational family, she became bitter: It was his choice, not mine. It turned the whole house and family upside down. When the kids wanted to learn to drive, when they needed to prepare for SAT, when the girls wanted to go out with guys, it was all me to deal with these difficult things that went with their growing up.

Lai constantly pressured her son and daughter in high school to study harder because the family was living transnationally for their education. Her urging

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often resulted in arguments with her children, who also experienced pressure from adjusting to the new school environment, and their father was nowhere around to defuse the tension. Elaine’s problem involved gendered activities in her view. She could take her children shopping at the malls but not to experience outdoor life or sports: “The kids lost all the fun. There was no father around for real family life with both parents. For seven years he was no father and no husband. He just sent money. I think he felt guilty about that.” The husbands’ absence forced these women to try to fulfill the roles of both mother and father, and this challenge was keenly felt by Hing: I have only one son. How do I use a male’s approach to teach him? For example, how do I talk to my son about sex education? I need my husband to teach him about this. It’s hard for me to cover this topic, my son also doesn’t feel comfortable discussing this subject with me. I have to be his father, too, but I don’t know how!

Strains in the Marital Bond and Divorce Six interviewees mentioned improved marital relations in the transnational families. Kate reported fewer arguments with her husband after they were apart while Kay appreciated her husband more than before and Wu said they recognized each other’s virtues and strengths instead of just shortcomings. Susan and Chu enjoyed the quality time spent with their husbands during family reunions, and Chi highlighted better communication in writing over geographic distance, leading to increased understanding. But prolonged spousal separation also destabilized some marriages. Eleven years into her marriage, Ming’s family immigrated in the early 1990s. Ming would manage her manufacturing business in Taiwan for two months and spend two months in California with the family. Nine years later, she found out that her husband was having an affair with one of her acquaintances. Her husband subsequently confessed that it had started during one of Ming’s long absences. In time, the woman started to ask him for large sums of money until he realized that what she wanted was his money, not him. In the end, he apologized to Ming in front of their children. “I forgave him,” Ming explained. “He was at the age that he needed his masculinity reaffirmed, that he could still attract another woman . . . since I was not around. . . . Of course it took two to tango. But good sex is luring for men.” May also experienced a threat to the marital bond, and it came with additional cost. In caring for her two daughters in the United States, she became dependent on her husband’s financial support from Taiwan. After seven years, May noticed a difference when her husband came for a family reunion. He avoided eye contact when she picked him up at the airport, and he left after one week without

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any desire for her the whole time. Then he started to send less money, and he did not call home as frequently as before. May began to budget better, and she started to work at a restaurant just in case. Wang had been married for fifteen years when she immigrated to the United States with her children on kin sponsorship while her husband managed his business in Taiwan and came to visit twice a year. Later, Wang found out that he was involved with another woman in Taiwan. In the early 1990s, his business failed and he retired to California to live with Wang and their children. Three years before I interviewed her, Wang had been diagnosed with breast cancer in its early stage. “I was lucky!” Wang counted her blessings about the early detection of her cancer. She recalled those transnational years, “When he came, he did not even touch me, then you knew he was ‘very well fed.’ That’s why I got cancer—sexual hormonal imbalance. I kept everything inside, I got depressed, and my immune system went down.” Another couple divorced. After seven years of marriage, in 1980 Shang persuaded her husband to immigrate to California, where her natal family resided. He was reluctant, but they undertook the long-distance move. He failed to land any work to his liking and eventually returned with their young son to his former job in Taiwan while their infant daughter remained with Shang in California. In the first year of this transnational family, he came every six months for two weeks to maintain his permanent resident status. His visits turned less frequent in the following year. In time, Shang called Taiwan but he was nowhere to be found. When Shang visited her son and husband in Taiwan, he acted coldly toward her and slept in a separate room. She returned to California to care for their daughter. The next year, her husband filed for a divorce in Taiwan, citing Shang’s abandonment of the household residence. The transnational family arrangement cost Shang her marriage given Taiwan’s civil law at the time: husband and wife hold the responsibility and obligation to coreside with each other barring rightful reasons, and a wife must coreside with the husband at his residence. Within three years of her transnational family formation, a court in Taiwan finalized the divorce because she had been living in the United States. After the divorce, Shang remained single, living close to her own siblings and working to support her daughter. Taiwan’s legal system constituted gender inequality in a patriarchal society that dictated marital life spanning two nation-states, and legal power asserted male domination in the transnational space. Shang remarked, I could not believe he did that. . . . I was dazed. . . . He had a very strong sexual appetite, frequently he wanted sex two or three times a night. We were in the thirties when we were apart. He needed sex, needed a woman. I heard that woman was only twenty years old and only a high school graduate office attendant who served tea to office visitors.

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Ting commented, “If men have their needs, so do women, just that women in Taiwan don’t talk about their needs. It’s a big unforgivable crime if women have extramarital affairs, yet it’s acceptable if men do. Women have biological needs, too!”

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted women’s voices through thirty-five interviewees reliving their choices, agency, and costs in the formation of Taiwanese American transnational families during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s. These families immigrated for various reasons, though most did so for their children’s academic education given Taiwan’s highly selective educational system. The experiences of these families suggest that Bourdieu’s concept of social class reproduction in France by the acquisition of cultural practices can also exist in transnational space with historical, political, and economic specificity; in this case, it spanned Taiwan and the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. They further reflect that their effort for social class reproduction is gendered. To counteract schooling disadvantages in Taiwan, the families migrated to the United States in pursuit of better educational opportunities for their children. They created transnational families to maximize the return on the parents’ productive labor and to optimize the likelihood of reproducing their socioeconomic class position by means of education for their children. This strategy was made possible by the participants’ non-working-class backgrounds at a historical time when the political economies of the nation-states involved favored such a maneuver to negotiate setbacks at the local level. It was facilitated by US immigration policies and by developments in Taiwan when its government liberalized the regulation of monetary movement and migration. Even in the age of globalization, the powers of the states largely control the bodies that cross national political demarcations and define international migration. My findings also challenge the assumptions of Blood and Wolfe’s resource theory, which suggests that women lack power in a household due to their contribution of fewer resources than their spouses. They also contest Traeger and Young’s assertion that wives have limited influence on a family’s migration decision by showing how Taiwanese women exerted power in their families. Several women followed their husbands’ lead on this journey, sometimes against their own will, reflecting a patriarchal structure in their society with a legal and social system that enhanced male domination. Yet a few women unilaterally decided on emigration for their families within this patriarchal society, contrary to the claims of resource theory and despite gender ideology. If power is the ability to carry out one’s wishes, then these women exercised power.28 The source of their authority was generated not from resource contribution to their marriage or ideological construct but from the stature of their natal family. Studies of marital

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power need to consider the forces of social class, political standing, and relative wealth of the extended family beyond the conjugal dyad. Further, some women effected international migration even in a patriarchal society by persuasion and appeal, and that is power qualified—the control of patriarchy was based on the fact that women anticipated and capitalized on the husbands’ desires. The experiences and agency of women in my Taiwanese American transnational families shed light on immigration and family studies and critique the more traditional views of spousal power relations. Women take active roles to achieve their goal to better their children’s education and future socioeconomic position or to realize their own wishes, sometimes within the constraints of patriarchy and laws that favor men. Taiwan’s social and cultural milieus impose restraints on the individual, and a double standard for women reflects inequality in structural forces as well as an ideology that affects members of society along gender and class lines. Yet, within the confines of male dominance, women are not always passive participants. They strategize to design a future that better serves their own interests, although they may not consider or expect adverse circumstances or possible costs to themselves. Their children reportedly succeeded, but one mother criticized the lack of moral education and respect for elders in American curricula. Although a few women cherished some aspects of the transnational family arrangement, it affected the interviewees in ways that might be variously positive, negative, or neutral, reflecting the complexity of situations, family relationship, and experiences. Some women took pride in their children’s accomplishments and considered their efforts worthwhile; others grappled with conflicts and ambivalence as they suppressed their own desires in the interest of the family. Many more lamented the challenges and hardships endured. The Taiwanese American transnational family strategy is class-specific and gendered, and this study is temporally specific to the 1980s to 1990s. The family as a unit largely achieved its goal, but women shouldered most of the cost in the case of my interviewees. Studies of contemporary transnational families are encouraged to examine continuities or changes in women’s experiences. Notes

I especially thank Shirley Hune for her insightful editorial comments and suggestions in preparing this chapter; it would not have been possible without her interest and patient guidance. 1 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 2 I completed both surveys in Southern California, with one at a retreat for female immigrants from Taiwan and the other at an adult school that offered English as a second language classes. The interviews with the women took place at their homes and lasted from two to three hours each, and the interviewees were identified through snowballing. This chapter is an original work with findings and quotations drawn from my book Taiwanese American Transnational Families: Women and Kin Work (New York: Routledge, 2005).

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3 Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). 4 In the 1950s, the Kuomintang regime prohibited male students from leaving Taiwan until they had fulfilled their military service. After completion, students could apply for Taiwan’s competitive government scholarship for graduate studies in the United States. 5 Sara R. Curran and Estela Rivero-Fuentes, “Engendering Migrant Networks: The Case of Mexican Migration,” Demography 40, no. 2 (2003): 289–307; Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 6 Mathew J. Creighton and Fernando Riosmena, “Migration and the Gendered Origin of Migrant Networks among Couples in Mexico,” Social Science Quarterly 94, no. 1 (2013): 97. 7 The EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa Program enables investors and family members to become permanent residents by investing a minimum of $1 million in commercial enterprises that would create full-time employment for at least ten US workers, but only $500,000 is required in rural areas or areas with high unemployment. See “EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program,” US Citizenship and Immigration Services, www.uscis.gov, accessed September 1, 2017. 8 Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadow of Affluence with a New Preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Mothering from a Distance: Emotions, Gender, and Intergenerational Relations in Filipino Transnational Families,” Feminist Studies 27, no.2 (2001): 361–90; Parreñas, “New Household Forms, Old Family Values: The Formation and Reproduction of the Filipino Transnational Family in Los Angeles,” in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 336–53. 9 Luin Golding, “The Power of Status in Transnational Social Fields,” in Transnationalism from Below, ed. Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), 189. 10 Susan C. Pearce, Elizabeth J. Clifford, and Reena Tandon, Immigration and Women: Understanding the American Experience (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 51. 11 Tsing-shan Sun and Rong-chaio Wu, Social Resources, Cultural Capital, and the Changing Process of Status Attainment Research Report [in Chinese] (Taichung: Graduate Institute of Sociology, Tung Hai University, 1993). See also Ying-hua Chang, Tai-shi Cheng, and Chih-wang Yi, Educational Tracking and Socioeconomic Status: Policy Implication on Technical and Vocational Education Reform [in Chinese] (Taipei: Executive Yuan Education Reform Committee, 1996). 12 Gerald McBeath, Wealth and Freedom: Taiwan’s New Political Economy (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998). 13 Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions. 14 Katie D. Willis and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, “Gender and Transnational Household Strategies: Singaporean Migration to China,” Regional Studies 34, no. 3 (2000): 253–64. 15 Robert O. Blood Jr. and Donald M. Wolfe, Husband and Wife: The Dynamics of Married Living (Glencoe, IL: Free, 1960). Blood and Wolfe pioneered the use of decision-making as a major indicator for marital power. They conclude that one’s contribution of resources determines spousal power relation—the resource theory. 16 Veronica Tichenor, “Maintaining Men’s Dominance: Negotiating Identity and Power when She Earns More,” Sex Roles 53, nos. 3/4 (2005): 191–205; Xiaohe Xu and Shu-Chuan Lai,

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“Resources, Gender Ideologies, and Marital Power: The Case of Taiwan,” Journal of Family Issues 23, no. 2 (2002): 241; Karen Pyke, “Class-Based Masculinities: The Interdependence of Gender, Class, and Interpersonal Power,” Gender & Society 10, no. 5 (1996): 528; Dair L. Gillespie, “Who Has the Power? The Marital Struggle,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 33, no. 3 (1971): 445–58. Yu-hsia Lu, “Women’s Labor Force Participation and Family Power Structure in Taiwan” [in Chinese], Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academic Sinica 56 (1983): 113–43; Lu, “Women’s Role in Taiwan’s Family Enterprises: A Preliminary Research” [in Chinese], in Population, Employment and Welfare (Taipei: Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, 1996). Karen Pyke, “Women’s Employment as a Gift or Burden? Marital Power across Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage,” Gender and Society 8, no.1 (1994): 73–91. Patricia R. Pessar, “Engendering Migration Studies: The Case of New Immigrants in the United States,” in Gender and US Immigration: Contemporary Trends, ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 20–42; Pessar, “On the Homefront and in the Workplace: Integrating Immigrant Women into Feminist Discourse,” Anthropological Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1995): 37–47. Arlie Hochschild, “The Economy of Gratitude,” in The Sociology of Emotion, ed. David D. Franks and E. Doyle McCarthy (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1989), 95–113. Lilian Traeger, “Family Strategies and the Migration of Women: Migrants to Dagupan City, Philippines,” International Migration Review 18, no. 4 (1984): 1264–77; Kate Young, “The Creation of a Relative Surplus Population: A Case Study from Mexico,” in Women and Development: The Sexual Division of Labor in Rural Societies, ed. Lourdes Beneria (New York: Praeger, 1982), 149–77. Yu-hsia Lu, “Value Extension of Modern Women’s Role” [in Chinese], Thoughts and Words 20, no. 2 (1982): 135–50. For a discussion on Asian American women and private/public spheres, see Shirley Hune, “Doing Gender with a Feminist Gaze: Toward a Historical Reconstruction of Asian America,” in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 419–27. Shirley Hune, “Chinese American Women in US History,” in The Practice of US Women’s History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues, ed. S. Jay Kleinberg, Eileen Boris, and Vicki L. Ruiz (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 177; Huping Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). Wen-yin Chien and Cherng-tay Hsueh. “Employment of Married Women in Taiwan: Its Pattern and Causes” [in Chinese], Journal of Population Studies [Taiwan] 17 (1996): 113–34. Sung-ling Lin, “Effects of Mother on Her Children’s School Performance: The Comparisons of Cultural Capital, Economic Resources, and Supervisory Role” [in Chinese], National Taiwan University Journal of Sociology 27 (1999): 73–105. Wan-yu Wu, “Women under the Patriarchal System in Taiwan” [in Chinese] (master’s thesis, Tung Wu University, 1992), 83. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free, 1947), 152. For various forms of power, see Aafke Komter, “Hidden Power in Marriage,” Gender & Society 3, no. 2 (1990): 187–216; Marion Kranichfeld, “Rethinking Family Power,” Journal of Family Issues 8, no. 1 (1987): 42–56; Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: MacMillan, 1976).

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“Revolutionary Care” as Activism Filipina Nurses and Care Workers in Chicago, 1965–2016 Joy Sales

Luwalhati is a seventy-two-year-old live-in caregiver in a Chicago suburb.1 She migrated from the Philippines in 2000 and financially supports her family back home. Her clients and some Filipino community members ask her why she chose caregiving given her “more respectable” job as a public school teacher in the Philippines. Luwalhati argued, Some people say that we swallow our dignity to do a job that is different from our profession in our home country. But I disagree. . . . Caregiving is even more [noble]. Because we are helping other people. The American society should see that our work is more than an affirmation of human dignity. We sacrifice our time with our own family, so that we could help other families and protect their homes.2

Luwalhati affirmed that caregiving is invaluable work and that domestic workers deserved respect from their employers, the Filipino community, and the state. However, as she cared for her family and clients, her own health began declining. An elderly woman, Luwalhati needed paid sick days and health insurance, but at the time of this testimony, Illinois did not recognize domestic work as labor. Because of this discrimination, Luwalhati and many other Filipinas in Chicago began organizing for domestic workers’ rights.3 Most Filipinos in Chicago migrated after 1965, with Filipinas being the majority of immigrants.4 Filipinas have shifted activism from social services centered on and led by men to issues-oriented and rights-based organizing centered on and led by women, particularly nurses and domestic workers.5 This chapter describes how Filipina nurses and domestic workers in Chicago resisted exploitative practices in the health care and care industries and articulated care as radical politics. I also show how Filipina organizers developed various strategies to care for themselves, the Filipino community, and other people of color through collective action. This post-1965 Filipina activism is revealed through the Philippine Nurses Association of Illinois Collection, diaries, and local newspapers. In addition, I conducted eleven oral histories between 2014 and 2016 of Filipina activists in immigrant justice organizations and coalitions in 269

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Chicago, notably the Alliance of Filipinos for Immigrant Rights and Empowerment (AFIRE), Latino Union, and the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON).6 I develop here the term “revolutionary care” to describe how Filipinas in Chicago—many of whom are immigrants, undocumented, and working class— deploy care politically through local and national campaigns and social movements that challenge capitalist exploitation and affirm Filipinas’ agency. As my interviewees explained, in the context of Filipina migration, self-care and caring for their community are revolutionary acts against neoliberal conditions.7 In my view, revolutionary care speaks to the social and material conditions of being an immigrant health care and care worker and offers a new way of thinking about and doing activism. Filipinas’ politicized notions of care serve as the heart and backbone of Filipino activism in Chicago.8

Post-1965 Filipino Demographics and the Feminization of Labor The colonial and neocolonial relationship between the United States and the Philippines has fueled Filipino migration since the turn of the twentieth century. Within the first ten years of colonial rule, US officials built more than four thousand public schools throughout the archipelago and made English the language of instruction.9 In 1907, they introduced a school of nursing at the Philippine Normal School, an institution where Americans trained Filipinos to become teachers.10 One year later, US officials founded the University of the Philippines to create an educated class of Filipinos sympathetic to the United States.11 US colonial education, white American teachers, missionaries, and labor recruiters impressed upon young Filipinos that America was a beacon of democracy and a country of promise and opportunity.12 This infrastructure assimilated Filipinos into US culture and society before their migration, and their proficiency in English and familiarity with the culture continues to make Filipinos marketable in the US and global workforce. Chicago, like many global cities, is home to a growing Filipino diaspora.13 Pre-1965 Filipino immigrants were students and working-class migrants who formed brotherly and provincial associations to maintain ties to the homeland and meet other Filipinos.14 While there are no hard figures on the Filipina population in pre-1965 Chicago, their migration was low overall, and only 6 and 9 percent of the Filipino populations in California and Hawai‘i, respectively, were women.15 The wives of Filipinos, regardless of their race or ethnicity, built community through women’s clubs, such as the Philippine American Women’s Club, where they facilitated banquets, beauty pageants, and celebrations of Filipino veterans. Filipinos participated in strikes as workers in the US Postal Service or the Pullman Car Company. However, their activism shifted after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act created a preference system for family reunification

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and professional migration and changed the demographics of Filipinos and Asian Americans writ large.16 The 1965 act intersected with the rise in global capitalism and the feminization of labor.17 Due to neoliberal economic policies after World War II, governments around the world adjusted their immigration policies to facilitate the migration of laborers—professional, low-wage, contract, and guest workers. Simultaneously, the feminization of labor integrated women into the workplace, especially in nursing and domestic service, including Filipinas.18 Since the 1970s, the Philippine government has contributed to this process by creating a system of labor export that was intended to mend the nation’s underdevelopment and unemployment and fulfill labor shortages in other countries. By the 1990s, one-tenth of its force worked abroad, and remittances made up 10 percent of the nation’s GDP. The Philippines continues to export more than six thousand workers each day to countries such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.19 The Philippines is known for specializing in nursing and domestic work. In 2014, it deployed 19,814 nurses and 70,034 domestic workers overseas. In some US nursing homes, Filipinos comprise up to 90 percent of the workforce, and more than 114,000 Filipinos work as domestic workers in private homes and health care facilities.20 The US government facilitates the mass migration of nurses through the H-1A visa, and domestic work is a common form of labor for new immigrants.21 Alongside labor export, immigration policies feminized Filipino migration after 1965; in the 1970s and 1980s, the ratio of Filipinas to Filipinos was 100:67, and many Filipinas became the family breadwinner in both the United States and the Philippines.22 Consequently, Filipinas in the health care and care industries have become the face of the Filipino diaspora and its activist communities.

The Changing Face of Filipino Activism in Chicago Filipina Nurses Beginning in the 1970s, nurses shifted Filipino activism. Foreign nurses were required to pass a state licensure exam before becoming registered nurses. Because of its jargon-heavy language and difficulty level for non-US-educated nurses, the failure rate of foreign nurses reached 77 percent in 1976.23 Filipinas found these results not only problematic but symptomatic of structural discrimination against foreign nurses and organized themselves using professional organizations in response. They founded the Philippine Nurses Association of Chicago (PNAC) as a social club in 1965. In the 1970s, as more Filipinos in Chicago embraced leftist activism, the PNAC shifted its framework to immigrant and workers’ rights for all foreign nurses.24 Before the creation of PNAC,

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Filipinos in Chicago participated in local workers’ associations and protests, but because of their large presence in the health care industry and the barriers they faced, Filipinas recognized the need to organize nationally. In 1977, the PNAC created a committee that facilitated a national petition to the Immigration and Naturalization Service demanding changes to state licensure. More than ten thousand nurses signed the petition. Its most important section called for an end to the deportation of foreign nurses.25 In light of discriminatory recruitment practices of employers, bias of the state licensure exam, and increasing rates of deported and undocumented nurses, PNAC president Clarita Go-Miraflor proposed an organizational shift “to [establish] a nationwide organization of Philippine nurses.”26 In 1978, at the annual conference of Philippine Nurses Association of New Jersey, Go-Miraflor was elected president of the Philippine Nurses Association of America (PNAA), and twenty-three other nurses from associations across the country were named founders.27 The PNAA represented a new way for Filipinas to confront an immigration and labor system that treated them as disposable labor.

Filipina Domestic Workers Similar to nursing, domestic work has shifted increasingly to immigrants, and due to the nation’s growing elderly population, the demand increases every year.28 Unlike nursing, federal labor laws do not recognize domestic work as labor. Congress excluded it from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, making domestic workers unqualified for rights such as collective bargaining, a day of rest, or a minimum wage.29 As of 2016, only seven states, with the most recent being Illinois, adopted a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, which extends labor rights to domestic workers. In the early 2000s, domestic workers nationally began campaigns for a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in their respective states.30 In Chicago, domestic workers affiliated with the Alliance for Filipino Immigrant Rights and Empowerment (AFIRE), a nonprofit organization that works with Filipino immigrants, joined the campaign for an Illinois Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in 2006. Myrla Baldonado (who will be discussed later) and Sally Richmond were two Filipina caregivers who led Filipino domestic workers and formed coalitions with Asian American and Latino organizations. Sally became involved in the campaign after a friend, a live-in caregiver, lost her job: She was teary-eyed and . . . didn’t know what to do. She told me she got fired by her employer. [She said], “I said something [my employer] did not like, and she never gave me the chance to explain myself.” That moment made me so mad—that she was treated so inhumane[ly]. She was not treated with dignity.31

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This interaction showed Sally that without laws and regulations, domestic workers had few avenues to defend their rights. Sally, like many Filipinas, chose activism as a way of addressing the systemic problems that put domestic workers at risk of discrimination.

Revolutionary Care and the Politicization of Filipinas In the global workforce, Filipinas are constructed as the epitome of “tender loving care.”32 The Philippine government has made Filipinas desirable and marketable in the global economy by deploying care as the quintessential quality of overseas Filipino workers. Media outlets overseas use the same language, and some Filipinos describe themselves as naturally caring.33 Many Filipina activists disputed this essentialist rhetoric, and reinterpreted care as anticapitalist acts such as unionization, direct actions, and lobbying for changes in legislation, as is revealed in my oral histories.

Edith: Organizing Nurses against Hospital Corporatization Edith’s story shows how Filipina nurses transformed compassion into action. She was born in the Philippines in 1948 and is a retired nurse. Influenced by the phenomenon of other Filipinos working abroad, she migrated to Chicago in 1969 via the petition of her father, a naturalized US citizen. Edith chose nursing because she felt “geared towards that work,” and she liked how “nursing is about compassion.”34 Instead of using the stereotypical rhetoric of “tender loving care,” Edith argued that care is ultimately about respecting the patients, the nurses, and their labor and expertise. With experience in more than seven hospitals, she saw the worst working conditions at Chicago’s Saint Mary of Nazareth Hospital, where patients were not getting proper care: The only thing that really drove me, or drove us, into having a union is because we feel that the patients are being shortchanged. We are not giving the best quality care that we can give. When you are working eight hours, and you have, like, six, seven, or eight patients, it’s impossible to give the best of care. . . . It is the quality of care that we are really concerned with. Because when you are not able to detect the first signs and symptoms of disease, how are you going to prevent it? That means a lot of knowledge and studying. You should be able to intervene. Nursing is not just physical work. . . . I think we are not being given the kind of respect that we should be getting.35

Giving proper care went beyond the demeanor of the nurse. Care, or the lack thereof, was part of the structure of the health care system. From her own and

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her coworkers’ experiences, she realized that the hospital abused its patients and nurses. Caring for six to eight patients resulted in longer working hours, sometimes with no overtime pay, and increased stress levels.36 In this environment, nursing was not about compassion, and Edith eventually learned how corporate models of care resulted in unsafe conditions. The corporatization of US hospitals began in the 1980s. By 2001, more than half of community hospitals were affiliated with health care systems or arrangements in which a group of affiliated hospitals are owned and operated by a single parent organization.37 While scholars and health care providers still debate the pros and cons of health care systems, unionized nurses contend that corporatization has led to poorer quality of care for patients and workplace abuse of nurses. According to the California Nurses Association (CNA), a multiracial nurses’ union of forty thousand members, a corporate model of care set nurse-to-patient ratios of 1:12, resulting in increased patient and nurse injuries and worker burnout.38 The CNA fought this model, and in 1999, California became the first state to mandate lower nurse-to-patient ratios, with the highest being 1:6.39 Inspired by this campaign, Edith and her fellow nurses joined their local branch of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a nationwide public services employees union. In 2003, AFSCME began organizing eight thousand hospital employees in the Resurrection Health Care System (RHC), the second-largest system in Chicago, following testimonies of patient and worker abuse. The mandated nurse-to-patient ratios was one of the major campaigns after a union study found that 85 percent of nurses in the RHC reported inadequate staffing.40 Nurses’ activism against the RHC, that is, revolutionary care, sought to dismantle practices of corporate care that harmed patients and nurses. Besides quality patient care, Edith became concerned with the hospital’s exploitation of Filipina nurses. Her way of caring for the nurses was to encourage them to join the union. Edith noticed illegal antiunion activity, such as manipulation and discrimination of the hospital’s immigrant workers. With more than half of RHC employees being immigrants, management often used scare tactics, mandating English speaking only and pressuring them to sign petitions opposing the union or contracts stating that they would not join the union.41 Edith discovered that the hospital used the latter strategy on Filipinas. Many of the newer Filipina nurses were contract workers, and Edith argued, “[The administration] represents corporate America. They are for profit. Maybe in their minds, they will say, ‘Oh we have these nurses from the Philippines. They cannot even leave within the three-year period. They have to go ahead and do their work.’”42 Indeed, many Filipinas feared losing their jobs. They told Edith they needed to support their spouses, children, and families in the Philippines. Their reasoning was rooted in realities of unemployment, declining wages, and landlessness as well as the Philippine state’s labor export policy, which pushes Filipinos to

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migrate and support their families through remittances.43 The Philippines’ version of care has contributed to the exploitation of Filipinas, such as the case of Edith’s coworkers. Because of antiorganizing tactics, the union lost their fight for a lower nurse-to-patient ratio with the RHC.44 Nonetheless, Edith emphasized that Filipinas and other immigrants were not to blame. If nurses really believed their profession was about care and compassion, they would continue helping immigrant nurses understand their rights as workers. Edith offered a revolutionary form of care in which nurses challenged corporatization, eliminated the fear of intimidation, and asserted their dignity as immigrants.

Myrla: Affirming the Rights of Domestic Workers Myrla’s experience as a live-in caregiver demonstrates how US society denies rights to domestic workers. She was born to a middle-class family in the Philippines and migrated to Chicago in 2006 to join her mother and siblings. Because of her upbringing, Myrla was initially reluctant to become a domestic worker, and her sisters discouraged her from doing “shameful” work. Despite her initial doubts, Myrla chose domestic service because of its flexible hours, but it quickly consumed her time and energy. As a caregiver for a family in Chicago’s suburbs, she worked sixteen-hour days for $4.94 per hour. At one point, Myrla worked more than ninety hours per week.45 Because of this abuse, Myrla attended workshops on immigrant rights, and learned about the campaign for an Illinois Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. After five years as a caregiver, Myrla joined Latino Union of Chicago, a nonprofit, nonunion advocacy organization that collaborates with low-income immigrant workers. Being a multiethnic and multiracial alliance, Latino Union tasked Myrla with recruiting Filipina domestic workers to support the campaign. Myrla’s activism constantly presented the contradiction in which Filipinas performed labor that cared for others but had no one to care for their health or well-being. Recognizing this phenomenon, she constructed a politics of care through her activism for a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, which she saw as an important step in creating a “caring society where workers are treated equally.”46 Myrla said, If you look at the way they work, they are not able to sleep. How can they belittle a bill of rights that will help regulate that? Because the conception is . . . [Pauses] it doesn’t matter. We are sending money to the Philippines. They don’t take care of themselves. In the hierarchy of needs, their need is to get more money instead of taking care of themselves.47

Indeed, Filipinas’ “moral economy” involved decision-making toward sustaining and improving the livelihood of their families at home and abroad. Even though

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the Philippine economy depends on their remittances, the state lacks in aiding its diaspora when their rights are violated.48 Activists like Myrla encourage their community to rework traditional notions of care into revolutionary practices to end the exploitation of Filipinos in the diaspora. Filipinas have mobilized alongside other women of color to find solutions and draw attention to systemic discrimination. One proposal, Caring Across Generations, was started by Ai-Jen Poo, a Taiwanese American domestic workers’ rights activist who helped lead the New York Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights campaign. It builds on bill-of-rights activism and seeks to change the care industry by making domestic workers like Myrla into community leaders. This is Myrla’s testimony to Congress and the Federal Department of Labor in 2012: Domestic workers should lead and become an active part in the campaign, Caring Across Generations Network. This campaign is a very comprehensive proposal and solution to the unregulated industry that is, in many ways, uncaring and so driven by a profit motive. It is an opportunity to work with families, patients, the disabled to change and be treated fairly and equitably. When these changes are made, you and I will be able to take care of own health, our children’s health, and become a become a better caregiver to our clients.49

Myrla’s testimony addressed the current state of the care industry, the ongoing fight for domestic workers’ rights, and an action plan to replace unfair practices after states legislate a bill of rights. Having worked with Latino, Filipino, other Asian American domestic workers, the disabled, and patients’ families, Myrla’s activism exemplifies how revolutionary care involves coalition-building across race, ethnicity, and ability. By understanding the needs of different sectors and cultivating the political potential of domestic workers, Myrla, Ai-Jen Poo, and other activists aim to create a caring society that puts people over profit.

Claire: Fighting the Systemic Silencing of Undocumented Filipinos Claire Maymay’s life story is another example of revolutionary care as a political ethos. She was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1990 and grew up in the Marshall Islands. After 9/11, the Marshall Islands reached the “high-risk” level on the Homeland Security Advisory System. With rumors of food, water, and air travel being cut off, Claire’s mother, who worked for a travel agency, obtained tourist visas for herself, her husband, Claire, and Claire’s sister. They settled in Skokie, a Chicago suburb, and became undocumented after overstaying their visas. Claire’s mother eventually found work as a live-in caregiver for a wealthy family: My mom started working as a 24-hour caregiver, and I didn’t see her. I saw her in the back alley of this mansion in Lincoln Park, or [a restaurant] Aloha Eats.50

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That’s the only time. Or she’d come to our celebrations, our birthdays, our graduations with some old white woman we don’t know. It just created such a distance between us.51

Claire’s frustration and anger sparked her desire to organize and understand the experiences of undocumented people. Claire’s transformative justice work is rooted in her family’s migration. Being a musician, artist, and poet, she used art and performance as avenues of healing and to amplify the stories of Filipinos and people of color. For example, Claire worked with two other undocumented youths to create a performance piece entitled “Walang Papeles, Walang Takot” (No papers, no fear). Using their own stories and testimonies from other undocumented Filipinos, the writers sought to “begin a conversation of how we can transform our thinking into one that prioritizes persons and people before profit, property, and place.”52 After seeing the performance, Claire’s father became angry with the content and asked, “Why can’t you just perform fun stuff?” Claire responded, “We need to heal.”53 Similar to the political praxis of other Filipinas, Claire’s activism began with the need to care for herself and her family and expanded to other marginalized people. As much of the rhetoric around undocumented immigrants and domestic workers revolved around shame, Claire believed storytelling was an important strategy of resisting the stigmatization of undocumented people. The women in Claire’s life, especially her mother, helped her realize that shame was rooted in colonialism, patriarchy, and the unjust immigration system. On Claire’s arm is a tattoo that says, “Walang Hiya” (no shame), which represents her rebellion against hiya (shame), a concept that the Spanish used to discipline Filipinos through Catholicism.54 Resisting this shame helped Claire express a revolutionary love for her mother that manifested in protest. In the following quote, Claire discusses how she and other immigrant youths were arrested after a direct action when participants chained themselves together to block the entrance of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Broadview, Illinois, in 2013. My mom has experienced a lot of isolation, depression, and never wanted to get involved and was ashamed because we’re undocumented. When I would do resistance work, she would want me to be quiet. When I got arrested, the first thing she said to me was that I brought shame to the family, and I threw them under the bus, and now they’re exposed. Even though my mom says it’s brought shame to our family [Starts to cry], I’ve done it because I feel like it’s the only way we can actually live freely and not have to go through this oppression and shame and fear and trauma, y’know? [Sniffs] Even though they fought the things that I did, I had them in my heart and mind the whole time.55

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Claire’s family still lives in Chicago, and her mother remains a caregiver. As of 2016, Claire lived and worked between California and Chicago, and she continues expressing her revolutionary love for her family and the undocumented community through her music.

Organizing against Classism and Xenophobia within the Filipino Community Systemic inequalities inform everyday interactions within Chicago’s Filipino community. Filipina activists explain that the need to organize also stems from internalized classism and xenophobia. Filipina activism demonstrates that revolutionary care for undocumented and working-class Filipinos is solidarity against surveillance, shaming, and complicity with xenophobic and racist politics. The disunity and distrust in Chicago’s Filipino community shows “that there is no natural experience of sharedness even within the ‘same’ national, gender, and class identity,” and activists interpret these alarming dynamics as a call for more community organizing.56 Xenophobia, even among immigrants, made many Filipinas distrustful of their own community members. Nikky was an undocumented nurse in the 1980s, and she recounted that she and her coworkers were extremely cautious when approached by Filipinos who would ask how they came to the United States. Nikky said, Some of them are traitors. Sometimes they ask where you live, and they will report you to immigration. We had to be clever. We just said we were immigrants, and they don’t bother us. Especially in the nursing home, they know we are TNT [Tagalog code word for undocumented], but we don’t say anything.57

Similarly, when Malou and Joy migrated in the early 2000s, they experienced similar interrogations from other Filipinos: Malou: Those who have papers—they will threaten those people without papers. I feel bad about it because [caregivers] are just here to work, but some Filipinos are so jealous. Maybe they think, “Oh, she is earning more than me. I have papers, and she has no papers.” Joy: That’s what you call crab mentality. They pull you down when you’re climbing up. Malou: Some people, up front, the first thing they ask you is, “May papel ka?” [Do you have papers?]. I was at a party [Chuckles], and we came from the same province, and the first thing that came out from her mouth was “Do you have papers?”

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Joy: You should have brought with you your citizenship papers! [Joy and Malou laugh]58 The experiences of Nikky, Joy, and Malou reveal the seemingly contradictory reactions of Filipinos to new immigrants, particularly undocumented Filipinos and caregivers. In the Filipino diaspora, the caregiver is a figure of resentment that is familiar and repulsive as well as “problematic and ultimately shameful for the nationstate.”59 The everyday interactions between undocumented and working-class Filipinas and their documented, middle-class counterparts exemplify how xenophobia is gendered and classed. This divide pushed Malou to join the campaign for a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. She said, I’m not underpaid, but those friends that are being underpaid [sic] cannot complain because they are out of status. . . . That’s why they are so afraid to voice their concerns. I told them, if there is anything I could help with, I can help. We cannot deny the fact that there is a lot [of undocumented] here in Chicago.60

As members of AFIRE, Malou and Joy are two of many domestic workers who help their coworkers learn about their rights, especially if they encounter ICE, apply for citizenship, and articulate their concerns to immigration lawyers. Their actions represent the kind of revolutionary care that challenges the systemic shaming of domestic workers and silencing of undocumented immigrants. The need for revolutionary care became more urgent after the 2016 presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump. On the day Trump was declared president-elect, I interviewed Nerissa, an activist with the National Alliance of Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), a coalition of twenty-five member organizations dedicated to promoting, defending, and asserting the democratic rights and welfare of Filipinos in the diaspora.61 We began our conversation with studies reporting that almost one-third of Filipinos supported Trump. Nerissa explained that Filipino activists needed to investigate their community’s political divide and find ways to unite to support its undocumented members. She hypothesized that a significant section of Filipinos resented the undocumented because of an elitist notion that undocumented people should have migrated “the right way.” Nerissa said, I meet people who say, “Hey, Nerissa, why are you so compassionate in organizing the undocumented? Were you undocumented before? Were you TNT before?” No. I say, “Why do we have undocumented Filipinos?” It’s not only hardheaded people who break the law. . . . It’s a social problem! It’s a phenomenon. And I’m so proud of them! They are the ones who send money to the Philippines every week . . . for

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how many families. Many of them are already grandmothers, and they don’t have anyone [here]. We who can speak up should speak up.62

Like Malou and Joy, Nerissa sees the importance of transforming compassion into action, and opposes the demonization of undocumented Filipinos. Revolutionary care means being with the most oppressed groups in the community, working alongside them to amplify their voices, and learning the importance of collective action.

Conclusion The Filipina activists in this study recognized that the absence of self-care among nurses and caregivers and that the hazards in patient and client care were linked to unfair labor laws, abusive workplace conditions, and inequalities in US and Philippine migration policies. Motivated by a love for their community and the goal to dismantle oppressive systems, Filipinas turned care into revolutionary action through unions, campaigns, and storytelling that valued care workers not simply as laborers but as humans who deserved rights. Revolutionary care is a strategy of resistance that challenges traditional gendered and racialized ways of caring. The experiences of nurses, care workers, and patients reflect how globalization, US immigration and labor policies, and internalized classism and xenophobia lead to discrimination against Filipinas. Oral histories show how Filipinas conceptualized revolutionary care through ideologies and strategies aimed at the empowerment and mobilization of Filipinos in Chicago and the diaspora. Edith organized for workers’ rights and patients’ rights against US corporate hospitals. Myrla fought for workers’ and immigrant rights in a labor system that devalues care work. Claire defied narratives of shame and invisibility of undocumented people. This chapter contributes to the growing body of knowledge on Asian Americans in the Midwest by concentrating on Filipina nurses, domestic workers, artists, and activists in Chicago and the ways Filipinas in the diaspora become political agents in a global capitalist society. Notes

Thank you to Shirley Hune, Gail Nomura, Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, and Ji-Yeon Yuh for your feedback and support. This project was funded by the Global Midwest Grant from the Alice Kaplan Institute for Humanities at Northwestern University. 1 The use of names and pseudonyms varies in this chapter. Narrators expressed their preference to the author. Nerissa and Edith preferred first name only. Joy and Malou are nicknames. Myrla Baldonado permitted the use of her full name, and Luwalhati, Claire Maymay, and Nikky are pseudonyms. 2 Christine Sumog-Oy, “‘Caregivers are Not Invisible’: Luwalhati’s Story,” AFIRE Chicago: Alliance of Filipinos for Immigrant Rights and Empowerment, January 4, 2017, www. afirechicago.org, accessed January 10, 2017; “Our Oral History Collection,” AFIRE Chicago, www.afirechicago.org, accessed April 1, 2018.

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3 Filipina is the feminine version of Filipino. I use Filipina when referring to women. Filipino is both masculine and gender-neutral. 4 Barbara Posadas, “Filipinos,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2005, www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org, accessed January 6, 2017. 5 Since the early 1900s, Filipino communities have come together through organizations, social clubs, and brotherly associations based on their region of origin in the Philippines. 6 This study is drawn from my research on transnational Filipino activism in Chicago. I found that many Filipinos who were activists during martial law in the Philippines (September 1972 to January 1981) later became community organizers in Chicago, particularly for workers’ and immigrant rights. From 2014 to 2016, I collected ten oral histories in Chicago and one in Quezon City, Philippines. I also used the Philippine Nurses Association Collection at the University of Illinois at Chicago, personal and professional writings of domestic workers and nurses, petitions, print and online newspaper and magazine articles on campaigns, and YouTube and Facebook videos of activists’ speeches and reflections of their activism. The sources demonstrate that Filipina health care and care workers use a wide range of outlets to make their activism visible and relevant to the greater Chicago community, the Illinois state government, and the federal government. 7 The focus on care is not meant to reify stereotypes of Filipinas. Rather, it pushes social movement scholars to think of care as politics centered on the intersection women’s rights, workers’ rights, and immigrant rights. The historical and contemporary exploitation of Filipina migrants and Filipina activists’ notions of care reminded me of Audre Lorde’s quote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Journalist Sarah Mirk’s interview with black feminist writer Evette Dion provides historical and contemporary examples of how self-care is a subversive act for black women. Sarah Mirk, “Audre Lorde Thought of Self-Care as an ‘Act of Political Warfare,’” Bitch Media, February 18, 2016, www.bitchmedia.org, accessed August 4, 2017. 8 Other scholars have also documented and theorized the role of Filipina domestic workers and nurses in the global economy and how Filipinas in the health care and care industries have become some of the most active and organized sectors of workers in the world. Catherine Ceniza Choy, “Relocating Struggle: Filipino Nurses Organize in the United States,” in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Anna Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Ligaya Lindio-McGovern, Globalization, Labor Export and Resistance: A Study of Filipino Migrant Domestic Workers in Global Cities (New York: Routledge, 2013); Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 9 The Philippines became a US colony in 1898 and gained independence in 1946. Alexander A. Calata, “The Role of Education in Americanizing Filipinos,” in Mixed Blessing: The Impact of the American Colonial Experience on Politics and Society in the Philippines, ed. Hazel M. McFerson (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002), 89–97. 10 Choy, Empire of Care, 23. 11 Reynaldo Ileto, “The Philippine Revolution of 1896 and US Colonial Education,” in Knowing America’s Colony: A Hundred Years from the Philippine War (Mānoa, HI: Center for Philippine Studies, University of Hawai‘i, 1999), 8. 12 Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 32–40. 13 Posadas, “Filipinos.”

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14 The US Census Bureau recorded 1,740 Filipinos in Chicago by 1940, but other estimates record almost five thousand. Posadas, “Filipinos”; Barbara Posadas, “The Hierarchy of Color and Psychological Adjustment in an Industrial Environment: Filipinos, the Pullman Company and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters,” Labor History 23, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 349–73; Barbara Posadas and Roland L. Guyotte, “Unintentional Immigrants: Chicago’s Filipino Foreign Students Become Settlers, 1900–1941,” Journal of American Ethnic History 9, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 26–48; Roland L. Guyotte, “Interracial Marriages and Transnational Families: Chicago’s Filipinos in the Aftermath of World War II,” Journal of American Ethnic History 25, nos. 2–3 (Winter–Spring 2006): 134–55. 15 Barbara M. Posadas, “Filipinas,” in The Reader’s Companion to US Women’s History, ed. Wilma Mankiller et al. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 231. I use “migrants” instead of “immigrants” because from 1902 to 1934, Filipinos were legally categorized as US nationals according to the Philippine Government Act of 1902. A US national could freely travel within the borders of the United States, but they were not granted political rights enumerated in the US Constitution such as citizenship. This status still exists for American Sāmoans. Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898–1946 (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 74. 16 Muzaffar Chishti, Faye Hipsman, and Isabel Ball, “Fifty Years On, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act Continues to Reshape the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, October 15, 2015, www.migrationpolicy.org, accessed May 2, 2017. Because of this Act, Filipinos in Illinois increased from 3,587 in 1960 to 12,355 in 1970. H. Brett Melendy, “Filipinos in the United States,” in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, ed. Emma Gee et al. (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, 1976), 425; Posadas, “Filipinas,” 231. The 2010 US Census reported 131,388 Filipinos lived in the Chicago metropolitan area with the majority in suburbs such as Skokie and Glendale Heights. 17 Leslie Hossfeld, “Feminization of Labor,” in Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, ed. Jodi O’Brien (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 318–19. See also chapter 13 by Krittiya Kantachote and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas in this volume. 18 Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes, 33–34; Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), x. Remittances are transfers of money by an overseas worker to family and friends in the homeland. 19 “#SONA2015 Number of OFWS Leaving Daily Rose from 2,500 to 6,092 in 2015,” Migrante International, July 29, 2015, https://migranteinternational.org, accessed May 10, 2017. 20 According to the Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools, more than half of US foreign nurses are from the Philippines. Cristina D. C. Pastor, “Filipinos Nurses in High Demand in US Health Facilities,” Rappler, August 17, 2015, www.rappler.com, accessed January 10, 2017. 21 Choy, Empire of Care, 110–11. 22 Sierra Stoney and Jeanne Batalova, “Filipino Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, June 5, 2013, http://migrationpolicy.org, accessed May 10, 2017. 23 In California, failure rates reached 80 to 90 percent. Choy, “Relocating Struggle,” 338. 24 Filipino nurses’ activism also intersected with the transnational movement against Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. 25 Mayee Asidao, “H-1 Nurses: A Case of Double Jeopardy,” PNAC Gazette, December 2, 1977. 26 Philippine Nurses Association of Illinois, “PNAI: A Historical Perspective,” 2007. 27 Philippine Nurses Association of Illinois, Box 1, Philippine Nurses Association of Illinois records, Health Sciences Manuscripts, University of Illinois at Chicago, Library of Health Sciences Special Collections and University Archives.

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28 The plight of Filipina domestic workers became international news in the mid-1990s when the Singaporean government executed Flor Contemplacion after she confessed under duress to murdering her employer’s son and another maid. In response, activists formed Migrante International, a global alliance of overseas Filipino workers. 29 The exclusions were a compromise with antiblack southern Democrats who refused to have domestic workers, a majority-black workforce, included in federal labor laws. Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1994), 86. 30 The first Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights was passed in New York in 2010. In 2016, Illinois became the seventh state to pass the bill. Other states include California, Connecticut, Hawai‘i, Massachusetts, and Oregon. 31 “AFIRE Organizer Sally Richmond Speaking at the Illinois Domestic Worker Coalition Conference,” AFIRE Facebook Page, May 2016, www.facebook.com, accessed January 2, 2017. 32 Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes, 133. 33 Guevarra, 64. 34 Edith, interview with the author, September 30, 2016, Skokie, IL. 35 Edith interview. 36 According to the American Nurses Association, employing fewer nurses with longer work hours “compromises care and contributes to the nursing shortage by creating an environment that drives nurses from the bedside.” “Safe Staffing Ratios: Benefitting Nurses and Patients,” Department for Professional Employees Research Department, AFL-CIO, January 2014. 37 Gloria J. Bazzoli, “The Corporatization of American Hospitals,” Journal of Health Policy, Politics, and Law 29, nos. 4–5 (August–October 2004): 886. 38 National Nurses United, “Celebrate 15 Years of California’s Nurse to Patient Ratios!,” YouTube, September 25, 2014, video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pHvFb1p7ow, accessed March 5, 2017. 39 California mandated the following nurse-to-patient staffing workload ratios: 1:6 in psychiatrics; 1:5 in medical-surgical units, telemetry, and oncology; 1:4 in pediatrics; 1:3 in labor and delivery; and 1:2 in intensive care units. Linda Aiken et al., “Impact of Nurse-toPatient Ratios: Implications of the California Nurse Staffing Mandate for Other States Fact Sheet 2011,” Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO, May 2011, http://dpeaflcio. org, accessed January 2, 2017. Since health care facilities implemented these ratios, researchers have found a significant decrease in nurse and patient injuries and nurse burnout as well as reports of consistently better quality of care. 40 Carol Schuck Sheiber, “Union Battles to Organize Chicago Hospital Chain,” National Catholic Reporter, March 17, 2006. 41 Jon Melegrito and Jimmie Turner, “Picking Up the Pace,” AFSCME Works, September/ October 2003; Jon Melegrito, “Seeking Resurrection,” AFSCME Works, November/ December 2003. 42 Edith interview. The use of immigrants as scab labor to break strikes and unions has been a common, and often successful, strategy of employers. Hospital recruiters in Chicago admitted that they deliberately hired Filipino nurses when management detected union activity. Yvonne M. Lau, “Re-visioning Filipino Communities” in The New Chicago: A Social and Cultural Analysis, ed. John P. Koval et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 145. 43 E. San Juan Jr., “Overseas Filipino Workers: The Making of an Asian-Pacific Diaspora,” Global South 3, no. 2 (2009): 99–129.

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44 Despite AFSCME’s loss with RHC in 2007, the Illinois legislature passed the Patient Acuity Act that same year. It states, “every hospital shall have a Nursing Care Committee of which at least 50% of the members are registered professional nurses providing direct patient care.” Committees determine staffing levels, including nurse-to-patient ratios, and communication of important issues and recommendations to the nursing staff. Therese Fitzpatrick et al., “Nurse Staffing: The Illinois Experience,” Nursing Economics 31, no. 5 (October 2013): 222. 45 National Domestic Workers Alliance, “Support Basic Labor Protections for Domestic Workers in Illinois!,” 2015, www.credomobilize.com, accessed June 2, 2017. 46 Myrla Baldonado, “Domestic Worker Organizing: From Invisibility to Recognition,” the White House (blog), May 13, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov, accessed February 2, 2017. 47 Myrla Baldonado, interview with the author, October 17, 2014, Chicago. 48 Valerie Francisco, “Moral Mismatch: Narratives of Migration from Immigrant Filipino Women in New York City and the Philippine State,” Philippine Sociological Review 57 (2009): 105–35. 49 Latino Union, “Myrla Baldonado Caregiver Testimony,” YouTube, June 22, 2012, video, https://youtu.be/i5GHQ7tm2cA. 50 Lincoln Park is a neighborhood in Chicago. 51 Claire Maymay, interview with the author, October 24, 2016, Chicago. 52 Claire Maymay et al., “Walang Papeles, Walang Takot: No Papers, No Fear Proposal,” n.d. 53 Maymay interview. 54 The phrase walang hiya means “no shame” or “shameless” in Tagalog and is considered an insult and swear word when directed at someone. However, some 1.5- and secondgeneration Filipino Americans such as Claire reconceptualize this phrase as a form of resistance. For more on new meanings of walang hiya, see “Reclaiming Walang Hiya,” Formation of a Filipinx American, 2015, www.formationofafilipinxamerican.com, accessed March 26, 2017. 55 Maymay interview. 56 Neferti Tadiar, “Filipinas ‘Living in a Time of War’” in Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory: Theorizing the Filipina/American Experience, ed. Melinda L. de Jesus (New York: Routledge, 2005), 380. 57 TNT stands for tago ng tago in Tagalog, which means “in hiding.” It is a code word for undocumented Filipinos. Nikky, interview with the author, December 15, 2016, Quezon City, Philippines. 58 Joy and Malou, interview with the author, November 3, 2016, Chicago. 59 Tadiar, “Filipinas,” 380; Rodriguez, Migrants, 95. 60 Joy and Malou interview. 61 The organizations include national groups and their local chapters, such as AnakbayanUSA and GABRIELA-USA, and community organizations, such as Filipino Migrant Center in Los Angeles. In Chicago, Anakbayan-Chicago and the Fellowship for Filipino Migrants are part of NAFCON. 62 Nerissa, interview with the author, November 10, 2016, Chicago.

Part VI Spaces of Political Struggles

Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s struggles for human rights, equal treatment, and social justice take many forms and occur in different sites. One of the understudied areas of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories is their public role in political and social change. The four chapters in part VI span the 1920s to the early twenty-first century. They center on women’s agency and empowerment at the intersections of private and public spaces to rectify race, gender, and cultural inequities and for the larger public good. They point to the multifaceted ways in which Asian American and Pacific Islander women have politically mobilized to transform their communities or homeland and the nation through enacting legislation, grassroots organizing, developing family and community support networks, and building coalitions to address complex and evolving issues. We begin with a chapter on Guam, a US territory that has survived serial colonization by Spain, Germany, Japan, and now the United States. Sharleen SantosBamba and Anne Perez Hattori discuss language use as a signifier of culture and power in Guam and the role of Chamorro women, especially mothers, in transmitting and preserving the indigenous language against possible extinction while recognizing the value of English use for employment. Over three generations, from the 1920s to 1985, key Chamorro women have been politically active in challenging policies and practices that tend to weaken Chamorro language use. They have also developed Chamorro language pedagogy and products to strengthen its use in schools and in the media. The importance of language acquisition/evolution, usage, and retention resonates with other chapters in this volume. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu features Hawai‘i congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink (1927–2002), the first woman of color to serve in the US Congress and a strong advocate for civil rights, the antiwar movement, environmental initiatives, and feminist policies. Wu assesses Mink’s political goals and activities to expand understandings of Asian American feminisms to include feminist legislative activism. Mink’s life was one of agency, resilience, and resistance to race and gender restrictions. She contributed to women’s equity, including Title IX (1975) and other policies, while facing many challenges in her professional pursuits and in being a mother. Marriage equality for same-sex couples in US law (2013/2015) broke new ground for social justice. Trinity A. Ordona documents the active role that Asian 285

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American lesbians played beginning in the 1980s to open the path to marriage equality. To shift the views of Asian American LGBTQ members from shame to acceptance, they sought parental approval and community group support. Sharing films and videos featuring testimonies by accepting parents, lobbying ethnic organizations, and having babies were all parts of their strategy. The chapter also documents Asian lesbians’ transnational activities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia as part of building family acceptance for marriage equality. Monisha Das Gupta and Soniya Munshi examine the leadership of South Asian American women’s organizations (SAWOs) in transforming research, policies, and practices in response to gender-based violence in the context of current immigration enforcement. In the 1980s SAWOs had begun to refocus their social justice efforts and put the survivors of gender-based violence at the center while challenging deportation and detention of their community members. With the intensification of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim racism after 9/11, they concluded that mainstream domestic violence movements’ reliance on the police, courts, and prisons to deter the abuse of women was detrimental to the South Asian community. This led SAWOs to create spaces of support as alternatives to the criminal legal system. As the four chapters reveal, Pacific Islander and Asian American women’s political activities in the public arena involve linking governmental and community spaces with the private spaces of their personal lives and families to achieve personal and public interests. Part VI highlights the political and public leadership of Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans for women’s social equity and ethnic group preservation and advancement. The chapters also broaden and deepen our understanding of women’s engagement and types of activities by giving attention to their issues, strategies, and coalition building to achieve their goals.

17

The Mother’s Tongue Language, Women, and the Chamorros of Guam Sharleen Santos- Bamba and Anne Perez Hattori Inifresi [literally, “Offering”] Ginen i mas takhelo’ gi Hinasso-ku, i mas takhalom gi Kurason-hu, yan i mas figo’ na Nina’siñå-hu, Hu ufresen maisa yu’ para bai hu Prutehi yan hu Difende i Hinengge, i Kottura, i Lengguahi, i Aire, i Hanom yan i tano’ Chamoru, ni’Irensiå-ku Direchu ginen as Yu’os Tåta. Este hu Afitma gi hilo’ i bipblia yan i banderå-hu, i banderan Guåhan

The Guam Pledge From the highest of my thoughts, from the deepest of my heart, and with the utmost of my strength, I offer myself to protect and to defend the beliefs, the culture, the language, the air, the water, and the land of the Chamorro, which are our inherent God-given rights. This I will affirm by the holy words and our banner, the flag of Guåhan.

Since its authorship in 1991 by Chamorro language professor and activist Bernadita Camacho Dungca, the Inifresi has become recognized as an anthem in honor of the cultural beliefs and practices of the indigenous natives of Guam. In an island heavily inundated by American popular culture, along with an influx of immigrants who now outnumber the indigenous Chamorros, the Inifresi serves as a cultural call to arms, so to speak, powerfully reminding each individual, regardless of ethnicity, of his or her personal responsibility toward cultural perpetuation. In 1998, then Governor Carl T. C. Gutierrez officially declared the Inifresi to be the “Chamorro Pledge of Allegiance,”1 mandating that it be delivered “in any public and private event where the ‘American Pledge of Allegiance’ might also be recited.”2 Students in Guam’s public school system learn the pledge in their grade school Chamorro language classes; in fact, the ability to recite the Inifresi is one of the performance indicators in the school system’s Chamorro Language Curriculum Kindergarten Content Standards.3 The Inifresi signifies the intensification of cultural issues on Guam, particularly concerns about the decline of Chamorro language fluency among younger Chamorro generations. Chamorro scholar Laura Torres Souder proclaimed in 287

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2017 that the Chamorro language is “sure to disappear in the next 50 years,” citing research that “unequivocally predicts” this path to linguistic extinction on Guam. Estimating that 80 percent of Guam’s Chamorro language speakers are over fifty years old, Souder has called for a “concentrated effort to transform the way we prioritize and teach” the native tongue.4 As Chamorro scholars and activists, we explore the ebbs and flows of Chamorro language use in the context of Guam’s history, focusing on the vital roles played by mothers in the area of language transmission. Over centuries of colonization by Spain and the United States and each colonizer’s attempts to influence the island’s mother tongue, Chamorro mothers have been idealized as static, staunch protectors and preservers of Guam’s native culture. Yet this chapter will demonstrate that Chamorro mothers have also been dynamic and aggressive agents of change, empowering their children to adapt to the island’s shifting political and economic landscapes. Indeed, while Chamorro language teaching has long been regarded as the mother’s domain, post–World War II Chamorro mothers steered their children toward fluency in English, and today’s declining usage of the Chamorro language is a prominent source of cultural anxiety. Unsurprisingly, then, a cohort of native mothers leads the current drive to revive usage of the Chamorro language. Declaring a state of emergency in the matter of language loss, these language activists reflect the cultural continuity of women as power brokers within the Chamorro tradition, drawing upon their roles as mothers, caretakers, and family decision-makers. This chapter examines the intricate mix of economic, political, and social issues that have informed which language would, indeed, be the mother’s tongue and highlights Chamorro women’s activism in that struggle.

Guam History and Chamorro Culture Located in the northwestern Pacific, Guam is the southernmost island in the Mariana Island archipelago. Discovered approximately four thousand years ago by Oceanic seafarers hailing from Island Southeast Asia, the island chain became the ancestral home of the indigenous Chamorro people. Yet, over the past 350 years, four different nations—Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United States— have colonized the islands in order to fulfill their expansionist desires. In 1668, Spanish Catholic priests arrived with the intent of achieving Christian conversion and, more than two centuries later, in 1898, colonizing nations driven by economic and geopolitical interests divided the Mariana Islands into two political entities, with the United States seizing Guam and Germany claiming the Northern Mariana Islands (NMI). After Germany’s defeat in World War I, the League of Nations handed the NMI to Japan, whose alliance with the United States proved all too brittle. World War II dragged Chamorros into the fray, but on opposite sides of the conflict. Guam, immersed since 1898 in an intense

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Americanization program, found itself opposed to its northern cousins who had undergone similar assimilation programs under Japanese rule. Although Japan’s defeat in the Second World War would bring the Northern Marianas under the umbrella of American colonial rule, the islands were not reunified. The Northern Mariana Islands, along with other former-Japanese territories in Micronesia, were reorganized as the United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Under UN watch, the Northern Marianas negotiated its own political status arrangement with the United States, becoming an American commonwealth in 1978. Thus, the 1898 division persists today in the forms of the US Unincorporated Territory of Guam and the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.5 In the centuries before colonization, Chamorros had developed a matrilineal system that enabled a gender-balanced division of labor and sharing of power. Ancient folklore strongly reflects this gender equity, commencing with the very beginning of time—creation. In the Chamorro cosmology, a brother and sister, Pontan and Fo’na, collaborated to create the world. Pontan sacrificed his body parts—his back becoming the earth, his breast the sky, one eye the sun, the other the moon, and his eyebrows the rainbows—while his sister, Fo’na, wielded her own magnificent power to breathe new life into his parts. Numerous other pieces of Chamorro folklore replicate this theme of shared power between females and males. Historically, this power dynamic was reflected broadly across Chamorro social and political organization as Chamorros defined identity through membership in clans determined by maternal lineage. One’s family affiliation and claims to rank, status, and wealth, most conspicuously in the form of land, were accorded along maternal lines. Clan leadership recognized the political authority of both female and male chiefs, the maga’haga (female chief, literally, “leading daughter”) and maga’lahe (male chief, literally, “leading son”). Both genders shared spiritual authority as well, apparent in the existence of both female and male traditional healers, referred to as kakahna. While men predominated in positions of power as navigators and warriors, women held great authority by virtue of their command over clan resources, including land, labor, and virtually all matters related to the family, including the rearing of children. Spanish colonization in the late 1600s infused a European patriarchy into the ancient matrilineal system, replacing the chiefly maga’haga and maga’lahe with Spanish crown officials. Chamorro women, however, found ways around the colonial regime to maintain authority within society, particularly in the power they wielded as mothers. Despite a dramatic 90–95 percent depopulation of the Chamorro people during the Spanish colonial era due to the combined effects of disease and warfare, indigenous cultural practices continued to reflect a respect for women and men as partners in society. The distinctive power ascribed to women as mothers continued to be described in virtually every text written

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about Chamorros. French explorer Louis Claude de Freycinet, for example, wrote in 1819, “When Europeans first arrived in the Marianas, women generally took a considerably more active part in the hard work of running a household than men did. This remains true, among the natives.”6 Early twentieth-century ethnographies likewise noted the cultural continuity of Chamorro women’s power as mothers. One visiting anthropologist observed in the 1940s that the mother holds a dominant position in the home. It is she who usually controls the purse strings; she brings up the children and exercises a strong control over them even in adult life. She is responsible for the health of the family and she directs its religious observances (which are to a great extent also its social activities).7

Contemporary research has likewise documented the persistence of women’s powerful role as mothers. Souder emphasizes that “throughout history, . . . the Chamorro culture has been mother-centered.”8 Chamorro women take responsibility for “sustaining the family and perpetuating traditions which form the core of Chamorro identity,”9 most significantly, Souder asserts, “the preservation and transmission of the Chamorro language to her children.”10 Indeed, the survival of the Chamorro language over more than three centuries of colonization merits consideration, particularly in light of the traumatic effects of Spanish onslaught and in comparison to areas of the Caribbean and the Americas in which the Spanish language came to dominate. Estimates suggest that in the Marianas, by the late 1800s, “only thirty percent of the population [had] achieved some degree of [Spanish language] literacy.” Spanish historian Carlos Madrid attributes this “underperformance” to a bevy of factors including a lack of teachers and learning resources and the inability of many children to leave the family farm for the purpose of attending school.11 While Spanish had never been widely spoken by Chamorros during the entirety of Spain’s 230 years of colonial rule, many Spanish words were absorbed into the Chamorro vocabulary. The United States as colonizer, however, tells a different story for the people of Guam. Unsure of how to manage its new colonies following victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898, President William McKinley placed the navy in charge of the island. Lawsuits seeking to clarify the political and civil rights of the peoples of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam reached the US Supreme Court in 1901, resulting in a ruling that created the category of Unincorporated Territory, meaning that the US Constitution and its accompanying guarantees of civil and political rights would not be applicable to Guam.12 The creation of a military dictatorship on Guam was thus validated by the nation’s highest court. Under the navy, becoming “American” would require fluency in the English language, beginning in 1900 with a patronizing law that directed all residents to “utilize every available opportunity to learn how to read, write, and speak the English language, thereby improving their own mental condition.”13 Language

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learning would occur most directly in schools that were first mandated in a 1904 law to require school attendance for children between the ages of eight and twelve.14 In the early 1920s, not only was the native language banned in the schools and on the playgrounds, but naval governor Adelbert Althouse further ordered that Chamorro dictionaries be collected and burned.15 Ironically, the dictionaries burned by Althouse had been printed at navy expense just four years earlier with the express purpose of helping Chamorros learn the meanings of English words.16 Notwithstanding naval efforts, by the late 1930s, visiting American anthropologist Laura Thompson observed that “Chamorro is still the language used in most native homes and on the village streets of Guam.”17 Even Catholic priests stationed on Guam, whether Spanish, German, or American, learned Chamorro in order to communicate effectively.18 In practice, “school children learned the rudiments of English for a few hours at school in the morning then went home to speak Chamorro for the rest of the afternoon and evening.”19 Their daily reality brought few opportunities to interact with fluent English speakers. Life continued to revolve around the Catholic Church, ranching, and extended-family obligations.20 At the time of World War II’s outbreak on Guam in December 1941, Chamorro still remained the primary language of use in the home while English was a language used at schools, government offices, and other formal (non-Chamorro) settings.

Upheaval of World War II From December 10, 1941, to July 21, 1944, Japanese Imperial Forces occupied Guam, subjecting Chamorros to a litany of physical and psychological abuses. Wartime trauma became embedded in the Chamorro collective memory of World War II, evidenced each July 21 since 1945 in Liberation Day commemorations that convey appreciation to the US military for ending the war.21 But the war left another significant legacy on the island, that of Chamorro homelessness, landlessness, and economic deprivation. The 1944 US military campaign to recapture Guam from Japan destroyed roughly 80 percent of the island’s homes, in the process also badly strafing farmlands. The capital city of Hagåtña, home to more than half of Guam’s population, was almost completely destroyed; by 1950, only a dozen of its prewar houses remained standing, and its population had decreased from a prewar peak of more than ten thousand to only 760 residents.22 In the villages closest to the island’s harbor—Asan, Piti, Agat, and Sumay—“not a single dwelling remained.”23 Even more critical for Chamorros was the US military confiscation of farmlands and fishing grounds on which they relied for sustenance. Vast swaths of Chamorro farmland and villages were confiscated within a year of Guam’s so-called liberation from Japanese occupation, and more than onethird of the island was condemned for the sake of military bases during the Cold War. Because of this massive militarization, “thoughts of reverting Guam to its

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prewar agricultural economy were wishful thinking.”24 By 1950, only 23 percent of the prewar agrarian Chamorro population relied upon farming and fishing as their primary occupations; by 1960, this had fallen to only 8.8 percent.25 The loss of farmlands, coupled with a shift in the island economy to cash rather than barter, pressed Chamorros into the labor force in unprecedented numbers. Yet seeking employment by the military and its contractors during segregationera America was highly problematic for the dark-skinned noncitizen Chamorro. Racial discrimination resulted in wages that were only 25 percent of the pay that mainland whites would receive for the same positions. In the 1930s and ’40s, “for the same work a Guamanian auto mechanic (first class) gets 43 cents an hour, while a ‘continental American citizen’ hired on Guam gets $1.42 an hour, and a ‘continental American citizen’ transferred to Guam from the States gets $1.72 an hour.”26 For Chamorros, the best avenue out of abject poverty was obtaining a higher-paying job, but such positions required proficiency in the English language.27 New political realities compounded the push for English language fluency among the indigenous people. In 1950, US Congress approved an Organic Act for Guam that included citizenship and a civilian government, ending authoritarian navy rule. Chamorro testimonies at congressional hearings held on Guam reflected islanders’ optimistic expectations that citizenship would mean the return of their farmlands as well as full inclusion in the American family.28 Emerging from the ravages of war with the “gift” of American citizenship propelled new forms of patriotic display among Chamorros, including the use of the English language as a marker of this new identity. Guam’s newfound membership in the American body politic as well as the island’s economic transformation to a cash-based system revolving around the US military complex were accompanied by equally dramatic transformations in the island’s social and cultural fabric. These profound changes affected virtually all aspects of Chamorro life, from land ownership to the foods eaten and the language spoken. While earlier generations of Chamorros took the vernacular language for granted, learning and speaking it without undue concern for its political or economic ramifications, postwar Chamorros faced unprecedented pressures to support their families, constraints that necessitated the use of English. How Chamorros met these new social, cultural, and economic challenges while managing familial and community responsibilities forms the focus of the remainder of this chapter.

The Mother’s Tongue: Women of Three Generations Language, especially in colonized spaces, is highly politicized, and this is no different on Guam. From colonization to occupation to liberation, Guam’s language and literacy history has been shaped by hundreds of years of sociopolitical events. In a larger body of work, three generations of Chamorro women

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participated in a study that traced the language and literacy histories of women born between 1920 and 1985.29 The study evaluated the ways these generations of mothers used language to navigate their lives, raise their children, and perpetuate Chamorro culture and values.30

1920–1945: Generation 1 Generation 1 (G1) women attended school on Guam during the first American occupation (1899–1941) and experienced English-only policies instituted by the US naval government. G1 women speak both Chamorro and English languages; however, their first language is Chamorro. This generation acquired English at school and, for the most part, spoke it primarily on school grounds. Catholicism played a crucial part in their home and village lives and directly impacted their ability to read in Chamorro since the church used vernacular-language prayer and song books to reach out to its parishioners. For G1 natives, Chamorro was the language of home and church, their most significant spheres of activity. Despite the English-only policy that had been in place for decades, G1 mothers did not purposefully exclude Chamorro from the home nor discourage Chamorro or English. Rather, they bifurcated the two languages and valued each for different purposes—English for academic and professional endeavors and Chamorro for spiritual, cultural, and social events. Manuela, a participant in the study, shared how she used English and Chamorro: I speak Chamorro at home with family and friends. So I mostly use Chamorro. Back then I only use English if I have to. . . . That’s cause most people back then speak Chamorro. The people who work in the government are mostly people from here [Guam]. But there are still Americans who are in charge. I remember when I have to go to the vital statistics for the birth certificate, I have to use English. I have to fill out forms so I have to use English. Lucky I know how to read and write English a little. Things like that I have to use English. What do you call that? Like the official business . . . I use English. I don’t really have a choice you know. If I need something from the government I have to use English.31

Manuela’s association of English with “official business” is evidence of the attitude or perception that English was deemed more significant and necessary than Chamorro. This perception stems from the socialization of English in education and government; all official or legal documents and tasks were legitimized via English language. While policies rendered the Chamorro language unusable in the contexts of government, education, and other professional activity, G1 women did not question the value of their first language. Another participant, Engracia, disclosed, “Ilekna I asagua-hu na ti Amerikano hit [My husband said that we are not American]. The kids’ first language is

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Chamorro. In the house only Chamorro.”32 Fluency in the mother tongue signified their sense of belonging to the collective community of Chamorros and was a central part of their identity as natives of the Mariana Islands. Engracia’s recollection of her husband’s statement confirms that for Chamorros like Engracia and her husband, the use of the Chamorro language is a characteristic of Chamorro identity. Being Chamorro and being American are not one in the same regardless of citizenship. In other words, Chamorroness is separate from Americanness. Being adamant about her language of choice for prayer, religious celebrations, and communication in the home reveals that the Chamorro language is a very personal and intimate language that has helped shape her attitude about the Chamorro language and her identity as a Chamorro woman of her generation.

1946–1965: Generation 2 Generation 2 (G2) women are descendants of Generation 1 and attended school during the reconstruction period following World War II. In their formative years, English was imposed as the sole official language of Guam, which, in the process, devalued the mother tongue. G1 mothers acknowledged that English was necessary for their G2 children to prosper in the “new” postwar cash economy since it was a virtual requirement for better-paying jobs. Thus, when the women of Generation 2 entered the school system, most were already bilingual. While at home, Chamorro was used to communicate, particularly with parents, grandparents, and older relatives, although English was spoken with those their junior. A G2 participant disclosed, “Chamorro is the first language I learned. My mom, dad and older brothers and sisters spoke it all the time at home and in the village. It wasn’t until I went to school that I really learned English”.33 Although born to Chamorro-speaking parents with limited English language skills, G2 women learned to read and write in English in school, were forbidden to communicate in Chamorro while on school grounds, and inevitably internalized the idea that English literacy provided access to opportunity and prosperity. They championed English acquisition and, without thinking of its full consequences, placed Chamorro in the periphery. G2 mothers did not consider that their children would grow up with the shame and disappointment of their inability to speak their native language. For G2 mothers, English language fluency was one direct avenue through which their children could be empowered to fight the worst effects of US military colonialism—dispossession from their homes and farmlands. Paid only 6 percent of the land’s appraised value—which, for many, amounted to roughly one dollar per acre—they were thrust into a bleak economic reality that threatened the livelihood of their entire families.34 G2 Chamorros thus apprehended English as an essential tool through which their children might build better lives. In this way, English as the “new” mother tongue served as a form of resistance to colonialism in the manner of James

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Scott’s “weapons of the weak.”35 Essentially, natives used the colonizers’ language to fight their marginalization at the hands of the US military—mastering their language as a tool to prevent their further marginalization, infiltrate the white man’s space, and avoid being limited to low-paying, manual-labor jobs. Exposed to the comforts and luxuries of modern life as observed among military families stationed on Guam as well as in various forms of media, including popular American television programs, it is not surprising that Chamorros of this generation desired a similar way of life—a US lifestyle. As they understood it, since English was the vehicle to achieve such a life, then Chamorro language and literacy acquisition were neither priorities nor necessities. G2’s actions perpetuated the idea that English was superior to Chamorro, which, in turn, led their children to internalize that being or speaking Chamorro was embarrassing. G2’s decision to limit Chamorro in the home was not without reason. Like their G1 predecessors, G2 Chamorros were victims of cultural and linguistic imperialism.36 A G2 participant recalled a traumatic childhood incident: I learned fast not to speak Chamorro at school ’cause once when I was playing jacks with my friends at recess I spoke Chamorro. I couldn’t help it. I guess I got excited about the game and I was talking in Chamorro. But a teacher heard me and she pulled my ponytail really hard that I started to cry. I was so ashamed. I felt a lot of shame for what I did. And all I did was talk in Chamorro.37

For them, violations of the English-only policy at school resulted in physical punishments, demerits, or monetary fines, all of which worked to devalue the significance of Chamorro in their own lives. Unlike their G1 mothers, who valued both English and Chamorro in different contexts, G2 women perceived Chamorro as a hindrance to academic, social, and professional mobility whereas English granted access to such pursuits; as one G2 mother expressed, “I did not speak to the kids in Chamorro. Not that it was not important, it’s just that it wasn’t a priority.”38 After liberation from the Japanese occupation and the signing of the Organic Act of Guam, G2 mothers made child-rearing decisions that were influenced by patriotism for the United States—which was particularly heightened after the granting of US citizenship for Guam in 1950—as well as economic pressures to escape poverty and attain a stateside lifestyle. Although English became the preferred language of the home, G2 women continued fostering Chamorro cultural practices and traditions and nurturing their faith, albeit in the English language.

1966–1985: Generation 3 Women of Generation 3 (G3)—descendants of G2 and grand-descendants of G1—attended school at a time when both English and Chamorro were

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recognized as official languages.39 Although not subjected to English-only policies, they witnessed English becoming the first language of most Chamorro households. For G3, Chamorro language lessons were now being implemented in the public school system. Children of Generation 3 grew up in family settings that included working mothers, thus their native-speaking Chamorro grandparents and extended family members served as primary caregivers in their formative years. The time spent with elders afforded G3 opportunities to closely observe and learn Chamorro practices and traditions. English was the first language for G3, so they did not experience the second-language anxiety of their mothers and grandmothers. Rather, schooling, social interactions, religious services, daily prayers, and home communications were carried out in English with ease. In spite of the prevalence of English in their lives, the Chamorro language remained present, particularly through their grandparents and in religious celebrations and activities through songs and prayers. In addition, for those of the G3 generation, Chamorro leaders, at the behest of language proponents, passed Public Law 14-53 in 1977 that required public schools to include mandatory Chamorro language classes in the elementary school grades and implemented lessons that focused on days of the week, colors, numbers, and practicing cultural arts for twenty to thirty minutes each day. Chamorro language curriculum and instruction that was delivered to G3 proved unsuccessful in developing G3 Chamorro speakers. Most of G3’s limited native language knowledge was acquired at home or in religious and social situations. G3 learned Chamorro by being around parents, grandparents, and extended family who used the language whereas the Chamorro that was taught at school was arbitrary and had little to do with daily life. By observing their G1 elders using the language fluently, G3 came to realize that Chamorro was the language of the family and of the Chamorro people. Although exposed to Chamorro language use through family members, G3 Chamorros still did not acquire the ability to speak Chamorro with ease, and a large number of this generation feels a deep sense of loss and longing for the language of their people. G3 participant Rozanne stated, I’m from Guam and proud to be Chamorro. It’s about understanding what it means to be Chamorro, you know the idea of helping each other out and about family and faith. I just wish for myself that I knew the language more. Chamorro is definitely more personal. It reflects who we are.40

G3 women also realize that Chamorro language and literacy are important for maintaining Chamorro culture and identity. The language choices G3 have made in their home lives as well as their attitudes about the English and Chamorro languages differ from their G2 mothers, bearing more similarity to their G1 grandmothers, who saw value in both

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languages. Unlike their grandmothers, however, they lack confidence in their own Chamorro language skills, an insecurity that prevents them from using the language more often. A combination of factors during their adolescent years led G3 to develop the attitude that it was humiliating to be or speak Chamorro and embarrassing to speak English with a Chamorro accent. One participant admitted to the stigma associated with Chamorro: “Now that I’m older I see things different. But to be honest speaking English with a Chamorro accent is associated with not being educated. It’s not proper. I mean who wants to be seen as uneducated or not proper?”41 Generation 3 women were also inculcated by their parents and teachers to believe that Chamorro had little practical value in their lives. Their negative feelings extended beyond the Chamorro language to their feelings about being Chamorros themselves. An internal conflict developed as G3 struggled with identifying themselves as both American and Chamorro. Speaking Chamorro or even speaking English with a Chamorro accent signified that they were uneducated and of a lower socioeconomic class. This perspective changed as they matured, but the attitude itself was a hindrance to Chamorro language acquisition. Conversely, the negative attitude about Chamorro during their teenage years pushed them to learn and speak English well. Knowledge of English offered them opportunities to pursue endeavors academically and professionally, often beyond the shores of Guam to the continental United States. This complex context confronted Chamorro language activists who were determined to reverse the trend of English as the new mother tongue.

Women and Chamorro Language Activism At the forefront of Guam’s language activist community has been a vocal cohort of mothers, notably Clotilde Gould, Rosa Salas Palomo, Bernadita Camacho Dungca, Katherine Aguon, and Pilar Lujan. Their efforts and teachings reflect their agreement with the notion that investing in a language is tantamount to investing in an identity.42 Because of their well-known activism that encompassed language and culture preservation, these women actively led and served as members in various iterations of the Kumision I Fino’ Chamorro (Chamorro Language Commission, hereafter Kumision) while also spearheading the drive toward compulsory Chamorro language instruction in Guam’s public schools, protesting publicly in order to gain acceptance of Chamorro language in the media (television, print, and radio), and raising awareness of the significance of Chamorro language use. Created in 1964 through legislation by the 7th Guam Legislature, the Kumision was tasked to “develop Guam’s indigenous language through a comprehensive system that includes attention to the daily operations of the Government of Guam and the government’s support in upholding and encouraging its usage.”43

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Figure 17.1. Bernadita “Benit” Camacho Dungca (1940–2016). Single use of copyright photo authorized by Pacific Daily News. No further redistribution or republication of this copyright work will be granted without permission from Pacific Daily News.

Their monumental mission was to create policies to halt the decline of the Chamorro language. In 1990, more than twenty-five years after its creation, Chairperson Rosa Salas Palomo positively reported that since the Kumision’s inception, attitudes toward Chamorro language had changed. Palomo cautiously penned, however, that “although a concerted revival in the practice of spoken and, in many cases, written Chamorro abounds in the public school system, in homes, and in most government agencies, the future of the Chamorro language is still not yet known. Most would agree that its usage continues to decline qualitatively as well as quantitatively.”44 In its early years, the Kumision focused primarily on providing Chamorro translations for various government agencies and for consultation on the naming of streets and other community projects. Because Chamorro is an unwritten language without an established orthography, coming to agreement upon “correct” spellings of Chamorro words has been a formidable task for the Kumision in its entire half century of existence. Nonetheless, Palomo and those who worked alongside her have substantially raised awareness among the indigenous community about the significance of Chamorro language use in all aspects of public and private life.

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In the arena of Chamorro language pedagogy, Inifresi author and University of Guam (UOG) professor Bernadita Camacho Dungca has been recognized as the “single leading authority on Chamorro language structure, and . . . a forceful advocate for equity and education, for bilingual education, for teaching the Chamorro language.”45 A driving force behind the Chamorro language and culture teaching program at UOG, Dungca co-authored the most widely recognized Chamorro-English dictionary as well as a Chamorro reference grammar book. Her legacy reverberates every day in Guam public school classrooms through student recitation of the Inifresi. For G3 Chamorros, Dungca’s impact has been most significantly felt in her career efforts toward training the island’s Chamorro language teachers, inspiring hundreds of students to embrace and incorporate Chamorro language and culture in the classroom and beyond. Like Dungca, Clotilde Castro Gould was an educator and a strong proponent of Chamorro language education. Gould developed instructional materials for the Chamorro language program at the Guam Department of Education and published children’s books for use in elementary schools. Yet she is most poignantly remembered for her lead in a high-profile public protest in 1981 against the island newspaper’s English-only policy. As a result, the Pacific Daily News (PDN) not

Figure 17.2. Clotilde “Ding” Castro Gould (1930– 2002). Courtesy of Sandy Gould Yow.

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only rescinded its policy but also turned to Gould to assist them in formulating a language policy that was inclusive of the native tongue. Her contributions to language preservation have been further memorialized in the PDN through her Chamorro-language comic strip Juan Malimanga as well as the daily Fino’ Chamorro column that features short Chamorro language lessons. Although Gould passed away in 2002, both Juan Malimanga and the Fino’ Chamorro column are still published in the daily newspaper, the comic strip’s production taken over by UOG art and Chamorro language students and the Fino’ Chamorro column by the Department of Education’s Chamorro Studies Division. In addition to Gould’s advocacy of the language through mass media, other Chamorro women have taken to promoting the language on television, including brief language lessons by Katherine Aguon that focused on vocabulary building and short conversation as well as news broadcasts in the Chamorro language by Pilar Lujan. Thus, in a variety of different platforms, including government commission work, educational reform, and media messaging, Chamorro women have worked at the frontlines to elevate the profile of the indigenous language. These mothers consequently brought the language out of the dark, so to speak, making it publicly visible and, over time, acceptable and even desirable. In the 1980s and early 1990s, G3 women observed these attitude shifts and began to acknowledge, and often struggle with, their Chamorro identity in direct connection to their language skills. That some now consider the ability to communicate in the language as an essential aspect of being Chamorro is leading to considerable anxiety among G3 natives. For many in G3, efforts by the Kumision, the university and public school language programs, and mass media have engendered desires both to learn the language and to use Chamorro more readily in social and spiritual domains of life. For descendants of post–World War II Chamorros, this shift in mentality was a major turning point. Despite these positive strides, language proponents have continued to confront ever-declining numbers of Chamorro language speakers. In a 1990 Kumision report, Palomo wrote, The Chamorro Language Commission recognizes that the Chamorro language is not as widely used as it could be. . . . The Government of Guam, as the legitimate protector of Chamorro heritage of Guam, continues to ignore the usage of Chamorro as an official language especially in day to day operations and communications.46

These troubling words point to the conundrum that the island is in today—actual Chamorro language use and fluency continue to decline despite heightened social appreciation of its value, compulsory instruction in schools, and numerous revitalization initiatives.

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Yet, amid various high-profile initiatives to grow the numbers of Chamorro language speakers, the consequences of colonization linger, in particular the indoctrination of English language learning as a prerequisite to academic and professional success. While proponents unrelentingly push forward with language revitalization initiatives like renaming Guam villages and roads in Chamorro terms, hosting a regional Chamorro Language Competition, and annually celebrating Mes Chamorro (Chamorro Month), the past two US Censuses tell a dramatic story of continuing decline. In the 2000 census, 53.6 percent of those identifying as Chamorro reported that they spoke the native language at home; a decade later, that had dropped to 43.5 percent.47 The decline of Chamorro speakers on Guam will continue without a unified approach toward Chamorro language instruction. After twenty years of dormancy since 1993, the Kumision has been reestablished, and yet its new strategy seems bent on alienating the existing body of fluent Chamorro language speakers rather than retrenching their efforts. The Kumision’s new trajectory has been to embrace a Fino’ Haya movement that proposes to “purify” the language by ridding it of colonially introduced words, a strategy that threatens to disenfranchise Chamorros of G1 and G2, whose fluent speech is deemed inauthentic because of a supposedly impure vocabulary.48 This movement has created tension among language proponents not only because it widens the gap between speakers and nonspeakers but also because it casts aspersions upon the authority of G1 and G2 as accurate speakers of the language. This impedes their ability to pass on their language knowledge to the children of G3 who are learning Fino’ Haya Chamorro in their classrooms. Furthermore, not only does Fino’ Haya create a divide among Chamorros on Guam, it also generates concerns in the Northern Mariana Islands, where, despite a majority population that continues to speak Chamorro as the mother tongue, they have yet to be consulted or included in Chamorro language policy-making. This recent Kumision trend deviates sharply from approaches taken by language advocates of the 1970s through the 1990s who embraced the Chamorro language as it was being actively spoken by G1 and G2 Chamorros, who are our greatest resources to pass on the language.

Our Mother Tongue Like other Pacific Islander and Asian American women entangled in multifarious webs of political, social, cultural, and economic inequity, Chamorro women continue to create opportunities to perpetuate those cultural values and traditions so long held dear. Contemporary efforts to grow the Chamorro-speaking population on Guam will undoubtedly continue to branch out in limitless directions, utilizing new technologies and forms of social media in addition to more traditional modes of transmission. Perhaps controversies such as that generated

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by Fino’ Haya will only increase as panic deepens in the decline of fluent speakers with each census. At this time, however, for at least four existing generations, the native language remains alive in the hearts and minds of the Chamorro people in our music and prayers and in the words and activism of our female elders, our maga’haga. For centuries, Chamorros have withstood the challenges posed by colonizers, be they religious, economic, political, or other, making changes as circumstances dictated in order to maintain the integrity of our families and communities. Our mothers’ tongue has been an instrument of our people’s survival and security, a “weapon of the weak” carried by each succeeding generation in order to navigate the specific challenges at hand. The mother tongue spoken and taught by greatgrandmothers, grandmothers, and mothers continues to resonate in the land we call home: Hu ufresen maisa yu’ para bai prutehi yan hu difende I hinengge, I kottura, I lenguahi, I aire, I hanom yan I tano’ Chamoru. Notes

1 Executive Order no. 98-28, October 29, 1998, Office of the Governor, Territory of Guam, http://documents.guam.gov. 2 Executive Order 98-28. 3 Chamorro Studies and Special Projects Division, Syllabus for Each Grade Level (Hagåtña, Guam: Guam Department of Education, 2011), 8. 4 Laura M. Torres Souder, “Chamoru Language Learning Needs Your Support,” Guam Daily Post, August 20, 2017, www.postguam.com. 5 In the NMI, the Chamorro language remains the primary language within indigenous households. The 2010 US Census reported more than 90 percent of the Chamorro population speaking the native tongue at home. 6 Louis Claude de Freycinet, An Account of the Corvette L’Uranie’s Sojourn at the Mariana Islands, 1819, trans. Glynn Barratt (Saipan: Division of Historic Preservation, 2003), 117. 7 Laura Thompson, Guam and Its People, 3rd ed. (1947; New York: Greenwood, 1969), 52. 8 Laura Marie Torres Souder, Daughters of the Island: Contemporary Chamorro Women Organizers on Guam (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), 51. 9 Souder, 44. 10 Souder, 55. 11 Carlos Madrid, Beyond Distances: The Mariana Islands from 1870 to 1877 (Saipan: Northern Marianas Council for the Humanities, 2006), 7. 12 See Arnold H. Leibowitz, Defining Status: A Comprehensive Analysis of US Territorial Relations (Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989). 13 “General Orders Issued by the Naval Governors of Guam, First to Fourth Installments,” Guam Recorder 1, no. 1 (1974): 1. 14 “General Order no. 80, September 3, 1904,” Guampedia, www.guampedia.com. 15 Thompson, Guam and Its People, 218. 16 Michael Clement Jr., “English and Chamorro Language Policies,” Guampedia, www. guampedia.com, 2. 17 Thompson, Guam and Its People, 10. 18 Eric Forbes, Pale’ Román (Agaña Heights, Guam: Capuchin Friars, 2009), 15. The assignment of priests to Guam fell under the authority of Catholic Church leaders in Rome. The

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22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

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last Spanish Augustinian Recollect priests left in 1899, replaced by Spanish Capuchins in 1901, then German Capuchins in 1907, followed by Spanish Capuchins in 1911. The US Navy lobbied for American Capuchins to take control of the Guam church, and in 1939, American priests began arriving. By the outbreak of World War II, the only Spaniards remaining on Guam were the bishop and his secretary. See Eric Forbes, “Capuchins,” Guampedia, www. guampedia.com. Forbes, Pale’ Román, 15. Clement, “English and Chamorro Language Policies,” 2. Anne Perez Hattori, “Guardians of Our Soil: Indigenous Responses to Post–World War II Military Land Appropriation on Guam,” in Firms, Farms, and Runways: Perspectives on US Military Bases in the Western Pacific, ed. L. Eve Armentrout Ma (Chicago: Imprint, 2001), 189. Pedro C. Sanchez, Guahan Guam: The History of Our Island (Agaña: Sanchez, 1989), 268. Sanchez, 254. Antonio Palomo, An Island in Agony (self-published, 1984), 249. LaVerne Beales, Guam: Population Agriculture 1940 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941), table 16, p. 15, www.pacificweb.org; Guam: Population Agriculture 1950–1960, table 46, p. 53, http://cnas-re.uog.edu. Thompson, Guam and Its People, 162. Clement, “English and Chamorro Language Policies,” 3. Hattori, “Guardians of Our Soil,” 196. Three women from each generation for a total of nine participants. Sharleen Santos-Bamba, “The Literate Lives of Chamorro Women in Modern Guam” (PhD diss., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2010). Santos-Bamba, 99–100. Santos-Bamba, 108. Santos-Bamba, 122. Hattori, “Guardians of Our Soil,” 193. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Alastair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (New York: Longman, 1994); Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Santos-Bamba, “The Literate Lives of Chamorro Women,” 123–124. Santos-Bamba, 145. Public Law 12-132 acknowledged English and Chamorro as the official languages of Guam. Santos-Bamba, “The Literate Lives of Chamorro Women,” 173–174. Santos-Bamba, 160. Bonny Norton, Identity and Language Learning (London: Pearson, 2000). Chamorro Language Commission, 1988–1989 and 1989–1990 Annual Report (Agana, Guam: Government of Guam, 1990), 2. Chamorro Language Commission, 1. Isa Baza, “Bernadita Camacho-Dungca Preserved Chamorro Culture,” KUAM, February 25, 2016, www.kuam.com. Chamorro Language Commission, 1988–1989 Annual Report and 1989–1990 Annual Report, 26. Guam: 2000 Census of Population and Housing, Social, Economic, and Housing Characteristics (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2003), 3; 2010 Census of Population and Housing, Guam Demographic Profile Summary File (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2012), 30. Fino’ Haya, literally “the language of the land” or “the language within the land.”

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Asian American Feminisms and Legislative Activism Patsy Takemoto Mink in the US Congress Judy Tzu- Chun Wu

At age thirty-seven, Patsy Takemoto Mink became the first woman of color to serve in the US Congress. A 1965 newspaper announced her arrival with the headline, “Pert and Pretty Patsy Mink Also Has a Lot of Serious Ideas.”1 A thirdgeneration Japanese American from Hawai‘i, Mink pursued public service and political leadership seriously. She broke gender and racial barriers as the first Japanese American female lawyer on the islands. She continued her unprecedented career by serving in the US House of Representatives for twenty-four years, first from 1965 to 1977 and again from 1990 until 2002, when she passed away at the age of seventy-four. In between these terms, Mink acted as President Jimmy Carter’s assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, as the president of Americans for Democratic Action (a progressive organization cofounded by Eleanor Roosevelt), and on the Honolulu City Council. Throughout her political career, Mink advocated for civil rights, the antiwar movement, environmental protection, and feminist policies. In fact, Mink ran for the US presidency as a peace candidate in 1972. She also cochampioned Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, since renamed the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act. This ban on sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding dramatically increased women’s opportunities in schools and colleges. Despite her pathbreaking achievements, Mink receives relatively little attention from scholars interested in Asian American history or US women’s history. The oversight partly stems from the tendency to focus on women and people of color as members of mass social movements during the 1960s and 1970s as outsiders demanding change. In addition, studies on race foreground white-black interactions, marginalizing Asian American subjects and their experiences of racialization. Also, scholars interested in more “traditional” political history privilege white male protagonists. This chapter analyzes two key issues that Mink advocated for, namely federally funded childcare and Title IX, to expand the parameters of Asian American feminisms to include legislative activism. Works on Asian American women’s activism tend to focus on grassroots and antiestablishment politics. Examining Patsy Mink’s career through her own words brings our attention to how an Asian 304

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Figure 18.1. Patsy Takemoto Mink poster, half-tone print, ca. 1970. Collection of the US House of Representatives.

American woman worked within and shaped the electoral political arena. She argued for feminist policies at the national legislative level, though, through her collaboration with grassroots, oppositional women’s activism, including womenof-color feminism.2 Mink’s feminist legislative activism, in other words, served as a bridge in two significant ways. Rachel Pierce coined the phrase, “Capitol Hill feminism,” to capture how “women on the Hill adopted and adapted the rhetoric, ideological precepts, and policy goals of the women’s movement.”3 Also, Anastasia Curwood uses the term “bridge feminism” to describe how Shirley Chisholm (D-New York), the first African American woman to serve in the House of Representatives, helped to bridge the African American civil rights movement and the women’s movement as well as the grassroots and the legislative arena.4 Mink indeed bridged so-called liberal forms of feminism, with her focus on legislative change and equal opportunity, with women-of-color feminisms that developed political priorities based on the oppression of women of color. More recent scholarship on women’s politics

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during the 1960s and 1970s emphasizes that political distinctions between various forms of feminism overlook more collaborative and fluid forms of politics.5 Liberal feminists were not all white, middle-class women. So-called liberal approaches to political change also fueled transformative results that benefited women of all backgrounds. Mink’s campaigns for federally funded childcare and her advocacy for Title IX illustrate these two forms of “bridge feminism”: the collaboration between the grassroots and electoral politics as well as the crossover between liberal, labor, and Asian American/women-of-color feminisms.

Childcare and Laboring Women In 1967, Mink introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to provide federal funding for early childhood education. Mink’s proposal, which she advocated for during the next decade or so, departed in two significant ways from past childcare legislation. Previous programs either provided temporary services to recruit women for defense work during World War II or offered support for lowincome parents as part of the 1960s War on Poverty programs. In contrast, Mink argued for federal government responsibility to provide childcare on a broader and more permanent basis. She believed that childcare should be available to all families, regardless of the income of the parents, and not just as an emergency measure. In addition, Mink advocated for quality early childhood education that included meaningful learning experiences for children, not just “custodial care.”6 Her efforts to pass federal legislation to support quality childcare held deep significance. As Mink argues, The value of Federal legislation, as others before me have pointed out, is not only that it provides a specific program and specific amounts of money, but that it represents a national statement of purpose and support. It provides the inspiration for action and leadership at other levels of government, thus having an effect far beyond the simple provisions of law themselves.7

Mink’s attempts to pass federally funded childcare represented an effort to shape national values regarding gendered labor, education, and governmental responsibility. Patsy Mink’s commitment to childcare reflected her personal experiences as a working mother and the collective needs of laboring women in Hawai‘i. Born in 1927, Mink grew up on a sugar plantation on Maui. The racialized and gendered economy of Hawaiian plantations fueled demands for maternity leave and childcare. Women, who were paid less than men, often carried their children on their backs while they worked. Some organized among themselves to share childrearing duties. Older children watched over younger ones. And unsupervised children sometimes suffered injuries or even death.8

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This history of labor exploitation of women as well as men, Japanese Americans, and other groups profoundly shaped Mink’s political consciousness. Even though she eventually became a member of a professional class, Mink advocated for labor interests along with women’s equality. For instance, she testified for the need for childcare by referencing the daily challenges facing working women in Hawai‘i: [Due to] the high cost of living in our islands, Hawaii has a higher than average proportion of working wives and mothers in the labor force. As in many areas, some of the children of these families where both parents work do receive good care from relatives or neighbours or from quality child care programs while mothers or fathers are away. But too many families are now forced to leave their children in understaffed and sometimes damaging environments because they can afford nothing better. The child care bill we have reintroduced addresses itself to this area of concern among others.9

As an expression of her solidarity with labor interests, Mink helped to launch the so-called Democratic Revolution in Hawai‘i in the 1950s. Seeking to challenge the long-standing political power of Republican plantation owners, the Democratic Party recruited the outsiders of Hawai‘i (racial minorities, laborers and labor unions, and political liberals and progressives) to engineer a series of political victories beginning in 1954.10 The party translated the interests of workers into legislative policy. Mink initially served as a grassroots and behindthe-scenes organizer before she became a political candidate herself. She ran for the territorial legislature, the state senate, and eventually national office. Japanese American men increasingly became involved in politics, but Japanese American women rarely became so publicly and politically engaged. In fact, the leadership of the Hawai‘i Democratic Party, an organization that Patsy devoted her efforts to build, prioritized Japanese American male candidates and obstructed her efforts to run for office.11 Mink’s experience with gender discrimination, both in the political and professional realms, fueled her personal need for childcare. She graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1951. Like many other women during this era, no law firm offered Mink a position either on the mainland or in Hawai‘i. Her identity as a Japanese American and a mother of a young child compounded her disadvantage in the labor market. Instead, Mink opened a practice out of her parents’ storefront in O‘ahu, doing odd legal assignments. Her clients, often impoverished, sometimes bartered for her services. Mink’s first client even paid her with a fish.12 To establish her career, Patsy and her husband searched for appropriate childcare for their daughter, Gwendolyn (Wendy), who was born in 1952 and eventually became a scholar of political science and women’s studies. John Mink,

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a hydrologist whom Patsy met at the University of Chicago, shared household responsibilities. He cleaned, cooked, and took care of their daughter. As both parents worked, though, they experimented with different forms of childcare. When they registered Wendy with a church-based childcare center, Patsy and John discovered that the curriculum reinforced traditional gender stereotypes. As Wendy grew a little older, she took the bus from school and spent the afternoon with her mother and grandparents in their storefront. After Patsy went to the US Congress in the mid-1960s, Wendy regularly spent time after school at her mother’s office and at the chamber of the House of Representatives, observing and engaging in political and legislative discussions and debates. These efforts to juggle work and family reflected broader trends in the United States. Despite the cultural emphasis on domesticity after World War II, American women, including mothers, increased their participation in the workforce. According to Mary Dublin Keyserling, director of the Women’s Bureau, by 1967, “about 4 million working mothers [had] children under 6 years of age” in the United States. However, “existing day care facilities [were] available for only 310,000 to 350,000 children.”13 With a longer history and greater participation in the labor force compared to white, middle-class women, women of color faced ever-pressing needs for quality childcare. In response, a childcare movement emerged during the 1960s and 1970s.14 The women’s movement prioritized the need for childcare. As one publication expressed: Day Care is number one on the list of demands of women’s rights groups. . . . Child care is considered by some feminists as the pivotal issue in determining the future course of women’s rights. Without day care to free women (and men), they say, you might as well forget about equal pay, equal advancement, and equal opportunity.15

Childcare allowed mothers to more fully participate in economic and political opportunities outside the family. The availability of quality care also lessened the guilt of many women whose work responsibilities conflicted with their family duties. For some radical feminists, reassigning childcare reconfigured both the family and the broader society. They advocated “universal childcare” as “the responsibility of all society.” For them, “children are not private property,” and “the nuclear family is archaic and stifling.”16 Childcare, for these individuals, allowed women greater freedom and also challenged the hetero-nuclear family (breadwinner husband, domestic wife, and children in single-family households) as the basis of US society. To lobby for federal legislation, Mink worked closely with various organizations, including mainstream feminist organizations at the national level like the National Organization for Women as well as those locally based and involving working-class women and women of color. Mink’s political coalitions included

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women’s activist groups as well as other legislators, both male and female. In many of these initiatives, she worked in alliance with Shirley Chisholm, the first African American female legislator, who was elected in 1969. They both served on the House Committee for Education and Labor, Mink since her election in 1965 and Chisholm for most of the 1970s. Mink’s advocacy for childcare anchored her broader legislative agenda for gender equity. She advocated for equal opportunity for women in education, changes in the school curriculum, and teacher training so that students could be exposed to nonsexist gender roles. Mink also championed social welfare programs for the impoverished. She not only supported the Great Society programs of the 1960s but also vigorously defended welfare during the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. In one sense, she advocated for “liberal” programs to create equal opportunity in education and the economy. However, Mink’s legislative agenda also reflected an understanding of the needs of various women—laboring, nonwaged, professional—and women of color as well as white women. Mink worked closely with various childcare allies to craft and pass legislation. In 1967 and again in 1969, she introduced bills to provide $300 million in funds for childcare. She cosponsored the bills with twenty-four other legislators in 1967 and forty-nine others in 1969. Mink also sponsored and attended public hearings about childcare in Washington, DC, and around the country. In 1971, Mink partnered with Senator Walter Mondale (D-Minnesota) and Representative John Brademas (D-Indiana) to pass a $1.85 billion early childhood development bill in both the Senate and the House. Mink developed bipartisan partnerships with Republican officials who supported childcare and other feminist legislation. However, President Richard Nixon promptly vetoed the 1971 childcare bill. The arguments against federally funding childcare reflected Cold War fears concerning the restructuring of the family and the increased role of the state. Nixon regarded government programs as antagonistic to family-based childcare. In his veto message, he described the bill as “the most radical piece of legislation to emerge from the Ninety-Second Congress . . . [one that] would commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”17 Although childcare advocates argued that these services would enhance family life, Nixon regarded the initiative as being antifamily. Antichildcare advocates also wrote letters to congressional representatives to express concerns about the loss of parental authority and government intrusion into their personal affairs. Mink, Mondale, and others regarded many of these efforts as misinformation campaigns. Mink responded that the use of childcare is voluntary, not mandatory, and that parental involvement is welcome in such centers. However, opponents wrote and published inflammatory messages “to the effect that we are attempting to ‘Russianize’ our children.”18

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The charge of “Russianizing” American children by providing publicly funded childcare resonated on multiple levels in the context of the Cold War. The phrase suggested that those who wanted to expand the US government into the “private” affairs of the family sought to control Americans, their children, and their way of thinking. Concerns about government totalitarianism and Russianization also reflected religious concerns. Some parents wrote to Mink, worried that their children were not receiving adequate moral and spiritual instruction in secular, “godless,” federally funded childcare institutions. Finally, Russianization of children also implied a Russianization of gender roles and American families. President Nixon, previously vice president under Eisenhower, engaged in the famous “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, in 1959. Nixon showed off the gadgets of a middle-class American home to demonstrate how technology and consumption as well as the nuclear family provided the foundations of US superiority. In the idealized nuclear family, the wife raised children and consumed goods. In reality, the economic demands of post–World War II society motivated housewives to enter the workforce. And the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s increasingly inspired women like Mink to demand an identity and a sense of independence from their family obligations. Mink continued to work with feminist allies (men and women, Republican and Democratic, inside and outside Congress) to advocate for federal resources for childcare throughout her first terms in Congress. She introduced and cosponsored legislation until she lost her senatorial campaign in 1976. She drafted and redrafted bills to provide federal funding for childcare programs, to ensure standards for early childhood education, and to support working parents, particularly mothers. While some elements achieved legislative success, Mink faced persistent and hostile opposition, particularly from those who feared fundamental changes in gender roles in US families.

Title IX and Educational Equity In contrast to Mink’s vetoed 1971 childcare bill, Title IX passed in 1972 and achieved implementation in 1975. In the period between passage and enactment, opponents contested Title IX, providing feedback on how to develop regulations in order to weaken, if not eliminate completely, the impact of the bill. Title IX bars discrimination against women in federally funded educational institutions and could be interpreted as the legislative crystallization of liberal feminism. However, the motivations of Title IX supporters like Mink also illustrated a key mantra of radical feminism: the personal is political. Mink’s experiences as a woman of color fueled her motivation to mandate educational equity. In addition, the collaboration between Mink and feminist advocates illuminates a similar “Capitol Hill” feminist partnership between movement organizations and congressional leaders. Finally, a closer examination of Title IX’s legislative

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history reveals how advocates, interpreters, and critics of the law linked racial and gender equity. Mink’s involvement in defending Title IX demonstrates that women of color played a crucial role in envisioning and passing this landmark legislation. Mink’s experiences in the stratified plantation society of Hawai‘i shaped her commitment to gender and racial equality in education. Unlike some members of her extended family who worked as laborers in the plantation economy, Mink’s family occupied a slightly elevated status due to her father’s work as a survey engineer. Nonetheless, they were still not equal to haoles. As a Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, Patsy grew up in an English-speaking household and attended Kaunoa School, Maui’s English Standard school. Prior to the political reforms of the Democratic Revolution, these institutions enforced racial segregation through linguistic admission regulations. Only those who spoke “Standard” English attended the schools. This restriction resulted in a predominantly haole student body with a smattering of Asian and Hawaiian students. At Kaunoa “in the mid-1930s, 95 percent of the students . . . were white”; in addition, “all of its teachers were white.” Most working-class, nonhaole children in Hawaiʻi spoke Hawaiian pidgin creole, a language that emerged in the plantations through the mixing of Asian, Spanish, Portuguese, and English languages. Patsy knew and spoke Pidgin but also learned “Standard English.” She likely acquired the latter from earlier schooling as well as from her parents, who were Nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, and educated in missionary institutions. Even though Patsy successfully entered Kaunoa and earned good grades, she found the learning environment “intimidating and unfriendly” and “felt unrecognized for her accomplishments.”19 Patsy experienced both racial and gender discrimination in the educational arena. At the age of four, intrigued by the opportunity to help other people, she decided to become a medical doctor. A kindly family physician on Maui, Frank St. Sure, encouraged his young patients to study. Becoming a physician constituted an unusual career choice for women in the mid-1940s. Patsy’s cousin Ruth, whose family also lived and worked on the plantation, recalled that the usual professional options for educated women were in nursing, teaching, or secretarial roles.20 To prepare for medical studies, Patsy double majored in zoology and chemistry at the University of Hawai‘i and pursued a variety of extracurricular activities, including debate, oratory, theater, and student government. She applied to more than a dozen schools for medical study. Despite her excellent grades and plethora of extracurricular activities that demonstrated her initiative and leadership skills, all the schools turned her down.21 Female students represented at most approximately 5 percent of the medical school body in the nation from the 1920s to the 1960s.22 In addition, Mink applied in 1948, when medical schools prioritized male World War II veterans for admissions. Patsy only decided to pursue law after her hopes for a medical career were crushed.

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Denying women educational opportunities persisted in US society into the 1960s and beyond. Stanford University informed Wendy Mink, Patsy’s daughter, that her rejection resulted from the school reaching its quota of female students, not due to her individual qualifications. Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, born a year after Patsy Mink and a key ally in passing and defending Title IX, also received repeated rejections from graduate programs and teaching positions. As a woman, mother, and older student, Sandler experienced cumulative effects of discrimination. She channeled her rage at this injustice by conducting a systematic analysis of the gender composition of university faculty. This data served as the basis of a class-action suit against hundreds of colleges and universities for sex discrimination.23 The formulation and implementation of Title IX represented a collective feminist achievement. Sandler, her assistant Margaret Dunkle, and other feminist activists like Arvonne Fraser served as political watchdogs. Through the Women’s Equity Action League (created in 1968 as a spinoff of the National Organization for Women, or NOW) as well as the Project on Equal Education Rights (created in 1971 by the NOW Legal and Defense Fund), they offered research and advice for congressional legislators. They worked closely with Mink, and other congressional allies, such as Edith Green (D-Oregon), Bella Abzug (D-New York), and Shirley Chisholm. Sandler, Dunkle, Fraser, and others also mobilized feminist constituents to engage in political lobbying. This collaboration countered repeated efforts to dilute and negate the impact of Title IX. As journalist Krista Chan has pointed out, “People have tried to change the law [Title IX] or abolish it completely. Title IX has gone back to Congress many more times than most other laws—24 times by 2007.”24 The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), under Secretary Casper Weinberger, spent two years developing proposed regulations after Title IX passed in 1972. After the draft version of the regulations became public, numerous institutions, private citizens, politicians, athletic directors, and various education and sports organizations (including the National Collegiate Athletic Association) lobbied for and against various aspects of Title IX. Legislators also proposed a series of amendments either to condemn Title IX or to constrain its impact. Sandler and Dunkle wrote and spoke regularly with Patsy Mink and her legislative aide, Susan Kaneko. They strategized about which legislator to approach for support as well as who might take the lead on particular issues. One memo from Kaneko to Mink illustrates this dynamic: [Margaret Dunkle] had come by last night to express her thanks (and that of Bunny Sandler and for the whole Education Task Force) that “without PTM [Mink] help it might have been lost.” They knew of your behind the scenes work—phone calls and were really supported by your moral support. Also feels that you were the crucial person because of your ability and presence on Education and Labor Committee.

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The women now lobbying the Senate becuz they fear that resolution may still be shaken loose in House and go to Senate.25

This type of collaboration between Mink and feminist organizers led to a significant revote in 1975. As HEW prepared its final draft version of the Title IX regulations, Representative Robert Casey (D-Pennsylvania) offered an amendment that initially passed the House in April of that year, but the Senate rejected the change. As a result, the House revoted on the amendment in July, just a few days before the Title IX regulations were scheduled for implementation. Casey proposed that federal funds not be withheld from schools or organizations even if they only offered sex-segregated physical education courses and/or single-sex social or professional organizations. Mink and others opposed the amendment because they had already addressed and debated the same issues in previous sessions. The lack of coeducational physical educational classes led to unequal opportunities for athletic participation. In her speech against the Casey Amendment, Mink emphasized the importance of physical education classes as part of the total educational experience of a child in the school system. . . . [As such] should not title IX apply to that child in physical education classes just as it applies in math classes or science and all of the other requirements under title IX? . . . All we are talking about is an opportunity for youngsters to have physical education classes in which all of the activities are oriented to people as individuals, as human beings, not because they are girls or boys or men or women, but because physical education is an important ingredient in the entire educational experience.26

In addition, gender-segregated professional organizations maintained old-boys’ networks and reinforced unequal access to employment and academic opportunities for women. Finally, the inability to withhold funds from schools nullified the impact of Title IX, which mandated gender equity for educational institutions receiving federal money. Mink cosigned a letter with seventy-seven other congressional representatives, warning that “the Casey Amendment will seriously weaken Title IX.”27 Mink played a central role in lobbying against the efforts to dilute and repeal Title IX. She spoke against the Casey amendment and other anti–Title IX efforts. She organized discussions and debated strategy with feminist organizers and congressional collaborators. Despite these efforts, the Casey amendment passed again on July 16, 1975, this time by one vote (212–211). Mink’s daughter, Wendy, suffered a serious injury in a car accident that day. Patsy spoke against the amendment but left the House of Representatives without casting her vote. As one of her supporters commented, “How ironic it is that the demands of motherhood should come at a time when your vote could have kept defeated the

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unconscionable Amendment of Casey. How truly difficult to meet both private and public demands.”28 However, feminist supporters refused to allow the vote to stand. The Washington Post described how “several hundred” women roamed “the corridors” of Congress, “handing out literature, pursuing House members onto elevators, meeting in hallways and cafeterias to map tactics.”29 Casey himself described the mobilization as “the heaviest lobbying I’ve ever seen around here.” The women “found enthusiastic backing among most women lawmakers and among congressional staff aides, particularly women.” The lobbyists chanted “Give women a sporting chance” to demand a revote. As a result of this collaborative political pressure, which also mobilized opposition in the Senate and within the Democratic Party leadership, the legislators conducted another vote on Casey’s amendment. This time, those who opposed Casey defeated the amendment (178–215). The number of no ballots increased a little, but a substantial number of Casey’s supporters declined to reassert their approval. Still caring for Wendy in upstate New York, Patsy followed these developments while away from Congress. In her place, feminist activists worked collaboratively to stem or at least politically embarrass some of the critics of Title IX. Some journalists describe Patsy Mink as the “the mother of Title IX,” which is now renamed after her. Mink’s “heroism” represented a collective endeavor. Feminist activists both inside and outside Congress engaged in political action to disrupt the regular work and power dynamics of Capitol Hill. Mink’s identity as an Asian American woman provides an opportunity to analyze how race and gender equity were closely linked in the minds of the advocates, interpreters, and critics of Title IX. Mink offers few comments about being a woman of color in her correspondence with Sandler and Dunkle. They also appear not to evoke or address her racial background in explicit ways. However, Mink’s status as a woman of color provides an opportunity to consider how racial inequality and civil rights shaped the passage and implementation of Title IX. As part of the Higher Education Act of 1972, which contained Title IX, the opponents of busing mandated that federal funds could not be used to support integration through transportation. Edith Green, the cosponsor of Title IX, supported the antibusing initiative. In contrast, Mink supported busing and integration. She explained her position in a letter to a person who supported Mink’s run for the presidency but disapproved of busing: I am unfamiliar with the reasons for busing in your school district, but if it is to secure greater integration of black children then I am for it. It is regrettable that we have come to this point in our history where we have to use our children to accomplish what their parents have refused to do which is to live in harmony and not in segregation.30

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Despite Mink’s support for racial integration, she supported the overall bill because it represented the best opportunity to pass what would become known as Title IX and to increase federal spending on other important educational initiatives. She believed that focusing on busing would lead to an impasse. Instead, Mink worked to increase funding for traditionally black schools as well as educational institutions in Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, and Alaska. Schools in the latter two states tended to have concentrations of Native Hawaiian, Asian, and native Alaskan students. Rather than advocate for racial integration, even as she promoted gender integration, Mink demanded more resources for schools that served students of color. No doubt, her experiences living among people of color and attending the English Standard school in Hawai‘i encouraged Mink to go beyond integration as the primary strategy for improving the quality of education for all students. After the passage of Title IX, its implementation became closely linked with the enforcement of civil rights laws. Legislators characterized Title IX as being modeled after Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs receiving federal funding. In fact, the critics of both laws frequently found common ground to attack them together. In 1974, Representative Marjorie Holt (R-Maryland) proposed an amendment to Title IX that would prevent educational institutions from collecting data on race and gender. Without this information, schools lacked the information to comply with either Title VI or Title IX. In other words, Holt advocated for a color- and gender-blind approach to prevent educational institutions from identifying and redressing historic and ongoing inequalities. Mink argued vehemently against Holt’s proposal in her address to the House of Representatives in December 1974: “Mr. Speaker, this is a most serious matter which we are considering. . . . This is a much more important and significant amendment. . . . Its net effect will be, in my estimation, to completely repeal the Civil Rights Act.” While detractors and advocates debated busing, Mink believed that keeping statistical information related to race and gender held greater importance. She went on to say, “It is not simply a question of whether we are for or against busing, but whether we believe we are a nation dedicated to the concepts of equality.” Mink even evoked her own racial and gender identity in the speech, seemingly placing greater emphasis on the latter to argue against the Holt Amendment: Now, I stand here before the House as a member of a minority race, as a member of a minority group in this country, really that should be the majority; the women of this country who have not ever been given their rightful entitlement to establish policies, to hold positions of responsibility, to compete for promotions, to hold professional positions in government and in institutions within our society. Of late, within the last few years, the Congress has responded to the cries

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of discrimination by women all across our society. We have enacted laws whose effectiveness depends upon these statistics being available to enforce the law.31

Despite Mink’s impassioned plea, the Holt amendment passed the House twice, the second time after senators attempted to filibuster the law. In a personal letter about the controversy, Mink observed about Holt, “Being a woman does not by sex make one liberal.”32 In the end, as Mink entered into discussions with Republican HEW secretary Casper Weinberger to ensure that the implementation of the Holt amendment would not prevent the enforcement of civil rights law, the Senate overturned the House vote. In other words, the federal mandates of Title IV and Title IX to prevent discrimination on the basis of race and gender trumped the attempted ban on collecting information related to race and gender. Title IX, still under attack in the twenty-first century by both antifeminists and feminists who criticize its implementation and uneven impact, is nevertheless transforming educational institutions. Just prior to its passage, “fewer than 295,000 girls participated in high school athletics, just 7 percent of the total number of athletes; fewer than 30,000 women competed in intercollegiate athletics, and women’s sports received a scant 2 percent of overall athletic budgets.”33 In contrast, by 2016, approximately two in five girls/women played sports.34 As historian Susan Ware argued, “While the playing field is still not totally level, women and girls now have far more opportunities to participate in organized athletic activities in their schools and communities than ever before.”35 In addition to these remarkable gains in athletics, including scholarships, Title IX is shaping gender equity and education more broadly. It mandated equal opportunity in the realm of admissions; the treatment of students in classes, financial aid, and housing; the employment practices of universities; and eventually the expansion of the law’s reach to include sexual harassment. Mink herself reflected on the significance of Title IX in 2002, the thirtieth anniversary of the bill and the year that she passed away: The few pages of Title IX set a policy for the United States in all areas of education: elementary, secondary, higher education, graduate education; a policy that set forth explicitly that no institution should discriminate against girls or women in the courses and programs that they offered at these institutions. . . . In a very short period of time, . . . we began to see some very remarkable changes in our schools in the programs that were being offered, the number of women that were enrolled . . . that prior to that, one could rarely ever see women students, especially in graduate programs. And they won fellowships and they had opportunities made available to them that were unheard of before 1972.36

Mink, a third-generation Japanese American who entered the legal profession and the realm of politics because of her exclusion from medical school, fought to create these educational opportunities for all women.

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Conclusion Patsy Mink’s political contributions to federal childcare legislation and the passage and implementation of Title IX reveal a complex history of feminist activism of the 1960s and 1970s. First, Mink’s involvement demonstrates that an Asian American woman was at the center of these pioneering initiatives. Mink’s experiences as a woman of color who grew up in Hawai‘i’s plantation society of the early twentieth century and became a professional career woman in the middle decades of the twentieth century shaped her understanding of injustice and motivated her efforts to change federal legislation. Second, her status as a congressional representative and her presence as a woman of color gave Mink a platform from which to raise issues of concern for women, particularly women of color. Third, although not always successful in her legislative battles, Mink worked collaboratively with grassroots activists at the local and national levels. Finally, Mink combined her advocacy for legislative change with the goal of profoundly transforming US society. Mink advocated both for “negative” rights of equal opportunity—commonly understood as “liberal feminism”—and for “positive” rights of state redistribution of resources, demands associated with more radical social movements.37 Some Asian American revolutionary women activists during the 1960s and 1970s criticized Mink for being “200% American” and having false hope in the “American system.”38 Committed to political liberalism, Mink participated in representative government because she believed democratic participation could change the nation. As she stated in her first political campaign for electoral office in 1956: “I BELIEVE that the . . . government exists for the people; to provide for the well-being of all; . . . to assure and achieve the fullest possible employment; and to increase the opportunities for a better life for ourselves and for our children.”39 Mink believed that the government existed “for the people” and that the state played a crucial role in eradicating discrimination and providing for the employment and welfare of its people, men and women, whites and nonwhites. Critics of political liberalism, however, argue that the US nation-state is inherently exclusionary based on an ongoing history of dispossession and exploitation. In fact, native Hawaiian movements to reclaim sovereignty and land point out how Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americans, contributed to settlercolonial projects through their civic claims for full inclusion.40 Mink recognized aspects of racial and gender oppression and attempted to bridge multiple feminist political strategies (electoral and grassroots as well as liberal and womenof-color) to right some of these wrongs. She worked from within to transform aspects of the system, attempting to utilize the master’s tools to significantly renovate and reclaim the master’s house for herself and others traditionally left out in the cold. Analyzing her attempts and achievements helps us recognize a more historically accurate range of Asian American feminist strategies.

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Notes

Deep gratitude to Shirley Hune, Gail Nomura, Lynn Fujiwara, and Shireen Roshanravan as well as members of the Asian American Women history writing group: Constance Chen, Kelly Fong, Dorothy Fujita-Rony, Jane Hong, Adria Imada, Karen J. Leong, Valerie Matsumoto, Isabela Quintana, and Susie Woo. 1 Kimberlee Bassford, Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority, DVD (Honolulu: Making Waves Film, 2008). 2 Describing Mink as a woman of color, an Asian American, or a feminist to characterize her politics utilizes categories that emerged after she entered the US Congress. Activists conceptualized, named, and promoted these collective identifications, particularly in the mid to late 1960s onward. Mink’s sense of identity, given her upbringing in Hawai‘i and her politics, preceded and at times existed in tension with these categories. However, Mink also worked synergistically with these new political movements given her beliefs in racial and gender equality. 3 Rachel Laura Pierce, “Capitol Feminism: Work, Politics, and Gender in Congress, 1960– 1980” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2014), 4. 4 Anastasia Curwood, “Black Feminism on Capitol Hill: Shirley Chisholm and Movement Politics, 1968–1984,” Meridians 13, no. 1 (2015): 204–32. 5 Some examples include Stephanie Gilmore and Sara Evans, Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Nancy Hewitt, No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of US Feminism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Becky Thompson, “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 336–60; Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Feminisms: Liberalism, Radicalism, and Invisibility,” Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics, ed. Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), the latter of which also discusses some aspects of Mink’s involvement with federal childcare. 6 Patsy T. Mink, “Remarks Relating to Supplementary Educational Programs in Day Care Centers,” January 21, 1969, Patsy T. Mink Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, box 71, folder 1. 7 Patsy T. Mink, “Statement to the Joint Hearing of the House Subcommittee on Select Education, Senate Subcommittee on Children and Youth, Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Poverty, and Migratory Labor Concerning the Child and Family Services Act,” March 3, 1975, Mink Papers, box 72, folder 2. 8 Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983). 9 Mink, “Statement.” 10 According to the US Census, Japanese Americans constituted the largest racial/ethnic group in Hawai‘i, growing from 184,598 to 203,455 between 1950 and 1960. Caucasians represented the second-largest group, increasing from 124,344 to 202,230 in that decade and eventually surpassing Japanese Americans at 301,429 by 1970. Native Hawaiians, the third-largest group, grew from 86,090 to 102,403 between 1950 and 1960 but declined steeply to 71,274 in 1970. Filipinos, the fourth-largest group, numbered 61,062 in 1950, 69,070 in 1960, and 95,353, in 1970, its growth largely as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act. “Table 1.03: The Population of Hawai‘i by Race/Ethnicity: US Census 1900–2010,” Native Hawaiian Data Book, www.ohadatabook.com, accessed December 18, 2017. 11 Bassford, Patsy Mink.

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12 Wendy Mink, interview with the author, Washington, DC, March 18, 2014. 13 Mary Dublin Keyserling to Patsy T. Mink, May 26, 1967, Mink Papers, box 68, folder 7. 14 Organizers formed the National Committee for the Day Care of Children, and the Day Care and Child Development Council of America as well as a variety of locally based organizations. Parents and educators created experimental childcares and developed early childhood education curricula. Advocates also publicized childcares in other countries and sometimes traveled internationally to observe and bring back lessons from these initiatives. 15 “A Woman’s Right,” Voice for Children newsletter 3, no. 2 (February 1970): 7, Patsy Mink Papers, box 66, folder 5. 16 “A Woman’s Right.” 17 Richard Nixon, “President Nixon’s Veto Message (S. 2007),” December 9, 1971, p. 2, Patsy Mink Papers, box 66, folder 8. 18 Patsy T. Mink to Frank F. Fasi, December 3, 1971, Mink Papers, box 69, folder 9. 19 Esther K. Arinaga and Rene E. Ojiri, “Patsy Takemoto Mink,” in Called from Within: Early Women Lawyers of Hawai‘i, ed. Mari J. Matsuda (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992), 255. On Standard English schools, see chapter 7 by Christine R. Yano in this volume. 20 “Ruth Mukai,” interviewed by Kimberlee Bassford, Kula, Maui, February 8, 2007, take 00, Timecoded transcript, p. 7. 21 Sue Davidson, A Heart in Politics: Jeannette Rankin and Patsy T. Mink (Seattle: Seal, 1994), 116–17. 22 Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 23 Early on, Sandler identified gender biases in academe. For example, Roberta M. Hall and Bernice R. Sandler, The Classroom Climate: A Chilly One for Women? (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges, 1982); Bernice R. Sandler and Roberta M. Hall, The Campus Climate Revisited: Chilly for Women Faculty, Administrators, and Graduate Students (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges, 1986). 24 Kristina Chan, “The Mother of Title IX: Patsy Mink,” She Network, April 24, 2012, www. womenssportsfoundation.org, accessed December 9, 2017. 25 Susan Kaneko, memo, July 10, 1975, Mink Papers, box 184, folder 2. 26 Cong. Rec. H23123 (July 16, 1975), Congressional Record (Bound Edition) vol. 121, part 18, Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov, accessed December 8, 2017. 27 Bella Abzug et al., “Dear Colleague,” Mink Papers, box 184, folder 7. 28 Julianne Densen-Gerber, letter, August 8, 1975, Mink Papers, box 184, folder 7. 29 Eric Wentworth, “Ban on Sex Integration Is Rejected,” Washington Post, July 19, 1975, Mink Papers, box 184, folder 7. 30 Patsy T. Mink to Marjean Davis, January 27, 1972, Mink Papers, box 168, folder 8. 31 Cong. Rec. H11282 (December 4, 1974). 32 Patsy T. Mink, letter, December 30, 1974, Mink Papers, box 183, folder 10. 33 Susan Ware, Title IX: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007). 34 Maegan Olmstead, “Title IX and the Rise of Female Athletes in America,” She Network, September 2, 2016, www.womenssportsfoundation.org. 35 Ware, Title IX, 1–2. For a critique of how Title IX disadvantages women of color, see Amira Rose Davis, “‘Watch What We Do’: The Politics and Possibilities of Black Women’s Athletics, 1910–1970” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2017). 36 “Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Title IX,” Congressional Record, June 19, 2002, Mink Papers, box 1693, folder 6. 37 Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill & Wang, 2012).

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38 Jeanne Quan, “Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink,” in Asian Women (1971; Berkeley: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1975), 106. 39 Patsy Takemoto Mink, “My Political Beliefs,” campaign brochure, Mink Papers, box 1, folder 11. 40 Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999); Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

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Opening the Path to Marriage Equality Asian American Lesbians Reach Out to Their Families and Communities Trinity A. Ordona

Introduction After decades of contentious politicking that revealed deep fissures in American society, the US Supreme Court ruled in 2013 and 2015 in favor of marriage equality for same-sex couples.1 Like elsewhere, gaining support in the Asian American community for same-sex marriage was an uphill battle. Prior to 1988, the Asian American community generally treated its lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) members with shame and isolation.2 Then it began to change. That year was a turning point for the community, in part, because of a turning point in my own life. On June 25, 1988, Desiree Thompson and I were married in a wedding ceremony attended by more than 120 family members and friends. Not only were we married before it was popular or political to do so but my mother, Segunda, made both our wedding dresses! Our story has been documented in print and film,3 and each time, when I shared my mother’s part, everyone got it. It was her way to show her love and acceptance of my new family, no explanation required. In Asian culture, where family is at the center of “all that is important,” I knew undoubtedly that “it was OK to be gay.” Today, a notable majority of Asian Americans—roughly seven in ten (69 percent)—support same-sex marriage, a greater percentage than in all other racial/ ethnic groups in the nation.4 This development clearly indicates a shift in the Asian American community beyond tolerance to acceptance of its LGBTQ members. How did this change happen? After all, a court ruling sets law, but it cannot adjudicate the heart. To explain this change, published analyses generally link modern-day gay and lesbian couples’ demands for marriage equality with the century-long struggle of Asian Americans for civil rights and against discriminatory antimiscegenation, immigration, and citizenship laws.5 For community leaders, organizations, and mainstream and Asian-language media, this connection brought the issue to Asian American groups. My research findings and direct experience, however, present a new and less known contribution to this analysis. In this chapter, I argue this transformation was facilitated by the preceding decades of deliberate interactions of “out” Asian American LGBTQ people and our families, especially parents. 321

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As a leader and cofounder of API Family Pride,6 the first organization created to support families of Asian American and Pacific Islander LGBTQ people, I was a participant in and observer of this grassroots “family acceptance” movement. Barely perceptible to anyone outside, this soft-spoken campaign counseled scores of family members; educated hundreds through workshops, conferences, and gatherings; and shared our stories through videos, films, booklets, stories, pamphlets, flyers, and exhibits distributed to thousands in the United States and abroad. The findings here are based on my own active engagement and leadership in LGBTQ organizations, participant observation, and interviews with key activists from the 1970s to the present. Throughout the 1980s, while Asian American gay men were battling for their lives in the AIDS pandemic,7 Asian American lesbians took up the challenge to win acceptance from our families. This included promoting “coming out” resources created by “out” Asian American lesbians, gay men, and bisexual and transgender people and, in the 1990s and beyond, creating new resources, some bilingual, for Asian families in the United States and in Asia. There was much exchange, support, and sharing of resources across language, ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, and even national boundaries. Before there were organized national or statewide political campaigns for marriage equality, many lesbians struggled for and received acceptance from our families, held commitment ceremonies, and raised children. In staying the course and charting this hitherto unknown space and place, out Asian American lesbians and our families played a prescient role in the struggle for marriage equality—in the forefront and behind the scenes—by creating the first pathway to family acceptance and reconciliation. Twenty years later, our next step was to openly advocate for marriage equality—the legal recognition of what were already acknowledged relationships in our families. This chapter explores how homophobic “Asian” cultural values challenged the Asian American community and LGBTQ family members; discusses new cultural patterns, especially films, that changed negative attitudes about being Asian and gay; identifies new cultural practices that brought families together with LGBTQ members; and considers the emerging prospects of acceptance, reconciliation, and diverse family formations and their positive outcomes for the Asian American community. Asian American lesbians played a leading role in shifting LGBTQ people from marginalization to greater inclusion within their families, community, and US society. While there were many more players and events of this movement than this chapter can record, these are some highlights of our story.

Before 1988: Old Cultural Values and the Shame of Being Gay According to Webster’s dictionary, folklore is “all of the unwritten traditional beliefs, legends, sayings, customs, etc., of a culture.”8 Looking back at the Asian

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community’s values and traditional beliefs about homosexuality, it was almost impossible to be Asian and gay back then. Among those interviewed for my doctoral ethnohistory study of Asian American lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s, there were only a few who were out. Kitty Tsui, one of the most prominent, was rejected by her family and the Asian American community. She shared, “[My] family stopped speaking to me. No one in the community invited me to read my poetry anymore. I was shut out. I did not exist.” After Kitty’s rebuff, very few Asian American lesbians came out to their families. For the next two decades, most generally stayed “under the radar,” favoring personal gatherings over explicitly lesbian events.9 A 1989 news story of a San Francisco family captured the dilemma. In “Asians Silenced by Family Ties: Gays Fear Rejection of Kin and Loss of Identity,” sister and brother Ana and Rafael Chang related the tragic break with their family when they came out to their immigrant Chinese parents and became a “shameful family secret.” Their parents barred them from visiting the family home in the East Bay, and relatives and friends were told they had left the state. Only an uncle and two other brothers accepted and still spoke to them.10 The elder Changs’ silence about their homosexual children was sadly typical and modeled by US president Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), who was conspicuously silent on the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS, especially on homosexual men.11 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the disease’s horror and the entrenched homophobic disgust that accompanied it were a daily morsel of the American diet. The fear and reality of contracting the deadly disease coupled with the possibility of losing one’s family were so strong that most Asian American LGBTQ people were in the closet, especially to parents and relatives. How could this ever change? It started at the movies.

Film: Depicting Fact through Fiction Film can powerfully carry a story to thousands, sometimes millions of people and reach beyond for generations to come. The prevailing story of homosexuals in society and film had been of isolated men and women living in the shadows and keeping the secrets of their “abnormal” lifestyle away from the eyes of “normal” society. When the Oscar-winning film Philadelphia (1993) tackled AIDS and homophobia, it signaled a shift that Hollywood films would challenge the marginalization of gay and lesbian people. In the ensuing decades, films, including those of Asian/Asian American filmmakers played a persuasive role in presenting accessible, complex portraits of LGBTQ people that helped transform people’s attitudes. In 1993 as well, then-emerging Taiwanese director/auteur Ang Lee released The Wedding Banquet, an award-winning romantic comedy film about a gay Taiwanese immigrant man who marries a mainland Chinese woman to placate

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his parents and get her a green card. Lee’s widely acclaimed gay cowboy movie, Brokeback Mountain (2005), later garnered significant international attention and honors. Although the film was banned in China, the official China Daily newspaper said, “Ang Lee is the pride of Chinese people all over the world, and he is the glory of Chinese cinematic talent.”12 From Canada, South Asian filmmaker, Deepa Mehta, produced, Fire, a feature-length movie that made its American premiere at the 1996 NAATA (National Asian American Telecommunications Association) Film Festival in San Francisco. Shown in Hindi and English, it portrays an evolving lesbian relationship between two Delhi sisters-in-law who are both trapped in joyless marriages. The film was received with great enthusiasm in the United States, but the controversial narrative shocked India.13 From the 1980s to the present, gay Asian American documentary filmmaker Arthur Dong has brought attention to both Asian American and LGBTQ identities, histories, and issues. His work has reached extensive audiences in the Asian American community here and abroad.14 It was through a film during this period that the old story line of the ill-fated shameful lesbian was finally transformed on the screen for the Asian American community. A close examination of the first feature-length story of an Asian American lesbian, Saving Face (2004),15 is warranted.

Saving Face—How to Be Gay and Asian Too Written and directed by Taiwanese American lesbian and first-time filmmaker Alice Wu, the film opens on Wil (short for Wilhelmina), a young professionally accomplished Chinese American woman surgeon. Wil is a good Chinese daughter and dutifully goes to “Planet China,” where local Chinese immigrant families not-so-subtly matchmake for their children. Wil’s “Ma” is forty-eight years old, widowed, and single. Speaking Mandarin throughout most of the film, she clucks her disapproval of Wil’s choice of “men’s clothes.” Amid the eating, dancing, chatting, and avoiding behaviors, Wil notices Vivian. Due to Vivian’s persistence, they fall in love. But Wil hides her lesbianism because, months before, Ma had found out and disapproved. Though a subplot exposes Ma’s own dilemma (she’s pregnant and without a husband), the tension of parental disapproval of Wil’s transgressive sexuality runs through the film. In a typical white American gay story line, this coming-out conflict might lead to a confrontation with a brave “take it or leave it” mentality as the hero strikes out alone. Here, however, the cultural nuances of a coming-out process unfold differently. Wil does not confront her mom—yet. This deferred approach is what most Asian American LGBTQ people practice when it comes to their family. Being in the closet is a problem, but likely a temporary one until the family can come to a place of acceptance. This process requires a culturally attuned mindset

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to orchestrate and evolve in each Asian American family, and Saving Face shows how one family does so. Here, Wil’s mother is accused by her own father of not being a good daughter. Because of her unwed pregnancy, she is kicked out of the house and faces her father’s anger for “his shame” and loss of standing in the community. Ma’s public disgrace runs counterpoint to Wil’s own not-so-secret dilemma. Wil is awkward, insecure, and afraid to be herself. Under the pressure, Wil breaks up with Vivian. Heartbroken, she finally says, “Ma, I love you. And I’m gay.” Ma flatly counters, “How can you say those two things at once . . . that you love me, then throw that in my face? I am not a bad mother. My daughter is not gay.” When Wil tearfully replies, “Then maybe I shouldn’t be your daughter,” Ma answers by agreeing with her father to marry Mr. Cho, a man she does not love. Wil is left behind, alone. But Ma, too, gives up trying to be the perfect daughter and leaves her father and her fiancé at the altar. In the end, the family survives the challenges. In the closing scene, with Vivian and Wil back together, Ma has the last word: “Wil, there’s only one thing left. When are you going to have a baby?!” Startled, Wil spits out her drink and the movie ends with a laugh. For Ma, a good daughter who is true to herself and marries for love trumps a dutiful daughter who goes against her own feelings and marries to please her family. In Wil’s case, a good daughter is a happy one who is also true to herself. Saving Face has a happy ending, but this was not make-believe for many Asian American lesbians. Its character development reflected the private struggles and transformations of many Asian American families with LGBTQ members. By the time the film premiered in the Asian American community in 2005, Asian American lesbians had forged a path that validated same-sex families as an acceptable option within traditional Asian family values. This is how we did it.

Informal Gatherings of Asian American Gays and Lesbians Getting married often changes your life in big ways. It did for Desiree and me. Until our wedding in 1988, I did not know for sure whether I was fully accepted by my family. I had kept my personal life to myself and had come out in small ways over the years. But a wedding was a public acknowledgement of what had otherwise been known “only in the family.” Seeing their support, I realized I had kept them out of my life and that many Asian American LGBTQ people were probably doing the same. The following year, we started organizing. In June 1989, “Gay in America,” a series in the San Francisco Examiner, commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the New York City Stonewall Rebellion, which launched the modern American LGBTQ movement. Asian American LGBTQ names, faces, and stories were shown throughout the series, including the Chang family story above.16 My wedding, however, told me that family acceptance was possible. I called a small group of Asian American lesbian

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women and gay men together,17 and we held the first of many support group potluck dinner meetings to discuss topics like: What does coming out to our families mean? Do we want to? Is this option forever denied? How do we deal with sexism in our families? How does it affect us as lesbians and gays? The discussions made everyone realize that sexuality is only part of the total person. Yet how could this be conveyed when the typical Asian family does not talk about sex, much less homosexuality? Furthermore, it is believed that one should not talk about family problems outside the family. Tight-knit relationships and self-reliant traditions that keep private matters within the Asian family made it virtually impossible to send our parents to PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), a national organization that sponsors drop-in support groups where people share their feelings about having lesbian, bisexual, gay, or transgender family members.18 While Asian family members were known to go to a PFLAG meeting, they generally never returned, and it did not matter whether the hosts were Asian.19 We knew that parents were the key. They were the most important—and most difficult to approach—as the fear of disapproval and being kicked out of the family hung over us. We reviewed the PFLAG materials that were available in English, Chinese, and Japanese and found them lacking. They were perfectly translated but were culturally awkward. For example, saying “I love you” is not what a typical Asian parent would say. Asian-style parental love is expressed in behavior, actions, and body language for the child’s best interests and good future. At the same time, the larger cultural climate for LGBTQ people was changing across the country, and Asian American LGBTQ people began to break the silence and make ourselves more visible. In August 1992, for example, SALGA (South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association) led the first South Asian LGBTQ contingent in the New York City India Day Parade. In 1993, the first Asian American LGBTQ groups participated in San Francisco’s Chinese New Year’s Parade (February 26) and the Japantown Cherry Blossom Festival Parade (April 24). While the majority of marchers showed their faces, not everyone did. The fears of being out to our communities and bringing shame to the family were still present. We knew this had to change.

Helping Asian Parents Come Out The opportunity came in September 1994 with the panel presentation by Harold and Ellen Kameya of Los Angeles, parents of lesbian daughter, Valerie Kameya, at the thirteenth annual PFLAG International Convention in San Francisco. The Kameyas, already active in PFLAG-LA, were afraid to be interviewed by national media, as their own family in Hawai‘i did not know about Valerie. But with the presence of Asian American supporters that day, the Kameyas bravely related their personal struggles with homophobia, which included changing churches in

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order to understand and accept Valerie. Following a reception for the Kameyas, the idea of videotaped stories featuring Asian American parents with LGBTQ children emerged. The API-PFLAG Family Project formed, and our video, Coming Out, Coming Home, premiered at the NAATA Film Festival in March 1995.20 Enthusiastically welcomed as “living proof ” that an Asian American gay son or lesbian daughter was not a shame nor catastrophe, the video included one Filipina mother and three Chinese couples sharing their stories of shock, shame, struggle, understanding, and acceptance of their LGBTQ children. They spoke candidly about their difficult feelings and the mistakes they made by confusing, blaming, and rejecting their children. The parents eloquently stated that their love for their children guided them through a process that opened their hearts and minds. As Paul Yee shared tearfully, What does it mean to be ‘right’ when you hurt someone and that person is your own child? . . . My experience [is] if you take the risk and come out, struggle, there will be an end of the tunnel. There will be a light, an opening for new possibility and even growth and self-discovery. . . . I have seen this.21

Community Debates the Issue All these coming out steps for visibility or understanding in our families took place as a national debate in the Japanese American community on samesex marriage was heating up. It, too, began with small steps. In 1989, Hokubei Mainichi, a San Francisco Japantown community daily newspaper, featured the Asian/Pacific lesbian contingent at the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade on its front page.22 The paper also reported on other Asian American LGBTQ events. Such coverage was not welcomed by everyone, and in 1991, a reader expressed his affront at this inclusion in a letter to the editor. The editor, J. K. Yamamoto, responded at length on the front page of the next issue: Whether or not you approve, these individuals and organizations do exist within the Nikkei community and not just in San Francisco. How should a community newspaper respond to this fact? . . . By whose standard do we decide who is “qualified” to be part of the community? . . . How Japanese Americans deal with it will say a lot about who we are as a people.23

Yamamoto’s 1991 comment was foretelling, as the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) became the first people-of-color civil rights organization to support same-sex marriage at its national conference (August 3–7, 1994). The events that led up to this community-wide struggle and its aftermath are already well documented.24 The importance here is recognizing its historic place in our

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struggle for family acceptance. While the LGBTQ movement sought same-sex marriage political rights, our primary struggle was always with our families, and by extension—and epitomized by the JACL controversy—the larger Asian American community. When long-standing members and officers outed themselves as LGBTQ people at the JACL gathering, it was a giant step forward. Whether their public outing won anyone over will never be known. But that day, our Japanese American LGBTQ people and allies stood up and fought for us.

Parents Step Forward Though same-sex marriage support was settled at the national level in JACL, the legal and political struggles in statewide and national levels across the country were not.25 Undaunted, the following year, we took the struggle directly to Asian American communities and churches, this time through our parents as ambassadors. A week after Ellen and Harold Kameya spoke to the JACL in New York City in September 1995, their local Methodist Church congregation formally committed “to outreach to Asian American parents and friends of gay and lesbian Asian Americans.”26 The 1997 publication and book tour of Honor Thy Children: One Family’s Journey to Wholeness dramatically redirected the issue away from shame and toward redemption and transformation. Al and Jane Nakatani, a third-generation Japanese American couple, lost all three of their sons tragically, including two of whom were gay and had died of HIV/AIDS. The Nakatani parents had pushed their sons, driving one to senseless fatal endangerment and the eldest to leave home, running away from the shame of not meeting up to rigid expectations.27 After reconciling with their youngest son and caring for him until his death from HIV/AIDS, they sold their family home of thirty years in San Jose. Taking their lesson back to their home state, Hawai‘i, they spoke to standing-room-only audiences of mostly Japanese Americans. Their tragic story, filled with poignancy and humor, was soon known by everyone in the islands.28 Like the Kameyas and Nakatanis, many of our accepting parents had come out to their families and communities too. From 2004 to 2012, API Family Pride held Family Presentation Banquets as “a public recognition of private courage.” In a masterful role reversal, Asian American adult LGBTQ children gave stirring testimonials of the love, honesty, and integrity that their families and/or allies had shown to them. There was always a flood of tears.

The Power of the Written Word, in Chinese Recent immigrants comprise the majority of today’s Asian American population. While many can speak and understand English, the difficult issues are best communicated in their native languages. With more than forty different

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Asian languages and dialects, this task was overwhelming, and without the funds to pay for translations of materials about homosexuality, coming out seemed impossible. A solution developed organically. Among those gathered to hear the Kameyas at the 1994 PFLAG convention was a small group of Chinese, specifically Taiwanese lesbians. At the Kameyas’ reception, Koko Lin and her friends spoke in Mandarin to Fung Bao, who was present with her gay son, Daniel Bao. They all asked her, How do I come out to my parents? Coming Out, Coming Home, was in English and a good start, but those with new-immigrant families knew that language was a barrier. Another video, produced in 1997, There’s No Name for This,29 featured Chinese lesbians and gay men speaking in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English with Chinese and English subtitles. Imagining how she would do it, Koko came out in this video to her family. As it turns out, this was practice for a coming-out process that would span generations, countries, and continents. Koko was fifteen years old and the eldest of five children when she immigrated to America with her siblings. Without their parents, who remained in Taiwan to run the family business, Koko bought groceries, cooked meals, paid bills, drove the car, and guided everyone through their schoolwork and new life. By the time Koko met the Kameyas in 1994, she had found love and friendship with other lesbian immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and Southeast Asia. While most Chinese in the San Francisco Bay Area came from southern China, Koko was among the new immigrants from Taiwan and mainland China, where language, food, and culture were different from their Cantonese-speaking compatriots. Over time, this friendship circle became MAPLBN (Mandarin Asian/Pacific Lesbian and Bisexual Network) and was soon propelled into the political frontlines with the creation of its signature project, Beloved Daughter: Family Letter Project (1999). It started as an effort by MAPLBN women in their thirties to help their younger members by sharing stories of how their families responded—some with concerns, others with support—to their coming out. Some interviewed family members over the phone while others went in person, including flying home to places in the United States and Asia. Margot Yapp, Koko’s girlfriend, received letters of support from both her parents when the couple visited them in Malaysia. More than a dozen families enthusiastically responded, writing letters to the MAPLBN women while a Chinese-English translation/editing team posted them online. When a visitor remarked, “We could really use this in Taiwan,” the value of the written word, which for Chinese bridges dialect differences, shone like a bright beacon. Everyone understood. They decided to publish it in Chinese and English, and with the consent of the letter writers, their families were out to the entire Chinese world! Completed in 1999 and eighty pages in length, the initial five hundred copies of Beloved Daughter were distributed quickly, and another five hundred “disappeared like water” at the First Chinese Gay and Lesbian (Tonghzi) Conference in

Figure 19.1. Cover of the first edition of Beloved Daughter: Family Letter Project (1999). Permission given by MAPLBN.

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Hong Kong.30 Later that year, on July 18, the first public reading was held at the Metropolitan Community Church, a gay-affirming congregation in San Francisco. At the reading, Juliet Lin, Koko’s sister, read: I could no longer hold back the tears. . . . I felt a sudden desire to join forces with her in her struggle. I know for this society to accept and respect homosexuality, a lengthy struggle will be necessary. Regardless whether she is straight or lesbian, . . . she is still the oldest sister who has the respect of her younger siblings.

At the event, MAPLBN also received an official commendation from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the booklet’s “family coming out” stories were touchingly reported in Sing Tao, the local Chinese-language newspaper and Channel 26, the Chinese-language cable station. After the ceremony, Margot’s father, James, who was visiting from Malaysia, asked whether such public honors were common. I told him, “Only if the work is very important.” He quietly beamed with pride.31

Next Comes the Baby After that, the Yapps fully entered the world with their gay and lesbian children and looked forward to a grandchild. Like Ma, who asks Wil at the end of Saving Face, “When are you going to have a baby?” the parents pressed on. Margot’s brother, who is gay, was asked by his mother to be the donor for Koko and Margot. It took months for all to agree and years to complete the arrangements, including a move from Asia to America and the purchase of a house with room enough for Margot’s parents to help with the baby. In 2002, in the presence of their parents from Taiwan and Malaysia, Koko and Margot got married. Two years later, after organizing another support group, Baby Buds, to assist Asian American and other lesbians of color to conceive or adopt children, Koko and Margot had a baby girl, Megan. Their house is now filled with children, family, and friends who gather for meetings, advice, support groups, and play dates. Koko and Margot were not the first Asian American lesbians to marry or have a child. But they were among the first of the post-1965 Asian immigrant generation—with parents still in Asia—to cross this formidable threshold. Today in the San Francisco Bay Area, fifteen years later, there are about sixty children who have been born or adopted by Asian American LGBTQ families. Many support each other, from sharing tips for making, adopting, or raising children to babysitting, throwing birthday parties, and passing on used furniture, clothes, books, and toys. The joys of these events might never have been imagined or realized without the initiatives of Asian lesbians within and across national borders and the use of powerful teaching tools like films, videos, and a little booklet with which to reach out to families.

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Marriage Equality: Private Struggles Become Public Models of Acceptance While Asian Americans (alone and in combination with other races) made up a little over 5.6 percent of the US population in 2010,32 Asian American lesbians played a noticeable public role in local, state, and national efforts to win marriage equality. First, we were among the named plaintiffs in three state lawsuits challenging same-sex marriage discrimination.33 Second, Asian Americans in California showed a remarkable level of support for same-sex marriage. Drawing on alliances within the Asian American community built over the preceding twenty-five years, our political, legal, and community allies took the lead. Paralleling the discrimination against LGBTQ people with anti-Asian discrimination and antimiscegenation, immigration, and citizenship laws, Asian and Pacific Islanders for LGBT Equality–Southern California (Los Angeles) successfully spearheaded a campaign that garnered an unprecedented coalition of more than sixty Asian American organizations that filed an amicus brief in support of equal marriage rights.34 Asian and Pacific Islanders for LGBT Equality–Northern California (San Francisco), in collaboration with the statewide coalition Let California Ring, ran a series of full-page ads in Asian Week featuring an Asian American lesbian or gay person and a family member.35 In the few months between May and November 2008, when it was legal for same-sex couples to marry in California,36 Asian American LGBTQ couples were well represented among them. Journalist and author Helen Zia and her partner of sixteen years, Lia Shigemura, were married in San Francisco on June 16, 2008, witnessed by Helen’s mother and officiated by San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera, who had successfully argued for gay marriage before the California State Supreme Court.37 In Oakland, as local celebrities in the campaign for equal marriage rights, Koko and Margot were married by Oakland mayor Ron Dellums while their three-year-old daughter, Megan, and Margot’s parents, James and Soon Tze Yapp, witnessed.38 In Southern California, George Takei—who famously played Mr. Sulu on the original TV and movie series Star Trek—beamed as he and his partner of twenty-one years, Brad Altman, were married at the Democracy Forum of the Japanese American National Museum on September 14, 2008.39

Conclusion While coming out and family acceptance are not automatic or guaranteed for every Asian American LGBTQ person, the old standards of shame and stigma have been challenged in both private and public spaces. Through new cultural practices, such as community organizing and sharing people’s stories of struggle and transformation in person, letter, video, and film, the pathway for a successful

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reconciliation with one’s family is possible. Overall, we no longer feel we have to lead secret lives cloaked in innuendo and far away from the eyes of our families. The transformations of Ma, Wil, their family, and the community in Saving Face are reflections of the actual changes that have taken place in the lives, families, and communities of Asian American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. The new cultural pattern beneath these practices retains the core value of family, yet it demonstrates the respect of the individual as well. Today, whether a whole family or individual members of one’s family overcome the social stigma and cultural beliefs embodied in homophobia or not, the trend toward family acceptance has created enough social space in the community as a whole for an Asian American LGBTQ person to step forward out of the shadows and live a full life. What propelled Asian American lesbians to persist, resist, accommodate, challenge, and eventually forge a successful pathway to family acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriage? Based on my observations, conversations, and experiences in the Asian American LGBTQ community, I believe our push to gain family acceptance was directly connected to our desire to have children. By the 1990s, assisted reproductive technology and sperm-donor banks were successfully developed and widely used by lesbians as a means for pregnancy. For the first time, you could have a child on your own! While we, as adults, could and did stay in the closet to our families, we could not and did not want to hide our children. (This is why Desiree and I got married in the first place. When we decided to have children, I said, “We have to get married first!”)40 Gaining family acknowledgment, support, and acceptance of ourselves as a homosexual, bisexual, or transgender person was necessary before children could be brought into the picture. In 2017, the world is much smaller, linked by organizations, newspapers, books, telephones, internet, television, and movie screens! Asian America has changed. We, as immigrant, transplant, native born, and everything in between, have taken those “given” cultural beliefs, traditions, and identities and reshaped them in the soil of accommodation, adaptation, and reinvention in America. This was certainly the case for gender- and sexual-minority people in the Asian American community, where it is now possible to be gay and Asian too. In recent decades, America has changed, legalizing same-sex marriage and accepting gays in the military, including transgender people. Yet many people in the United States and elsewhere are still deeply divided on the gay question, and the Trump administration is actively undermining and reversing these gains. The acceptance of homosexuals and the legitimization of same-sex relationships through legal marriage is far from settled, though it has been significantly resolved for many Asian American families and their LGBTQ children, relatives, friends, or colleagues. How and when the current political and cultural polarization plays out and resolves—as a reversal or move forward—is not known. Yet

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the honor remains that the Asian American community, led by the courageous private and public struggles of its LGBTQ members and their parents, demonstrated that “in Asian families, all children are welcome.”41 From the example and leadership of Asian American lesbians, it is an inspirational prospect that other marginalized groups can also effect similar transformations in families, communities, ethnic groups, and countries.

Epilogue On Friday, May 24, 2019, more than 350 LGBTQ couples exercised their new legal rights and exchanged vows at Taipei’s Xinyi District Household Registration Office, as Taiwan became the first place in Asia to recognize same-sex unions. The registrations came exactly one week after Taiwan’s legislature made headlines worldwide by voting to recognize same-sex marriage. Two years earlier, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court ruled that laws prohibiting marriage between two people of the same sex violated constitutional guarantees of equality and ordered the parliament to amend the civil code within two years to comply with its decision. Since the historic legislative vote, there has been an outpouring of love and acceptance across Taiwan, both by same-sex couples and by their friends and families.42 Notes

1 The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the law barring the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages that were legalized by the states, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court by a 5–4 vote on June 26, 2013. On June 26, 2015, by a 5–4 majority, the Supreme Court declared that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry and have their marriages recognized. “Same-Sex Marriage in the United States,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org. 2 I use “Asian American” for people of Asian descent in the United States and “Asian” when broadly referring to the history or culture of Asia or any person, place, or event in Asia. The chapter covers a thirty-year span during which different terms were used at different times in the United States to designate sexual- and gender-minority people. “Pacific Islanders” is used in the name of an organization or a data report if Pacific Islander people are part of its mission or research population. I use “LGBTQ” (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer) as the overall term for this community and “lesbian” for homosexual women, as it was their chosen identifier between 1980 and 2000. 3 Neil Miller, In Search of Gay America: Women and Men in a Time of Change (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1989), 157–62; Trinity A. Ordona and Desiree Thompson, “A Thousand Cranes,” in Ceremonies of the Heart: Celebrating Lesbian Unions, ed. Becky Butler (Seattle: Seal, 1990), 81–90; Shulee Ong, Because This Is about Love: A Portrait of Gay and Lesbian Marriage (New York: Filmmakers Library, 1991); Trinity A. Ordona, “A Long Road Ahead,” in Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian, ed. Anna Leah Sarabia (Manila: Anvil and Circle, 1998), 147–59. 4 While all racial/ethnic groups show increased support for same-sex marriage, current estimates are Asian/Pacific Islanders 69 percent, Hispanic 60 percent, white 59 percent,

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mixed race 59 percent, and black 48 percent. Daniel Cox, Rachel Lienesch, and Robert P. Jones, “Same Sex Marriage: Who Sees Discrimination? Attitudes on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Race, and Immigration Status: Executive Summary,” in Findings from PRRI’s American Values Atlas, Public Religion Research Institute, June 21, 2017, www.prri.org. Karin Wang, “A Look Back: The Push to Rally Asian American Support for Marriage Equality,” Women’s E-News, June 2016, excerpted from Love Unites Us: Winning the Freedom to Marry in America, ed. Kevin M. Cathcart and Lesblie J. Gabel-Brett (New York: New, 2016). Asian and Pacific Islander Family Pride was founded in 2004 by Belinda Dronkers-Laureta (executive director), John Dronkers-Laureta, Loren Javier, Trinity Ordona, and Julia and Sam Thoron, www.apifamilypride.org. Though Pacific Islanders are part of its program and outreach, this chapter chronicles only Asian American LGBTQ people and their family stories. From the beginning of the epidemic, gay men of color were disproportionately impacted by HIV/AIDS, and by the time the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program launched in 1990, they accounted for approximately 30 percent of reported cumulative AIDS cases. See “Gay Men and the History of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program,” Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), https://hab.hrsa.gov, accessed December 14, 2017. “Folklore,” Webster’s New World College Dictionary, www.yourdictionary.com, accessed August 28, 2009. Kitty Tsui, personal communication, April 5, 1994. See also Trinity A. Ordona, “Coming Out Together: An Ethnohistory of the Asian and Pacific Islander Queer Women’s and Transgender People’s Movement of San Francisco” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2000), 120–21; Kitty Tsui, The Words of a Woman Who Breathes Fire (San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1983), 12–13. Mireya Navarro, “A Special Report, Part 3: Gay in America,” San Francisco Examiner, June 6, 1989, 20. Allen White, “Open Forum: Reagan’s AIDS Legacy: Silence Equals Death,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 8, 2004, B-9. The Wedding Banquet won the Golden Bear at the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated as the Best Foreign Language Film in both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. Brokeback Mountain was the most acclaimed film of 2005, winning eighty-five awards and an additional fifty-two nominations from around the world. “The Wedding Banquet,” and “Brokeback Mountain,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/. China Daily quotation, as cited in the Guardian, March 7, 2006, www.theguardian.com. Fire was both an instant box-office success and violently targeted by a Hindu fundamentalist party for portraying homosexual intimacies. “Fire (1996 film),” Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/. Arthur Dong’s films have earned him numerous awards and public-service honors in the LGBTQ and Asian American communities in the United States and Taiwan. See “Arthur Dong,” DeepFocus Productions, www.deepfocusproductions.com. “Saving Face (2004 film),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/. “Gay in America: 1989,” San Francisco Examiner, June 23–30, 1989. The initiators were Rafael Chang, Yvette Fang, Trinity Ordona, Nancy Otto, and Pat Souza. PFLAG, founded in 1972 to support LGBTQ people, their families, and allies, is a national nonprofit organization with more than two hundred thousand members and supporters and more than four hundred chapters in the United States. Ellen and Harold Kameya joined PFLAG in the early 1990s and opened their home to host a support group for Asian American parents, but none came. This is also true of other

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racial- and ethnic-minority people. Ellen and Harold Kameya, personal communication, 1994. API-PFLAG Family Project—formed in 1995 and composed of Julia Thoron (SF-PFLAG president), Sam Thoron (PFLAG National Board member), Cianna Stewart, Daniel Bao from the API Wellness Center, and myself—grew into API Family Pride in 2004. Coming Out, Coming Home, video, dir. Hima B., 44 min., with introductory pamphlets in English, Chinese and Tagalog (San Francisco: API-PFLAG Family Project, 1995). “Pride on Parade,” Hokubei Mainichi, June 29, 1989, no. 12094. “Hokubei’s Family Values Questioned,” and J. K. Yamamoto, “Letters to the Editor: A Reply,” Hokubei Mainichi Northern California Daily, September 16, 1992, no. 12705, p. 1. Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 227–51. President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife,” on September 21, 1996, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Marriage_Act. Hawai‘i voters, circumventing the legal challenge altogether, joined a growing handful of other states that approved a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, https://gaymarriage. procon.org. Event flyers, personal file copies. Molly Fumia, Honor Thy Children: One Family’s Journey to Wholeness (Berkeley, CA: Conari, 1997). The Nakatanis lost their middle son, Greg, to a senseless road rage killing over a parking space. Their eldest and youngest sons, Glen and Guy, died of HIV/AIDS. In 1999, the Nakatanis were honored by the National Education Association with the Ellison S. Onizuka Memorial Award for “their efforts to teach tolerance and acceptance by sharing their experiences raising two homosexual sons and another who had difficulty adjusting to being a racial minority in the US.” Hawaii Herald, August 6, 1999, A-3. There Is No Name for This: Chinese in America Discuss Sexual Diversity, video, 49 min., dir. and prod. Ming Yuen S. Ma and Cianna Pamintuan Stewart (San Francisco: API Wellness Center, 1997). Family Project of MAPLBN (Mandarin Asian/Pacific Lesbian and Bisexual Network), Beloved Daughter: Family Letter Project, in Chinese and English (San Francisco: selfpublished, 1999), 35–36. James Yapp, personal communication, July 18, 1999. “The Asian Population: 2010,” (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2012). Ninia Baehr and Genora Dancel in Baehr v. Miike, 910 P.2d 112 (Haw. 1996); Vegavahini Subramaniam, Vaijayanthimala Nagarajan, Michelle Esguerra, and Boo Torres De Esguera, Andersen v. King County, 138 P.3d 963 (Wash. 2006); Lancy Woo and Cristy Chung in Woo v. Lockyer (A110451 [Super. Ct. S.F. City & County, No. CPF-04-504038]). “Unprecedented Coalition of Over 60 Asian American Organizations File Legal Brief Supporting Equal Marriage Rights in California,” API Equality, http://apiequality.org. Asian Week: The Voice of Asian America 29, nos. 2–6 (August 29–October 2, 2008); Let California Ring, “Strong Commitments, Strong Families,” Lightbox Collaborative, www. lightboxcollaborative.com. In May 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled that the ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional on the basis of equal protection. In re Marriage Cases, 183 P.3d 384 (Cal. 2008). From June to November 2008, California allowed an estimated eighteen thousand same-sex couples to legally marry. David Masci and Jesse Merriam, “The Constitutional Dimensions of the Same-Sex Marriage Debate,” Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion &

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Public Life, July 9, 2009, www.pewforum.org. Jesse McKinley, “California Couples Await Gay Marriage Ruling,” New York Times, May 25, 2009, www.nytimes.com. Jesse McKinley, “Hundreds of Same-Sex Couples Wed in California,” New York Times, June 18, 2008, www.nytimes.com. APIENC, “Helen Zia and Lia Shigemura,” YouTube, June 19, 2008, video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4rPTzxHbIo. Zak Szymanski, “East Bay Couples Celebrate Nuptials,” Bay Area Reporter, June 16, 2008, 1. Michael Schulman, “George Takei Is Still Guiding the Ship,” New York Times, June 13, 2014, www.nytimes.com. Ordona and Thompson, “A Thousand Cranes,” 82. Motto of API Family Pride. Chris Horton, “After a Long Fight, Taiwan’s Same-Sex Couples Celebrate New Marriages,” New York Times, May 24, 2019, www.nytimes.com.

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Turning Points South Asian Feminist Responses to Gender-Based Violence and Immigration Enforcement Monisha Das Gupta and Soniya Munshi

Shireen, a South Asian woman, is in a relationship marked by physical, sexual, and emotional violence. Shireen sometimes feels afraid of her abusive partner but is not sure whether she wants to leave the relationship. She simply wants the violence to stop. Shireen’s friend gives her the phone number of a local South Asian women’s organization. Shireen learns that she can be matched with a peer counselor. The organization can help her to get a restraining order and arrange for a pro bono consultation with a family law attorney and, if needed, an immigration lawyer. Shireen learns about public benefits and housing assistance. She is assured that she does not have to confront the situation alone. The advocate emphasizes that, above all, the organization will support what Shireen believes is best for herself. Shireen wants to make a safety plan. What can she do when there is another violent incident? Who can she call for help? She has few friends in New York City, where she lives. She knows one of her neighbors, but this person works evenings, when the violence usually escalates. Shireen’s family lives in South Asia. The advocate tells her that in an emergency, she can call the police. This last suggestion is fraught with complexity. Most anti-domestic-violence (anti-DV) organizations inform survivors that law enforcement is a resource, particularly in life-threatening situations or when their isolation prevents them from seeking other options. Yet there is no guarantee that the police response will be helpful. What if Shireen is not fluent in English and the abusive partner convinces the police that she, in fact, was the aggressor? In a jurisdiction such as New York with mandatory arrest laws, Shireen may find herself arrested and charged with a crime.1 What if she is undocumented? Since 2012, the federal government has required New York State to share arrestee fingerprints collected by local police with immigration enforcement. A simple fingerprint could lead to the activation of a deportation process. What if Shireen is Muslim or a member of another community that is profiled such that contacting law enforcement would be viewed as a community betrayal? What if she is economically dependent upon the abusive partner and worries that criminal charges may jeopardize 338

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their family income? What if she has engaged in criminalized behaviors and is afraid of further punishment by the legal system? What if the violence is transnational and the abusive partner retaliates by enacting violence against her family in South Asia, where a US-issued restraining order cannot be enforced? These questions face South Asian women’s organizations (SAWOs) every time they assess how to best support women in their communities affected by intimate violence. These communities are heterogeneous in terms of nationality, class, immigration status, religion, language, sexuality, caste, and other vectors of power that shape everyday vulnerabilities to structural violence. Shireen is exposed not only to intimate violence but also to the state’s methods of regulating immigration and immigrant rights. Her social location is relevant to crafting a response to her needs because her access to resources depends on the capacity of institutions to recognize her as a legitimate subject who has been injured.2 In this chapter, we trace South Asian feminist responses to intimate violence pioneered in the New York–New Jersey area and historicize the SAWOs’ points of departure from the templates set by the mainstream US anti-DV movement. We draw on interviews with South Asian advocates involved in two New York City–based organizations dedicated to serving survivors of gendered violence— Sakhi for South Asian Women and Turning Point for Women and Families—and campaign materials of the New York–based coalition Anti-Violence Advocates against Deportation (AVA). We also tap into our ethnographic research on SAWOs and our experiences as South Asian feminist activists in multiple movements, including organizing around gendered violence. The turning points we identify represent a significant part of Asian American history and politics because they instantiate intersectional approaches rooted in the lived realities of South Asian immigrant women.

Negotiating Carceral Feminism At the heart of our story is the urgency in our communities to navigate the antiDV movement’s prioritization of responses that rely on policing, prosecution, and punishment to address the sociopolitical problem of domestic abuse. Starting in the 1970s, sectors of the women’s antiviolence movement fought hard for a responsive police force that would recognize domestic violence as a crime instead of dismissing it as a private matter. Elizabeth Bernstein calls this a carceral feminist approach to ending gender violence.3 This punishment-oriented approach has become institutionalized through state and federal laws and policies that strengthen criminal procedures to address violence against women. Restraining orders, convictions, and the imprisonment of perpetrators of family violence have become routine ways of addressing women’s needs for personal safety. Yet, when we examine the experiences of survivors from an intersectional lens, we see that “greater criminalization often places these same women at risk

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of state violence.”4 The realities of immigrant women and women of color have informed alternative approaches in anti-gendered-violence activism, which simultaneously seek to confront structural violence and interpersonal violence. One approach has been to challenge carceral feminism.5 We shed light on the ways in which South Asian American gender justice activists and advocates in New York City negotiate, resist, and refuse the logics of the criminal legal system, which, since 1996, have increasingly infiltrated the civil arena of immigration law enforcement. We focus on South Asian–led organizing efforts in New York City as they have had to contend with the expansion of the policing of immigrant communities, enabled by the 1996 laws and post-9/11 mechanisms of security and surveillance. Following the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, South Asian communities in New York City acutely experienced anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim racism in the form of raids authorized by the federal government, the special registration of immigrant men from Muslim-majority countries, detentions, and deportations. Additionally, the New York Police Department’s covert surveillance at mosques has corroded community-building efforts among Muslims.6 Post-9/11, the city’s existing network of progressive South Asian–led organizations were compelled to respond in immigrant-centered ways to the violence perpetuated by enforcement agencies and the consequent elevated levels of fear and insecurity. The political culture of resistance in the city incubated new methods. We discuss Sakhi and Turning Point below; both are examples of efforts at reexamining the anti-DV movement’s investment in carceral responses.

Fork in the Road: Departures from Mainstream Feminism Autonomous South Asian feminist spaces emerged in the United States in the 1980s. As South Asian immigrant women, many of them “runaways from mainstream feminism,” came together to name and contend with their distinctive experiences,7 they began to address the intersections of immigration control and racism in the lives of South Asian women, in particular as survivors of violence.8 In 1985, six first-generation Indian women founded Manavi in New Jersey. Soon after, the deadly intersection of white supremacy and gender violence became inescapable when South Asian immigrants became targets of the Dotbusters, a Jersey City–based hate group. At the same time, Manavi members were confronting violence against women within their communities. In the process, they saw that mainstream anti-DV institutions were not appropriately serving immigrants. Inspired by Manavi’s work, a group of young professional South Asian women formed Sakhi in New York City in 1989. These first SAWOs sprang up in the New York–New Jersey area, which, at that time, had one of the largest concentrations of South Asians in the United States. These migrants, mostly Hindu Indian middle-class professionals, arrived

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after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act lifted race-based immigration quotas and set up a preference system for skilled workers. The growing numbers of immigrants from India as well as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal since the 1990s have diversified the South Asian communities along immigration status, class, cultural, linguistic, and religious lines. This enormous diversity has required complex responses from SAWOs in their work of violence prevention, education, and advocacy. Sakhi and Manavi have inspired the founding of other SAWOs that embrace a panethnic and regional South Asian identity and social justice orientation. Narika and Maitri in the Bay Area, API Chaya in Seattle, DAYA in Houston, Raksha in Atlanta, Apna Ghar in Chicago, and ASHA in the Washington, DC, area are well-established organizations. Organizations like AshaKiran in Alabama and South Asians for Safe Families in Arizona reflect shifts in South Asian migration patterns. Yet only in the last fifteen years have scholars begun to situate South Asian women as political subjects who have built an impressive infrastructure of organizations that provide support services; educate communities, service providers, and public officials; interface with local, state, and federal institutions; influence policy; and establish ties with feminist, women’s, and workers’ organizations and movements in South Asia and the diaspora.9 From their inception, SAWOs offered alternatives to the dominant secondwave feminist understandings of domestic violence. Antiviolence work in South Asian communities required a simultaneous examination of the roots of antiimmigrant brands of racism, which played out in public policy as well as support services. For these organizations, violence was never simply “domestic.” Violence encompassed the discriminatory treatment that immigrant women encountered in the institutions with which they engaged when driven to seek help. The SAWOs’ foundational attention to the relation between structural inequalities and intimate violence emerged from addressing gaps in support, advocacy, and services. For example, they strive to address the challenges posed by immigration status, which barred women who were not permanent residents from legally seeking employment. The organizations envision responses to meet survivors’ linguistic and cultural needs, their family dynamics, and the limits on their and their children’s entitlement to public assistance. They recognize workplaces and neighborhoods as sites of racist violence. The strategies to address structural violence have ranged from conducting trainings for police to building awareness about the implications of immigration policies for survivors to Sakhi’s local campaign for access to court interpreters in family and criminal courts in major South Asian languages. They aim to reform the police and courts to make them more accessible to immigrant survivors of violence and represent a significant contribution to the larger anti-DV movement.10 Nationally, South Asian antiviolence advocates have engaged the policy arena. They pushed for the passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)

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and have repeatedly mobilized for its reauthorization, most recently in 2018.11 Their advocacy has played a central role in articulating and correcting the many ways in which immigration law perpetuates gender-based discrimination that inordinately affects non-US-citizen South Asian women by illuminating that immigration law itself is a tool in the power-and-control tool kit of the abusive partner. As a result of the coalitional advocacy, two waiver provisions of the 1994 VAWA pried open a space for immigrant women’s voices and protected immigrant women who were dependent on abusive spouses for their immigration status. One waiver allows immigrant survivors of spousal violence to self-petition for legal immigrant status. The other provision cancels the removal of battered migrants in deportation proceedings and allows them to file for permanent residence. Freeing eligible immigrant women from the control of abusive spouses with respect to their immigration status was no small matter. In their legislative work, South Asian anti-DV advocates also protested the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which, among other measures, barred permanent residents from food stamps and supplemental security incomes for five years or longer. A coalition of antiviolence advocates negotiated a Family Violence Option (FVO), an exemption that waives certain restrictions on public benefits for domestic violence survivors, including immigrant women adjusting their status under VAWA and their children. The success of South Asian antiviolence groups in reforming immigration law is not only impressive but also analytically significant, as they inserted intersections of immigration law, racism, and gender violence into the debates over social welfare. The 1994 and 1996 legislation expanded the presence of immigration authorities and police in the lives of immigrant families in distinct ways. Whereas VAWA promised to help domestic violence survivors through prosecuting perpetrators of violence, three pieces of legislation that were passed in 1996—the PRWORA, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA)— strengthened and expanded the immigration consequences for noncitizens with criminal records. Anti-DV groups—focused on the FVO—did not mobilize against IIRIRA and AEDPA provisions that tightened the link between immigration enforcement and the criminal legal system. The absence of an antioppression platform against the expansion of deportable offenses and the mandatory detention and deportation of immigrants with criminal records produced narrow discursive parameters that privileged some immigrants as “good” or deserving at the expense of immigrants who are targeted by the state or not recognized as worthy of protection from violence. In looking at the arc of these older South Asian women’s anti-DV organizations and newer ones modeled after them, we see that

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Figure 20.1. Members of Turning Point at the Muslim Day Parade, New York City (2010). Courtesy of Turning Point for Women and Families, NYC.

they are often caught in these discursive limits. Even though they are aware of these parameters and negotiate them, they often align with the logics of carceral feminism to produce some subjects as worthy of protection through policing, prosecution, and punishment.12

Fear and Faith How have SAWOs confronted the carceral logics within which they are delivering much-needed services to survivors of intimate violence as they contend with the rising tide of anti-Muslim racism and immigration enforcement? At the time of writing this chapter, 70 percent of the women who have approached Sakhi were Muslim, mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and have experienced violence because of their religion, according to Sakhi advocates. Let’s return to Shireen. Shireen shies away from the option of contacting police. She sees it as an invasion of her family’s privacy and is unwilling to expose her partner to police officers, but she also avoids that option because of what she has witnessed in her neighborhood. She has seen her neighbors’ fear of approaching the NYPD even when they have been physically and verbally targeted in supermarkets for wearing head scarves. She has heard of women who contacted them to no avail when their children came home crying because they were called “Osama” (a slur used against some who are profiled as terrorists) or were bullied and beaten. It seems to her that these women have little confidence in the police. Her neighbor has shared stories of the harassment that her taxi driver husband faces from NYPD officers. They did nothing when he reported a passenger who profiled him as Muslim based on his appearance and the name on his hack license, refused to

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pay the fare, and punched him in the eye. Everyone is afraid of or frustrated with the police, and she is afraid of alienating her neighbors if NYPD officers turn up at her door.13 In 2004, as a response to the corrosive culture of fear stemming from post-9/11 policies and public discourse, Robina Niaz, a longtime Sakhi volunteer and antiwar activist, founded a pan-Muslim organization, Turning Point for Women and Children, in the heart of Queens, where many South Asian Muslims live, work, go to school, and worship. Turning Point has developed a faith-based analysis in the context of gendered violence and the policing of Muslim communities. It recognizes that federal, state, and local enforcement agencies charged with prosecuting domestic violence cannot ensure the safety of Muslim women because these very same arms of the state criminalize their communities in the name of national security. As Muslim communities turned inward after the 9/11 attack and rearticulated their Muslim identity to counteract Islam’s vilification, Niaz felt the pressing need to create a faith-based antiviolence space that encompassed survivors’ and communities’ religious identity. Niaz remembers that “even for secular Muslims at that time, faith was at the forefront of everything.”14 For survivors, their struggles with intimate violence were intertwined with the dangers faced by their families and their communities and questions about what it meant to be Muslim in the United States. In this hostile political climate, Muslim communities would be unwilling to seek outside assistance, especially from city, state, and federal agencies. Domestic violence survivors would be at even greater risk of abuse and have fewer options. Forging a new fork in the road, Turning Point offers culturally and religiously sensitive services for women and children. By working across different ethnicities and nationalities, it makes the space safer for survivors who might otherwise be reluctant to approach an ethnic-group-specific resource. The organization works closely with Muslim leaders and groups and has found Black Muslim leaders to be consistent allies. Like many earlier SAWOs, Turning Point provides direct support to survivors while also engaging in community education. It raises awareness of the needs of Muslim survivors to feel safe in the face of interpersonal violence and the violence of religious profiling and works within Muslim communities to build a groundswell of support for survivors. Looking back on the months after 9/11, Niaz recalls, “No one was out on the street” because the city’s Muslim communities were living in fear.15 The scrutiny of Muslim culture induced a greater public zeal to rescue Muslim women from their culture and from men, both represented as oppressive. Community resistance to this rescue syndrome led to a focus on the “imprisonment, deportation and ‘disappearing’ of their male kin” in Muslim communities at the expense of an attention to gender violence.16 Reflecting on the commitment she made post-9/11, Niaz observes,

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We cannot allow [the issue of domestic violence] to disappear amidst all the craziness. . . . [Domestic violence is] not an issue on the Muslim community’s front burner, even though women are getting murdered. . . . When we do this to each other, we can’t pretend [domestic violence] is not happening.

Turning Point’s mission ensures that the underaddressed issue of domestic violence does not get lost amid fighting against anti-Muslim racism. Its work is a constant reminder that women’s well-being is tied to their community’s. Turning Point is a significant departure from the models of existing SAWOs and Muslim women’s organizations. Neither could adequately meet the needs of Muslim survivors of domestic violence. On the one hand, Turning Point’s constituency did not perceive SAWOs such as Sakhi and Manavi to be accessible because they were secular feminist groups. Even though both organizations work with Muslim survivors, they hold fast to their founding secularist commitments as a way to resist sectarian homeland politics, which reproduce themselves in the diaspora. The faith-based premise of Turning Point’s work brings insider sensibilities. The organization feels the pulse of New York City’s Muslim communities. On the other hand, Muslim women’s groups were talking about gender but not adequately addressing domestic violence. Over thirteen years, Turning Point has articulated a theory of violence that connects everyday forms of interpersonal abuse to larger structures of oppression. The organization’s programs encompass micro-level attention to pressures that young women are facing at home, to bullying at school, to macro-level anti-Muslim racism. Turning Point works with youth and the elderly, two groups that are often at the margins of anti-DV organizations. Its strategies shed light on the causes of violence against women as well as the community’s will to end it in the context of Islam. As difficult as it is, Niaz says, “We have to talk about how women are treated in Muslim society, by Muslim men in our communities. We will only be credible if we are honest.” Elaborating on this need and connecting it to discussions about the guiding values of Islam, Niaz points out, “Domestic violence is perpetrated in the name of Islam, and our community asks, why Islam is getting a bad name.” Turning Point taps into the discussions that reject and correct distortions of Islam and its conflation with violence to provoke a similar interrogation of the cultural rationalizations of domestic violence within Muslim communities.17 Turning Point has seen the community’s attitude toward domestic violence change over the years. There are more conversations about domestic violence, greater awareness of elder abuse, and more instances of women’s and girls’ leadership. It is an example of a “space-making” organization that “create(s) structures and resources that transform daily life into an arena of political contest.”18 While Turning Point offers services pioneered by the SAWOs, it roots them in faith-based practices and voices a conception of women’s safety that reflects community-based responses.

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Since 9/11, Sakhi, too, has revisited the role of the police in the lives of survivors and the potential for triggering immigration consequences for non-US citizens. Survivors, according to advocates, were already reticent about contacting the police because of the stigma of domestic violence, concerns about their reputation and privacy, fear of repercussions from the abusers, the lack of familiarity with the US criminal legal system, and negative experiences of law enforcement in South Asia.19 More recently, as Sakhi advocates noted, the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant, antirefugee, and anti-Muslim policy directives have sparked panic about any situation in which a survivor’s or her family’s immigration status may come under scrutiny. Explaining how women themselves define their most urgent needs, one of which is regularizing their immigration status, Sakhi advocates discussed survivors’ strategic distance from law-enforcement-based solutions. Women rarely want to press charges or testify, points out Tiloma Jayasinghe, former executive director of Sakhi, because “they weren’t going to jeopardize the family situation . . . [or] their status by doing any of the systemic responses.” The Sakhi advocates recognize that an engagement with these systems undermines any sense of agency over what happens to your case; you’re forced to testify. . . . You’re stigmatized to have a cop in front of your house, to speak up against family, you actually don’t want the person doing harm to you to be further harmed by going into the carceral system.

Addressing the majority of Muslim survivors from Pakistan and Bangladesh in their caseload, Sakhi advocates stress women’s agency in finding ways to access services. They note, “So, [Muslim survivors] know a hijabi walking into a police station is going to get a very different reaction than a white woman or even a brown person without hijab. They are . . . showing resilience by navigating the options they know will not harm them further.” Sakhi understands that most survivors in their constituency do not desire a carceral response in the post-9/11 anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim environment. However, Sakhi’s analysis assumes that survivors make a choice about whether they want to bring in the state when, in fact, the state shapes immigrant women’s everyday existence in both benign and harmful ways. In 2011, in the Anti-Violence Advocates against Deportation coalition, Sakhi reflected on the contradictions of such assumptions about the incursions of immigration law into the lives of survivors and clearly articulated its objection to the criminalization of domestic violence and its expedient use to deport immigrants who are labeled criminal aliens.

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Securing Consensus on the Many Faces of Violence When noncitizens—undocumented, visa holder, or permanent resident—are deported as criminal aliens, the removal is permanent. The deportees live in permanent exile from their loved ones. Their close relation to US citizens makes no difference. This inhumane impact of deportation on immigrant communities has led to the ubiquitous cry, “Deportation tears families apart; keep families together” in the contemporary immigrant rights movement. In the anti-DV movement, the public message for decades has been that “domestic violence tears families apart.” Both movements see families as sites that are shaped by violence. Immigrant rights activists draw attention to the state’s punishing hand, while those addressing domestic violence foreground intimate relationships. In 2011, the New York State Working Group against Deportation—selfdescribed as a broad coalition of anti-DV, immigrant rights, family services, labor, faith-based, civil rights, and community-based organizations—initiated a campaign to stop the statewide adoption of a federal immigration enforcement program, Secure Communities (S-Comm). Within the coalition, the AVA subcommittee coalesced in New York City. In AVA, advocates could speak from their combined roles as people who organized against gendered, homophobic, and transphobic violence and anti-immigrant racism, thereby straddling the gap in movement politics between gender justice and migrant justice. Thus, the coalition’s work focused on generating public and political will to change the policies that harm the most vulnerable immigrants.20 The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) piloted its S-Comm program in 2008. At the time of an arrest, local police officers take fingerprints, automatically sharing them with the FBI, which then transmits the information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). If the arrested person has an immigration violation on record, ICE issues a request (a detainer) to the local police station to hold the person for forty-eight hours after release from criminal custody in order to transfer the person to ICE custody. While S-Comm has gone through several permutations, the underlying principle of police-ICE information sharing remains the same.21 As AVA’s press releases and letters to public officials make clear, any program like S-Comm operates on the law-and-order appeal that the deportation of people who have criminal convictions promotes public safety.22 Reconstructing the incentive of forming a space like AVA, Mizue Aizeki, an immigrant rights activist and a staff member at the Immigrant Defense Project, remembers a conversation with attorney Marisol Arriaga at an anti-DV advocates’ meeting. Arriaga identified the dominant narrative among advocates that framed the turning over of persons who were violent in intimate relationships to the criminal legal system to be an appropriate response, leading to the longrunning tension of a “punishment-driven model versus a survivor-centered

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approach to what the solution ought to be for their [survivors’] life.” The coalition consciously drew on the experiences of those with “frequent contact with the police—survivors of violence, sex workers, LGBTQ people” in order to seek survivor-centered solutions. Sakhi participated from the inception of AVA’s campaign. It understood that S-Comm would negatively affect survivor and community safety. Immigrant women would become even more unwilling to contact the police if they had fears about their immigration status. In AVA, Sakhi felt that it had an equal voice as an anti-DV organization working in immigrant communities in a deliberation over immigration policy. Its advocates engaged directly with the criminalization of domestic violence in the context of community safety. AVA’s work was pathbreaking. In every aspect of its work, it was committed to standing up for the rights of all immigrants who were put at risk of being funneled into the deportation pipeline, including those with criminal convictions for domestic violence. This extraordinary stance made a partial break from the carceral feminist approach that Aizeki outlines above and the dominant immigrant rights discourse, which avoids immigrants with serious criminal convictions, in their call to end deportation. Between 2011 and 2012, sixteen social justice groups, including Sakhi, hammered out six points of unity. We focus on three of these points. AVA members worked to build genuinely secure communities, intervening in the state’s carceral frame. In AVA’s definition, genuine security meant robust public policies that ensured “equal access to rights such as education, language access, employment, housing, freedom of movement, and reproductive justice.” Moving away from the mainstream immigrant rights movement’s unexamined heteronormativity, the unity document stressed that the coalition fought for all kinds of families and emphasized the need to protect family forms that are not recognized by the state from deportation.23 Most remarkably, it publicly stated, “We push back against anti-violence responses that privilege the rights of some at the expense of others. Privileging the ‘good’ or ‘innocent’ immigrant from the ‘bad’ or ‘criminal’ immigrant dehumanizes and minimizes the complexities of people’s lives.”24 As AVA members shared the survivors’ stories, the clear-cut distinction between a victim and a perpetrator of a crime broke down. They detailed many instances of survivors being separated from their families because they had been charged with crimes ranging from petty larceny to drug use and commercial sex and then put into removal proceedings for these offenses.25 In policy work, this commitment translates into challenging the differential treatment of noncitizens charged with or convicted of deportable crimes.26 For anti-DV advocates, it elicits a public declaration of the value of family unity, something that scholarship on immigrant women has shown is often desired by survivors but discouraged within mainstream anti-DV models.27 Despite taking a politically risky position that refused to make the usual distinctions between law-abiding immigrants and criminals and between victims

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and perpetrators, the coalition successfully pressured New York governor Andrew Cuomo to suspend the program in 2011. Less than a year later, the DHS announced that the program would be mandatory across all jurisdictions. In May 2012, S-Comm was activated in New York State. In a press statement on Mother’s Day, then Sakhi policy advocate Suha Dabbouseh noted that the activation would mean that “if the NYPD offers ICE access to police facilities, it’s our obligation to inform non-citizen survivors that the risk of calling the police also comes with the risk of deportation.”28 These real risks, which further complicate the work of advocates, have led to AVA’s persistence since 2012 in pressing the New York City Council to pass a bill to prevent ICE-police collaborations and put an end to detainers. It has resisted carveouts that produce certain protected groups at the expense of the rest, who continue to be disciplined under criminal and immigration law. Sakhi testified in support of the bill and is a cosignatory of a 2014 letter to the City Council speaker.29 The coalition also joined efforts to end NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices and framed police-ICE collaboration as an extension of the discriminatory policing practices.30 However, Aizeki remarked that the continuous shifts in policy have left the partner organizations “maxed out,” accounting for the coalition’s current hiatus. Rejecting carve-outs or exemptions for DV survivors marks another turning point away from the traditional strategies that antiviolence advocacy has used to shield survivors from repressive legislation. These strategies emphasize the victimization of the survivor to justify the exemption. The Family Violence Option in the 1996 welfare law (PRWORA) is a classic example of creating a division between the deserving and undeserving. In the fight against S-Comm, AVA advocates refused the enticement of the carve-out strategy. While they firmly believe that survivors of violence deserve protections, they also recognize that not all survivors of violence are deemed worthy in advocacy and public policy. Jayasinghe underlined the solidarity within the group in standing firm on combatting exemptions and supporting family unity: What was so good about that coalition was [our stance]: all of us or none. You can’t make a carve-out for survivors. Ok, so you will tear families apart unless there is an instance of abuse? No. [I]f you work with any [immigrant] survivors, whether you are Voces Latinas or you’re Sakhi or Garden of Hope, it was so upfront that they are making choices in the context of their family and their community. . . . The bigger immigration reform groups don’t know . . . the intersection of violence and poverty and immigration and the carceral system are all so present in the women who come to us. . . . We don’t want violence in our families but that doesn’t mean you take away the person doing harm. Prison doesn’t fix violence [emphasis ours].

While Sakhi struggles in its day-to-day crisis-driven work to keep the visions of family unity and critiques of criminalization front and center, it was able

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to articulate them in the supportive context of the coalition. The call to keep families together in the face of carcerality is more common in antideportation immigrant rights discourse than in anti-gendered-violence discourse. Antiviolence advocacy usually articulates the need to remove obstacles in the way of survivors’ options to leave their abusive partner and live independently. They usually do not name family intactness as a goal. In Jayasinghe’s analysis, we see the power of foregrounding the perspectives of immigrant survivors, who can also get entangled in the criminal legal system and face deportation. She recognizes that survivor safety cannot be treated apart from community concerns. This political shift serves as a crucial corrective to the gender blindness of mainstream immigrant rights advocacy, and the reliance on carceral solutions that besets the anti-DV movement. It also teaches us that in the policy arena, it is possible, even necessary, to adopt a principled and holistic antioppression stance and not take the “quick win.”

Conclusion The first generation of SAWOs made significant contributions to feminist theories of gendered violence through articulating the relationship between intimate and structural violence in the lives of immigrant survivors. SAWO advocacy revealed the ways in which immigration policies create economic and legal dependence, which empower abusive partners to enact violence. In addition to creating peer counseling models that focused on supporting survivors, these earlier efforts also advocated for remedies to laws and policies that harmed survivors. South Asian American gender justice advocates are increasingly being tasked with addressing the shifting complexities in the lives of family violence survivors who are at risk of violence perpetrated by agents of the state. Since 9/11, changes in the political context and blatant anti-Muslim racism have propelled SAWOs to wrestle with the ways in which state power, particularly through the institutions of policing, punishment, and/or immigration enforcement, impacts the communities to which survivors belong. To end gender-based violence, they have had to contend with conditions of community safety. They have built a more extensive organizational infrastructure to challenge racism, xenophobia, and other forms of structural oppression because they see this painstaking work as an essential dimension of supporting the safety and well-being of survivors. What might these shifts mean for Shireen? If she is Muslim, Shireen may approach an organization like Turning Point, which responds to many Muslim survivors’ perceptions that existing institutions are not safe or accessible. Shireen may find that, through Turning Point, she is able to build community with other Muslim immigrants and learn about local resources that she can approach safely.

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If Shireen or her family members are undocumented, Shireen may join or feel supported by the coalition of immigrant rights organizers working with antiviolence advocates to resist policies that put undocumented people at risk for deportation. The effectiveness of the coalition might mean that Shireen does not have to choose between protecting herself in her relationship and protecting her community from agents of immigration enforcement. If she needs emergency assistance and decides to call 911, she can do so without making herself vulnerable to deportation. For Shireen, contacting an organization like Sakhi may also feel more possible because she knows that her intersecting concerns are seen and understood by their advocates. Shireen may also find out about other formations that approach gender justice from an organizing framework in which survivors work to support one another and build collective power. Newer projects such as Project Hajra and DRUM’s Eckshate program aim to transform the conditions that enable gender-based oppression without engaging the criminal legal system. By centering the leadership of working-class women and girls who are most directly impacted by antiMuslim racism, economic precarity, and state-driven deportation terror,31 these projects focus on building community-based, collective, and public responses to the needs of survivors of gender-based violence without the involvement of state-sponsored institutions. For example, Project Hajra, based in Muslim communities in Queens, is a peer-based network that provides a support system for survivors outside of state-based social services. They believe in the principle of mutual care that includes economic interdependence for low-income women. DRUM’s Eckshate program organizes Indo-Caribbean and South Asian women and their communities. As part of this program, in 2016, they held a workshop in a pedestrian plaza in Jackson Heights, Queens, about the street harassment of women and girls and the policing of women by families, communities, and law enforcement. This process led a collective revisioning of what community safety could look like for all. Although nascent, efforts to craft alternatives to criminal legal system approaches to gendered violence need our collective attention and investment. Notes

Our heartfelt thanks to Mizue Aizeki, Tiloma Jayasinghe, Robina Niaz, and Shalini Somayaji for making the time in the midst of the daily and difficult work of organizing to reflect on their experiences and share their insights. We thank Sakhi for South Asian Women and Turning Point for Women and Families for making available photographs documenting their work. Gail Nomura’s constant encouragement was indispensable. Gail’s and Shirley Hune’s comments on drafts have made this contribution stronger and sharper. 1 New York State extended mandatory arrests for family violence under amended Criminal Procedure Law §140.10 (4) until September 2019. The provision was first put in place in 1994. See “Summary of New York State Domestic Violence and Related Laws by Subject (beginning from 1995),” New York Office for the Prevention of Violence, http://opdv.ny.gov.

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2 In this chapter, we use she/her pronouns because the vast majority of survivors of intimate violence served by SAWOs identify as women. 3 Elizabeth Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism,” Signs 36, no. 1 (2010): 45–71, https://doi.com/10.1086/652918. 4 Victoria Law, “Against Carceral Feminism,” Jacobin, October 17, 2014, www.jacobinmag. com. 5 Mimi Kim, “Challenging the Pursuit of Criminalisation in an Era of Mass Incarceration: The Limitations of Social Work Responses to Domestic Violence in the USA,” British Journal of Social Work 43, no. 7 (2013): 1273–93, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcs060; Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 6 “In Our Own Words: Narratives of South Asian New Yorkers Affected by Racial and Religious Profiling,” South Asian Americans Leading Together, 2012, http://saalt.org; “Factsheet: The NYPD Muslim Surveillance Program,” American Civil Liberties Union, www.aclu.org, accessed July 31, 2017; Sunaina Maira, Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 7 Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta, “Journeys: Reclaiming South Asian Feminism,” in Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of South Asian Diaspora, ed. Women of South Asian Descent Collective (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1993), 126. 8 For the work of Manavi, Sakhi, and South Asian Women for Action, see Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 109–58. 9 Sangay Mishra, Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Soniya Munshi, “Intertwined Violence: Implications of State Responses to Domestic Violence in South Asian Immigrant Communities,” in The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of US Power, ed. Vivek Bald et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 251–73; Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants; Sharmila Rudrappa, Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Margaret Abraham, Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence among South Asian Immigrants in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000); Kamala Visweswaran, “Diaspora by Design: Flexible Citizenship and South Asians in US Racial Formation,” Diaspora 6, no. 1 (1997): 5–29, https://doi.org/10.1353/dsp.1997.0016; Jyotsna Vaid, “Beyond a Space of Our Own: South Asian Women’s Groups in the US,” Amerasia Journal 25, no. 3 (1999): 111–26, https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.25.3.p8658uu571772065. 10 See Abraham, Speaking the Unspeakable; Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants; Soniya Munshi, “Negotiating Violence, Navigating Neoliberalism: Domestic Violence Advocacy Efforts in South Asian Communities in Post-9/11 New York City” (PhD diss., Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2013); Rudrappa, Ethnic Routes. 11 Sakhi advocates expressed the anti-DV movement’s fears about VAWA’s very existence under the Trump administration. Tiloma Jayasinghe and Shalini Somayaji, interview with Soniya Munshi, April 28, 2017. All subsequent quotes are drawn from this interview. For current advocacy see also “Support the Reauthorization of the Violence against Women Act,” Manavi, www.manavi.org. 12 Priya Kandaswamy, “Gendering Racial Formation Theory,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Daniel HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 23–43; Munshi, “Intertwined Violence.” 13 The examples of the hate crimes and police unresponsiveness are drawn from our own research done after 9/11, news reports, and handouts from social justice organizations.

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“Toxic Hate: American Muslim Experiences of Violent Backlash since Late August 2014—Islamophobia,” CAIR Counter-Islamophobia Project, www.islamophobia.org, accessed July 31, 2017; Sandra Bookman, Council on American-Islamic Relations and Center for Race and Gender at the University of California–Berkeley, “Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and its Impact in the United States, January 2009–December 2010,” Council on American-Islamic Relations, Washington, DC, 2010, www.cair.com; “Discrimination against Muslim Women—Fact Sheet,” American Civil Liberties Union, 2008, www. aclu.org; Monisha Das Gupta, “Of Hardship and Hostility: The Impact of 9/11 on New York City Taxi Drivers,” in Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11, ed. Nancy Foner (New York: Russell Sage, 2005), 60. Robina Niaz, phone interview with Soniya Munshi, June 20, 2016. All subsequent quotes are drawn from this interview. See also Maira, Missing. Nada Elia, “Islamophobia and the ‘Privileging’ of Arab American Women,” NWSA Journal 18, no. 3 (2006): 155–61, https://doi.org/10.1353/nwsa.2006.0048, see 155. Ruksana Ayyub, “Domestic Violence in the South Asian Muslim Immigrant Population in the United States,” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 9, no. 3 (2000): 237–48, https://doi.org/ 0.1023/A:1009412119016. Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants, 55. Maunica Sthanki, “The Aftermath of September 11: An Anti-Domestic Violence Perspective,” in Body Evidence: Intimate Violence against South Asian Women in America, ed. Shamita Das Dasgupta (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 68–78. “About,” New York State Working Group against Deportation, 2011, https://newyorkagainstdeportation.wordpress.com; Mizue Aizeki, interview with Soniya Munshi, May 1, 2017; all subsequent quotes are drawn from this interview. See also “AVA Points of Unity May 2012,” Anti-Violence Advocates against Deportation, 2012, https://newyorkagainstdeportation. files.wordpress.com. After a continued pushback against the mass deportations, the DHS, under the Obama administration, replaced S-Comm with the Priority Enhancement Program (PEP) in November 2014. Under PEP, the biometric data-sharing process between law enforcement and ICE remained the same, but ICE issued a memo to prioritize migrants with criminal convictions for removal. The Trump administration has eliminated the prioritization provisions, putting a wider range of immigrants at risk of deportation. See also “Secure Communities,” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2017, www.ice.gov. “Anti-Violence Advocates Against Deportation,” New York State Working Group against Deportation, 2012, https://newyorkagainstdeportation.wordpress.com. Monisha Das Gupta, “‘Don’t Deport Our Daddies’: Gendering State Deportation Practices and Immigrant Organizing,” Gender & Society 28, no. 1 (2014): 83–109, https://doi. org/10.1177/0891243213508840. “AVA Points of Unity.” “The High Cost of Collaboration between Police and Immigration: Perspectives from Survivors of Violence, Sex Workers, and LGBTQ People,” Anti-Violence Advocates against Deportation, 2014, https://newyorkagainstdeportation.files.wordpress.com. “The High Cost of Collaboration.” Rudrappa, Ethnic Routes, 31–74. “Instead of Flowers, Deportation and Hardship for New York Mothers and Families; Anti-Violence Advocates Deliver Message to NYC to End ‘Secure Communities,’” AntiViolence Advocates against Deportation, 2012, https://newyorkagainstdeportation.files. wordpress.com.

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29 “Anti-Violence Advocates Commend City’s Efforts to Limit Harm of Secure Communities Program; Call for Further Protections,” Anti-Violence Advocates against Deportation, 2013, https://newyorkagainstdeportation.files.wordpress.com; “Letter to New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito,” Anti-Violence Advocates against Deportation, October 7, 2014, https://newyorkagainstdeportation.files.wordpress.com. 30 “Immigrant Rights Leaders Highlight NYPD Profiling Immigrants Face Outside Stop-andFrisk Trial,” Anti-Violence Advocates against Deportation, 2013, https:// newyorkagainstdeportation.files.wordpress.com; for the challenge to NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice, see “Landmark Decision: Judge Rules NYPD Stop and Frisk Practices Unconstitutional, Racially Discriminatory,” Center for Constitutional Rights, https://ccrjustice.org, accessed August 5, 2017. 31 Rachel Ida Buff, “The Deportation Terror,” American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2008): 523–51, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.0.0028.

Part VII New Diasporas, Diverse Lives, Evolving Identities

New diasporas of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (the topic and time period covered in part VII) bring additional ethnic diversity and complexity to their populations. These three chapters focus on transracial adoptees from South Korea, Bangladeshi American women, and Tongan-American women, respectively. Each expands the multiple facets of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s experiences in the United States and transnationally. The international adoption of children from Asia has been a growing phenomenon in America since the 1950s. Some are mixed race children whose fathers were part of the US military presence in Asia as a result of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and American bases in additional Asian locations. Other children, especially infants from China and Korea, were supposedly unwanted by their parents and left at orphanages, where they were later adopted by parents from Western countries. Most of these US adoptees are being raised in transracial homes with white parents. Transracial adoptees are unlike other transnational subjects. As they come of age, transracial adoptees are shifting the scholarship on the subject by documenting their own experiences. Kimberley D. McKee utilizes the works of Jane Jeong Trenka and Deann Borshay Liem to reclaim the space for transracial adoptees from South Korea in narratives that previously privileged the views of adoption organizations and the parents of adoptees. Trenka and Liem dispute both the concept of Western adoption as a rescue narrative of good (Christian) endeavor and the notion of a joyful adoptee’s return to and reunion with biological family members. McKee also reveals a complicit “transnational adoption industrial complex” that sends children overseas, leaving behind distraught parents who had no intention of having their children adopted. Nazli Kibria explores the experiences of Muslim Bangladeshi American women of the post-1980s in Boston and greater New York City at a time when Muslim Americans are viewed with fear, suspicion, and hostility. In her chapter, four women from urban middle-class families who came to the United States for better opportunities discuss how they negotiate their religious identities against negative, racialized, and gendered stereotypes of Islam and Muslims that include the belief that Muslim women are oppressed and in need of saving. Given their varied backgrounds, goals, and circumstances in America, the women’s emerging identities are not the same despite all being Muslim. 355

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Kibria’s study gives attention to the heterogeneity of Muslim Bangladeshi American women. Studies of Tongans in America are scarce, especially of professional women. Halaevalu F. Ofahengaue Vakalahi, a senior academic and administrator who emigrated from the independent Kingdom of Tonga, and Ofa Ku’ulei Lanimekealoha Hafoka, who is of Tongan ancestry, was born and raised in Hawaiʻi, and is beginning an academic career, contribute their voices, insights, and experiences as Tongan-American women in academe, which is largely white and male. For them, a hyphenated Tongan-American identity expresses their transnational and intersectional lives; they live in two cultures simultaneously. The hyphen represents an inclusive, reciprocal link between their Tongan ancestry, values, traditions, and identity and their present space and identity as American women of color academics. The authors’ narratives bring visibility to the voices of Tongan-American faculty and students and the ways in which their scholarship contributes to knowledge and their community. These three chapters are examples of new diasporas that contribute to the contemporary heterogeneity and diverse histories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, both inside and outside the United States. They demonstrate as well the women’s shared experiences of racism, stereotyping, gender biases, and general disregard for their well-being whether as children or adults. Their different challenges and situations notwithstanding, the women’s voices, standpoints, and first-person accounts give their experiences fuller meaning and illustrate their agency in the evolution of new identities in the United States that include global, transnational, and intersectional components.

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Locating Adoptees in Asian America Jane Jeong Trenka and Deann Borshay Liem Kimberly D. McKee

When I arrived in the United States at five months old in 1984, I became one of the thousands of Korean children who were adopted by American families during that decade. Adoption from South Korea began at the end of the Korean War (1950–1953) as a method to provide ostensibly better opportunities for war orphans and mixed race children. Korean adoption flourished as the nation ascended into the developed world and became a global economic leader. International adoption from South Korea peaked in the 1980s, and by the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, the global press criticized the nation, saying children were their largest export.1 Of the roughly two hundred thousand Korean children sent to the West, two-thirds came to the United States while the remaining children entered Canada as well as countries in Europe and Australia. The vast majority of these children were adopted into white families. South Korea still sends children for adoption even as the government continues to make overtures to cease the practice. As Korean adoptees grew up, they began to document their experiences as transnational, transracial adoptees. They disseminated these reflections through literature, film, and art. These works contribute to the growth of first-person accounts, which initially proliferated in the 1990s, articulating how adoptees represent a different strand of what it means to be Korean American by virtue of their upbringings in transracial households. I, too, participated in this boom of adoptee-authored material in a published essay reflecting on what it meant to grow up as an adopted teen in western New York.2 These early adoptee-authored works are significant because, prior to the rise of Web 2.0 media,3 Korean adoptees often realized their experiences were not isolated only after they first encountered these adoptee-authored productions. Two women in particular contributed to society’s understanding of adoption in South Korea and the United States. The writing and documentaries of Jane Jeong Trenka and Deann Borshay Liem reveal the intersection of Korean adoptee and Asian American histories. Trenka’s and Liem’s engagements with gender, race, class, and nation elucidate the way international adoption from South Korea is not only a method of family making and unmaking but is also linked to broader issues of military imperialism, reproductive justice, and Asian American 357

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immigration. Trenka’s first memoir, The Language of Blood (2003), continues to be a go-to text for the discussion of adoption among practitioners and scholars. And its inclusion in university settings means it’s one of the first texts Asian adoptees encounter if they are unfamiliar with the broader adoption community. At the same time, Liem’s adoption documentaries—First Person Plural (2000) and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2010)—found a home at PBS on its POV series. They are part of the vanguard of Korean adoptees’ experiences entering into wider cultural conversations. Both women are often cited for critically challenging mainstream America’s perception of Korean adoption. Their narratives shift historical depictions of adoptees and represent a larger evolution in how adoptees can assert their authority as experts on the adopted person’s experience. Trenka’s The Language of Blood (2003) and Liem’s First Person Plural (2000) capture the nuances and contradictions of adoption not only for Korean adoptees but also for the American public, where adoption is celebrated as an exemplar of American multiculturalism. Their second works, Fugitive Visions (2009) and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2010), respectively, signal the adoptee community’s disruption of mainstream adoption norms. Those productions center adoptees as activists, critiquing the adoption systems that facilitate the transnational movement of children. Exploring the works of Trenka and Liem offers an opportunity to consider women’s roles in shaping Asian transnational adoption history. This includes women’s overrepresentation in adoption studies and Asian American studies scholarship that explores adoptees’ articulations of their racial, ethnic, and cultural identities.4 Trenka’s and Liem’s works provide the groundwork for rethinking adoption from a perspective that decenters rescue narratives. They instead focus on how adoption relies on the losses of adoptees and birth families and the lifelong journey of adoption that does not simply end upon an adoption’s finalization or a reunion with one’s birth parents. This chapter grounds broader histories of adoption and its gendered, raced, and classed affects and effects through an investigation of Trenka’s and Liem’s adoption journeys. Situating their work within broader historical narratives reveals how their productions capture significant moments within Korean adoption histories in the United States and South Korea. Discussing home and homeland, Rhacel S. Parreñas and Lok C. D. Siu write: “[Home] is both a place one left behind and a place one currently inhabits. ‘Home’ is situated in both as well as somewhere in between. Being diasporic involves the simultaneous affiliation and disidentification with both the place one occupies and ‘back home.’”5 For adoptees, homelands are not simple geographic locations to return to or from which they came. In exploring Asia in their psyches and their migratory circuits, first as children entering the West and then as adults returning to South Korea, adoptees expose the contradictions of their diaspora.

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From Orphan Korean Waifs to Adopted Korean Americans “Help Heal a Child’s Broken Heart”; “Sponsor a Needy, Neglected Korean Orphan”; and “Hundreds Are Deserted, Homeless and Hungry” were headlines in an Everett Swanson Evangelistic Association advertisement soliciting potential sponsors for South Korean children.6 While less known than the Christian Children’s Fund or the Foster Parents Plan sponsorship programs, the Everett Swanson Evangelistic Association operated under a similar premise encouraging American families’ donations to support children in postwar or developing nations. The advertisement reads “For only $8 a month—just 26 pennies a day— you can provide loving care, shelter, clothing, food and all necessities, including cost of school tuition, for the child you select.” Featuring the photos of six orphans, the advertisement included some of the children’s background information, overemphasizing their pitiful state of living and neediness. Prospective sponsors could select one of the children they wished to sponsor or indicate their general interest in sponsoring a girl or boy. Those selecting the latter would be paired with a child that matched their specifications. Sponsorship advertisements aided the US government’s overall interest in establishing Americans’ investment in Asia and, by extension, in American foreign policy.7 This relationship is best reflected in the statement that Col. Ben C. Limb, South Korea’s permanent observer at the United Nations, made to the 1954 Foster Parents Plan for War Children regarding the program to provide shoes to five hundred thousand Korean children: “You are now building a permanent friendship by this work between your country and mine.”8 In one example of how everyday Americans worked together to support Korean war waifs, employees of Hamilton Park station of the Chicago-area Rock Island Railroad “adopted” Kim Yang Ja, age eleven, through the Foster Parents Plan for War Children. Moved by the story of Kim and her mother and three sisters, who fled Seoul in 1950, the employees banded together to sponsor the girl for fifteen dollars per month.9 By the late 1950s, World Vision, a Christian organization, became a leader in shaping American public perceptions of Korean War orphans as a result of its film, Other Sheep, which “explained World Vision’s work in South Korea supporting war widows and orphans.”10 Harry and Bertha Holt attended a Eugene, Oregon, screening of the film in 1954. Inspired by Other Sheep, the Holts went on to sponsor, then adopt, eight mixed race Korean children fathered by UN and US servicemen. Harry Holt later founded the Holt Adoption Program, currently known as Holt International. Though controversial for their use and advocacy of proxy adoptions, which allowed for parents to adopt a child sight unseen, the Holt Adoption Program significantly impacted Korean adoption and became one of the adoption industry’s leaders in placing foreign-born children into American families.11

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Similar to the Holts’ decision to adopt, other parents wrote to adoption agencies with a specific interest to formally adopt the children they sponsored. As part of their inquiries, individuals often included the child’s sponsorship case number, name, orphanage, and even birth date.12 Deann Borshay Liem, for example, entered the United States as a result of her adoptive parents’ sponsorship of the Korean orphan Cha Jung Hee in Sun Duck Orphanage. Prior to the adoption, the Borshay family sent monthly letters, donations of fifteen dollars, and occasionally clothing. An orphanage social worker wrote on the child’s behalf. The origins of Korean adoption are thus traced to this particular post–Korean War moment.13 In addition to mixed raced children, devastation and poverty in postwar Korea facilitated the creation of war orphans and the relinquishment of children due to families’ economic precarity. As a result, the first wave of adoptees had direct ties to Cold War militarism. Korean military brides, women who performed sexual and emotional labor in military camp towns, and adoptees are not disconnected from one another. These three groups represent the various threads that American imperialism and military presence had in the lives of Koreans following the Korean War. The beginnings of Korean adoption are rooted in supporting the adoptive family’s ability to parent and not in ensuring or protecting the rights of biological families to parent their children. Korean women, similar to other prospective Asian immigrants at the time, were rendered outsiders to the US nation as foreign.14 The fostering and adopting of Korean children allowed Americans the opportunity to fulfill the biblical call from James 1:27 to save orphans. In doing so, however, they disregarded the second half of the biblical verse—“to look after orphans and widows in their distress.”15 Unlike their mothers, Korean children had a vulnerability that was marketable to an American public invested in upholding the idealized American Dream and providing a future to the most promising—children. Korean adoption reflects how adoption, more generally, exists at the intersections of socioeconomic inequality, societal stigma, and government understandings of “good” families, which encourage a specific type of family—white, middle-class—at the expense of other families—nonwhite, poor.16 As a legacy of the Korean War, the dominant narrative of Korean transnational adoption found itself driven by trite tropes of forever families and humanitarianism via saving vulnerable children. This narrative only shifted in the last decade of the twentieth century as adoptees reclaimed their space in narratives of adoption. They were no longer the spoken-for demographic of the adoption constellation. Women like Trenka and Liem led to this new understanding of adoption. Their works portray Korean adoption as a multidimensional, complex subject—departing from the historical, reductive narratives that Korean adoption was an act of humanitarian rescue and resisting stereotypes of adoptees as perpetual children or melancholic subjects.

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The popularity and mainstream reception of Trenka’s and Liem’s works underscore their impact on complicating what it means to think of adoptees’ experiences as Asian American. Korean adoptees are unlike other transnational subjects. Their experiences as transracial, internationally adopted individuals living in predominately white families and communities is markedly different than those with same-race biological and social parents.17 White parents were ill equipped to discuss issues of racial difference. They, too, could be the perpetrators of racial microaggressions. Additionally, adoptees lacked the cultural touchstones of growing up in an Asian American family. An overwhelming number of adoptees lack access to learning about Korean culture in their daily lives, especially as children. At the same time, they cannot seamlessly enter South Korean culture without exposing the limits of what it means to “be Korean.” Returnees arrive as deficient Koreans lacking cultural capital even as they may be able to “pass” as Korean upon landing at Incheon International Airport in Seoul. A shared ethnic identity does not imbue an automatic cultural identity.

Pushing the Boundaries of Korean Adoption in Print: Jane Jeong Trenka Interweaving letters and poems within the narrative text, Jane Jeong Trenka chronicles her return to Korea, including meeting her Korean family, in The Language of Blood (2003) and Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea (2009). Published six years apart, the memoirs capture a unique vantage point of how an adoptee’s relationship with South Korea continually evolves. In this sense, “Korea” remains abstract, intangible, and in constant negotiation as adoptees continue to reconcile their hybrid identity. Fugitive Visions reflects an adult Korean adoptee experience while The Language of Blood represents an adoptee’s identity exploration in childhood as well as the birth search and reunion process in young adulthood. Even as her first memoir is lauded for its groundbreaking nature, Trenka is positioned as an angry adoptee in mainstream conversations on adoption and is portrayed as a melancholic subject in adoption scholarship.18 Addressing the frequent invocation of loss in adoption, Trenka writes, “Somehow, I felt that the American adoptive parents didn’t quite see the orphans and the mothers as people but rather as interesting specimens, a menagerie of personified sorrow.”19 Magnifying sorrow ignores adoptees’ and birth mothers’ ability to exert agency to express a range of complex emotions concerning adoption. Assumptions of melancholy fuel a tangle of pathology whereby adoptees search for something missing and forever exist with a lack. Moreover, reducing melancholic behavior to anger or potential anger assumes that adoptees must be grateful and happy for their adoptions. Those who depart from narratives of happiness are labeled ungrateful or angry as they complicate reductive notions of adoption as the best option.20 The holistic nature of Trenka’s memoir exposes

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hard truths associated with adoption that many adoptive parents and practitioners prefer left unspoken. In the beginning of her first memoir, Trenka traces her two births, one as Jeong Kyong-Ah, born on January 24, 1972, and the other as Jane Marie Brauer, created on September 26, 1972. Trenka explicitly calls attention to how adoption requires the elimination of ties to one’s country of origin. Kyong-Ah becomes Jane, and her older sister, Mi-Ja, becomes Carol. This transformation reflects how white adoptive parents were encouraged to see their children as blank slates ready to enter the new lives bestowed on them via the adoption process. Adoption agencies emphasized assimilation, touting the practice as a benefit when adopting children from abroad and for these children’s easy assimilability into American culture. Reflecting the impact of this form of parenting, Trenka notes, “The a-word, adoption, was not mentioned in our house. Neither was the K-word, Korea. There were no books about adopted children, no celebrations of adoption day or naturalization day, no culture camps to attend. They raised us the way they were supposed to—like we were their own.”21 Her experiences capture how those adopted from the late 1950s until the early 1990s found themselves raised in families that encouraged colorblind love and superficial multiculturalism that valued their presence but not the experiences of people of color. This assimilation came at the expense of racial and ethnic identity development. As many transnational and transracial adoptees sought the acceptance and assurance of belonging in their families, they consciously adopted an affective behavior to ensure that they seamlessly fit in their communities. The racial homogeneity of her childhood community was not lost on Trenka, who contends that the predominately white community existed because those minorities who had been resettled to the area by religious organizations promptly left as they discovered their own ethnic enclaves elsewhere. Trenka sought to be white to find social acceptance. Yet, try as she might, Trenka never succeeded in being white. Trenka underscores the racial microaggressions she and her sister endured in Harlow, Minnesota, while reenacting scenes from her childhood. From questions regarding whether they spoke Chinese and comments about almond-shaped eyes to racial slurs such as “rice-picker,” “chink,” “gook,” and “boat person” being liberally used to describe Carol and Jane, the multicultural fantasy of adoption whereby love transcends difference did not shield the daughters from racism.22 Additionally, Trenka discusses her father’s anti-Asian racism when Jane dated young Hmong men in high school. Trenka recalls him “mock[ing] their faces, as if they were not human, but dark, stupid monkeys” and “mutilat[ing] their long names, which he could not and did not want to pronounce correctly.”23 Anything Korean, or Asian more generally, carried a negative connotation. Being Korean was not a source of pride or celebration. These cumulative messages reinforced Trenka’s Asian otherness and her Asian Americanness.

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Adoption did not make the Brauer girls immune to virulent, racist stereotypes. Even if they were raised as culturally white and their parents failed to acknowledge their daughters as nonwhite, society recognized them as racially Asian. Adoption into a white family did not bestow automatic whiteness. The sisters were seen as interchangeable with Asian Americans writ large. To pretend that adoptees are immune to xenophobia and racism overlooks processes of racialization in the United States. This fallacy can be traced to the limits of multiculturalism and reinforces an investment in banal multiculturalism—celebrating tokenized moments of inclusivity while flattening difference under the guise of equality.24 Trenka internalized the raced and gendered stereotypes of persons of Asian descent, sprinkling them throughout her memoir—exotic, obedient, China dolls, whiz kids, lotus blossoms, docile, geishas, menacing, buck-toothed, suspicious, emasculated. While she does not conduct a critical analysis of these generalizations, their inclusion illustrates the lasting impact of anti-Asian sentiment in the lives of Asian Americans. These sentiments resurface in Fugitive Visions as Trenka reflects, “underneath it all [her performance of whiteness] I was still a chink.”25 Disentangling her adoptee status from her racial and ethnic identities overlooks how adoptees’ experiences as adopted Korean Americans are fundamentally intersectional.26 And these identities are further complicated when considering the complexities associated with living in South Korea. Her second memoir captures the disjunctures that adoption produces in the lives of adoptees as members of the Korean diaspora. Trenka writes, “In Korea, I am an overseas Korean. I am an overseas adopted Korean. In Korea, I cannot speak Korean. In Korea, I am not a real Korean.”27 Adoptees inhabit the interstices between the countries of their adoption (e.g., the United States, Norway, Sweden) and South Korea. Adoptees like Trenka who speak frankly about the complexities of adoption kill joy in both the concept of adoption vis-à-vis the disruption of its construction as a humanitarian, child-saving act and the notion of return as a healing end point in one’s adoption journey.28 She aptly characterizes the pains of adoption and its potential occurrence in any Korean household, writing, “Any Korean family with a bit of bad luck—an overwhelming hospital bill, too many kids to feed, a drinking problem in the family—was vulnerable to adoption.”29 Trenka also underscores how some Korean parents utilized orphanages as temporary options and later discovered they could not reclaim their children, and she acknowledges how the adoptions of some children lacked their biological mothers’ consent. She writes of “misrepresentations, kidnapping, child switching, and forged records” as well as her work with other adoptees to document these claims with the formation of TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community in Korea) in 2007.30

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The exposure of the systemic causes that fuel adoption alongside unethical adoption practices illuminate how international adoption cannot only be seen as a joyful experience. Trenka’s account of personal and collective losses reveals the damaging effects adoption has on Korean families. The joy of adoption is further disrupted when adoptees disclose experiences of alienation and displacement in both nations. A chasm exists between the imagined homeland—the alleged object of happiness—and what is there upon arrival. The very experience of adoption makes a happy return impossible, thus killing the joy of the mythic return and reunion with biological family members. More importantly, the South Korean government, orphanages, and adoption agencies did not expect that this segment of the Korean diaspora would return to South Korea in search of biological families, cultural ties, and belonging. Adoptees sent to the United States and elsewhere were supposed to embark on a one-way journey across the Pacific Ocean. Constructed as a better option than remaining in their countries of birth, adoption was believed to be their ticket to success. Yet the voices of adult adoptees in contemporary society trouble this widely held belief.31 And when adoptees like Trenka openly critique these abusive practices, they are told “mistakes were made” or “move on” as too much time has passed for redress.32 Trenka became representative of the “angry adoptee” archetype due to the criticisms she leveraged at the adoption industry in her writing as well as in her activism. To be vocal about adoption and to question its unethical practices meant that Trenka, who was at the forefront of this work in South Korea alongside other women adoptee activists in Korea, transformed how both nonadoptees and adoptees understood adoption through the reach of her memoirs.

Seeing Is Believing? Troubling Korean Adoption with Deann Borshay Liem In her film First Person Plural, Deann Borshay Liem introduced viewers to both the Borshay family and her birth family as she traced her roots from South Korea to the United States and back again. Liem’s arrival in America in March 1966 dramatically altered the course of two families. Born Kang Ok Jin, she, like other adoptees, represented family and the future to her waiting adoptive parents. Yet, unbeknownst to her biological family, she was sent by the orphanage in place of Cha Jung Hee, who had previously left the institution with a biological family member. Liem’s birth mother was distraught after learning of Liem’s adoption, for she changed her mind and wanted to retrieve her from the orphanage. Economic insecurity created a constrained choice. Without the requisite funds to care for all her children, Liem’s birth mother initially placed her youngest children in the orphanage at the advice of a neighbor. Viewers learn that this

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Figure 21.1. Deann Borshay Liem examines three photographs labeled with the name Cha Jung Hee. From In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2010). Courtesy of Deann Borshay Liem.

decision was not easy and resulted in her making multiple return trips to the orphanage—and retrieving the other children. The child once known as Kang Ok Jin was forever lost at the exact moment it was determined that she would replace Cha Jung Hee. The orphanage believed sending another child in Cha Jung Hee’s place would be best for everyone. Catherine Ceniza Choy notes, “The booming business of Korean international adoption led the adoption agency to assume that no one would notice if it falsified Ok Jin’s [Liem] paperwork and sent her in Jung Hee’s place.”33 This switch reflects how, according to David Eng, “in the same breath, her Korean past is effaced and denied, a forgotten history repressed and passed over.”34 By the age of eight, Liem was three people—Kang Ok Jin, born June 14, 1957; Cha Jung Hee, born November 5, 1956; and Deann Borshay, born March 3, 1966, as she stepped off the airplane in San Francisco. Her identity as Kang Ok Jin was not confirmed until May 1981, when Deann received a response from her biological Korean brother following her letter to the orphanage. The arrival of this letter meant that “[she] was beginning to unravel the mysteries of [her] past.”35 This journey to uncover the truth about her Korean identity stemmed from her discovery of a photo of another girl in adoption documents at her parents’ house. Written on the back of this photo was the name Cha Jung Hee. The same name was also written on a back of a different photo, one of Liem. As she unearthed new details of her past, her family did not appear to understand the emotional impact of such news. Her mother, Alveen, frankly comments, “Well, I didn’t care that they had switched a child on us. You couldn’t be

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loved more. And just because suddenly you weren’t Cha Jung Hee—you were Ok Jin Kang, Kang or whatever—it didn’t matter to me. You were Deann and you were mine.”36 Alveen dismisses Liem’s original identity even as it means that it overlooks Deann’s Korean family and their loss. To her, and many other adoptive parents, the adoptee is a blank slate ready to be absorbed into the family with little care for her previous life in her country of origin. After all, adoption agencies reassured adoptive parents of their future children’s assimilability. Her adoptive family only recognizes the figurative orphan that Liem represents. They do not fully register the impact that switching children had on Liem or her Korean family. Liem internalized notions of gratitude and adoption. She reflects, For a long time, I couldn’t talk to my American parents about my Korean family because I felt like I was somehow being disloyal to them. That here they’ve done all these wonderful things for me, and provided a lot of opportunities for me, and loved me a lot. And it was like putting dirt in my mouth somehow if I was to talk to them about a Korean mother.37

The positioning of adoption as a benevolent act locates adoptees as interminably grateful for the opportunities allegedly afforded by adoption. Rhetorics of child-saving and rescue become internalized by adoptees who find themselves struggling between the abstract concept of adoption and the realities that adoption brings to their everyday lives.38 In an effort to confront the dissonance produced by reunion, Liem asks her parents to come meet her Korean family, who live in Kunsan, a city about 110 miles south of Seoul. The visit proves to be a turning point as Liem confronts her parents’ presence in Korea and reflects on her own belonging in the country she left as a child. Her parents do not equate South Korea with her. Alveen states, “You belong to us at home. It’s almost as if we’re just visitors and so are you.”39 Her comments implicitly reflect the role of colorblindness and multiculturalism in shaping the adoptive family. Race is not a deciding factor. Rather, the legal and emotional bonds of family are primary factors to Deann’s position as being at home with the Borshays. South Korea is just a place to visit—a country without ties to Alveen’s daughter. For Liem, this particular visit makes salient its strangeness. Seeing her two families together, Liem comments, “I felt more like a visitor . . . a temporary visitor to the family than I felt before. Especially with my parents in the room.”40 She must grapple with the tensions and dissonance produced by witnessing her two mothers together. Capturing this difficulty, Liem notes, “Emotionally, there wasn’t room in my mind for two mothers.”41 She also confides, “I didn’t know how to talk to my mother about my mother.” While processing her reunion and what it means to acknowledge both families, Liem recognizes that she needs to develop a different kind of relationship with her birth family. Reunion is no

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longer a childhood fantasy. In adulthood she must account for what it means to have a mother who was effectively absent for more than thirty years. “Mother” becomes only a label, and mothering is an act performed by only one person. To better understand the deceit involved in adoption, Liem’s subsequent film, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, interrogates what it means when one child is sent for adoption in place of another orphan. She returns to Korea and visits Sun Duk Orphanage and Social Welfare Society to seek answers regarding why she was sent in place of Cha Jung Hee. Her meeting with orphanage workers fails to bring clarity to the discrepancies in her adoption. In fact, while reviewing her file at the orphanage, Liem discovers a third photo of a girl named Cha Jung Hee. Three girls were Cha Jung Hee. After the original Cha Jung Hee left the orphanage, two subsequent girls, one of whom was Liem, were called Cha Jung Hee to satisfy the mythic orphan narrative that was initially attached to the original Cha Jung Hee. Cha Jung Hee becomes an orphan archetype similar to orphanages’ manufactured accounts to describe children’s origins.42 This act of duplicity cannot go unchallenged by society at large and, more specifically, members of the adoption triad—adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents. In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee raises the question that was first articulated in First Person Plural: what happens when adoptees are seen as interchangeable? Their status as objects available for consumption erases their personal sovereignty and personhood. Adoption can no longer be framed as being about rescuing children and placing them in “good” homes. Rather, the consumptive practices of adoption illustrate the mechanized pipeline created by the adoption marketplace whereby a deeper emphasis is on money and satiating (prospective) adoptive parents’ needs over the rights of biological parents and adoptees. Until recently, many adoptive parents and allies of adoptees have not considered the real and imagined consequences of adoption and its deep impact on biological families. When children become interchangeable objects instructed not to speak of their actual names and birthdays, they are told that their original identities are irrelevant and unimportant. The second film addresses what it means to contend with literally becoming someone else. Liem’s intrinsic understanding of self “has been held captive to [the original Cha Jung Hee’s] name and her identity.”43 The documentary becomes an avenue for her to discover those alternate realities and explore the “what ifs” of her life. After contacting 101 individuals named Cha Jung Hee in South Korea who are roughly her age, Liem meets several of these women. These encounters allow her to gain a new understanding of what life could have been like. This experience reveals to her that she is connected to a generation of Korean women whose lives were profoundly impacted by the legacy of war, poverty, and slow economic recovery. The documentary elucidates how Cha Jung Hee represents a template of an adoptable child through a seemingly unique narrative that is instead a recycled and repurposed fiction used to describe more than one child’s biological origins.

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For Korean adoptees, this is frequently the story of a mother dying during childbirth and a father killed during the Korean War, which seems plausible. Throughout Liem’s childhood and young adulthood, this narrative seemed feasible. After all, when placed into wider historical context, many of the earliest adoptees were orphaned during the Korean War. Yet this narrative cannot be applied to her. She was born four years following the war. The fictional tale celebrated the rescue of war-orphaned children, which contributes to why it went unchallenged. Departing from the narrative of rescue requires orphanages, adoption agencies, adoptive parents, and pro-adoption supporters to grapple with the social, economic, and political reasons fueling adoption. A war orphan is much more appealing than a child whose biological parents lacked the economic means to parent. To engage with this latter narrative requires attention to the impacts of militarism, war, and lack of support for impoverished mothers in Korea after the Korean War. While In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee constructs a story of the many lives and possibilities of Liem, it offers adoptees more broadly an opportunity to consider the discrepancies and irregularities in their own adoptions. Adoption is arbitrary, which means that the family and even the country one is sent to are not predetermined. Given slightly different circumstances, she could have been raised in Sweden, Denmark, or France, for example. Liem’s experience cannot be seen as an anomaly. The cathartic production of Liem’s film provides her the opportunity to attempt to “string [the lost moments of the past] together into one unbroken history.”44 Liem is a central figure in understanding the disruption of singular, reductive adoption narratives. First Person Plural and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee explore what happens when adoption is predicated upon falsity and deception. These films expose the mechanisms behind the transnational adoption industrial complex, specifically how orphanages worked to sustain a continuous supply of available children.45 By incorporating Liem’s birth and adoptive families, the films elucidate the frailties of reunion and the ways the affective boundaries of kinship are challenged, which may result in estrangement from both families.46 The platform provided by her documentaries allows Liem a greater reach than other adoptees—the power of her story amplifies the work that other adoptees have invested in dismantling the lies that Korean adoption is predicated upon. The films are comparable to Trenka’s memoirs in that they call attention to the intricacies of adoption processes and falsities to audiences outside the adoption community who may only believe that adoption is a humanitarian child-saving practice.

Conclusion Women continue to have a presence in shaping mainstream understandings of adoption. The one-woman performance of Sun Mee Chomet (How to Be a

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Korean Woman) was acclaimed by audiences in Minneapolis and Seoul for her interrogations of adoption when it premiered in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Similarly, Deb Sigvigny garnered attention in 2017 for her Washington, DC, installation, Hello, My Name Is . . . , which explores a story of Korean adoption in Minnesota. Women activists such as Laura Klunder also garnered attention in a January 2015 New York Times magazine cover story on South Korean adoption.47 The reception these women received should be seen as part of a longer history of women’s disruption of adoption narratives. Jane Jeong Trenka and Deann Borshay Liem laid the groundwork for these contemporary cultural productions. Trenka’s and Liem’s adoptee-authored productions effectively capture what it means to be one of the tens of thousands of adoptees raised in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. In their assessments of the adoption industry, the two women push against and critique the grateful adoptee stereotype and center adoption’s ethical dilemmas. Trenka and Liem also situate adoptees as members of the Korean diaspora. Their writings and films disrupt traditional assumptions concerning migration and mobility in the context of who is a diasporic subject. This positioning coincides with President Kim Dae Jung’s 1998 apology to adoptees for the nation’s adoption practices and includes adoptees as “overseas Koreans.”48 President Kim’s remarks were a marked departure from previous administrations’ elision of adoptees from the nation’s history and signaled a shift in how his successors would integrate adoptees into the nation. Adoptees may now access the F-4 visa for Korean residents abroad, and under the 2010 Nationality Law revision, they may obtain dual citizenship.49 Adoptees’ existence as “overseas Koreans” complicates notions of homeland because, for many, this homeland may not hold any tangible memory. Although Liem was older when she was adopted, Trenka, with faint memories of Korea, reflects on how the majority of the estimated 130,000 adoptees sent to the United States were infants or toddlers upon adoption. Yet the idea of the moldable, assimilable adoptee is not only applied to young children. Adoptees, regardless of age at adoption, were thought to be ready-made Americans or, ostensibly, French, Swedes, and so on. Considerations of adoptees’ locations in the Korean diaspora must account for how it is only in adulthood, with Western cultural capital, that they prove to be useful Korean subjects. Adoption complicates ideas of the Asian American experience. Adoptees’ transracial existence requires a reexamination of the heterogeneity of Asian America and assumptions of children raised with at least one ethnically same-race biological/social parent. Notes

1 See Susan Chira, “Babies for Export: And Now the Painful Questions,” New York Times, April 21, 1988, www.nytimes.com, accessed August 25, 2012. 2 Kimberly McKee, “The Other Sister,” in YELL-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American, ed. Vickie Nam (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 142–44.

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3 Kimberly McKee, “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. May Friedman and Silvia Schultermandl (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 159–79. 4 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); 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):101–28. 5 Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Lok C. D. Siu, Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 15. See also Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 6 Sponsor advertisement, “Help Heal a Child’s Broken Heart,” International Social Service, American Branch Records, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota, box 10, folder 28. In accordance with regulations of the International Social Service–American Branch, the points of view in this monograph are mine and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of International Social Service, United States of America Branch. 7 See Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critiques and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 8 “Drive for Shoes Is Set,” New York Times, September 10, 1954. 9 “Railroad Workers ‘Adopt’ Korean Girl thru Foster Plan,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 18, 1953. 10 Kristi Brian, Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 10. 11 Catherine Ceniza Choy, “Institutionalizing International Adoption: The Historical Origins of Korean Adoption in the United States,” in International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice, ed. Kathleen Ja Sook Bergquist, M. Elizabeth Vonk, Dong Soo Kim, and Marvin D. Feit (New York: Haworth, 2007), 25–42. 12 Kimberly McKee, “Monetary Flows and the Movements of Children: The Transnational Adoption Industrial Complex,” Journal of Korean Studies 21, no. 1 (2016), https://doi. org/10.1353/jks.2016.0007. 13 SooJin Pate, From Orphan to Adoptee: US Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Arissa H. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 14 Although the 1952 Immigration Act began to loosen immigration restrictions for persons of Asian descent, the existing quotas served to limit those arriving from Asia. Consequently, Korean adoptees’ entry into the nation marks the protoliberalization of immigration laws. 15 David M. Smolin, “Of Orphans and Adoption, Parents and the Poor, Exploitation and Rescue: A Scriptural and Theological Critique of the Evangelical Christian Adoption and Orphan Care Movement,” Regent Journal of International Law 8, no. 2 (2012), emphasis mine. 16 Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, “A New Vision for Advancing Our Movement for Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice” (Oakland, CA:

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ACRJ, 2005); Laura Briggs, Faye Ginsburg, Elena R. Gutiérrez, Rosalind Petchesky, Rayna Rapp, Andrea Smith, and Chikako Takeshita, “Roundtable: Reproductive Technologies and Reproductive Justice,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 34, no. 3 (2013); Loretta J. Ross, Sarah L. Brownlee, Dazon Dixon Diallo, and Luz Rodriguez, “The ‘SisterSong Collective’: Women of Color, Reproductive Health and Human Rights,” American Journal of Health Studies 17 (2001); Kimberly McKee, “Adoption as Reproductive Justice,” Adoption & Culture 6, no. 1 (2018): 74–93. Kimberly McKee, “Real versus Fictive Kinship: Legitimating the Adoptive Family,” in Critical Kinship Studies, ed. Charlotte Kroløkke, Lene Myong, Stine Wilum Adrian, and Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomse (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 221–336. Park Nelson, “‘Loss Is More than Sadness’”; John Seabrook, “The Joys and Struggles of International Adoption,” interview by Terry Gross, National Public Radio, May 13, 2010, www.npr.org. For additional discussion on adoptees and racial melancholia, see Eng, The Feeling of Kinship. Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2003), 118. Kimberly McKee, Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoptees in the United States (Champaign: University of Illinois, 2019). Trenka, The Language of Blood, 38–39. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 34. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 66. Kate Driscoll Derickson, “The Racial Politics of Neoliberal Regulation in Post-Katrina Mississippi,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, no. 4 (2014): 895, https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.912542; Mary E. Thomas, Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality, and the Conflicted Spaces of American Education (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). Jane Jeong Trenka, Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2009), 29. Hollee McGinnis, Susan Smith, Scott D. Ryan, and Jeanne Howard, “Beyond Culture Camp: Promoting Healthy Identity Formation in Adoption,” Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, 2009, www.adoptioninstitute.org, accessed September 3, 2017; Dani Meier, “Cultural Identity and Place in Adult Korean-American Intercountry Adoptees” Adoption Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1999), https://doi.org/10.1300/J145v03n01_03; Sueyoung L. Song and Richard M. Lee, “The Past and Present Cultural Experiences of Adopted Korean American Adults,” Adoption Quarterly 12, no. 1 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1080/10926750902791946; Jiannbin L. Shiao and Mia H. Tuan, “Korean Adoptees and the Social Context of Ethnic Exploration,” American Journal of Sociology 113, no. 4 (2008). Trenka, Fugitive Visions, 31. For a deeper discussion of adoptees and gratitude, see McKee, Disrupting Kinship. Trenka, Fugitive Visions, 89. Trenka, Fugitive Visions, 93. See Elizabeth Kim, Ten Thousand Sorrows (London: Transworld, 2002); Maggie Jones, “Adam Crapser’s Bizarre Deportation Odyssey,” New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2015, www.nytimes.com, accessed April 30, 2015. Trenka, Fugitive Visions, 94. Catherine Ceniza Choy, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (New York: New York University Press), 139. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 113. First Person Plural, dir. Deann Borshay Liem, DVD (San Francisco, CA: Center for Asian American Media, 2000).

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First Person Plural. First Person Plural. McKee, Disrupting Kinship. First Person Plural. First Person Plural. First Person Plural. McKee, “Monetary Flows and the Movements of Children.” In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, directed by Deann Borshay Liem (Berkeley: Mu Films, 2010), DVD. In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee. McKee, Disrupting Kinship. Jodi Kim comments, “Borshay Liem has two mothers, yet she is differently estranged from both of them, precisely because there are two of them . . . [which] signify some of the painfully ‘impossible contradictions’ engendered by transracial adoptions”; Kim, Ends of Empire, 180. Maggie Jones, “Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to South Korea.” New York Times, January 17, 2015, www.nytimes.com, accessed July 06, 2015. 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, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0190–7409(97)00068–6. Eleana J. Kim, “Wedding Citizenship and Culture: Korean Adoptees and the Global Family of Korea,” Social Text 21, no. 1 (Spring 2003), https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-21-1_74–57; Tae-hoon Lee, “Dual Citizenship to Be Allowed,” Korea Times, April 21, 2010, www. koreatimes.co.kr, accessed April 21, 2010.

22

“Let Them Attack Me for Wearing the Hijab” Islam and Identity in the Lives of Bangladeshi American Women Nazli Kibria

When Sanjeeda spoke about her family and friends in Chittagong, a port city in Bangladesh that she had left behind three years before, her face lit up.1 She had come to the Boston area to join her eldest daughter, who had left Bangladesh almost a decade previously, in the late 1990s, when she married a US citizen who was also from Chittagong. In the United States, Sanjeeda felt anxious much of the time as she worried about her two teenage children who had remained in Chittagong as they waited for visas that would enable them to enter the country. She worried in particular about her eighteen-year-old son given that he (the only one among her children) had attended a madrasa, or an Islamic school; she had heard that an Islamic educational background could jeopardize US visa approvals given the nation’s suspicions about Islam and its connections to terrorism. Sanjeeda and her husband (who had died a decade before) had enrolled their son in a madrasa with the goal of educating him so that he could lead prayers at a mosque and also perform the recitation of the Qu’ran (the central holy text of Islam) at the funerals of his parents—an act that promised to bring them religious honor. They had never imagined that a madrasa education might be a source of stigma or disadvantage. Despite these worries, Sanjeeda was optimistic that her teenage children would eventually join her in Boston. In the meantime, she was taking English language lessons at the local public library and working part-time as a babysitter. A devout Muslim, Sanjeeda prayed five times a day; she spoke of her religious beliefs and practices as a source of comfort and strength for her. Besides anxieties about the children she had left behind in Bangladesh, Sanjeeda was concerned about the difficult family life of her eldest daughter, who lived in Boston and whose husband, a taxi driver, was prone to fits of uncontrollable rage. Sanjeeda had appealed to her son-in-law to change his behavior and to focus his attention on the faith and practice of Islam, which would give him a sense of peace and purpose. At the same time, she had advised her daughter to be firm with her husband and to make it clear to him that she would not tolerate his abusive behavior toward her or their children. She urged her daughter to take courses at the local community college so that she could eventually get a job and be economically independent from her husband. 373

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Informed by variations of social class, age, immigrant status, and other life circumstances, Bangladeshi-origin Muslim women in the United States understand and relate to their religious identity in many ways. For some women, as for Sanjeeda, Islamic practices are deeply and visibly woven into their daily lives, and for others, the role of religion is scarcely visible. Some women participate in panethnic Muslim American organizations that bring together Muslims of varied national origins, and others eschew such involvements. In this chapter, I explore the lives of Bangladeshi American women with a focus on formations of Muslim identity: How do women experience and understand themselves as Muslims in the fractious political landscape of early twenty-first-century America? How do they respond to the fears and anxieties surrounding the War on Terror and the growth of visible anti-Muslim sentiment that has accompanied it?2 Informed by theoretical perspectives that are attentive to the agency of women in negotiating the role of religion in their lives,3 I draw on oral histories of four Bangladeshi American women to examine these questions. We see how these first-generation immigrants and second-generation (i.e., born and/or raised in the United States) Bangladeshi American women strategically negotiate what it means to be Muslim in America as they strive to create positive identities and to achieve well-being for themselves and their families. The construction of Muslim identity is, for them, a relational process that is embedded in multiple and intersecting identities, including those that emerge from their family roles as mothers and daughters as well as other roles that reflect their status as racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. The portraits of Bangladeshi American women that I offer in this chapter are drawn from a larger qualitative study of the Bangladeshi diaspora.4 From 2001 to 2007, I conducted participant observation at Bangladeshi community and family gatherings in the United States as well as seventy-two oral history interviews with Bangladeshi American women and men living in the metropolitan areas of Boston, New York, and Detroit; forty-six of these interviews were with first-generation migrants, and the remaining twenty-six were with Bangladeshi Americans who had been born in or come to the country before the age of eighteen. In the course of the interviews I asked informants to talk about their migration histories and integration experiences, including family and community life, participation in civic groups, political views, and religious practice.

History and Development of the Bangladeshi American Diaspora Located in the Bay of Bengal between India and Myanmar, Bangladesh, meaning “Bengal nation,” is a country of more than 156 million people; it is the ninthmost-populous country in the world and one of the most densely populated.5 With a majority Muslim Sunni population (85–90 percent), it is also the thirdlargest Muslim-majority country in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan.

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During the era of colonized British India,6 the area that is currently Bangladesh was known as East Bengal—the eastern part of the provincial region of Bengal. With the departure of the British in 1947 and the partition of India, East Bengal became integrated as the province of East Pakistan in the newly created state of Pakistan. The basis for the national formation of Pakistan was Islam—the majority religion of those within the territory. But this bond soon showed itself to be insufficient for keeping together the geographically and culturally disparate east and west wings of the country, particularly given the position of political and economic dominance assumed by West Pakistan. In 1971, after nine months of bitter conflict in which large numbers of Bengali citizens died at the hands of the Pakistani military junta and its allies, Bangladesh emerged as an independent state. Among the legacies of this history of secession from Pakistan is a political tradition of secular nationalism in Bangladesh that has moderated the development of Islamic political movements in the country. Since the 1980s, growing numbers of Bangladeshis have gone abroad in search of greater economic and educational opportunities not available to them within the country. The most prominent emigration has been of semiskilled and lessskilled men from rural backgrounds who travel to the Arab Gulf states or to the emerging economies of Asia under temporary labor contracts. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the government of Bangladesh placed bans on the labor migration of women, citing the need to protect women due to their vulnerability to sexual exploitation. These prohibitions were lifted in 2007 at the urging of civil rights groups that argued that they were not only unconstitutional and discriminatory to women but also likely to foster the trafficking of women through underground channels. Since the lifting of the bans, the flow of women labor migrants has risen sharply but still remains small in comparison to that of men, reflecting cultural restrictions on women’s activities outside the home as well as economic disparities that disadvantage women in their ability to pay the travel costs and other fees required to work abroad.7 Apart from temporary labor migration to Asia and the Middle East, there is another migration stream from Bangladesh that offers more opportunities for family migration and permanent settlement in destination countries. This involves movement toward the developed world, to the United States as well as to Australia, Britain, Canada, and Italy. Migration to America has tended to involve families from urban middle-class backgrounds who leave Bangladesh in search of economic prospects and educational opportunities, especially for the younger generation, with the goal of permanent settlement. Reflecting these conditions, many Bangladeshi immigrants in the United States understand their movement and settlement in America as a strategy for greater economic security and upward mobility for the family through the achievements of their children.8 Echoing a common theme in immigrant communities, they articulate a narrative of “the immigrant bargain,”9 in which migration is viewed as a collective

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family project of socioeconomic mobility whereby the first generation endures the hardships of dislocation to ensure that their children will have access to better education and employment opportunities. The initial wave of immigration from Bangladesh to America occurred in the 1980s via employment-based visas available to skilled workers. In the decades that followed, the Bangladeshi presence grew rapidly through family reunification laws as well as the Diversity Program (the green card lottery), which offers a certain number of entry slots to citizens (randomly selected) of countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. By 2014, the Bangladeshi American population was estimated at 277,000, including 90,000 persons born in the United States.10 A 2014 Migration Policy Institute study found that Bangladeshi Americans have higher levels of education and slightly higher levels of median household income in comparison to the general US population ($54,000 compared to $50,000).11 However, the percentage of persons in managerial/professional occupations is the same across both populations, thus suggesting that higher levels of education do not necessarily bring commensurate occupational rewards for those of Bangladeshi origin. Arriving through family reunification processes, women migrating from Bangladesh have most often come to America accompanied by spouses, children, and other relatives. Reflecting inequalities in education and access to economic resources for women in Bangladesh, 39 percent of first-generation Bangladeshi immigrant women are in the US labor force; this 2014 figure is similar to labor force participation rates for women in Bangladesh but is far lower than the 58 percent rate for US women overall.12 Bangladeshi immigrant women’s labor is thus often focused on unpaid domestic labor or the work of “family reproduction,” which has been defined as the “various kinds of work—mental, manual, and emotional—aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined care necessary to maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation.”13 Across these different types of work, from paid employment to unpaid caregiving, Bangladeshi immigrant women often approach and understand their contributions in relation to the collective family project of mobility through migration. Since the 1990s, as Bangladeshi Americans have grown in numbers, Bangladeshi community organizations have mushroomed across the country, especially in such areas of concentration as the New York City metropolitan area, which is home to an estimated seventy-five thousand Bangladeshi immigrants.14 Many of these organizations aim to facilitate and encourage the practice of cultural traditions as well as foster a sense of community among Bangladeshis in the area through cultural festivals and gatherings to commemorate national holidays such as Bangladesh Independence Day. Bangladeshi Americans are also increasingly active in pan-Muslim groups and organizations that bring together Muslims of varied origins. These alliances

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have been supported by the politicization of Muslim Americans that followed the September 11, 2001, attacks (9/11) on New York and Washington, DC, by the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda. The backlash that followed the attacks generated a wave of political mobilization as Muslim Americans sought to organize themselves in response to the spurt of hate crimes, discrimination, and government surveillance programs directed toward them.15 A trend toward pan-Muslim community involvement is especially sharp among the younger generation of Bangladeshis growing up in the United States who may see Muslim identity as a more salient aspect of their lives than Bangladeshi identity.16 Besides a sense of cultural distance from Bangladesh, especially in comparison to immigrant parents, second-generation Bangladeshi Americans report their identity as “Bangladeshi” to have a quality of invisibility in social encounters due to the widespread lack of knowledge or familiarity among Americans with the country of Bangladesh. This point was made to me by Tahmina, a nineteen-yearold woman who had grown up in the Boston area since the age of seven. She noted her Muslim religious affiliation to be far more likely to provoke a response of recognition from others than her Bangladeshi origins: Americans don’t see us as Bangladeshi. If I say I’m from Bangladesh, the most common reaction is “Where’s that?” or “Oh, that’s the place with all the starving people.” They have no idea. But if they understand that I’m Muslim, either from my name or for whatever reason, it’s different. I’m not saying that they actually have real knowledge of Muslims either, but the idea of Muslim means something to them whereas Bangladesh means almost nothing to them.

Muslim American Women and the Politics of Identity From extending practical assistance with referrals of housing and jobs to fostering a sense of acceptance and belonging, religious organizations and identities have long been identified as important resources for immigrants and more broadly for racial and ethnic minorities, offering them support for coping with marginality in the broader society.17 But for Muslim immigrants to America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the potential support of their religious membership and community is complicated by a political and social landscape marked by antagonism toward Islam and its followers. Contemporary notions of Muslim difference are rooted in histories of race, imperialism and Orientalism: “[Islamophobia] draws from a historical antiMuslimism and anti-Islamism and fuses them with racist ideologies of the twentieth century to construct a modern concept.”18 In the early twenty-first century, these ideas have gained strength against the backdrop of a global and domestic War on Terror whereby Muslims are the focus of a variety of government interventions that include racial profiling, surveillance, and targeting by security and

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intelligence forces.19 A racialized concept of intrinsic and oppositional difference has emerged whereby Islam and Muslims are defined as homogeneous, inferior, and inherently inimical to Western civilization and its values of democracy, equality, and tolerance.20 The racialization of Islam and Muslims is deeply informed by an image of “the oppressed Muslim woman” that captures the idea of Islam as an innately patriarchal religion that suppresses women’s interests. The hijab (head scarf) and other Muslim practices of women’s veiling and seclusion play an important role as symbols of the oppression of women in Islam. Muslim women are seen as victims who lack agency and who require saving through Western interventions.21 In sharp contrast, studies of Muslim women’s religious experiences offer a picture of diversity and nuance in which patriarchal structures coexist with women’s agency and power.22 The practice of veiling, for example, has varied and situational meanings for Muslim women.23 Thus, women in Bangladesh may adopt veiling as a strategy that enables them to move freely and without dishonor in public spaces whereas, for their migrant counterparts in the United States, veiling may be a practice of identity and of symbolic resistance to racism. Indeed, for Muslim American women, veiling and other religious practices are deeply informed by the contemporary political landscape and the hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is part of it. The negotiation of Muslim identity takes place for them within a deeply fraught politics of discrimination and resistance.

Rumana: “Let Them Attack Me for Wearing the Hijab” Rumana immigrated to the United States in the late 1990s with her husband, Azad, and two young children. They had been sponsored for legal permanent residence by Rumana’s sister, who had been living in Boston since the early 1980s. About a year after arriving in Boston, Azad and Rumana purchased ownership of a twenty-four-hour convenience store in a low-income neighborhood using funds they had accumulated in Bangladesh by selling the properties they owned there. Rumana spoke wistfully about family and friends and the comfortable middle-class life she had left behind in Bangladesh. She and Azad had initially been hesitant to leave Bangladesh, knowing that life in America would be hard in many respects and would require them to take on low-status dead-end jobs. But like many other middle-class Bangladeshi migrants, they ultimately decided to make the transition, driven by the desire to see their children have access to educational opportunities in America that they would not have had in Bangladesh. Rumana spent most of her day at the convenience store, working alongside her husband at various tasks, from stocking shelves to ringing up customers. While Azad was the one who dealt with suppliers, Rumana, who held a bachelor’s degree in finance from Bangladesh, was the store’s accountant, keeping

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track of purchases and sales. Every afternoon, Rumana walked the four blocks from the store to their apartment so that she could meet the bus that brought her two sons home from school. After supervising their homework and dinner, she returned to the store, where she remained until the late evening. In the gritty neighborhood where the store was located, disruptive customers and petty criminals were not uncommon. Especially when she was at the store alone, Rumana was careful to remain near the counter where she could easily turn on the alarm in case of intruders. Rumana was keenly aware of the suspicion with which she was often viewed as a Muslim woman who wore the head scarf, or hijab, as an expression of her faith. She and Azad had acquired their store just a couple of months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The months after the attacks were a tense time. Rumana recalled the implementation of a special registration program in 2002 that was created in response to the security fears generated by the 9/11 attacks. The program, which was discontinued in 2003, required nonimmigrant men aged sixteen to sixty-four from selected countries—Eritrea, North Korea, and twenty-three Muslim-majority states (including Bangladesh)—to annually register with the US government. Rumana also remembered being the target of hostile remarks as well as anti-Muslim graffiti outside the door of their building. Azad had urged Rumana to take off the hijab in order to protect herself from harassment, but she had refused: Before I came to America, I didn’t wear the hijab. Then I started to wear it here because it is a way to show your religious belief. There is so much hatred of us as Muslims in America. I feel proud of being Muslim; I want to show that I am Muslim. Let them attack me for wearing the hijab. I will keep on wearing it. It’s a way that I teach my children to live their life as Muslims, even if we are in America.

For Rumana, publicly declaring her religious identity as Muslim was one of the ways in which she challenged and resisted its stigmatization. In an environment marked by palpable hostility against Islam, what had initially started for Rumana as an expression of religious faith had become a matter of pride, principled resistance, and identity preservation. Rumana gained a sense of dignity and empowerment from wearing a visible sign of her Islamic faith, and she felt that doing so conveyed an important lesson to her children.

Sara: “Religion Is Important for Raising Children in America” Sara lived with her husband and twelve-year-old son in Hillside, Queens, in a neighborhood with many Bangladeshi families and businesses. In Bangladesh, Sara had worked for several years as a model and an artist. In the United States,

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however, she had been unable to break into these fields, and she resigned herself to working in the advertising department of a local New York Bangladeshi newspaper. Sitting in the living room of their two-bedroom apartment, we leafed through dazzling photographs of Sara in jeans, saris, and chic salwar-kameez (long tunic and baggy pants) outfits in striking poses that played up her long sleek hair and doe-like eyes. Sara told me that back home, she had never given much conscious thought to religion, and she disliked those who were extremely conservative about religious matters. She described herself as a free spirit who, as a girl growing up in an upper-middle-class family in Bangladesh, had faced pressures to conduct herself in accordance with social norms of modesty regarding dress and relationships. Her own parents, who were politically aligned with secular nationalist movements in Bangladesh, had been tolerant of her somewhat unconventional ways. Beyond participation in Islamic festivals and teaching her how to say her prayers, they had made little effort to ensure a religious upbringing. For Sara, however, moving to America had fostered a conscious attention to Muslim practice to help as she struggled with a sense of “losing herself ” and also to maintain “cultural balance” in her son’s life. To a degree that she herself found somewhat surprising, the local Islamic Center had become a prominent part of her weekly routine. She did not like everything about the women’s religious circles at the center, but still, she often attended them: After coming here, I have become much more conscious about religion. Here, I feel, I will lose myself, so the consciousness goes up. I have become more serious about prayer and fasting. In Bangladesh, we are not so worried about religion. There, the environment is not so bad, there are fewer dangers. Here, I constantly worry about my son. We have come to America for his sake, to see him do well, so we have to make sure he does not go astray. I try to teach him. I send him to the Islamic Center for religious classes. I go there sometimes to attend the women’s circles. At home, I would never think about attending these activities. I find that I have to constantly teach my son which one is halal and which one is haram [accepted or forbidden according to Islamic rules]. These are big changes for us; at home, we were more relaxed about religion. The problem with America is that there is no balance and children can easily go the wrong way. Our religion teaches us the right way, it gives us the strength to resist temptations. Religion is important for raising children in America.

A sense of dislocation, along with psychic and moral uncertainties about the world and one’s place in it, are often associated with the experience of immigration. As scholars have observed, these are conditions that can foster religiosity, as migrants turn to religion to anchor themselves in the receiving society.24 For Sara, as for other Bangladeshi immigrant mothers, the sense of a moral vacuum

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in the United States and the subsequent need for a strong religious anchor were deeply tied to the challenges she felt over raising children in America and ensuring that they fulfill, through their achievements, the goal of family socioeconomic mobility through migration. Sara’s experiences highlight how women’s negotiations of Muslim identity are embedded in the work of fostering a positive identity, parenting effectively, and achieving family goals.

Ferdousi: “I Want to Live a Life That’s True to Islam” I interviewed Ferdousi in the waiting area of an MAS (Muslim American Society) center where she was taking long-distance courses on Islam through the Islamic American University. These studies were in addition to her coursework toward a master’s degree in education at a local state college. Dressed in salwar kameez (long tunic and baggy pants) with the dupatta (long scarf) wrapped loosely around her head, Ferdousi greeted me with a warm smile. Ferdousi and her family had come to the United States when she was seven years old from a small town in Madharipur, a district in central Bangladesh. After a brief stay in New York, they moved to Boston, where her uncle had been living for many years. Ferdousi’s father had worked as a security guard and also as a taxi driver for many years before a leg injury had forced him to retire. Ferdousi’s mother worked as a cashier at a local supermarket, and her older brother held a part-time job at a pizza parlor. Ferdousi, who was now twenty-three, had been married for three years. In the summer before the completion of her undergraduate degree she and her family had gone for a three-month visit to Madharipur in Bangladesh, where her parents had hoped to find her an appropriate groom. Although uncomfortable with the idea of an “arranged marriage,” Ferdousi had been persuaded to go along with these plans by her father’s assurance that she could choose whom she wanted to marry in Madharipur. For Ferdousi herself, the choice of whom to marry had been largely about finding someone who shared her commitment to Islam. Unlike her parents, she placed little importance on marrying a fellow Bangladeshi or Madharipur native. After rejecting a string of suitors, she had eventually settled on the son of a family friend who had impressed her by his expressed commitment to her about living as a good Muslim. When I asked Ferdousi about how religion had come to be so important to her, she told a story of personal crisis followed by the discovery of Islam as a complete way of life. For Ferdousi, the crisis had centered on a troubled adolescence in which she had suffered from deep bouts of depression. There had been conflicts with her parents stemming from her desire to fit in with “American” peers at school coupled with parental efforts to keep the influence of these peers at bay. She recalled feeling resentful of how she was not allowed to go out

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with friends and how she was discouraged from participating in after-school extracurricular activities. Things changed for her, however, as she began her first year at a local public university and began to learn more about Islam through a friend who took her to some Muslim Students Association (MSA) events on campus. For Ferdousi, attendance at the MSA events triggered a life-altering transformation: It’s no longer about fitting in. What’s important to me now is to live my life—my professional life, my family life—in a way that is true to Islam. I am learning Arabic now so that I can read the Qu’ran on my own. After I get my teaching certificate, I hope to work in a public school, maybe one where there are Muslim children who I can help. They face so many problems; there are so many misconceptions about Islam out there. Eventually I may shift to teaching in an Islamic school. When we have children, I will raise them as good Muslims. For my mother and father, religion was part of their way of life, but it was not a priority. For us, my husband and I have agreed, it’s about Islam; we are not so concerned about Bangladeshi culture. I mean, it’s nice if they know the language and stuff, but it’s not a big thing for us. Islam is the same everywhere. There are no roots and branches. Islam is one God, one Prophet, and one Book.

For Ferdousi, Islam had given meaning and purpose to a life that had seemed without bearings before. It had also given her a way to successfully negotiate the family pressures on her—to concurrently comply with and resist them. She had agreed to marry a Madharipur native, to go along with her family’s wishes. But she did so in a way that suited her own purposes, that fulfilled her goal of marrying someone who shared her commitment to Islam over and above the maintenance of local cultural traditions. Also, through her involvement in various Islamic groups and organizations, she had developed a large network of friends who were united in their shared commitment to Islam but diverse in other respects, such as racial and ethnic background and socioeconomic status. Her social networks extended well beyond the confines of the Bangladeshicentered world inhabited by her family in Boston. Religion had thus extended Ferdousi’s social world, freeing her, in some respects, from the confines that had been imposed on her by her family. A sense of agency was also evident in how Ferdousi approached the practice of Islam. Ferdousi spoke of Islam as a complete way of life, one that did not allow for compromise. Even as she affirmed her total commitment to Islam, she also spoke of the importance of individual choice. In the interview, I asked Ferdousi whether she always covered her head in public. Her reply emphasized the importance of spiritual authenticity—how maintaining correct practice was only meaningful when coupled with true inner conviction and desire to obey:

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No, I don’t always cover my head. I want to, but I’m not comfortable with it yet. Like I told you, I grew up trying to be very American, so it’s a big jump for me. I am working towards it. But I only want to cover my head when I’m totally comfortable with it, when I can do so with an open heart. The most important thing is your belief, what’s inside.

Studies of the children of Muslim immigrants from Middle Eastern and South Asian societies note a trend toward distancing from the ethnic and national origin affiliations of their parents in favor of a pan-Muslim identity.25 For Ferdousi, the daughter of immigrants from rural Bangladesh, Muslim identity and practice offered a means of negotiating family constraints and expectations and finding her own voice and identity as a Muslim American.

Tori: “Muslim Identity Is Important to Me in a Political Sense” Tori and her brother were born and raised in Long Island, New York. Her father, Jamal, had come to the United States in the 1980s as a student. After obtaining a degree in pharmacy, he returned to Bangladesh to marry and bring his bride to America. Jamal began his career with a job at a large pharmaceutical company. But he quickly became frustrated as he was repeatedly turned down for promotions, which he attributed to the discriminatory treatment of South Asian immigrants like himself. Vowing to never be an employee again, Jamal opened his own pharmacy service. In the early years, while Jamal worked to establish the business, Tori’s mother took on a job as a bank teller to make ends meet. Over time, however, the business had become quite profitable, allowing Tori’s mother to quit her job and devote herself to family and community activities. When I interviewed Tori, she had recently graduated from college; she had attended an elite private college in New York where she had created her own interdisciplinary major in environmental studies. Tori had moved back home with her parents, though she and a group of her friends were hoping to rent a place in the city soon. Since her junior year in college, Tori had been a volunteer with a community organization on a project that was dedicated to immigrant empowerment through naturalization and voter registration. She was expecting the organization to offer her a paid position soon. She described her parents as supportive of her plans to work at the community organization although she also knew that they were hoping that she would eventually go to law school. The relatively comfortable economic circumstances of her parents meant that she did not face immediate pressure to enter into a professional pathway. Talking about her childhood, Tori described her parents as active participants and leaders in local Bangladeshi community associations. At one point, her father had been president of a large and prominent organization that was

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dedicated to bringing Bangladeshis together for holidays and other various community events. Her mother had also been active in these groups; she had used her training as a singer of classical Bengali music to teach children in the community to perform traditional music. Weekends for Tori when she was growing up had been filled with these Bangladeshi community-centered activities and events. Growing up, Tori and her family had occasionally attended Muslim festival celebrations at a local mosque, and during a long visit to Bangladesh when she was a child, her grandmother had taught her how to say Islamic prayers. But Tori did not recall religious organizations and activities figuring prominently in her childhood. She described her parents as people who approached religion as a deeply private matter. Her mother prayed once a day and fasted during Ramadan, but she never asked her children to do so, leaving it to them to make their own choices. Her father had been an atheist and socialist political organizer in his younger days, and even now, he was not inclined toward religion in his life. After entering college Tori found herself increasing identifying as Muslim. She went to the gatherings of the Muslim Students Association on campus, and she also attended several national conferences that brought together Muslim students from across the country. But unlike Ferdousi, who saw her identification as a matter of religious faith, Tori understood her Muslim identity in political terms. In college, Tori had become active in a student group that protested US military interventions in Iraq. She had also volunteered at a South Asian community organization where she had helped to draft a report on the rise of antiMuslim hate crimes in New York City. These political activities had given her a keen sense of the importance for Muslims to collectively organize themselves in response to discriminatory environments and policies: I am not a religiously observant Muslim. I mean, I believe in the basic principles, and I respect those who want to observe. I have Muslim women friends who wear the hijab and others like me who don’t wear it. It’s not really an issue. My Muslim identity is really important to me in a political sense. It’s essential that we, as progressive Muslims, stand together to fight against all the injustices around us. It’s not just a matter of anti-Muslim bias, it’s bigger than that. It’s about anti-immigrant hysteria and the mass incarceration of young men of color. I see the Muslim community as a very wide political platform that brings together many different groups of people. It’s very different from the Bangladeshi community or a South Asian community, which are very limited politically. When I say, “I am Muslim,” I define myself in this greater community that includes blacks, whites, Arabs, Indians. It’s a religious community, but it’s also a political community that brings together oppressed peoples. Of course, there are things that I don’t like in the Muslim community, like sexism and homophobia. I see myself as a progressive Muslim voice, as someone who is working with the community to bring about change.

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Like her immigrant parents, Tori was deeply involved in local community organizations. But in her case, these involvements were centered on the notion of pan-Muslim solidarities rather than the national-origin loyalties of her parents. As a second-generation Bangladeshi American who had grown up in a post-9/11 America, where antagonism toward Muslims was visible and widespread, she felt her identity as Muslim to be both politically and personally salient. The relatively prosperous circumstances of her parents as well as their socially progressive attitudes facilitated Tori’s efforts to develop a Muslim identity that was meaningful and consonant with her commitment to progressive political causes.

Conclusion For Muslim American women in the early twenty-first century, the negotiation of religious identity takes place in the shadows of widespread suspicions, fears, and racialized stereotypes of Islam and Muslims that include a conception of Muslim women as oppressed and in need of saving. The above portraits of Bangladeshi American women offer a glimpse into both the importance of these political conditions as well as the diversity of women’s experiences and responses to them. As first-generation immigrants from the Muslim-majority country of Bangladesh, both Rumana and Sara were keenly aware of how moving to the United States had transformed the social and political context in which they practiced their religion. Arriving in America soon after the 9/11 attacks, Rumana found herself in the midst of an anti-Muslim backlash to which she responded with a resolve to remain true to her beliefs and to not hide her Muslim identity; she was determined to wear the hijab even if this made her vulnerable to anti-Muslim attacks. Sara, a self-proclaimed free spirit, found herself turning to religion in a manner that she had never imagined while growing up in Bangladesh. Religion had become important to her in the United States as a means of preserving her sense of identity and especially for conveying moral values to her son. Unlike Rumana and Sara, the second-generation Bangladeshi American women, Ferdousi and Tara, did not draw on memories of their lives in Bangladesh to formulate their identities. In their efforts to resolve dilemmas of family, community, and belonging, they cultivated a sense of themselves as “Muslim American.” Whereas, for Ferdousi, the identification with a pan-Muslim American community was informed by her deep-seated faith, for Tara, it brought opportunities for meaningful political activity. Along with what it means to be Muslim in America, the portraits of women in this chapter draw attention to the multiple and interactional character of social identities.26 These Bangladeshi American women are not only Muslims but also members of immigrant families whose journeys overseas are driven by a search for economic and educational opportunities, especially for children.

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This collective and intergenerational family project of socioeconomic mobility is a key aspect of Bangladeshi American women’s experiences and their efforts to build lives of meaning and significance in the United States. Notes

1 All names have been changed in order to protect the confidentiality of the informants. 2 The War on Terror was launched by the United States and its allies following the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, DC, by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda. It has involved Western military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and programs of surveillance and policing directed toward Muslim American communities. Nazli Kibria, Cara Bowman and Megan O’Leary, Race and Immigration (New York: Polity, 2013). 3 Orit Avishai, “‘Doing Religion’ in a Secular World: Women in Conservative Religions and the Question of Agency,” Gender & Society 22 (June 2008): 409–33. 4 Nazli Kibria, Muslims in Motion: Islam and National Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 5 CIA World Factbook 2016, www.cia.gov. 6 British colonial rule was established in India during the eighteenth century through the activities of the East India Trading Company. Direct rule, or the rule of India by the British Crown, began in 1858 and ended in 1947. 7 According to a 2014 Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh Policy Brief titled “Gender and Migration from Bangladesh,” women constituted 2.9 percent of the international labor migrant flow out of the country in 2007 and 13 percent in 2013. 8 Kibria, Muslims in Motion. 9 Robert C. Smith, Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 10 “RAD Diaspora Profile: The Bangladeshi Diaspora in the US,” Migration Policy Institute, July 2014, www.migrationpolicy.org. 11 “RAD Diaspora Profile.” 12 “RAD Diaspora Profile.” 13 Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives,” Annual Review of Sociology 15 (August 1989): 383, https://doi.org/10.1146/ annurev.so.15.080189.002121. 14 “RAD Diaspora Profile.” 15 Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 16 Kibria, Muslims in Motion. 17 Stephen R. Warner and Judith Gittner, eds., Gatherings in Diaspora Religious Communities and the New Immigration (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 18 Raymond Taras, “‘Islamophobia Never Stands Still’: Race, Religion, and Culture,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (March 2013): 417–33. 19 Louise Cainkar, Homeland Insecurity: The Arab and Muslim American Experience after 9/11 (New York: Russell Sage, 2009). 20 Nasar Meer, “Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (March 2013): 385–98, https:// doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.734392. 21 Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104 (September 2002): 783–90.

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22 Avishai, Gender & Society. 23 Jen’Nan Ghazal Read and John P. Bartkowski, “To Veil or Not to Veil? A Case Study of Identity Negotiation among Muslim Women in Austin, Texas,” Gender and Society 14 (June 2000): 395–417. 24 Timothy Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in America,” American Historical Review 83 (December 1978): 1155–85. 25 Zareena A. Grewal, “Marriage in Colour: Race, Religion and Spouse Selection in Four American Mosques,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32 (January 2009): 323–45. https://doi. org/10.1080/01419870801961490. 26 Nira Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (March 2006): 193–209.

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Navigating the Hyphen Tongan-American Women in Academia Halaevalu F. Ofahengaue Vakalahi and Ofa Ku’ulei Lanimekealoha Hafoka

In 2004, thirteen indigenous grandmothers from the Americas, Africa, and Asia gathered in Phoenicia, New York, to form an alliance, declaring to the world: We, the international council of thirteen indigenous grandmothers, represent a global alliance of prayer, education and healing for our Mother Earth, all her inhabitants, all the children, and for the next seven generations to come. We are deeply concerned with the unprecedented destruction of our Mother Earth and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. We believe the teachings of our ancestors will light our way through an uncertain future. We look to further our vision through the realization of projects that protect our diverse cultures: lands, medicines, language and ceremonial ways of prayer and through projects that educate and nurture our children.1

The spirit of solidarity, connection, and collectivity honors the uniqueness of each culture personified in the declaration of the alliance while serving as the sustaining force for navigating the hyphen in a Tongan-American woman identity. We, the authors of this chapter, as Tongan-American women, honor women from across all human cultures who paved the way for women like ourselves to enter, contribute to, and thrive in our intersected global communities and in academia. We are because you are. As represented in the Maori saying that a woman’s womb is Te Whare Tangata (house of humanity), we are collectively the house of humanity. Indeed, honoring the lived experiences of a people and the context in which they exist contributes to the collective humanity of all people. Such lived experiences and contexts are contributions to humanity that must be recognized and valued in order to move toward social justice and equality for all. The lived experiences of Tongan-American women, in this case, are a valuable contribution to humanity. The lived experience of each Tongan-American woman is unique and richly distinct yet complex and intersecting with the journeys of women across all cultures, particularly women of color. Given diverse histories and experiences, we recognize that many racial and ethnic cultural communities in the United States 388

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Figure 23.1. Fonua (land), Frigate (bird used by the ancestors of Pasifika peoples to navigate Moana [ocean]), and Ngatu (material made from the land that has communal and familial significance). Through exchange of precious cultural gifts, land travels like a frigate bird to Tauhi Vā (nurture space) among communities that are stewards of the Ngatu. Artist: Tali Alisa Hafoka. Courtesy of Tali Alisa Hafoka.

do not use the hyphen in identifying themselves; however, the hyphen is appropriate in Tongan-American because, in our view, it represents the meanings of connection, collectivity, inclusivity, and reciprocity. It is also the complex experiences of other people of color who fought for women’s rights, civil rights, and human rights for all Americans. For Tongan-American women, the underlying premises of navigating the hyphen are the immigrant experience and the opportunities and challenges afforded to those living two cultures simultaneously. The hyphen in TonganAmerican speaks to intersectional meanings in and experiences with immigration, transnationalism, formal education, and indigenous and American cultural values that ultimately impact a hyphenated identity. Understanding the

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immigration experience is pertinent for navigating the hyphen for all generations of Tongan-Americans, as both cultures are lived simultaneously in their homes in the United States and larger US society. The hyphen in Tongan-American is the connector that links a Tongan woman’s identity to her American woman identity. The hyphen also represents the space that allows a Tongan-American woman to disconnect her dual identities and bridge that chasm with choices to embrace a singular or dual or multiple identity at any given time. It is the embodiment of the intersectional lives of Tongan-American women, the evolution of culture, and the influences of their lives on the health and well-being of families, communities, and nations. This chapter considers what it means to be a Tongan-American woman, a person of color, an immigrant, and an indigenous woman in academia, an institution whose culture is largely white and male centered. Moreover, faculty remain predominantly white and male, and students, although growing in diversity, include few Pacific Islanders, and Tongans are underrepresented among those few Pacific Islanders. The literature on Pacific Islander Americans, and specifically on Tongan-American women, in academia continues to be sparse because of multiple factors including their extremely small population size, academic and political underrepresentation, and historically aggregated data and exclusion as participants and researchers in major studies.2 Although the experiences of Tongan-American women academics are often marginalized, this gap also presents an opportunity to contribute to the general knowledge base and information on experiences of women of color in academia as well as to guide the creation of a narrative that could inform culturally competent responses to challenges in the Tongan-American community as well as opportunities for TonganAmerican women who aspire to be in academia. The chapter is based on our personal insights and experiences as two TonganAmerican women in academe. The first author is an established scholar/professor and administrator with a twenty-year academic career in multiple university systems, and the second author recently completed her PhD in counseling psychology and is entering academia as an assistant clinical professor. Although our narratives cannot completely capture the totality of the Tongan-American women experience, our discussion offers a platform for dialogues, interpretations, and connections that bring visibility to Tongan-American women’s presence and contributions to academia and to encourage more research on the topic. To provide context for this discussion, we begin with a brief description of Tonga as a sovereign constitutional monarchy, Tongans as global navigators for educational and employment opportunities, and indigenous cultural practices, such as the Fahu system, which emphasizes reverence for women. We also provide two narratives, one on the hyphenated identity from the perspective and experiences of an immigrant Tongan-American woman academic and another from a US-born TonganAmerican woman academic, as well as some thoughts for the future.

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Context Located in the heart of the Polynesian triangle in the South Pacific Ocean, Tonga is the last remaining Polynesian monarchy with land that can only be inherited by native-born indigenous Tongan men. There are about 169 islands in Tonga with approximately one hundred thousand people inhabiting thirtysix of the islands. The majority of the population is Tongan, while there is a small population from Britain, other Pacific Islands, India, and Asia. The primary languages spoken are Tongan and English. Tonga contributes to global peace and security through its military forces and in partnership with the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and others. The nation is a sovereign constitutional monarchy that has experienced little formal colonization—allegedly as a result of the political savviness of King George Tupou I (1845–1893)—and is governed by a king and a parliament, which includes representatives from the people. In 1839, King George Tupou I, baptized by Wesleyan Methodist missionaries who arrived in 1822 to Christianize the islands, proclaimed, “God and Tonga are my inheritance,” which thereafter became Tonga’s national motto. Although there are many religions in Tonga, Tongans are predominantly Christians. Spirituality defined in terms of connections with a higher power and with fellow human beings, but often practiced through organized religion, specifically Christianity, is an essential part of the Tongan identity and socialization. The country observes the Sabbath day as a day of spiritual renewal and worship, a demonstration of reverence for a higher power.3 Similar to their ancestors from Oceania who were extraordinary navigators of Moana Nui (Pacific Ocean) for generations, Tongans have been global migrants to such regions as the United Kingdom, Europe, continental Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and the United States. They are free to migrate out of the country, a freedom they have embraced and maximized in seeking higher education and employment that generates resources to help their families and those in the homeland. Tongan men and women primarily migrate for higher educational opportunities and in hope of good employment in a variety of fields, from business to service areas as well as academia, keeping in mind the contributions they can and should make to their families and communities in Tonga. This is especially important because Tonga’s economy is primarily nonmonetary and heavily dependent on remittances from Tongans abroad, particularly Tongans in the United States. In the United States, there are about a dozen known Tongan-Americans who hold the doctor of philosophy (PhD) degree, excluding other doctorates, with Tongan-American women making up 50 percent of that number.4 In 2014 Tongan-Americans comprised more than fifty-seven thousand with more than 18,500 born outside the United States. They have lived in the United States for

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several generations; about 63 percent of them migrated to the United States before the 1990s.5 Low wages, land shortage, and higher educational opportunities brought Tongans to the United States beginning in the 1950s and increasingly after 1965, given relaxed immigration policies. As a result of conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the first known Tongan-American communities were established in O‘ahu, Hawaiʻi, to attend Brigham Young University–Hawai‘i (previously known as the Church College of Hawai‘i) and for employment opportunities at the Polynesian Cultural Center, and in Salt Lake City, Utah, to enroll in Brigham Young University and to work on construction projects of the church. Tongan-Americans live primarily in majority-minority states such as Hawaiʻi, California, Nevada, and Texas as well as other states with large Pacific Islander populations such as Utah and Oregon, which are strategically positioned for a transnational lifestyle inclusive of travel and community cultural gatherings.6 Transnationalism is an integral part of Tongan-American life. Transnational Tongans are effective and resourceful in establishing social networks and allies in both the homeland and in new lands. Relying on extended family, the church, and the larger Tongan community, these connections allow them to preserve their traditional Tongan cultural values and language when they settle in a foreign land. Their transnational identities, based on familial, community, and country responsibilities and expectations, reflect interdependence among the individual, family, community, and land that, in turn, impacts a TonganAmerican dual identity.

Indigenous Tongan Culture The strength and power of the indigenous Tongan culture, whether passed on through legends or practiced through rituals and ceremonies, have sustained its people across time and space. Significant to Tongan culture and epistemology are core values of respect, loyalty, interdependence, inclusivity, collectivity, reciprocity, and social space, or va.7 Health and well-being are inclusive of the spiritual, sociocultural, physical environment and a sacred connection to the land. Through intergenerational relationships and living, respect for the elders as leaders of their families and communities, and the collective responsibility for teaching cultural values and practices to the next generation, the Tongan culture has been integral to the survival of all Tongans in the homeland and in the diaspora. In particular, intergenerational living and relationships have provided economic, emotional, and spiritual supports to Tongan families and communities in Tonga and around the world. As in other Pacific Islander communities, Tongan elders are intimately linked to the survival of the Tongan culture as the keepers of all aspects of indigenous culture, including rituals, ceremonies, artifacts,

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and language, which facilitate the navigation of dual/multiple identities resulting from global migration. Indigenous Tongan cultural values and practices connect one to the ancestors and strengthen relationships with family and community. Through the elders, indigenous Tongan culture is preserved and transmitted from one generation to the next, which is critical as Tongans expand their ambitions, migration, and travel globally beyond the Pacific Ocean. Health and well-being in indigenous Tongan culture involve ancestors, lived experiences, rituals, and ceremonies that take place in the community and family context because the healing process is rooted in the intersection of relationships and spiritual alignment. A Tongan individual’s well-being is strongly connected to how well he or she can fulfill his or her familial and social responsibilities. Thus, any relational and familial conflict or discord may contribute to physical or emotional illness. Tongan people are cautious by nature, but they are also adaptable and versatile, very generous in spirit, inclusive in welcoming foreigners, and loyal in their relationships and responsibilities.8

Fahu System (Symbolic Matriarch) Faka’apa’apa (respect) preserves and perpetuates the Tongan culture and the basis for the significant value and honor placed on Tongan women. The indigenous Tongan cultural perspective on women relative to roles, powers, and privileges is reflected in how they are critical to the health, well-being and survival of their families, communities, and country. Women occupy the most honored and respected position in the Tongan culture, which may help explain their oftenconflicted feelings and thoughts as Tongan-American women in academia, where they are treated otherwise and are more likely to experience a negative climate and lack of support for their endeavors.9 The reverence for women and womanhood in indigenous Tongan culture is one of the most influential factors in a Tongan woman’s identity both in the homeland and abroad. In the fahu system (symbolic matriarch), the mehikitanga (eldest sister of one’s father) possesses the highest rank in the family. A fahu has inherent social status accompanied by material and political power and privileges that supersede all members of the family. Such power and privileges are recognized regardless of whether or not she is present. The fahu is at the center of all events, and sisters or women in the family and their children are ‘eiki (superior) to their brothers and their children. Consequently, the fahu may exercise her power and privilege to request anything she desires from her brothers and their children. The fahu has specific responsibilities in certain ceremonies, including the cutting of female relatives’ hair at the end of a funeral as a symbol of respect and honor for the dead and the accepting of gifts made especially for her at weddings in which she is invited to be present as the guest of highest honor.10

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Though beautiful, the role of Tongan women and the fahu system can be complex. A Tongan woman is only superior in her family of origin, to her brothers and her mother’s brothers. But that rank and role do not automatically translate into her marriage. Some Tongan women have an equal partnership in marriage while others are expected to submit to their husbands, who are the traditional “head of the household.” When a Tongan woman is married, her role and responsibilities will change when she is among her in-laws, as she is then inferior to her husband’s sister, who is the fahu of her children. She is privileged and an active member in her family of origin when she is the fahu, but her role is often that of an observer or helper when she is with her husband’s family. Thus, the lived experiences of Tongan women are those of superiority, equality, and inferiority simultaneously. They are no strangers to systems of power and privilege as well as inequality and oppression, which have implications for contemporary cross-cultural identities such as the Tongan-American identity. Understanding the intricate roles of a Tongan woman in navigating the complexity of hierarchies is essential as it influences her ability to carry out her distinct responsibilities in different family dynamics in addition to her responsibilities in professional circles such as academia.

Fanga Fa’e (Many Mothers) The Tongan proverb lea he fonua ho’o fa’e (speak freely of your mother’s land) points to the honored position of Tongan women and the accompanying privileges. That is, a Tongan child is granted privileges to speak and act freely in her/his mother’s side of the family because a woman is superior to the men in the Tongan family. On the other hand, this child has responsibilities to her/his father’s side of the family by virtue of brothers being inferior to their sisters in the Tongan family. In one’s mother’s family come privileges and in one’s father’s family come responsibilities. A grandmother is the fountain of all wisdom and love. A child is taught to trust the intuition of her/his grandmother and mother. In that same vein, a Tongan child has fanga fa’e (many mothers), referring to her/his mother’s sisters, who also serve as mothers to the child. A fahu can also utilize her power and privilege to reinforce the teachings of grandmothers and mothers. Thus, there is no lack of love and teaching in a child’s life because of the many layers of women who are grandmothers and mothers to the Tongan child. Grounded in a powerful indigenous culture that created a sense of confidence and certainty in navigating life on and off the island, Tongan grandmothers and mothers have collectively managed to create a sense of safety in spaces across the globe for themselves and the next generations of Tongan women. Safe spaces include physical space, such as in the home and community, where indigenous Tongan cultural values and practices can be preserved and social and spiritual

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spaces in which conversations and teachings take place. Grandmothers and mothers have become sources of refuge for Tongan girls and women who struggle to navigate the hyphenated Tongan-American identity. In essence, the power in the lived experiences and cultural privileges that are inherent in the lives of Tongan grandmothers and mothers can facilitate the freedom of discovery and exploration and the support of ambitions for present and future generations of TonganAmerican girls and women, particularly ones who aspire to be in academia.

Tongan-American Identity Navigating cultural duality or multiplicity can be a challenge for both immigrants and native-born individuals. Mutual respect, acceptance, and support are important for moving forward in the process of bridging the cultural duality gap. The hyphen in Tongan-American speaks to many elements of the human experience including the immigration experience and transnational identity. Similar to their counterparts, Tongan-American identities reflect multiple ecosystem components such as race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, ability, and other human diversities. The strengths of indigenous Tongan cultural values and practices are at the core of the hyphenated Tongan-American identity. For instance, many Tongan-Americans live in intergenerational homes, which support new immigrants in getting settled and strengthen the relationships among three or more generations through which culture is transmitted. Education is also highly valued in the Tongan-American community and is an impetus for Tongans to migrate to the United States with the expectation of reciprocal help to the family and community back home. Spirituality, defined as connections to a higher power and people, often practiced through a church or organized religion, likewise functions as a centering factor for Tongan-Americans, particularly new immigrants to the United States.11 The Tongan culture is transmitted in the family and community from one generation to the next primarily through the Tongan language. The Tongan language is taught in the home by parents and grandparents and is utilized in community events through cultural ceremonies led by Tongan elders. The language is also reinforced in church services if one is attending a Tongan-language church. Knowledge of the language facilitates transnational connections, which are critical for navigating dual identity. Consequently, the second and subsequent generations of TonganAmericans sometimes struggle with dual identities for various reasons including rejection by the American culture, dissonance from the Tongan culture, the lack of cultural and language knowledge, and disconnection from the homeland. Tongan-Americans, like their relatives from other parts of Oceania, struggle with the generational outcomes of the immigration experience, acculturative stress, and language barriers. These negative outcomes include underrepresentation in educational achievement, low socioeconomic status, poverty, overcrowded

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housing, high rates in disease and illness such as diabetes and heart disease, and disproportionate rates of crime and delinquency.12 Among Tongan-Americans, health problems are tremendously influenced by the trend of moving away from fresh traditional foods to conveniently accessible and affordable foods. Disconnection from indigenous ways of life that build in daily physical activity in nature also contributes to illness. In a study on gestational diabetes among Asian American and Pacific Islander mothers in Utah in 2008, Tongan-Americans were the most inactive group in the sample, and 20 percent failed the physical activity test. Likewise, certain indigenous cultural tapu (taboos) relative to the human body hindered open discussion of diseases such as HIV, HPV, and breast cancer, which are evidently critical for the health of Tongan-American women today.13

Tongan-American Women Academics The power and influence of women in the Tongan culture have existed since the beginning of time. As we discussed above, matriarchal order is an integral component of the Tongan culture in which women are elevated to the highest rank and order in their families of origin. In the context of academia, the story is different in that gender- and race-based discrimination have created barriers for women of color to enter into and advance in academia.14 Oppressive practices in the larger academic and societal systems have disenfranchised women academics. Women in US academia date back to the late 1800s whereas women of color are a more recent phenomenon, and Tongan-American women are an almost nonexistent phenomenon. Despite challenges, academia has embraced feminist/womanist theories in advocacy for equality and liberation from oppression for all people, male and female.15 Theories of intersectionality also facilitate understanding of the complexities of the woman experience and the result of interactions among systems of oppression that lead to discrimination based on gender, race/ethnicity, and other human diversities.16 Although extremely small in number, as of 2017 in the United States, known Tongan-American women who had earned doctorate degrees and held academic positions numbered about six, with more coming through the pipelines.17 The unrelenting commitment of these Tongan-American women academics to their community is demonstrated in their contributions through the three pillars of academia: building the knowledge base on issues critical to the Tongan-American community, teaching and mentoring college/university students including Tongan-Americans, and service and outreach to local and national communities including the Tongan-American community. Furthermore, Tongan-American women academics bring to the forefront of national conversations topics of interest to the Tongan community such as health disparities, undereducation, racism, and sexism through their professional organizations in social work, public health, medicine, biology, psychology, anthropology, and other disciplines. In

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alignment with indigenous ways of doing, Tongan-American women academics also engage in formal and informal mentoring, coaching, and supporting of other emerging Tongan-American women in academia.18 As a global effort, the Association of Tongan University Women (ATUW), headquartered in Tonga with worldwide membership, including the United States, was created in 2008 to promote higher education for Tongan women and girls. In terms of community organizing, framed by the value of extended family and care, the National Tongan American Society, headquartered in Utah, was established in 1994 and led by a group of Tongan-American women committed to serving Tongan-Americans and other Pacific Islanders through health education, management, and resources to decrease health disparities. Similarly, the Tongan-American Health Professionals Association (TAHPA) was established in 2008 using a community-empowerment approach to address health disparities and support career advancement in the health profession for the TonganAmerican community.19 Tongan-American women academics continue to face enormous institutional and interpersonal barriers to advancement in academia along with their fellow women of color academics. Racism, sexism, prejudice, discrimination, microaggression, gender-based pay inequity, and presumptions of incompetence are common experiences of women of color in academia,20 and certainly, these traumatic experiences are magnified for the extremely small number of Tongan-American women academics. Nevertheless, there is a need to increase efforts to educate and position Tongan-American women to lead their families and communities into a twenty-first-century environment, with advanced educational levels and skills as the keys to competitive employment and increased socioeconomic status, particularly in the United States today. Advancing Tongan-American women academics can be a mechanism for alleviating poverty and increasing the pipeline to academia through intentional mentoring, facilitating access to higher education and competitive paying employment, and increasing engagement of community members in civic and political activism. University student bodies are diversifying, but faculty bodies continue to be predominantly white and male. That is an opportunity for Tongan-American women academics to contribute their voices, knowledge, and skills to diversity and inclusion in academia.

Taking the Hyphen Personally Tongan-American-Woman-Immigrant-Academic In 2010, I (Vakalahi) was on a Fulbright Senior Scholar’s award to Aotearoa, New Zealand, to conduct research on grandparenting in the Maori culture. On the first day of meetings with my cultural consultants, I was well prepared as an academic with an agenda strategically laid out. I began immediately with my

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research focus and purpose as a scholar. Without skipping a beat, one of the elders, a grandmother, stretched out her arms, signing “stop,” and said, “locate yourself.” I paused and, at a loss for words for a few seconds that felt like forever, gathered myself, and took advantage of the chance to “redo.” I apologized, introduced myself, my ancestors, and my current space as an immigrant to the United States. Thereafter and for the duration of my visit, I learned to navigate my hyphenated Tongan-American identity in a place where I was embraced because of my Tongan heritage, supported in my research endeavor, and perhaps, forgiven for my Americanness. So, in locating myself, my name is Halaevalu Fonongavainga Ofahengaue Vakalahi. I am the daughter of Moana and Faleola Ofahengaue. I was born in Tonga and raised in Hawaiʻi. In 1977, at age nine, my family migrated to America, living in Hawaiʻi in order for my father to attend Brigham Young University– Hawaiʻi. Through my mother’s older sister Huni, a naturalized US citizen, my family obtained permanent residency and thereafter citizenship. My parents remained in the United States so that my siblings and I could take advantage of available educational and economic opportunities. My parents believed that education is the great equalizer. The return on that investment includes the second generation of my parents’ fanga mokopuna (grandchildren) pursuing higher education, such as my co-author, my niece, who earned her doctorate degree during the writing of this chapter. She is the first grandchild of my parents to earn a PhD. Navigating the hyphen, as in living two cultures simultaneously, has been my experience since arrival in America and has become intensified in my journey in academia. The immigration experience and opportunities and challenges it offers are the underlying premise of navigating the hyphen. For example, faith, family, and community have been my saving grace in academia and sources of renewal, encouragement, acceptance, respect, and love. I learned to master the English language in order to advance in school yet remained grounded in my language of origin in order to facilitate my connection to my parents, my grandparents, and the elders in my community. I learned balance in how I interact with others, particularly regarding respect for the elders, engaging in a complex conversation with an elder in a manner expected by my Tongan culture but acceptable as an American. I learned to appreciate the strengths of women from all cultures and integrated the womanist/feminist perspectives into my indigenous Tongan woman identity. I earned my PhD in social work and a master’s degree in education from the University of Utah, master of social work from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, and a bachelor of science in business management from BYU–Hawai‘i. I am a professor and currently the dean of the College of Health and Society at Hawai‘i Pacific University–Honolulu. I have served in faculty and administrative positions in six universities and in various capacities in professional

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organizations including the Council on Social Work Education and the National Association of Social Workers. My areas of teaching include social policy, human behavior and the social work environment, organizational leadership, pedagogy, and cultural diversity. My two areas of scholarship are Pacific Islander family and community and women of color in academia. My publications include peerreviewed articles, book chapters/reference works, and books including, most recently, Transnational Pacific Islanders and Social Work (2014) and The Collective Spirit of Aging across Cultures (2014).21 From my vantage point, the sky is no limit. In retrospect, the most provocative yet motivational element of my experience in academia as a Tongan-American woman has been navigating the presumption of incompetence. I cannot count how many times I have had my ability underestimated and been told that I am “not enough.” The need to carefully navigate my hyphenated identity has been a lifelong task, which became intensified as I entered academia as a faculty member and by my attempts to advance in administration and leadership. When people question my research on Pacific Islander families and communities, I make a case for supporting an underrepresented and underserved population and for my contribution to the knowledge base. When asked about my leadership style, I clarify the importance of both cultural and professional values as the foundation of my philosophy. In teaching, I integrate indigenous and contemporary content, perspectives, and methods. In service, I remain connected to my communities through the mentoring of students as well as contributions to local communities in which I have lived. I have gained a deeper appreciation for pioneering American women who paved the way for me to enter academia and to be bold in speaking up and combatting racism and sexism. Much of the work in navigating my hyphenated Tongan-American identity in academia has been about managing mixed emotions about my place in it, the psychological tension and strained relationships that resulted from experiences of racism, gender discrimination, and microaggression. But I embrace and am at peace with the hyphen as it represents the link between my ancestry and my current intersectional space and identity. It has offered me balance, for the most part, in terms of encountering challenges that keep me motivated and successes that give me energy to continue the fight for leveling the playing field, but I am comfortable with the occasional imbalance. Throughout my life I have been intentional about preserving and perpetuating the hyphen through embracing both cultures’ languages, values, knowledge, and practices for my own sense of completeness and sanity. Overall, my experiences at an HBCU (historically black college and university), at a predominantly white institution, and at Hispanic and minority-serving institutions have nurtured my hyphenated identity. I hope that my discussion of navigating my hyphenated identity in academia will offer some wisdom for future Tongan-American women academics.

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Tongan-American Woman, US-Born Academic It is a daunting task to navigate the fact that I am the investment of many influential women and men from my family and community as well as diverse cultures with which I have interacted. I am indeed in deep gratitude for all with whom I have crossed paths. My name is Ofa Ku’ulei Lanimekealoha Hafoka, and I have a PhD in counseling psychology from Brigham Young University. I was born and raised on the North Shore of O‘ahu, Hawaiʻi, and I am a product of the old adage “It takes a village to raise a child.” In my family and community, success was described in a collective view, and I was taught that my success is the result of not merely my own personal hard work but the investment and collective effort of my community. In the world of academia, I echo the sentiments of our African American sister Maya Angelou: “I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.”22 As a Tongan-American woman, I have had the opportunity to be taught and raised in the values and principles of two distinct cultures. Through the examples of my parents and grandparents, I learned that hard work, sacrifice, and reciprocity are the fundamental foundational values that preserve our native Tongan heritage. The continual pursuit of secular and spiritual knowledge was expected and modeled for me by my elders. The women in my family are unapologetically strong, fearless, and ambitious. Consequently, I was raised to believe that I could pursue and excel in higher education and then use it to elevate my family, my community, and myself. With the academic opportunities I have had as a Tongan-American woman, I feel a responsibility to pay homage to the past, show gratitude for the present, and shine a light down the path toward the future. The hyphen represents the deep respect and reverence I have for my Tongan ancestors and preceding generations of Americans who sacrificed and paved the way for me to pursue higher education today. To me, the hyphen symbolizes the intersectionality of two distinct cultures, worldviews, and practices and my increased ability to balance and navigate the two. Never in my life did I actually feel like an ethnic minority until I was in my doctoral program at a predominantly white institution. My self-exploration in academia has led me to understand that being a Tongan-American woman is empowering although sometimes intimidating. It is simultaneously beautiful and chaotic. As the fahu in her family of origin, my mother always reciprocated respect and love for her brothers and her mother’s brothers by not overstepping her power. I learned how to navigate and balance the complexities of my TonganAmerican woman identity through her example. I watched her closely as she voluntarily helped in the kitchen at celebrations for her brothers’ children, duties from which a fahu is exempt. At those special events where she is recognized, she graciously shares the spotlight and gifts with her younger sisters. At the same time, she gave traditional Tongan gifts to my father’s sisters, who are her children’s fahu, with no reservations or complaints. In true Tongan fashion, values

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are passed down through the examples of the preceding generation. As the eldest daughter in my family, I want to perpetuate the fahu system in the same way that my mother modeled for me, as a channel to promote harmony, respect, and love within our family. I recognize that being a woman and the eldest daughter affords me a position of power and privilege in my family and culture. However, in the academic arena, my experiences as a woman of color point toward inequality, marginalization, discrimination, racism, and sexism. The contrast in both settings has made it difficult for me to navigate the latter space, where I have been marginalized. My family and religious and cultural communities have provided me with support, encouragement, and confidence to continue to pursue higher education. Sometimes this encouragement served as motivation, and other times it felt like pressure to do well, but that is part of the hyphen’s complexity. My identity as a Tongan-American woman complements my career aspirations to be a psychologist. My interest in counseling psychology stems from the lack of psychoeducation and attention for mental health services in the Tongan community. Through my educational training, I have actually observed similarities in Western philosophies and deeply rooted Tongan practices. Although Tongans often stigmatize mental illnesses, there are several fundamental values in the Tongan culture that are parallel to psychological principles (e.g., health and well-being, collectivism, spirituality, mindfulness, healthy coping mechanisms). Thus, I believe that the field of psychology and the Tongan culture are not as polarized as many Tongans might believe them to be. For instance, Tongans often depend on strong family ties and relationships to help when a family member deals with physical, emotional, or financial distress. When a Tongan family has a funeral, wedding, or other significant life event, extended family members often give of their time, food, or money to help ease the family’s burdens. Without my training in psychology, I would not have realized that this strong support network that is built into the Tongan culture is also a coping mechanism against psychological distress. I believe that with my educational achievements, I have a responsibility and opportunity to give back to my community by speaking my truth, sharing my experiences, and encouraging other women of color to seek higher education. With an earned PhD, I have multiple career options in academia and in practice.

Future Directions For our success as Tongan-American women in academia, our indigenous roots are critical as a foundation. In contrast to those who view communities of color as lacking and deficient, we argue here that cultural pride, community commitment, and family obligation have positively contributed to our motivation, dedication, and drive to enter into and thrive in academia. The sense of freedom

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rooted in both our indigenous and American cultures relative to the opportunity to freely venture anywhere in the world has positively impacted our worldview as Tongan-American women academics. Intergenerational life also offers the support and wisdom of our grandmothers and many mothers who overcome and excel with such grace and dignity. Although challenged by inequities and inequality, as Tongan-American women academics, we are blessed to be able to effectively navigate new spaces, directions, and developments in solidarity with our women comrades. Where do we go from here? As a start, we need to increase our contributions to the knowledge base artistically, musically, and through the written word. The power of the written word to influence generations needs to be leveraged. As Tongan-American women academics, our identities and lived experiences are multidimensional and intersectional with not only our hyphenated cultures but also the incredible experiences we have with fellow women on the same journey. Our identities are beautifully multifaceted. As such, we must create allies with our sister cultures as there are amazing opportunities for contribution to the knowledge base as well as for making a difference in communities at the intersection of Tongan women and all women. A collective theoretical framework is our lens for analysis and a foundational element for Tongan-American women academics. We view ourselves as assets. Using a collective lens, we can develop culturally relevant strategies for the advancement of immigrant and US-born Tongan-American women. We can engage our Pacific Islander American sisters from Oceania and women from across all cultures in understanding transcultural adaptation and healthy development. Higher education has been proven to produce opportunities for social justice and economic stability. Creating a pipeline for Tongan-American women as academics is imperative to this process as higher education is intimately linked to better-paying employment and therefore access to resources and purchasing power for the individual and community. To recruit and retain Tongan-American women into academic careers, we must facilitate the navigation of the hyphenated Tongan-American identity in which the hyphen serves as the connector between the indigenous and new cultures. We must create a forum for global connection, offer culturally informed mentoring and coaching, facilitate collaboration across disciplines and cultures, and value culturally based pedagogical paradigms for success in academia. In essence, the hyphen can be a protected and nurturing space for a Tongan-American woman academic to find refuge, renew, reinvent, thrive, and at the same time support other academics, especially those of color, our families, and communities. Notes

1 “The Secret Prophecy of the Grandmothers,” International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, www.grandmotherscouncil.com, accessed November 28, 2017.

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2 Empowering Pacific Island Communities and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, “A Community of Contrasts: Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in California, 2014.” Asian Americans Advancing Justice, https://advancingjustice-la.org, accessed July 1, 2018; Karen L. Moy, James F. Sallis, and Katrine J. David, “Health Indicators of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders in the United States,” Journal of Community Health 35 (2010): 81–92; Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Populations, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov, accessed January 2, 2018. 3 ‘Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 6, no. 1 (1994): 148–61. 4 Inoke Hafoka, personal communication, March 1, 2018. Hafoka is a doctoral student in social science and comparative education (SSCE) at the University of California–Los Angeles within the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies and is researching Pacific Islanders in education. 5 US Relations with Tonga, US Department of State, 2016, www.state.gov, accessed December 19, 2017. 6 Cathy A. Small and David L. Dixon, “Tonga: Migration and the Homeland,” Migration Policy Institute, www.migrationpolicy.org, accessed March 20, 2018. See also chapter 9 by M. Luafata Simanu-Klutz on Sāmoans in this volume. 7 Tevita O. Ka‘ili, “Tauhi va: Nurturing Tongan Sociospatial Ties in Maui and Beyond,” Contemporary Pacific 17, no. 1 (2005): 83–114. 8 Paul Alan Cox, “Polynesian Herbal Medicine,” in Islands, Plants, and Polynesians: An Introduction to Polynesian Ethnobotany, ed. Paul Alan Cox and Sandra Anne Banack (Portland: Dioscorides, 1991), 147–68. 9 Halaevalu F. O. Vakalahi, Saundra H. Starks, and Carmen O. Hendricks, Women of Color as Social Work Educators: Strengths and Survival (Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education, 2007). 10 Senolita Vakata, “Gender Women in Tonga,” Mercy International Association, www. mercyworld.org, accessed July 8, 2018. 11 Halaevalu F. O. Vakalahi and Ofa Ku’ulei Lanimekealoha Hafoka, “Beyond Words: Language of Our Ancestors,” Amerasia Journal 43, no. 1 (2017): 1–12. 12 Noreen Mokuau, Colette V. Browne, Lana S. Ka’opua, Paula Higuchi, Kathleen M. Sweet, and Kathryn L. Braun, “Native Hawaiian Grandparents: Exploring Benefits and Challenges in the Caregiving Experience,” Journal of Indigenous Social Development 4, no. 1 (2015): 1–19. 13 Brenda Ralls, William F. Stinner, Gulzar H. Shah, Richard Bullough, Fahina Pasi, Jeffrey Duncan, and Marie Aschliman, “Variations in Rates of Gestational Diabetes between Asian American and Pacific Islander Mothers in Utah,” Utah Health Review 13, no. 6 (2008): 33–38. 14 Molly Everett Davis, Halaevalu F. O. Vakalahi, and Renay Scales, “Women of Color in the Academy, from Trauma to Transformation,” in Disrupting the Culture of Silence: Confronting Gender Inequality and Making Change in Higher Education, ed. Kristine De Welde and Andi Stepnick (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2015), 265–77. 15 bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge: South End, 2000). 16 Irene Browne and Joya Misra, “The Intersection of Gender and Race in the Labor Market,” Annual Review of Sociology 29, no. 1 (2003): 487–513. 17 Hafoka personal communication. 18 Halaevalu F. O. Vakalahi, “Epiphany: My Pacific Islander Voice,” in Women of Color as Social Work Educators: Strengths and Survival, ed. Halaevalu F. O. Vakalahi, Saundra H. Starks, and Carmen O. Hendricks (Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education, 2007), 249–58. 19 Tongan Health Society, www.tonganhealth.com.

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20 Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris, eds., Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2012); Lucila Vargas, ed., Women Faculty of Color in the White Classroom (New York: Peter Lang, 2002); Guofang Li and Gulbahar H. Beckett, eds., Strangers of the Academy: Asian Women Scholars in Higher Education (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2006); Edith Wen-Chu Chen and Shirley Hune, “Asian American Pacific Islander Women from PhD to Campus President: Gains and Leaks in the Pipeline,” Women of Color in Higher Education: Changing Directions and New Perspectives, Diversity in Higher Education 10 (2011): 163–90. 21 Halaevalu F. Ofahengaue Vakalahi and Meripa Talai Godinet Godinet, eds., Transnational Pacific Islanders and Social Work: Dancing to the Beat of a Different Drum (Washington, DC: NASW, 2014); Halaevalu F. Ofahengaue Vakalahi and Gaynell M. Simpson, and Nancy Giunta, eds., The Collective Spirit of Aging across Cultures (New York: Springer Science & Business, 2014). 22 Maya Angelou, “Our Grandmothers,” I Shall Not Be Moved (New York: Random House, 1990), 33.

Part VIII Gender, Cultural Change, Intergenerational Dynamics

Gender, cultural change, and intergenerational dynamics are continuing phenomena in Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s lives and are evident throughout this volume. In part VIII, we give attention to a new group of 1.5- or second-generation Asian Americans whose parents and other family members came to the United States following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act or after 1975 as refugees from Southeast Asia. The three chapters consider different ethnic groups—Korean, Hmong, and Khmer Americans—and show how each community’s history, cultural formations, and gender and intergenerational dynamics are evolving in the early twenty-first century when faced with specific changes in their circumstances and the life course of families. The elderly is an understudied topic in Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and the post-1965 immigrant population is aging. Barbara W. Kim and Grace J. Yoo provide voices of 1.5- and second-generation adult Korean American daughters who are navigating the caregiving expectations of aging immigrant parents. They also examine the extent to which traditional cultural and gendered norms of caregiving within Korean American families are being redefined. As parents shift to relying on daughters instead of sons and daughters-inlaw for future support, the realities of American life, such as working daughters, geographic distance, lack of culturally and linguistically competent health and elder care services, challenges of financing support, and the independence of some Korean parents are posing new questions and transforming family responsibilities for the care of the elderly. Other Asian American and Pacific Islander communities are searching for meaningful solutions to elder care as gender roles and intergenerational transitions evolve. Studies of Hmong women have typically focused on the refugee generation and the struggles of so-called illiterate women to adapt to US society. Chia Youyee Vang fills a gap with an analysis of professional 1.5- and secondgeneration Hmong American women as educational, religious, and political leaders in the Midwest. The women reveal their multiple oppressions outside the Hmong American community and within, such as the colonial mentality of elders and the sexism of traditional gender and generational norms that expect women and younger people to be subordinate, and for wives to assume a supporting rather than a leadership role. The women demonstrate agency and resistance in extensive maneuvers to overcome the cultural politics of their community as they carry out their professional roles and work to improve 405

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the social conditions of Hmong American communities, especially the lives of women and girls. Shirley S. Tang, Kim Soun Ty, and Linda Thiem tell the stories and visions of second-generation Khmer/Cambodian American women as they find their way through restructured refugee families, family and intergenerational trauma and healing, racism and sexual harassment in schools, heterosexist behavior and white standards of beauty, life-threatening housing and health care, and physical disability and poverty to become resilient and find richness in their cultural heritage with support from community elders and grandmothers. The empowerment and forceful voices of college-age women, especially through their digital media, is an important contribution to Khmer American history as well as to gender, generational, and community studies in the greater Boston area. Part VIII provides new findings on how cultural change, new situations, and the life course of families are affecting the lives of three distinct and less researched groups of post-1965 Asian Americans in different regions of the United States. The three chapters also link the historical and cultural contexts of families and ethnic communities with their contemporary and generational developments in a new land. Centered around the intersection of gender and intergenerational dynamics, they show the continuing agency of women of all ages to address new issues and the growing diversity and complexity of Asian American as well as Pacific Islander women’s experiences in the twenty-first century.

24

Linked Lives Korean American Daughters and Their Aging Immigrant Parents Barbara W. Kim and Grace J. Yoo

Natalie is a 1.5-generation Korean American in her thirties who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her parents have been saving for retirement, are in good health, and live near her brother in another state.1 Natalie’s mother tells her that if both parents became ill or her father ever became a widower, “I know your dad will want to live with you.” Although she would like to reciprocate the desire, her spouse does not want to leave California. And if her parents were to move, they would have to leave their home, friends, church, and other familiar aspects of their lives. How will Natalie and her brother take care of their parents as their need for assistance grows? How will she provide financial, emotional, and service support for her parents from afar as she juggles the responsibilities of parenthood and career? The case of aging Korean immigrants and their adult children provides a unique lens into intergenerational relations in racial/ethnic immigrant families throughout the life course. This chapter examines how adult daughters navigate the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, class, culture, immigration, and aging that shape caregiving expectations. The findings are drawn from in-depth interviews conducted between 2006 and 2012 with seventy-three adult daughters of Korean immigrants regarding their attitudes and expectations of intergenerational caregiving.2 They show that their parents tended to expect a daughter in the family to be the future primary caregiver to the parents and the main contact person and organizer among the siblings. The attitudes of these daughters ranged from those who would love it to those who approached it with apprehension, ambivalence, and anger. The diverse voices reveal the range and nuances of how Korean American adult daughters observe, negotiate, and redefine cultural values and expectations as they seek to meet the multigenerational needs and complex challenges of caregiving. At the time of the interviews, respondents resided in the Los Angeles or San Francisco Bay metropolitan areas and had been born in the United States or arrived as young children (the mean age at arrival was seven). The mean age of the fathers at the time of the interviews was sixty-six, and the mean age of the mothers was sixty-three, while the mean age of the respondents was thirty-four. The marital status of the respondents was split between single/never married and 407

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married. Most respondents’ parents were married, and some were divorced or widowed. All respondents are identified by pseudonyms.

Linked Lives: Immigrant Children and Care Work The older adult population (sixty-five years and older) is the fastest-growing age demographic group in the United States and becoming more racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse; Asian Americans are expected to comprise 7.2 percent of the total older population by 2050.3 The solvency and sustainability of Social Security and Medicare, the financial affordability of long-term care, and caring and providing for older adults are issues of critical social, scholarly, and policy importance in the United States. Americans generally believe that family members should provide care out of love and obligation and without compensation, even as they struggle emotionally and financially to do so; in 2014, approximately 14 percent of American adults provided care to an adult age fifty or older.4 These expectations can be even greater for immigrant families and/or people of color who may have strong cultural values around caregiving practices and face institutional barriers in accessing mainstream services and other support.5 One nationwide study conducted in 2001 found that Asian Americans were more likely than other racial groups to expect to care for their parents and to actually help care for their parents.6 However, few studies have examined caregiving relationships between aging immigrant parents and their second-generation adult children as the first cohorts of post-1965 immigrants (the Baby Boomer generation) enter their retirement years. The theoretical concept of linked lives argues that sociohistorical factors like the Great Depression shape family relations and intergenerational relations such that “lives are lived interdependently and socio-historical influences are expressed through this network of shared relationships.”7 Many immigrant families live such linked lives, relying on all members for collective survival and adaptation; starting at a young age, children of immigrants may help out in family businesses, earn wages, serve as interpreters and translators, do chores and provide childcare for younger siblings, or study excessively to fulfill parents’ hopes that their educational success will lead to future jobs and income for the intergenerational household.8 Additionally, they may perform emotional work to manage and alleviate their parents’ negative feelings––such as anger, depression, anxiety, or stress––rooted in the daily struggles for survival.9 They are simultaneously the hoped-for benefactors and the brokers of their parents’ immigrant aspirations.10 In this sense, elder caregiving can be viewed as the later stage of that collective journey in the new homeland.11 Scholars have also found that there is a gendered aspect to the type of work that children of immigrants do; more girls than boys help translate and interpret for their family members, and girls continue do so through adolescence.12

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In the United States, unpaid family members and friends provide more than 80 percent of the care for older adults such as visiting, calling, paying bills, helping with daily activities and household chores, and taking them to doctor’s appointments.13 Caregiving is gendered across racial and ethnic groups; daughters are three times more likely than sons to provide assistance to parents, and wives are more likely to take care of husbands than vice versa.14 This is due to a strong personally and socially held belief that daughters should take care of parents even though they represent an array of backgrounds such as age, labor force status, marital status, economic situation, personal circumstance, and capacity.15 Women also comprise the majority of paid care workers, often underpaid and overworked in these physically and emotionally demanding health care and other care industry jobs.16 Meanwhile, they are also juggling competing demands from their parents, partners, children, and work, often at the cost of their own physical, emotional, and financial well-being, prompting authors of one recent study to wryly observe that “the best long-term care insurance in our country is a conscientious daughter.”17 More than 1.8 million Korean Americans resided in the United States in 2014. While the first wave arrived in 1903, Koreans, like many other Asian ethnic groups, entered in large numbers after exclusionary policies targeting Asians were repealed under the Immigration Act of 1965. Many children of Korean immigrants grow up hearing about the importance of filial piety in the “traditional” culture and the expectation that sons and daughters-in-law are responsible for taking care of elderly parents. Neo-Confucianism in the late Yi (Joseon) dynasty (1392–1910) reemphasized patriarchy in family systems, and the postliberation South Korean government, composed of older men inculcated in Confucianism, codified social and inheritance rights for eldest male descendants through the head-of-the-family system (hojuje). The eldest son and his wife were expected to care for his family members; the state did not provide elder support until the 1980s.18 As post–Korean War South Korea experienced rapid industrialization, increased female participation in the labor force, lower birth rates, and a fierce democratic movement, activists in the women’s movement were successful in pushing multiple revisions of the family law code to establish equality between men and women in issues pertaining to family relations and marriage, including inheritance.19 As a result, women have had more educational and economic opportunities, tend to financially support their own parents, and are less likely to live with their husbands’ parents in contemporary South Korea. Simultaneously, aging parents desire the emotional support from their sons but also the independence and convenience of living in separate households.20 Previous studies support that Korean immigrants and their children in the United States observe and value filial piety, or hyo, rooted in Confucian teachings. While Confucianism is organized around patrilineality, one study found that post-1965 Korean immigrant family and kinship networks may be organized around matrilineal ties. Due to elder sons’ legal and cultural responsibilities of

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taking care of aging parents and the family inheritance, they tended to stay in Korea longer while their sisters immigrated first, sponsored others in their natal families, and used kinship networks to establish small businesses.21 In light of these social, legal, and cultural shifts in South Korea and Korean America in recent decades, this chapter discusses what 1.5- and second-generation daughters of aging Korean immigrants think about caregiving roles and responsibilities.

“They Don’t Have a Retirement Plan”: Linked Lives and Caregiving Expectations Korean immigrants’ high entrepreneurship rates and experiences have been well documented. While entrepreneurship has been celebrated as a means of achieving socioeconomic mobility, self-employed persons in the United States do not have employer-based retirement accounts or pensions and are less likely to use tax-deferred savings for retirement.22 Most respondents with parents who had professional occupations in the United States indicated that their parents planned to fund or were funding their retirement with a combination of retirement savings, personal savings, investments, or Social Security, similar to other Americans. While many respondents with self-employed parents reported that they were financially prepared for retirement, others recalled how their parents struggled to support their families while owning a business or working bluecollar jobs and were not able to save for their own future. Daughters reconsidered responsibilities as their parents faced retirement, which sometimes came sooner than expected due to unemployment, a failing business, or declining health or illness. Others realized in later adulthood that their parents had paid for their education and had not saved for their own retirement. This sense of parental sacrifice and linked lives motivated daughters to choose to take on responsibilities and help their parents plan for the future. Elizabeth, a 1.5-generation woman in her thirties, shared how her father asked his two single children to buy a bigger home with their parents and live in it as an investment. Even though it lengthened their commutes, Elizabeth and her brother agreed to help build their parents’ home equity. Once I moved and got a higher-paying job, I was able to pay the mortgage every month, so we switched. I paid the mortgage, and they paid their living expenses and gave me a little bit of money every month. We kind of switched our financial roles. . . . I’ve been taking care of all their Medicare stuff. I’m assuming I’ll be the one who will be taking them to the Social Security office and start them getting their Social Security payments.

Elizabeth took the responsibility of researching mortgage offers, applying for social programs, and monitoring her parents’ health issues because she worried

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more about those issues. She was also working while her brother was in graduate school. In Elizabeth’s family, the siblings assessed their individual interests, abilities, and financial standing to divide their supporting roles. Lauren’s parents had owned many different businesses, such as a gas station, a tutoring center, and a vitamin shop. As consumer trends changed, her parents had to close some businesses. They focused on financial survival and the costs of running businesses and were not able to save for retirement. A 1.5-generation social worker in her thirties, Lauren discussed the costs of self-employment to her parents. Money is a pain in the butt if you don’t have any. I think my mom is more on the impulsive side, so they just worked and worked. Because they were self-employed, it’s not like they had benefits. . . . My parents never had health insurance. . . . My sister and I pay the mortgage. We take care of everything [bills]. They both get Social Security—so they take care of whatever little [remains]. . . . We don’t really talk about it. You just do. . . . I’ve already looked at senior housing and already filled out an application.

For Lauren, retirement was an intergenerational project; she and her sister paid her parents’ bills and home mortgage, but the house was also a joint investment for the sisters’ financial future. Lauren also provided emotional and other support by visiting them weekly, translating mail, and going grocery shopping. She assumed primary responsibility because she was a self-described planner and more financially established than her sister, and she used her professional knowledge and research skills to navigate various social safety net programs for older persons. Lauren noted that she and her parents fought often when she was growing up, but her decision to help plan their retirement and their appreciation of her knowledge and support had improved their relationship in recent years. Ji Hee, who also described herself as the planner of the family, was a 1.5-generation woman who moved to California more than twenty years ago from the East Coast, where her parents still lived. She sent a monthly allowance, and her younger sister, who lived nearby, took care of in-person errands. Ji Hee and her younger sister did not have a close relationship with their parents, and she was working to rebuild this relationship. She wanted her parents to relocate to California so that her children and parents could spend more time together. She was alarmed to learn in recent years that her parents had paid their daughters’ education costs and had little left for retirement. “All these years that they worked and they put us through school and they took care of us, they never saved for themselves.” As she and her husband became more financially secure, she felt it was her turn to give back to her parents, who had prioritized their children’s futures over their own. She also tried to save for her own retirement so she would not have to rely on her children.

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Sabrina, a 1.5-generation woman in her thirties, also felt financially responsible for her parents. Her parents worried about money often and had to sell their business after her father was diagnosed with cancer in 1999. Since then, her parents were living on savings and Social Security payments. Sabrina predicted that her parents would need her assistance soon: “They don’t say that it’s an expectation, but I don’t see how they could survive.” Sabrina expected that she would be the primary caregiver, given that her older married brother earned less and had dependents. While she was motivated to help them due to her father’s declining health, it was a burden that she hoped to spare any children of her own. In general, aging parents and adult children were well aware of the challenges that were associated with retirement and declining health. Parents tried to be independent for as long as they could, and daughters tried to anticipate parental needs in the present and in the future. Respondents who identified themselves as the planners of the family often initiated these conversations about finances and different types of support and worked to divide roles and responsibilities among siblings according to each person’s ability and desire. Another important factor that shaped respondents’ ability and desire to care for their parents was the emotional closeness that they had with their parents as daughters and the kin work they did within their natal family.23 Nina, a secondgeneration woman in her thirties, had two older brothers, but said, “I am always the one that calls my folks to see how they are, and seeing how they are, so . . . I am a very nagging, worrisome daughter. I talk to them daily.” Although her parents were prepared for retirement, Nina thought that if anything happened, they would prefer to live with her and her husband. She observed that among her girlfriends, “[the daughters are] the ones that look after our parents and call them and see how they are doing. And my parents realize that.” Nina’s discussion highlights how a daughter’s relationship and active kin work within her natal family may encourage parents to turn to daughters for intergenerational support and caregiving and may also include coresidence expectations in particular.

“When Are You Going to Be Taking Care of Me?”: Ambivalence and Responsibilities In past research, “ambivalence” has referred to the positive and negative emotions that are often associated with relationships between aging parents and their adult children.24 As retirement and aging became realities, respondents expressed a mix of gratitude, a sense of burden, and feelings of doubt about how they would provide direct assistance, emotional support, service coordination, and financial support from near or far while juggling their own responsibilities. The ambivalence suggests that many adult children of Korean immigrants will need information, resources, and, in particular, bilingual services and practitioners to care for their aging parents.

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Most respondents did not coreside with parents at the time of the interviews.25 Previous studies have found that Korean immigrant and other older adults preferred “intimacy at a distance” in which they lived near but not with children and maintained regular physical and emotional contact with them.26 Gillian was a native midwesterner whose parents, recently retired professionals, were able to prepare financially for their “golden years.” They did not expect their daughters, all of whom lived out of state, to live with them in old age. Gillian said, “They think it’s important to live close by, but they don’t want to live in the same space. I don’t know if it’s coming from both of them, but my mom does talk about it more. . . . Not too close and not to be in each other’s hair. Not to overstep stuff.” The parents who expressed the desire to live with or near an adult child in old age tended to want to live with or near a daughter. Shelia’s parents had a combination of Social Security, part-time jobs, and an income from a recently sold business. Shelia’s mother, who was in her seventies, asked regularly—although “not intentionally or selfishly”—when her children would take care of the parents. “She would say, ‘I am already seventy years old, and when are you guys going to take care of me?’” Shelia wondered whether she had made a “selfish choice” to pursue a career that did not have a high salary. Kim, an attorney, joked that her parents, who were in their late sixties, “one hundred percent expect me to take care of them in their old age. . . . They’re searching for a way to park an RV in my backyard when I get a backyard.” She expected that she would be the one to care for her parents in illness and old age, not her younger brother. She noted that her parents always treated them equally without gendered preference, and the siblings “talk all the time” about supporting their parents because “they sacrificed quite a bit,” especially her engineer father, who was laid off from his job and turned to self-employment when he could not find a similar position in the United States. Yet her parents looked to Kim for future support and expected to live with Kim and her husband in their old age, perhaps because her brother was still a student. Kim was willing to support her parents and believed her brother would help in some way. Melinda, a 1.5-generation woman in her forties, and her older brothers lived within thirty miles of each other and planned to have their parents live with them when the time came for round-the-clock care. The family dynamics being in a really insulated situation as immigrants, . . . everything was kept within the house. It was very intimate, and growing up, we felt a tremendous sense of support. So now my brothers and I have talked about a plan for when my parents do become elderly to the point where they can’t live by themselves. We’re going to have them live with us and support them.

Some years ago, Melinda’s family needed to find a skilled nursing facility for her great-grandmother; the family brought her back home after two weeks

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because no place had a Korean-speaking staff. Based on this, they did not wish to place their parents in facilities. Despite good relations and intentions, none of the siblings could provide a permanent home for both parents, who said they did not want to impose or inconvenience their children. The siblings discussed how they would split responsibilities, such as having their parents rotate between homes or having each parent live with a different sibling if they required more hands-on care. Despite the most ideal circumstances—she had siblings with whom she could share responsibilities and family members who got along well with each other, lived geographically close to each other, planned to share caregiving responsibilities, and were financially secure in professional careers— Melinda was still worried about how she would balance her sandwich-generation responsibilities and, specifically, how coresidence would impact the lives of her husband, children, and parents. Lisa became close with her mother after her father walked out on the family. She had two brothers but said she would be the primary caregiver for her mother, who had no assets. “I’ll probably be supporting my mom until she dies. . . . She wishes she could be independent and take care of her own. . . . I think that’s what poor people struggle with.” However, her mother did not want to live in the Bay Area, where Lisa lived; Lisa wondered how she would take care of her mother from afar. Miriam also worried about her divorced mother, who had a business and no savings. However, coresidence was also far from her mind as she joked that it was her mother’s “secret wish” to live with her in old age, “but I do not know if I am down on that.” Miriam, one of the younger second-generation respondents in their late twenties, was in school and pursuing a career; with her mother still working and in relatively good health, she found it difficult to focus on future caregiving responsibilities at that life stage. Respondents who were an only child like Miriam or were not close to siblings also worried about providing caregiving on their own, especially providing financial assistance.

Family Obligations: Family Strains and Boundaries Respondents reported various qualities of relationships, and many wondered how family conflicts would affect the delegation of future caregiving responsibilities. For example, Cherry got along with her mother, but her brother did not. Cherry worried what would happen when her divorced mother could no longer work and live independently, saying, No, she does not think that we should take care of her, but I’m hoping my brother would help me in those responsibilities. If she couldn’t live on her own, I’d have to have her live probably with me, but at the moment, we’re in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, and that’s not doable. . . . We’re not financially able to take care of anybody except ourselves.

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Cherry hoped that even if her mother and brother did not speak to each other in the future, he would contribute financially to her care. Some parents who had experience caring for older family members told their children to put them in assisted care or nursing homes. Lynn’s mother would tell her—especially after watching Korean drama episodes involving taking care of older family members—to place her in assisted living if she ever developed Alzheimer’s disease. “She wouldn’t want us to take care of her because it’s too much work.” Lynn agreed that she probably would. “I just don’t see that I’d have the means to take care of . . . Alzheimer’s patients. You have to be by their side all the time.” Camille, a 1.5-generation woman and the youngest of three siblings, noted, “[My parents] have been saying that they would rather go to a home. Well, yeah, because they had such a hard time with my grandmother and finally they had to just put her in one.” She thought that if her parents would live with any of them, it would be her older sister, not the eldest brother and his wife, who rarely saw them even though they lived nearest their parents. Nancy, a 1.5-generation woman in her forties, and her siblings did not have a close relationship with their father, who was in his seventies. He expected to live with one of them one day, but no one had stepped up yet; there was the added complication of how they would care for their stepmother for whom they did not feel “loyalty”; their mother passed away more than twenty years ago. Nancy and her siblings sent him a monthly allowance out of a sense of duty, yet she saw duty as a positive feeling rather than a lack of agency. Duties and obligations are not the enemy. I think that there’s a place for it. That we are obliged to our older generation, whether it’s a relationship and intimacy, or out of just the fact that we were born from them, and then if we’re able to, then I want to . . . I would love if my dad had a place in the system for healthcare, providing long-term care solutions, but I don’t know that he fits very well into the system as an immigrant, and so he will rely on us, and I’m just thankful that we can, that we have the means and the energy, and hopefully the relationship will develop, too, out of that.

Most married respondents did not discuss caregiving plans for in-laws in detail. Most respondents with non-Korean spouses/partners said their in-laws did not have coresidence expectations; they had heard of and were glad that they did not have to endure stereotypically difficult and overbearing Korean in-laws (especially mothers-in-law as portrayed in television dramas). However, Korean in-laws of respondents in general also did not expect to live with or be cared for by their eldest sons and daughters-in-law. In South Korea, family structures have become more nuclearized; while the relationship between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law are important in maintaining harmonious kin relations, they prefer separate living arrangements in order to avoid tensions and conflicts over

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household management, which are still considered to be the women’s primary domain responsibility in patriarchal societies.27 The Korean American respondents also emphasized kin work but deemphasized the sons’ responsibility to live with their parents. Elizabeth’s mother, for example, would rather live with her daughter than a daughter-in-law, with whom she predicted there would be greater possibilities of tensions, misunderstandings, and conflicts from living together. Elizabeth and her mother were both mindful that these preferences might be adjusted; Elizabeth might need to relocate, or she might find a partner who would have different obligations or conflicting ideas about caregiving. Respondents expected themselves to be responsible daughters but expressed boundaries or limited capacity in taking on caregiving tasks for their in-laws. Previous studies suggest that the first generation also wished to have boundaries and avoid conflicts with their daughters-in-law and did not want to be seen as authoritarian parents-in-law as portrayed in the traditional Confucian hierarchy.28 One way to avoid these conflicts on all sides was for Korean immigrant family members to reemphasize parent-daughter relations and rely less on parent-in-law and daughter-in-law responsibilities. As caregiving daughters and sisters, the second-generation Korean American women negotiated cultural values of filial piety and the sense of linked intergenerational lives due to the harshness of immigrant life. As their time and other resources were challenged and constrained due to working outside the home and other demands, they focused their caregiving efforts on their parents, whose personalities, histories, needs, and quirks were familiar to them.

“The Golden Years” of the Sandwich Generation: Discussion and Conclusion Many adult children of immigrants reported numerous positive aspects about their lives. The majority of respondents’ parents were in good health. Parents were eligible for or drawing Social Security and Medicare. In their younger years, many parents had focused on surviving; in retirement, they were able to slow down and enjoy spending time with their adult children and/or grandchildren. Joy, a second-generation woman in her late thirties and a mother of two children, noted, “These are the golden years, where everybody is healthy and everybody is kind of functioning by themselves and can contribute. . . . I’m really trying to enjoy them.” Joy and her husband could not afford to provide financial help, and she had not discussed caregiving plans with her parents and in-laws yet. Many aging immigrant parents and their middle-aged children were enjoying such golden years of their linked lives. However, with ten thousand Baby Boomers turning sixty-five each day between 2011 and 2030 and more adults living well into and beyond their eighties, Korean immigrants and their adult children like

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Joy are not that far off from their own retirement and long-term care.29 There is a need to learn about and make plans for aging parents and for themselves as well. Both cultural factors and structural conditions shape caregiving attitudes and expectations of adult daughters. Caregiving serves as the extension of ways in which immigrant children contribute to the family’s collective adjustment in the United States. Asian Americans are often viewed as following “cultural codes” of filial piety, but respondents were also motivated by sociohistorical experiences of watching their parents struggle with racial, cultural, and language barriers. Immigrant parents have survived and established themselves and their families in the United States, yet they may face challenges accessing mainstream support and services.30 Most interviewees were employed outside the home and had other obligations. Some lived hundreds or thousands of miles away from their parents, and some could not provide financial support; despite best intentions, many parents would need outside services and programs. Respondents had yet to provide around-theclock care or to make such decisions as hiring paid caregivers or placing parents in assisted living or nursing home facilities. Health complications and the difficulties of caring for a frail elderly parent full-time led many families to consider these options for short-term or long-term care. The number of dementia patients is expected to rise as the population of those age eighty-five and older is projected to increase from 5.5 million in 2010 to 8.5 million by 2030; family caregivers will also need support and services from bilingual health care providers and short-term or long-term memory care facilities.31 The potential costs related to long-term care have major implications for families who do not qualify for Medicaid. They could be impoverished by these expenses; some might outlive their assets.32 At the same time, the culturally diverse older immigrant population needs bilingual and bicultural home health aides, health care providers, and older adult institutions, such as adult day centers, retirement communities, assisted living facilities, and skilled nursing facilities in multiple languages.33 The adult daughters will also need support. Studies on caregivers indicate that there are significant implications for their personal emotional, physical, financial, and relational health as well as for broader society and economy. Caregivers report emotional effects (such as depression, anxiety, anger, and exhaustion) and physical effects (such as back pains and ulcers); one study found that the longer caregivers provided care, the worse their health became.34 Women are more likely than men to quit or reduce hours of work due to unpaid caregiving responsibilities, which negatively impacts their household income and own retirement benefits, including Social Security.35 Meanwhile, the United States relies on intergenerational, informal caregivers, but there are no conversations around providing paid leave to take care of aging parents.36 Demographic trends suggest that other racial and ethnic populations with large post-1965 arrivals are wrestling with similar questions and challenges both

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Figure 24.1. The authors with their parents at a book talk and reception for Caring across Generations: The Linked Lives of Korean American Families, California State University, Long Beach, 2015. Photo by and courtesy of Alice Yoo.

inside and outside places with concentrated populations of Asian Americans.37 Asian American communities with multiple generations in the United States, as well as first-generation immigrants who cared for the .5-generation immigrant elders, can provide some lessons, examples, and resources for the secondgeneration adult children.38 Japanese American community leaders in Los Angeles, for example, founded Keiro in 1960 to provide different levels of culturally and linguistically sensitive health and elder care for the Issei, the first generation, and later the Nisei, the second generation. In Seattle, Keiro Northwest continued similar services to the Nisei and an increasingly multiethnic, largely Asian American aging population. San Francisco community leaders founded On Lok, one of the first health care day centers for older adults in the country, to provide meals, medical services, and social services to primarily Chinese immigrant seniors who wished to live in their own homes for as long as possible. On Lok, which means “peaceful, happy home” in Cantonese, provides a range of multilingual services to older adults and their families.39 Ethnic and panethnic organizations are responding to the needs of immigrant elders and their family caregivers by training and providing culturally and language-specific home care aides and adult day care centers.40 Additionally, a majority of Korean Americans attend churches, which have served as central social institutions and providers of formal and informal support and programs in the community; Korean-speaking and English-speaking ministries together could act as a critical intergenerational hub and help initiate important conversations, provide information, and even help with housing resources for taking care of older adults.41

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This chapter has provided a lens for viewing the experience of adult daughters of Korean immigrants navigating caregiving expectations. Many immigrant families may still hold homeland cultural norms regarding caregiving, and Korean American women are redefining these family values and practices as they become aware of the gaps in services and challenges of providing financial support and round-the-clock care to frail aging parents in the United States. They both acknowledge and complicate the image of the “good” filial daughter; their narratives describe shifting cultural formations of daughters and sons as they anticipate needs and concerns that arise for older adults. As they look to the future, the personal and collective experiences of others, including multigenerational Asian Americans, immigrants, transnational Korean Americans, communities of color, and aging communities provide much-needed voices in bridging gaps and finding meaningful solutions to the realities that their families will face. Notes

We thank Gail M. Nomura and Shirley Hune for their invaluable comments and suggestions. 1 Rubén G. Rumbaut and Golnaz Komaie define the 1.5-generation Americans as those who were born abroad and immigrated to the United States before age thirteen, differentiating their experiences from those of the first generation, who immigrated as adults, and the second generation, who are US born of immigrant parents. See Rumbaut and Komaie, “Immigration and Adult Transitions,” Future of Children 20, no. 1 (2010): 43–66, https://doi. org/10.1353/foc.0.0046. 2 All quotations are drawn from interviews originally conducted for Grace J. Yoo and Barbara W. Kim, Caring across Generations: The Linked Lives of Korean American Families (New York: New York University Press, 2014). This chapter draws from an analysis of seventythree female respondents (out of 137 total interviews) who identified themselves as daughters of Korean immigrants. 3 The older adult population comprised 13 percent of the total US population in 2010 and are projected to make up about 20 percent in 2030. Jennifer M. Ortman, Victoria A. Velkoff, and Howard Hogan, An Aging Nation: The Older Population in the United States, Current Population Reports P25–1140 (Washington DC: US Census Bureau, 2014), 2. People of color comprised 17.5 percent of older adult population in 2003 but are projected to represent 28.5 percent by 2060. Judith Treas and Daisy Carreon, “Diversity and Our Common Future: Race, Ethnicity, and the Older American,” Generations 34, no. 3 (2010): 38–44, www.asaging.org; Ortman, Velkoff, and Hogan, An Aging Nation, 12. 4 Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New York: New, 2002); National Alliance for Caregiving and the AARP Policy Institute, Caregiving in the US 2015, (Bethesda, MD: AARP Policy Institute, June 2015), 15. 5 Masako Ishii-Kuntz, “Intergenerational Relationships among Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans,” Family Relations 46 (1997): 23–32; Michelle C. Clark and Kathleen Huttlinger, “Elder Care among Mexican American Families,” Clinical Nursing Research 7 (1998): 64–81, https://doi.org/10.1177/105477389800700106. 6 AARP Research Center, Caregiving among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Age 50+: An AARP Report (Washington, DC: AARP, 2014), www.aarp.org.

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7 Glen H. Elder Jr., Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson, and Robert Crosnoe, “The Emergence and Development of the Life Course Theory,” in Handbook of the Life Course, ed. Jeyland T. Mortimer and Michael J. Shanahan (New York: Klewer Academic/Plenum, 2003), 13. 8 Miri Song, Helping Out: Children’s Labor in Ethnic Business (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Lisa Sun-hee Park, Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Lisa Dorner, and Lucila Pulido, “Accessing Assets: Immigrant Youth’s Work as Family Translators or ‘Para-Phrasers,’” Social Problems 50, no. 4 (2003): 505–24, https://doi. org/10.1525/sp.2003.50.4.505; Nazli Kibria, The Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Yoo and Kim, Caring. 9 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercializing of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Yoo and Kim. 10 Kyeyoung Park, The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Businesses in New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Yoo and Kim. Park defines the Korean American dream as the pursuit of attaining anjong, or stability, in the United States, which may include establishing businesses or other occupations, owning a home in a suburban neighborhood with a highly ranked school district, and having their children attend selective colleges and become established in their own careers. 11 Yoo and Kim. 12 Orellana, Dorner and Pulido, “Accessing,” 509. 13 Elaine Brody, Women in the Middle: Their Parent Care Years (New York: Springer, 2006); Merril Silverstein, Daphna Gans, and Frances M. Yang, “Intergenerational Support to Aging Parents: The Role of Norms and Needs,” Journal of Family Issues 27, no. 8 (2006): 1068–84, https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X06288120; Jeffrey W. Dwyer and Raymond T. Coward, “A Longitudinal Study of Residential Differences in the Composition of the Helping Networks of Impaired Elders,” Journal of Aging Studies 5, no. 4 (1991): 391–407, https://doi. org/10.1016/0890–4065(91)90018-N. 14 Brody, 5; Mignon Duffy, Amy Armenia, and Clare L. Stacey, “On the Clock, Off the Radar: Paid Care Work in the United States,” in Caring on the Clock: The Complexities and Contradictions of Paid Care Work, ed. Mignon Duffy, Amy Armenia, and Clare L. Stacey (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 4. 15 Brody, xviii. 16 Duffy, Armenia and Stacey, “On the Clock,” 10. On Asian American women as health and home care workers, see chapter 13 by Krittiya Kantachote and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and chapter 16 by Joy Sales in this volume. 17 Brody, Women; Nicholas T. Bott, Clifford B. Sheckter, and Arnold S. Milstein, “Dementia Care, Women’s Health, and Gender Equity: The Value of Well-Timed Caregiver Support,” JAMA Neurology, May 8, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2017.0403. 18 Dayoon Lee, “The Evolution of Family Policy in South Korea: From Confucian Familism to Neo-familism,” Asian Social Work and Policy Review 12, no. 1 (2018): 46–53, https://doi. org/10.1111/aswp.12137; Sanghui Nam, “The Women’s Movement and the Reformation of the Family Law in South Korea: Interactions between Local, National, and Global Structures,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 9, no. 1 (2010): 67–86, https://doi. org/10.1163/156805810X517670. 19 The head-of-the-family system was abolished in 2005. Nam, “The Women’s Movement and the Reformation of the Family Law in South Korea.” 20 Myung-Hye Kim, “Changing Relationships between Daughters-in-Law and Mothers-inLaw in Urban South Korea,” Anthropological Quarterly 69, no. 4 (1996): 179–92, https://doi. org/10.2307/3317527.

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21 Park, The Korean American Dream; Sabrina Wong, Grace J. Yoo, and Anita Stewart, “The Changing Meaning of Family Support among Older Chinese and Korean Immigrants,” Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 61, no. 1 (2006): S4–S9. 22 Large numbers of post-1965 Koreans immigrated with high levels of educational attainment and professional backgrounds, but many have been unable to obtain similar jobs in the US labor market due to cultural and language barriers and the inability to transfer their educational and work credentials from South Korea. Scholars explain that Korean immigrants turn to self-employment as an alternative to working in low-wage, unskilled occupations and rely on class and ethnic resources to open small businesses. Jennifer Lee, “Striving for the American Dream: Struggle, Success, and Intergroup Conflict among Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 278–94; Sung, “An Asian Perspective.” 23 Micaela di Leonardo, “The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship,” Signs 12, no. 3 (1987): 440–53. 24 Andrea E. Willson, Kim M. Shuey, and Glen H. Elder, “Ambivalence in the Relationship of Adult Children to Aging Parents and In-Laws,” Journal of Marriage and Family 65, no. 4 (2003): 1055–72; Yoo and Kim, Caring. 25 The majority of the greater Los Angeles–area respondents were born in and/or grew up in Los Angeles and lived fifty or fewer miles from their parents. The greater San Francisco Bay Area respondents were divided between native residents and those who relocated to the area for school or work. More Bay Area residents had parents who lived in Southern California or out of state and had to think about how to care from a farther distance. 26 Brody, Women, 18; Shin Kim and Kwang Chung Kim, “Intimacy at a Distance, Korean American Style: Invited Korean Elderly and Their Married Children,” in Age through Ethnic Lenses: Caring for the Elderly in a Multicultural Society, ed. Laura Katz Olson (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 52. 27 Kim, “Changing Relationships.” 28 Kim, 179. 29 D’Vera Cohn and Paul Taylor, “Baby Boomers Approach 65—Glumly” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2010), www.pewsocialtrends.org. 30 Ishii-Kuntz, “Intergenerational Relationships.” 31 Bott, Scheckter, and Millstein, “Dementia.” 32 One industry survey found that in California, the 2016 state median monthly cost for an assisted living facility was $4,000 for a shared room; the mean national cost for a shared room in a skilled nursing home (for a patient in advanced stages of dementia, for example) was $82,125 a year. Genworth, “Compare Long Term Care Costs across the United States,” June 22, 2016, www.genworth.com. 33 Hae-Ra Han, Yun Jung Choi, Miyong T. Kim, Jong Eun Lee, and Kim B. Kim, “Experiences and Challenges of Informal Caregiving for Korean Immigrants,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 63, no. 5 (2008): 517–26, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2008.04746.x. 34 National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP Public Policy Institute, Caregiving in the US, 51. 35 One 2011 study conservatively estimated that a female caregiver will lose about $324,044 over her lifetime in lost wages, pension, and Social Security benefits by withdrawing early or partially from the workforce. The MetLife Mature Market Institute, National Alliance for Caregiving and the Centre for Long Term Care Research and Policy, New York Medical College, “The MetLife Study of Caregiving Costs to Working Caregivers: Double Jeopardy for Baby Boomers Caring for Their Parents” (Westport, CT: MetLife Mature Market Institute, 2011), www.aarp.org, 15.

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36 Gretchen Livingston, “Among 41 Nations, US is the Outlier When It Comes to Paid Parental Leave” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2016), www.pewresearch.org. 37 AARP Research Center, Caregiving, 8. 38 Treas and Carreon, “Diversity.” 39 See Keiro, www.keiro.org; Keiro Northwest, www.keironorthwest.org; On Lok, www.onlok. org. 40 One example is Penn Asian Senior Services, or PASSi, located in Philadelphia. See PASSi, www.passi.us. 41 Park, Dream; AARP, Caregiving, 7.

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Negotiating Cultural Change Professional Hmong American Women Chia Youyee Vang

The story of immigrant children working hard to overcome adversity to succeed is not a new one. In narrating her life story, human factor engineer Mai Lee Chang stated, “One of the lessons that I learned is that where you start doesn’t automatically define where you’re going to go in life.”1 She was born in Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand. Her Hmong family was among the last to leave when the United Nations–sponsored camps for refugees escaping Laos officially closed. They arrived in Fresno, California, in 1992, when she was six. She explained how her upbringing impacted her academic performance: As I helped my parents pick vegetables in the California fields, I remember telling myself that I definitely do not want to continue this type of work in the future. . . . Growing up, school was always something that was very important to me, and my parents emphasized the importance of an education. And that education is what’s going to allow us to help ourselves, our family, community, and the world at large.2

Mai Lee’s parents’ actions reflect the dreams of many immigrant parents. When Hmong refugees first arrived in the United States in the mid-1970s, their primary concern was survival in a strange land. Children often experience fewer difficulties integrating into US society than their parents due to their ability to attend school, which puts them into frequent, direct contact with other Americans. Like Mai Lee, some children were inspired to achieve academically due to the harsh conditions in which most refugees find themselves. Stories of women and girls pursuing formal education as a means to overcome thousand-year-old traditions are also more and more common.3 In fact, a significant number of Hmong pioneers who have achieved major milestones in larger US society are women, including the first person of Hmong ethnicity to be elected to a US political office.4 Hmong American women collectively and indisputably achieved a great deal during the last quarter of the twentieth century, but the extent to which their achievement has resulted in greater gender equality within Hmong America remains a complex question. This chapter explores how professional Hmong American women, who are mostly 1.5 and second generation,5 negotiate and challenge cultural practices in 423

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their everyday lives, with a focus on transformations in the early twenty-first century. Though Hmong in the United States no longer live in the same maledominated culture as in their premigration world, I contend that how the women choose to narrate their lived experiences as they navigate through the cultural politics of what it means to be a Hmong American woman reflects the reality of existing social practices based on the old and prevailing patriarchal system wherein sons are valued more than daughters. The move from the East to the West is not necessarily a progressive move for women. Thus, the need to write patriarchal culture as the quintessential reason for women’s unequal treatment across time and place persists since it subjects Hmong American women to marginal status regardless of their personal achievements in mainstream society. My analysis shifts away from the tendency to focus on the illiterate refugee women who are unable to advocate for themselves to professional women in order to unpack the contentious positions that they collectively straddle. The goal of this chapter is to highlight moments in the lives of professional Hmong women to illustrate how they continue to be subjected to multiple layers of oppression from inside and outside the Hmong American community despite the diversity of their work and the collective gains that they have made. I employ oral history interviews, ethnographic research, and supplemental data from the internet. My ethnographic research involves participant observation of conference panels and community-based research projects in addition to “itinerant ethnography,” largely in Midwest states, comprising brief interactions in informal meetings over a long period of time.6 My position as a participant in these activities enables me to have insider knowledge, as itinerant ethnography entails certain kinds of involvement on the part of the researcher in the processes she aims to record.7

Historical Context The Hmong American population surpassed three hundred thousand in 2017.8 In-depth analysis of the 2010 US Census shows that the largest populations reside in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, respectively.9 Although they are frequently featured in the news in areas with large Hmong populations, most Americans outside these areas know little about Hmong history. They know even less about Hmong women’s history since scholarly studies and popular publications tend to emphasize men’s military sacrifices that facilitated Hmong migration to the Western hemisphere. Their entanglement in global political struggles during the twentieth century led to the subsequent international interest in Hmong. As inhabitants of Indochina (present-day Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam), they were French colonial subjects from the mid-1800s through the end of French rule in 1954 and became victims of the colonial regime’s “divide and conquer” strategy to pit colonial subjects against one another. Those who

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collaborated with the French gained economic and political power and exposure to the benefits of formal education. As the decolonization processes unfolded, some Hmong fought alongside nationalist groups during the First Indochina War (1946–1954) while others collaborated with the French. Following America’s militarization in Southeast Asia and their alliance with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covert operations in Laos from the early 1960s through the early 1970s, thousands of Hmong fled the country after the United States withdrew from the region. In the United States, the discourse around Hmong refugee resettlement during the last quarter of the twentieth century was influenced by its relationship to failed US foreign policy during the Cold War era. Many found themselves homeless and became refugees in Thailand beginning in mid-May 1975. Because of their involvement with the Americans during the Vietnam War, the vast majority of these refugees chose to resettle in the United States. Studies focusing on the Secret War in Laos have since expanded, but they almost always highlight only men’s military experiences. I have argued elsewhere that in addition to imposing hardships, wartime in Laos transformed Hmong gender relations as some women challenged normative social practices by pursuing opportunities that resulted in self-empowerment.10 The women’s personal empowerment, however, did not translate into positions of power due to their isolated physical context and the practices embedded in patrilineal Hmong social structure. In traditional patrilineal life, women were considered “of no consequence insofar as clan membership is concerned,” and they count “for nothing in the handing down of the family name.”11 Similar to other agrarian societies, Hmong women’s economic security and well-being were tied to fathers and husbands. The foundation of the Hmong social system was one in which “father-right [w]as the norm.”12 Moreover, all family members were expected to submit to what was perceived as the overall welfare of the group, which was decided by the men.13 Women might discuss concerns with the men in their families, but they did not actively participate in the public sphere. While a Hmong woman’s clan affiliation is with her father’s clan for life, after marriage, her spiritual well-being in life and after death belongs exclusively to her husband’s clan since only members of his lineage can offer sacrifices to her soul after she dies. Before migrating to the West, Hmong women overwhelmingly worked alongside husbands in the fields of their agricultural-based society. Thus, a wife’s primary worth was characterized by her ability to reproduce, in particular, by giving birth to sons and caring for her children and elders. Considered “other people’s women,” daughters’ labor was also expected to benefit their husbands’ families.14 This representation of Hmong women in relation to marriage situates their historical position within the traditional patriarchal agrarian society in which fieldwork, family, and motherhood were their primary functions. These traditions traveled with the Hmong in the move to the West along

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with well-publicized culture clashes as Hmong women and their families were thrown into new economic, bureaucratic, and globalized environments, where they faced new hierarchies that accompanied a cash economy and hosts who highly valued Western systems of education.

Confronting Colonial Mentality and Gender Bias Similar to Mai Lee Chang’s family, Chris Her-Xiong’s parents also stressed the importance of education. Born in Laos, Chris is a member of the 1.5 generation. Her family arrived in the United States in December 1976, when she was eleven.15 She grew up in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and moved to Milwaukee after college, where she became the first Hmong American teacher in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). MPS was and continues to be the most diverse and academically challenged school district in Wisconsin. Chris witnessed Hmong families struggle to ensure that their children succeeded and, more importantly, observed that many children had limited knowledge of Hmong heritage. Although she did not grow up in an area with a large Hmong population, she described her upbringing as “a blended life of learning a new culture while maintaining family and cultural traditions.”16 Inspired by the educational opportunities she had been given in the United States and the desire to make sure that Hmong American children understand their heritage, beginning in 2000, Chris led a process to establish Hmong American Peace Academy (HAPA), a Hmong heritage–focused charter school.17 She recalls many critics during the planning process from within the Hmong and the larger Milwaukee community, but her belief that Hmong American children deserve quality education motivated her to forge forward with supporters. From the two hundred students in 2004 when the school opened its doors, the student population increased to more than fifteen hundred in 2017. Its student population is nearly 95 percent Asian (Hmong, Karen, Laotian) and 5 percent other races (white, Native American, Hispanic/Latino, black/African American). Of the seventy-eight teachers, 55 percent are white, 43 percent Hmong, 1 percent African American, and 1 percent Hispanic.18 When the school began, the majority of the students had difficulties meeting state standards. In 2017, the achievement gap had continued to narrow and, in most areas, HAPA students surpassed those enrolled in MPS to meet state standards. After more than a decade in operation, the school has made significant gains garnering praise as evidenced by numerous awards, including a 2017 bronze award for high-performing schools from US News and World Report.19 Chris has been recognized for her educational leadership, including from the Milwaukee Hmong Consortium Woman of the Year and the Milwaukee Business Journal’s Women of Influence. Academic achievement is celebrated as the result of the collective work of students, teachers, and parents. Parents frequently

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express gratitude for being able to communicate with their children’s bilingual teachers when they attend parent-teacher conferences.20 Interestingly, however, Chris points out that she often struggles with Hmong parents’ requests for particular teachers based on race: HAPA has some extraordinary Hmong American teachers. I am always troubled by parents who request that their children be placed in a classroom with a white teacher. There is a perception that a European American teacher is better than one who is Hmong American. I try to help parents understand how great the Hmong American teachers are, but some parents cannot overcome the biases.21

Hmong parents’ colonial mentality, the belief that they are inferior to whites, impacts their perceptions of who would be in a better position to teach their children. The bias that Hmong parents exhibit manifests itself in other spaces as well, and it is exacerbated by intraethnic sexism. Whether it is during a professional meeting, a small family gathering, or a large community event, Hmong men publicly go out of their way to show respect to non-Hmong, in particular European Americans, while Hmong American women of the same or higher status rarely receive such treatment. Chee Yang (pseudonym) had joined the board of a Hmong cultural organization in the Midwest and moved up to serve as an officer.22 Her status as a 1.5-generation Hmong American with a graduate degree helped her to hold this leadership position. She describes the problematic situation she confronts on an ongoing basis: When I’m in a professional environment, I shake hands with people regardless of their gender or race. As professional women, Hmong American men, especially older men, don’t know what to do with us. I’ve been in meetings where the Hmong men would shake hands with other Hmong men and non-Hmong women, but when they get to me, they just say hello. I usually just extend my hand, and then they’ll shake it, but rarely do they ever gesture first. I understand the older men’s discomfort, but what bugs me is that they have no problems shaking hands with non-Hmong women! They would invite a white person, be they male or female, to sit at the head table just because of their skin color.23

The discomfort of older men in shaking Chee’s hand can be viewed in two ways that are products of the colonial mentality and sexism. These particular individuals are clan leaders whose role is to maintain Hmong social structure, which traditionally does not have a place for women at the decision-making table.24 While they value her professional skills that benefit the organization, Chee is not viewed as being equal to the men. From a different angle, cultural taboos discourage physical contact between men and especially married women, but

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they do not explain why the men would offer to shake a white woman’s hand and not the hand of a Hmong woman. To further complicate gender bias and problematic colonial mentality among Hmong American men, I turn to one of the most well-known Hmong Americans, former Minnesota state senator Mee Moua. Also from the 1.5 generation, Mee Moua made history in 2002 when she became the first Asian American to be elected to the Minnesota Senate. She accomplished a great deal during her eight years in office (2002–2010). She is dynamic, outspoken, and intelligent, yet Moua could not avoid the sexism from members of the Hmong American community. In a 2013 panel on women and gender during the Hmong across Borders conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Yer Chang, who worked for Mee Moua as her legislative assistant, pointed out the same awkward hand-shaking situation that Chee alluded to above. In the mainstream community, Senator Mee Moua easily shakes hands with all kinds of people, including white males, but when she’s in a Hmong type of setting, it’s kind of awkward. Hmong men seemed to not be able to decide whether they should shake her hand. You see the reactions. I don’t know what’s going on in their heads at the time, but you definitely can feel the tension.

Because of such behavior, Yer questions how much Hmong men accept Hmong women as leaders. Perhaps more problematic is Yer’s description of how Hmong event organizers treat Moua when they invite her to speak: I noticed many times that our community members disregarded her role. A common mistake Hmong community members made was that as a state senator, she had higher status than a city council member, but at different community events, they would have male politicians with lower status speak first. This was especially true when those politicians were not Hmong. They always put her last. I don’t know if they do this consciously or unconsciously. One particular event I remember attending with her was [when] the mayor from the City of Saint Paul, who is a white man, and Minnesota state representative Cy Thao, who is a Hmong man, were also invited. They had the mayor speak, then the representative, before her.25

Yer explained that Hmong event organizers pay little attention to the hierarchies of state government and protocol that is typically followed in mainstream society, which is to have the highest-ranking official speak first. She did not believe that their actions were due to ignorance of such protocol and instead pointed to the prevailing sexism that Hmong American women face in addition to the negative impact of Hmong men’s reification of white superiority. Mee Moua’s and Chee Yang’s experiences illustrate the conflicting treatment that professional Hmong American women receive from Hmong men. In Sia

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Her’s prominent role as head of the state agency Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans, she frequently interacts with Hmong elders. She arrived in the United States at age four, so Sia has little personal memory of her family’s migration history. Sia has seen Hmong elders increasingly accepting the important role that Hmong American women leaders play in helping them to understand how to influence public policies, but she has little patience for their suggestion that she cannot advance in her career due to her gender and marital status. [Hmong male elders] have gotten comfortable coming to me and other HmongAmerican women for guidance on how to navigate the processes that make America uniquely American. But in the same breath they are asking me for help, right after, they will say things like, “Oh, if only you had been born a son,” and “We are so proud of you, but remember, a Hmong woman is nothing without a man by her side.”26

Sia does not brush off such comments, but she understands the worldview that has influenced her elders. Her observation is that despite the gender-biased comments, elders are beginning to accept the new way of life that young Hmong professionals are choosing for themselves. If they do not, Sia vehemently states, they will be left behind because more and more professional Hmong American women and men are staying single much longer. To be sure, having a husband does not guarantee that a Hmong American woman can avoid being a victim of sexism. For years Rev. Mao Her played a supporting role as a pastor’s wife serving Hmong congregations. She was born into a Christian family in Laos and married a man who became a United Methodist pastor. Thus, Mao remembers being involved in ministry most of her life. She received a calling to serve in 2010, and not long thereafter, she began to pursue a master of divinity degree, which her husband supported. By this time, her husband was a pastor for a mainstream congregation in East Troy, Wisconsin, Saint James United Methodist Church. Upon completion of divinity school in 2013, she became the first Hmong American woman to be ordained as a minister with the United Methodist Church. She had hoped to serve a Hmong congregation. I was considered for one [Hmong] congregation, but the members decided that they did not want me. Since I was a female pastor, they wouldn’t have a pastor’s wife to depend on. I have enjoyed serving a mainstream congregation, Christ United Methodist Church [in Greenfield, Wisconsin], but I was very hurt with this discrimination from fellow believers.27

Mao believes her rejection by the Hmong congregation was based on two interconnected reasons. First, the congregation expects that although a pastor is the only paid staff, the spouse should be readily available to help them as well. Since her husband was serving another congregation, he would not be able to play that

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supporting role. Mao, however, suspected that the primary issue had to do with the fact that there had never been a Hmong woman serving a Hmong congregation. A cultural shift had not taken place so that church goers could accept a Hmong woman as their senior pastor. For the time being, she would fulfill her calling by serving a mainstream congregation that was not concerned with the need to have her spouse serve in a volunteer capacity alongside her. She made history by becoming the first Hmong American ordained elder with the United Methodist Church and the first to be appointed senior pastor of a congregation, but sexism within Hmong congregations continues to pose a barrier that she feels still needs to be overcome if women are to be given equal opportunity to work in churches. The prevailing practice seems to be that professional Hmong American women experience greater acceptance in mainstream society than within Hmong settings. As a result, some professional women do not expect the same treatment by community members as their male counterparts. One area that best demonstrates Hmong American progress is political activism. From 1991 to 2017, thirty-five Hmong Americans were elected to political office. Four held statelevel seats while the vast majority were local positions, which were dominated by service on school boards and city councils. The desire to be at the table and to have their voices heard in the community has been an impetus for many Hmong Americans to seek elected office. Male and female candidates certainly have to overcome many similar obstacles to earn endorsements in the larger community. Within the Hmong community, female candidates seem to have greater obstacles to overcome. While Hmong Americans have won seats on school boards and city councils in several small Wisconsin cities, none have attempted to seek office in Milwaukee despite the Milwaukee area being the nation’s fourth-largest concentration of Hmong Americans. Asian Americans overall represent a very small number of the area’s residents. The only Asian American judge in Wisconsin, Glenn Yamahiro, was appointed by then governor Jim Doyle in 2003 to fill a vacancy. He was reelected in subsequent elections. Despite an aggressive campaign, Taiwanese American attorney Edgar Lin’s 2016 bid for Assembly District 16 in central Milwaukee did not succeed in sending the first Asian American to the Wisconsin Assembly. Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge Kristy Yang’s election in April 2017 was thus unexpected. During the campaign, she often shared with Hmong community members that she had decided to run because she was tired of the negative comments that she heard in the court system about Hmong people. Her campaign message promoted justice for all. As an attorney, I can only help one person at a time. I see that a judge is someone with power to help more than one person. That is why I am running for this position. In this country, no matter how educated we are, if we are not able to sit at

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the decision-making table, then we cannot help. No matter how passionate we are about our Hmong people, if we don’t have a seat at the table, then there is little that we can do.28

Unlike other candidates within large Hmong populations who have been involved in those communities, Kristy struggled to demonstrate how passionate she was about the Hmong community. Before she decided to run for office, she had sporadically volunteered for a few initiatives. When pushed by clan leaders about her involvement with the local Hmong community, she could only refer to her participation in a legal clinic that few community members had ever heard of. To gain trust from community members, she garnered the support of two male relatives from her husband’s clan and a couple of respected Hmong community members to convince others that she was worth supporting. Like her opponents in the mainstream community, many Hmong American professionals and elders expressed skepticism regarding Kristy’s abilities. She had no trial experience, and some who had observed her performance as an attorney in the courtroom were outspoken about her limited experience. Although Kristy successfully utilized the few Hmong professionals and the existing Hmong social structure to seek support, her campaign differed greatly from Mee Moua’s historic state senate race in 2002. More than two hundred volunteers consisting of family and friends had rallied the Hmong community to support Mee Moua. They visited households, circulated literature and made telephone calls in the district during the campaign.29 Kristy’s campaign, however, neither drew large numbers of volunteers nor rallied the Hmong community. While a number of individuals hosted fund-raising events, the first four months showed fewer than a half-dozen consistent volunteers, and the vast majority of the more than one thousand nomination signatures were collected by a small group at the Milwaukee Hmong New Year celebration. She was an outsider to the political establishment and mostly unknown to the local Hmong community. Kristy frequently expressed in campaign meetings that since the Hmong population in Milwaukee was small, she did not count on them to help her win. However, her male relatives and the couple of Hmong American professionals argued that symbolically the Hmong community needed to see her as someone who would help to lift their community. Their support was necessary. The campaign sought the help of a Yang clan leader in Milwaukee, Nao Vai Yang, to lead the effort to raise funds from Hmong cultural leaders throughout the State of Wisconsin to jumpstart her campaign. Nao Vai reported that clan leaders from around Wisconsin attended the fund-raiser or sent in contributions not necessarily because they supported Kristy but because he had been very involved with the Hmong clan leaders’ network for years. Their actions reflected mutual interclan obligations.30 When Kristy realized it was going to be difficult for her to get the Hmong community to rally for her, she decided to focus

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Figure 25.1. Hmong American academics discussing gender issues at the 2017 Hmong National Development conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. From left to right: Aline Lo, Ka Vang, Pa Der Vang, and Dia Cha. Photo from author’s personal collection.

her time on mainstream supporters who were not concerned about her Hmong community involvement. During the second half of the campaign, she showed up at many events throughout Milwaukee County.31 Her victory in April 2017 to become the second Hmong American judge is credited to her ability to navigate the most racially segregated city in the nation and is not necessarily considered as a Hmong Milwaukee community victory.

Forging Ahead to Effect Change The sexism that professional Hmong American women continue to confront explains why even the purportedly positive depictions of them construct a fixed understanding of the position of Hmong women without getting at the larger structures of domination. In the case of Hmong women, culture operates as a haunting hindrance to their assimilation and liberation so that they always seem caught between tradition and modernity. This seemingly negative position suggests that Hmong American women have little power to effect cultural change and that their efforts have not altered patrilineal practices significantly. On the contrary, professional Hmong American women have maneuvered inside and outside Hmong communities to impact cultural change where possible. The 2014 election of Mao Khang as vice president of the Hmong 18 Council of Wisconsin was considered a step toward gender equity and a willingness to confront

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Hmong patriarchal practices. As an advocate for victims of domestic and sexual abuse, Mao was regarded by supporters as someone who could promote change in cultural practices that were overseen by the council, including issues relating to marriage.32 However, the council’s work is limited to families interested in bringing cultural cases to be resolved, so it does not have the power to enforce cultural changes broadly. In thinking about where professional Hmong women galvanized their energy to work toward bringing about positive change, it is important to note the types of organizations and initiatives they lead that employ strategies to empower the community. Although they may not explicitly highlight changing patriarchal Hmong culture, their actions are geared toward addressing gender inequality and the welfare of the community. I identify a few of the many ongoing initiatives led by 1.5- and second-generation professional women despite slow changes in patrilineal gender relations. Maychy Vu is the director of the first Hmong-focused charter school in the United States, Hope Community Academy in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She understands the importance of preparing for opportunities, and like other 1.5-generation members, she grew up advocating for resources for her community. After being actively involved for many months, she was selected as one of the Minnesota delegates to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, which she said required attending many meetings outside work to get to know her neighbors who voted for her.33 Maychy is taking her political activism to a new level. She is among a dozen Hmong American women in Minnesota who founded Maiv PAC, the first Hmong American political action committee in the United States. These women have been helping to get candidates elected, but they believe it requires more than getting their own candidates into office. Its more than one hundred women members aim to build Maiv PAC’s capacity to endorse candidates who are sensitive to new American populations, in particular, women and girls.34 Although leadership efforts to influence the political process have been more visible among the 1.5 generation, second-generation Hmong American women have also been actively involved in community organizing. For Cha Vang, founder and director of the grassroots organization Hmong Innovating Politics (HIP) in Sacramento, California, the work is personal. Being second generation, she had not thought of herself as an activist, but when her community needed to mobilize, she and other young people stepped up. Similar to Vietnamese youths following Hurricane Katrina who helped their elders protest against the placement of a toxic landfill near their neighborhood, Hmong youth organizers got involved to bridge the gap between their elders and mainstream school leaders. We began organizing because we saw that the system consistently failed our communities. We grew up in poverty and lived among other communities of

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color who confronted similar issues. We began to organize after the Sacramento Unified School District voted to close schools located in poor neighborhoods. We held listening sessions with parents from multicultural backgrounds. We sued the school district for the discriminatory practice. Parents in more affluent neighborhoods protested, so that was why the proposed closures were in poor neighborhoods. We had an attorney to represent us, but we did all of the organizing work.35

Most of the schools did close, but this organizing experience led to the establishment of HIP in 2013. It would focus on civic engagement and education. Cha revealed that several male organizers were initially involved, but they lacked commitment. In 2017, all seven organizers are second-generation Hmong American women. For Cha, this work is “not just a job. It’s passion for helping to address issues that affect our communities.”36 Twenty-four-year-old Brenda Yang, who is the youngest HIP organizer, added, “It’s our [HIP’s] responsibility to make sure that we don’t just sit and let decisions be made without our community’s input.”37 Brenda graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles and works full-time at Kaiser Permanente. Volunteering with HIP has inspired her to be proactive.38 Through training, HIP has increased the capacity and activism of second-generation Hmong American women to help solve community issues. Organizing around larger societal issues is becoming common in Hmong communities. Although not unique to Hmong Americans, domestic abuse and violence against women are problems that families have struggled to address. Hmong elders often encourage women in troubled marriages to be patient, but this often creates unsafe conditions for them. In traditional Hmong society, the bride price was created to ensure that women would not be abused. If a husband abused his wife, he would have to return the money to her parents. The practice is interpreted by some men to mean that their wives are property. A number of Hmong women have been stabbed to death or gunned down by former spouses for seeking divorce. In some instances, it is not only the ex-wife who is killed; family members and others involved in divorce processes become victims of violence against the women they are trying to help.39 An interrelated component of domestic abuse is the increasingly widespread issue of abusive international marriages that have deeply impacted a segment of the Hmong American community. These are marriages between significantly older Hmong American men and young Hmong women and girls in Southeast Asia.40 The latter are typically teenagers from poor families looking for an escape from poverty or those who strategically position themselves in cities and towns where they would likely meet Hmong Americans traveling back to the homeland to seek a younger spouse. The practice has been occurring since the 1990s. Some

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marriages do last, but the majority are often based on unequal power dynamics. Some young transnational brides live in fear of abuse and deportation. Others stay in the marriages long enough to obtain their green cards, then divorce their older spouses. Sometimes there are deadly consequences.41 Many Hmong American women of the 1.5 generation have criticized transnational marriages as a form of international sex trafficking. In addition to raising awareness in the United States, advocates have taken action aimed at empowering Hmong women in Southeast Asia. One such initiative is to develop economic opportunities so that Hmong women there have more options. According to Bo Thao-Urabe, she and her cofounders established RedGreen Rivers because they observed the growth of sex tourism resulting from Hmong Americans going overseas. She said that change is happening slowly because the cofounders are all volunteers who have limited time to devote to the enterprise.42 As a social enterprise that collaborates with artisans in Southeast Asia and focuses on their livelihood, RedGreen Rivers hopes to help preserve indigenous art forms.43 Cofounder Kazuag Vaj pointed out that “economic security and economic freedom” are going to change the lives of Hmong women artisans in Southeast Asia. For those who have been involved, cofounder Ka Ying Yang said that the impact has already been felt after only two years. In addition to greater access to income, confidence among the women in Southeast Asia has increased so that they do not feel a need to engage in sex tourism.

Conclusion The collective experiences of professional Hmong American women from the 1.5 and second generation demonstrate that they are motivated to overcome the multiple oppressions that they experience as women of color. Although not a comprehensive study of the status of Hmong American women, the diverse lived experiences discussed in this chapter reveal the different ways that marginalized communities negotiate identities inside and outside ethnic groups. Collectively, they defy prevailing images of Hmong women as merely victims of Hmong patriarchy and actively participate in defining what it means to be Hmong women in America on their own terms, which does not necessarily depend on altering patrilineal cultural practices. Professional Hmong American women do challenge the gender inequity embedded in Hmong patriarchal practices, but because of shared racial discrimination, they are also committed to efforts that help to lift their ethnic group. The intraethnic sexism that they face has not deterred many prominent women from spearheading initiatives that affect Hmong communities. They consider their efforts to improve the lives of women and girls to be instrumental in advancing the social conditions of Hmong in the United States and beyond.

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Notes

1 “Mai Lee Chang,” Women @ NASA, September 11, 2017, https://women.nasa.gov. Throughout this chapter, I include the full name of each woman; thereafter, I use her first name. This is because several women have the same last name. 2 “Mai Lee Chang.” 3 For example, Gosia Wozniacka, “Hmong Women in California Break with Traditional Roles,” HuffPost, www.huffingtonpost.com, accessed October 12, 2015; Taeko Yoshikawa, “From a Refugee Camp to the Minnesota State Senate: A Case Study of a Hmong American Woman’s Challenge,” Hmong Studies Journal 7 (2006). 4 Choua Lee was elected to the Saint Paul, Minnesota, Public School Board in 1991. A decade later, Mee Moua became the first Hmong American to be elected to the Minnesota Senate. Both women have become leaders in their professions. 5 Migration scholars generally define the 1.5 generation as immigrants who arrived in the United States prior to age twelve. Being born and raised abroad enables them to have personal connections to the homeland, but as young children, they are able to acculturate into US society more easily than their parents. The second generation typically consists of individuals born and raised in the United States with at least one parent who is foreign born. 6 Louisa Schein, “Hmong/Miao Transnationality: Identity Beyond Culture,” in Hmong/Miao in Asia, ed. Nicholas Tapp et al. (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm, 2004). 7 Schein. 8 “2017 American Community Survey One-Year Estimates,” American FactFinder, https:// factfinder.census.gov. 9 The Midwest region is home to nearly 50 percent of the US Hmong population. See Mark E. Pfeifer and Bruce K. Thao, eds., The State of the Hmong American Community (Washington, DC: Hmong National Development, 2013). 10 Chia Youyee Vang, “Rethinking Hmong Women’s Wartime Sacrifices,” in Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women, ed. Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, and Ma Vang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 56–84. 11 Dao Yang, Hmong at the Turning Point (Minneapolis: Worldbridge, 1993), 23. 12 Gary Yia Lee, “The Religious Presentation of Social Relations: Hmong World View and Social Structure,” Lao Studies Review 2 (1994–95): 44–60, www.garyyialee.com. 13 Nancy Donnelly, The Changing Lives of Refugee Hmong Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 29. 14 Lee, “The Religious Presentation.” 15 Georgia Pabst, “Finding Peace: Chris Her-Xiong Profile,” Milwaukee Magazine, January 4, 2016, www.milwaukeemag.com. Having worked together on a number of projects for more than ten years, Chris Her-Xiong and I have had many conversations about growing up as refugee children. 16 Audrey Nowakowski, “From Laos to Milwaukee, Hmong Heritage Stays Strong in Charter School,” Milwaukee Public Radio, January 14, 2016, www.wuwm.com. 17 Charter schools are independently run public schools that are granted greater flexibility in their operations in return for greater accountability for student performance. 18 Chris Her-Xiong, email, November 29, 2017. 19 “Wisconsin,” US News and World Report High School Rankings, www.usnews.com, accessed April 27, 2017. I served on the Hmong American Peace Academy board of directors from 2009 to 2013. Since then, I have collaborated with some of its staff on a number of projects. From September 2015 to 2017, Chris Her-Xiong and I led a civic engagement project to increase civic participation in the Milwaukee Hmong community.

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20 As a former board member, I have had many conversations with parents about why they enroll their children at HAPA. 21 Chris Her-Xiong, informal discussion, Wisconsin, 2015. 22 Chee Yang, interview with author, Minnesota, 2014. Chee Yang is a pseudonym; she asked to not be identified due to her position. 23 Yang interview. 24 The exception is a female Hmong shaman. Following a ceremony, she sits at the head table with the men. Her role in animist Hmong society is revered since one must be chosen by shaman spirits to serve in this capacity. It is believed that spirits will choose only those who are generous and willing to help their community. 25 I participated in the 2013 Hmong across Borders conference in Minneapolis. Yer Chang was on a panel that discussed women and gender issues. 26 Quoted in Mark Roth, “A Hmong American Leader Describes the Changing Role of Women,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 24, 2014, www.post-gazette.com, accessed March 15, 2017. 27 Rev. Mao Her discussed her experiences as part of a January 2017 panel organized for the Hmong Leadership Institute in Milwaukee. 28 Suab Hmong Broadcasting, “Suab Hmong Community: Fundraising for Kashoua Yang Running for Judge in Milwaukee County,” YouTube, October 27, 2016, video, www.youtube. com/watch?v=6AAKBxrnnMU. Halfway through the campaign, her marketing strategists told her to drop her Hmong first name, Kashoua, and use her non-Hmong middle name, Kristy, to make her name sound more American. 29 Taeko Yoshikawa, “From a Refugee Camp to the Minnesota State Senate: A Case Study of a Hmong American Woman’s Challenge,” Hmong Studies Journal 7 (2006): 1–23. 30 I met with Nao Vai and Kristy’s relatives numerous times to strategize about the Hmong community fund-raiser and debriefed with him afterward. 31 I volunteered to serve as Kashoua Kristy Yang’s campaign manager from August 2016 through the end of December. Work commitments required me to turn over the tasks to another manager. She and I met to strategize for a year before she ran. 32 Keith Uhlig, “Wausau Woman Makes History in Hmong Council Election,” Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter, November 11, 2014, www.htrnews.com. 33 “Wang-Yu and Maychu Vu are MN Delegates to the National Democratic Convention,” Hmong TV News, August 16, 2016, www.hbctv.net. Maychy Vu attended several civic engagement activities that I co-organized in Milwaukee. I had the opportunity to learn about her motivations for creating an engaged Hmong American community and the strategies she thought were necessary for Hmong to gain political power. 34 Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, “Maiv PAC Wants to Improve ‘the Lives of Hmong and Immigrant Women,’” NBC News Asian America, September 13, 2016, www.nbcnews.com. 35 Cha Vang, interview with the author, Hmong National Development conference in Milwaukee, WI, April 23, 2017, where she received an Impact Award for her work from HND. 36 Vang interview. 37 Brenda Yang, interview with the author, Wisconsin, April 23, 2017. 38 Brenda Yang is planning to go to medical school and hopes to help build a healthier community. 39 For example, Panhia Yang and her brother, Kong Meng Lee, were stabbed to death by Panhia’s husband Chue Lor in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2013; coworkers and the attorney for Naly Yang were gunned down in Wausau, Wisconsin, in 2017 by her husband, Nengmy Vang.

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40 Some older Hmong American women have also begun to return to Laos to marry younger men and bring them to the United States. They tend to be women whose husbands have left them for younger women. 41 Chic Dabby-Chinoy, Abusive International Marriages: Hmong Advocates Organizing in Wisconsin, report, Asian and Pacific Islander Institute for Domestic Violence and Wisconsin Refugee Family Strengthening Project, 2012. 42 Bo Thao-Urabe, informal interview with the author, Wisconsin, April 22, 2017. 43 “Self-Starters: RedGreen River,” NBC Asian America, April 26, 2016, www.nbcnews.com.

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Stories and Visions across Generations Khmer American Women Shirley Suet- Ling Tang, Kim Soun Ty, and Linda Thiem The Struggles You Bear Do you understand the depth and beauty that lay resting in your hand? Your eyes tell a story, one you experienced firsthand —a dark and morbid history. The hurt and pain, the memories you’ve tried to discard, because of the future you hoped to gain. But in your silence, there is a story that has been blocked by a barbed-wired fence. You’re trapped in the Midway-to-Nowhere once again, a past relapsed. You cannot sleep as insomnia eats away your night but you’ve continued to leap. Did I ever tell you that who you are, the strength you have built, is a beauty that struggles bear? —Kim Soun Ty, March 2012

Introduction In the performance poem above, “The Struggles You Bear,” a second-generation Khmer/Cambodian American woman from Lynn, Massachusetts, reveals how legacies of the Khmer Rouge genocide—known as the killing fields, in which roughly one-fourth of Cambodia’s total population of 7.3 million died between 1975 and 1979 during Khmer Rouge government rule under Pol Pot—continue as embodied experiences of nightmares and insomnia that prevent her mother 439

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from resting peacefully.1 Kim raises questions about her own and others’ families who struggle to overcome the “hurt and pain” of war trauma, the rootlessness of living “Midway-to-Nowhere” even after resettlement, and the corrosive silence that hinders communication between first-generation Cambodian parents and their US-born or US-raised children. Given such burdensome challenges, Kim makes meaning of her mother’s story despite being “blocked by a barbed-wire fence” and visible only in her mother’s eyes. In valuing the firsthand struggles of her mother rather than avoiding, denying, or fearing them, Kim claims the strength and beauty embodied in her mother’s survival. The poem is a daughter’s tribute to her refugee mother, who has raised six children in a country where she does not speak the language or fully understand the culture. It also exemplifies the integrative, personal-political power of reflective and documentary storytelling across generations of Cambodian American women. More than forty years have passed since the first wave of roughly five thousand Cambodian refugees (parolees) migrated to the United States immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975. A second wave of 130,000 genocide survivors resettled here from refugee camps along the Cambodian-Thai border following the 1978 overthrow of the Khmer Rouge and the installation of the Vietnam-backed Hun Sen government in Cambodia. The emergence of underserved, underresourced yet vibrant Khmer refugee communities during the 1980s and 1990s—particularly in small cities such as Long Beach, California, and Lowell and Revere/Lynn, Massachusetts—generated intense local awareness of Khmer cultural profiles and needs with implications for larger policy issues of that era related to refugee resettlement, immigration and welfare reform, bilingual education, ethnic community development, and political empowerment.2 Few studies from that period aside from public health research, however, focus on gender dynamics, gendered realities in Khmer communities,3 or the critical roles of Khmer refugee women, many of whom were surviving widows of the Khmer Rouge genocide.4 Today, Khmer American women and their families continue to survive and adapt to legacies of homeland genocide and American-peculiar racialized poverty. The history of Khmer community development and the disproportionate burdens that refugee women pioneers carry are important contexts for understanding the numerous barriers and challenges their daughters and granddaughters of the second and emerging third generations encounter. In this chapter, we focus on the perspectives and experiences of second-generation Khmer American young women born during the late 1980s and 1990s in relation to the challenges they face across domains of family, school, and community in the metro Boston cities of Revere, Lynn, and Lowell, Massachusetts. In particular, we thematically highlight the importance of recognizing legacies of trauma, intergenerational connections, and the power of storytelling for Khmer American women and girls.

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Second-Generation Experiences through Digital and Written Stories Informed by community research, documentation, and critical analysis in Lynn, Revere, and Lowell, conducted by co-author Shirley Suet-Ling Tang during the 1990s and 2000s, this chapter draws methodologically upon digital stories, reflective writings, and creative expressions that the co-authors have gathered or coproduced from 2009 to 2016 through various curricular interventions and research/development platforms supported by the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass Boston). Our interdisciplinary and bilingual/bicultural methods of inquiry, expression, and coproduction through oral history, digital storytelling, performance poetry, autohistoria, public exhibition, thematic narrative analysis, and reflection-action praxis within structured Asian American studies environments have enabled Khmer refugee, immigrant, and second-generation women to document and share a wide range of personal, family, and community histories. Several of our source narratives come from an archive of more than 170 digital media products coproduced in Tang’s digital storytelling in Asian American studies course, “Asian American Media Literacy,” which document Asian American migration stories, transnational family histories, and a broad range of critical community issues ranging from health disparities and depression to racial harassment and veteran status to intergenerational trauma, resilience, and educational persistence. Based on a commitment to “coproducer knowledge,” which focuses on developing critical research approaches and generating socially contextualized data that reflect the voices, histories, and cultures of marginalized, underresearched populations,5 more than a dozen digital stories have been coproduced by Cambodian American students from immigrant/refugee family backgrounds in Lynn, Revere, and Lowell, including those of co-authors Kim Soun Ty and Linda Thiem. This archive represents an original contribution to Cambodian American community research and documentation with narrative content coproduced by an underresourced, underresearched population whose voices and family/community documentation would otherwise not be recorded institutionally.6 Rather than simply state the need for Cambodian American disaggregated data, we have actively sought to produce such data within our university and community locations.

Cambodian American Community Contexts Cambodians, along with Lao and Vietnamese, began arriving in metro Boston— the geographic focus of this chapter—directly through the refugee resettlement programs of Catholic Charities, the International Rescue Committee, and other voluntary agencies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Despite modest community

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development efforts linked to social services and bilingual education in the public schools, the realities of racial harassment and escalating rents in Boston forced many Cambodian residents to relocate to more affordable cities such as Chelsea and Revere and later Lynn and Lowell. Cambodian refugees also came to Massachusetts via secondary migration from other states throughout the 1980s, drawn by employment opportunities, progressive social welfare policies, and some of the first Cambodian Buddhist temples in the country.7 Many Cambodians found semiskilled factory jobs in plants that assembled electronics, computers, and medical supplies. By 1990, Lowell had become the nation’s second-largest Cambodian American concentration, with an estimated population of twenty-five thousand people, while the fifth-largest Cambodian community emerged independently in Lynn and Revere. A generation removed from the peak years of refugee resettlement during the 1980s, one out of ten Cambodian Americans in the United States (10.2 percent) in 2013 resided in Massachusetts. Only 14 percent of Cambodian Americans nationally hold a bachelor’s degree, compared with 49 percent of Asian Americans and 30 percent of Americans overall. Nearly one-fifth (18.8 percent) of Cambodian American families are poor, compared to 12.8 percent and 15.7 percent for the Asian American population and total US population, respectively, and the poverty rate is much higher for those Cambodian American families with children under eighteen years: 39 percent compared to 13.6 percent for Asian Americans overall and 22.2 percent for the total US population.8 Such dramatic educational and economic disparities, both nationally and locally, greatly impact the daily dynamics and quality of life for Khmer American women, including the second generation.9 Our findings are organized around seven themes that exemplify some of these important gendered and generational effects.

Restructured Refugee Families Legacies of war, genocide, and trauma have profoundly disrupted traditional family structures in Khmer American communities, deeply affecting not only the first generation of Khmer refugee women survivors but also their US-born daughters and sons. The initial overturning of traditional Khmer family structures in Cambodia resulted from forced family separations imposed by the Khmer Rouge regime in their Year Zero reshaping of Khmer society.10 Subsequent family redefinitions and reconstructions took place within Thai refugee camps as extended families, friends, and neighbors devised collective survival strategies to maximize precious resources such as per capita allocations of food rations and opportunities for faster humanitarian resettlement.11 Further crisisbased family redefinitions continued after resettlement due to divorce, escape from domestic abuse, incarceration, and deportation.

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Sally’s digital story provides a street-centered view of family redefinition.12 It opens with a recounting of her refugee father’s murder when she was a young child in Kansas. A few years later, her mother remarried and moved to Lynn. When Sally reached the eighth grade, her mother moved again—but without her—to another state. As Sally’s refugee family realities left her without any parents or legal guardians, she devised flexible family structures and alternative support through the help of her street friends and extended family members. She explains, “During high school years, I lived in Lynn, Revere, East Boston, and Everett. I stayed with friends in their parents’ homes.” When deprived of shelter, she “even slept in hallways and fell asleep on stairways.” She also rerooted herself in the Shirley Avenue area of Revere, where many Cambodian refugees had faced serious racial and street violence during the early years of resettlement: “Growing up . . . the Shirley Ave community became home to me. And the familiar faces became like a family.”13 Sally also found warmth from older Khmer refugees whom she met when she worked assembly-line graveyard shifts under the table. She recalls, “I remember the old Asian folks nodding, gesturing, commenting, and praising my effort for continuing school.” Lena’s digital story offers another example of nontraditional family structure and women-centered support, beginning with Lena’s birth when her refugee mother was only sixteen years old. During the early resettlement period, Lena’s parents constantly engaged in violent behavior at home. When Lena was three, the Massachusetts Department of Social Services (DSS) gave custody of Lena to her grandmother. Lena has difficulty remembering her parents because they were not present in her life. She felt “embarrassed, ashamed, abandoned,” growing up because her family was not an intact two-parent profile. After turning eighteen, Lena experienced renewed pains of childhood abandonment when she lost her age-based DSS support. Working full-time while attending school, she struggled greatly trying to survive on her own. Lena also created her own alternative family structure of strong women role models, including two older Khmer refugee women who guided her through these challenges. Lena’s grandmother provided her with love, care, and important values such as education by encouraging Lena to complete her high school degree even though many Khmer Americans in their Revere neighborhood frequently dropped out of school. Recalling how her grandmother also taught her everyday survival skills like cooking and cleaning, Lena wonders “how I would have survived if my grandmother had never taken me in.” In addition, a youth program director at UMass Boston (and one of the few 1.5-generation Khmer refugee women with a graduate degree in Massachusetts) served as a role model and mentor for Lena, especially in navigating the university. She “would invite me to get involved and to be a more active student,” Lena noted with gratitude.

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Family and Intergenerational Trauma, Violence, Depression, and Pathways to Healing As US-born children of genocide survivors, many Khmer American young women directly experience their families’ continuing traumas. In a written narrative, Melissa recalls, I was about 9 or 10 when I witnessed my mother’s form of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. We were in a room talking and standing around when we heard a low jet airplane flying by above us. . . . My mother grabbed my arm hard and went to the ground. I was panicking a little but was telling her that it was just a plane. However, she was convinced that it was a bombing. Thinking about this incident makes me sad because I saw a different side of her that I never really saw before. There was fear in her eyes and the trembling of her voice. I reassured her it was fine to calm her down and she mentioned about her experience in Cambodia briefly. She had lived through the bombings which were mostly from the US military.

Linda’s digital story uses “running” as a theme to capture the violent consequences of war, genocide, and refugee resettlement and to juxtapose how violence has affected both refugee parents and US-born children in ways that further widen the rift between generations. In the opening scene, Linda is running through a forest and narrates, “I am running away from you, Pa. The abuse is too much for me to handle. Stop yelling at Mommy and stop yelling at me. And stop drinking!” This scene is followed by a dramatization of her father as a teenager running to reach the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand, where many survivors of the killing fields fled and then languished midway to nowhere. The camera then zooms to a worn Boston newspaper article of her father’s experience during his early years of resettlement in the 1980s. The newspaper story details her father’s refugee relocation to East Boston, recounting various forms of urban violence—car vandalism, physical assaults, verbal abuse, and more—and referencing high unemployment rates and unaffordable housing costs. While narrating an emerging understanding of her father’s refugee resettlement context, Linda fast-forwards to a scene in which she is lying under her bed covers to shield herself from her father’s violence and the shrieks of pain from her mother and baby brother. In fear and anger, Linda runs away from her father, emotionally and physically, but develops anxiety and eating disorders and has difficulty focusing in school. At the climax of her seven-minute video, Linda engages her father on camera in a real conversation in which he reveals the violence he experienced during the Khmer Rouge period: “They bring my dad to kill.” Her father is seen crying with Linda as he recounts the story, and Linda’s narrative, which has consistently

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Figure 26.1. This screenshot is from the digital story of Linda Thiem, a co-author of this chapter. It reveals multiple public school photos taken when she was experiencing violence in the home largely as a result of her father’s experiences with war, genocide, and resettlement. Her digital story is of “running,” first from her father and then toward him, as part of the healing process. Photo by permission of Linda Thiem.

expressed her desire to run away from her father, shifts as she repositions her direction and declares, “I am running towards my father. I want to understand why did he hurt me and our family so much. I want to be able to let this go and forgive him.” Linda begins to recognize “the mental instability within the Cambodian American community” and her father’s own PTSD. In the final scene, Linda’s feet, which have constantly been moving, come to a halt as she states her intention to stop running and heal from the pain inflicted by violence. Lizzy also shares her intergenerational trauma and isolation as a secondgeneration girl in a Cambodian American household in Lynn in the late 1990s and 2000s: My parents played a huge role in my life. . . . They did not believe the world was a safe place, so they raised me to believe that too. Friends were not an option, and the only people I should associate myself with are . . . family only. Discipline was something big in my house with my parents. It was something that especially my mom would do, but even if she were to make me cry, it wasn’t like I would be able to run to the other parent for comfort.

Lizzy’s parents are both traumatized survivors of the Cambodian genocide. Growing up in such a household greatly affected her mental well-being. Like Linda, Lizzy experiences depression and anxiety—a reality shared by many other

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Khmer American women and girls. Her mental health struggles have, at times, prevented her from completing daily tasks like getting out of bed or attending school. She explains: My anxiety was always pretty bad. My heart would always jump out of my chest, and my hands would tremble doing everyday things like driving, having small talk with people. . . . My depression got worse in college to the point where I would cry about three times on a daily basis and I would have to see a therapist once a week. I would even have anxiety attacks, which I dreaded. I would never know when or where it was going to happen. . . . Why did my life have to be like this? Is it my entire fault?

Intersectional Isolation, Racial Discrimination, and Sexual Harassment The experiences of isolation and exclusion in school and community have also significantly affected the mental health of many Khmer American girls and young women. For some, the first instances of harassment occurred when they were as young as five years old. Alice, a second-generation Khmer American woman from Boston, reflects on her traumatic experiences: It happened in kindergarten, when I felt like I had no voice. I never spoke in the classroom and barely spoke amongst my peers. So I inevitably became an easy target for bullying. The major moments that have stuck with me, though, was the harassment I received from boys. It would happen on the playground, in the bathroom, and right inside the classroom. The most prominent memory . . . was when the boys in class would chase me down and force me to kiss them.

Even after mustering the courage to speak to a teacher, Alice was silenced: I felt the most powerless because it was also the first time I ever confronted the teacher about bullying. . . . Though I used my voice, I [also] felt the most voiceless . . . because no matter who I told, nothing could be done about the harassment. . . . I felt like I was doing something wrong by not being able to fight back. I felt immensely weak and lacked self-esteem.

In this case, the authority figure in the classroom irresponsibly ignored Alice’s call for help and reinforced the predatory paradigm of “boys will be boys.” In perpetuating racialized, sexist ideas by silencing a young “Asian girl” and allowing the boys to continue their violent attacks on her body, the teacher deeply affected Alice’s self-worth as a second-generation Cambodian American young woman.

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Lizzy recalled her middle school experience in her coproduced digital story. The only boy in her group of friends at school humiliated her in front of everyone by saying, “Oh, Lizzy, she has no body. She’s just flat.” Lizzy remembers, “It was the first moment I felt something was absolutely wrong with me. It began to consume me.” After this incident, Lizzy obsessed over her physical appearance. In one scene, Lizzy stands in front of her middle school, hugging her body as she stares intensely into the camera. She narrates over the image: “I didn’t want to speak Khmer anymore. I didn’t want to deal with anything that reminded me of what I was: crushed, hurt, anger, disgust. These aching feelings haunted me everywhere I went.” Further isolated from her own family, Lizzy soon lost her Khmer home language while “drowning in a sea of shame and insecurity” at the intersections of both racism and sexism in school.

Resisting Heterosexist, White-Dominated Standards of Behavior and Beauty The racist and sexist expectations for how “Asian girls” should look and behave are interlinked with Khmer American girls’ school experiences. Alice recalls that peers and teachers expected her “to be academically successful”: I fell into the stereotype of an Asian girl. I even looked Chinese. I was pale and small. I was always quiet. In elementary school I excelled in all my studies. I was the stereotype of both the “smart Asian kid” and the “quiet Asian girl.” As a result my teachers just began expecting me to know things. I was often called on to explain math problems even though I felt like I was clearly better at reading and writing. And whenever I made a mistake, the students reacted like I had done something impossible. So even though I never really cared about doing well in school, I did enough to reinforce the classroom’s image of what an Asian child is supposed to be and act.

School realities of bullying, harassment, and unrealistic expectations left Alice feeling uncertain about her Khmer identity, much like Lizzy. Confused and embarrassed, Alice similarly distanced herself from her Khmer heritage. She writes, I [immersed] myself in East Asian culture. I was learning Japanese and Chinese. I watched their dramas and was really into K-pop. . . . I started investing in skin lighteners in order to achieve that paleness. . . . I had internalized a lot of the racism that I experienced throughout my childhood.

Even though her daily realities as a daughter of Khmer refugee parents contradicted dominant Asian American stereotypes, Alice wanted to fit into the

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socioculturally prescribed mold of a “perfect Asian” and resorted to toxic methods such as trying to lighten her skin to appear East Asian rather than Cambodian. Alice articulates her disconnection from her family history, her food values, and her internalization of Western standards of beauty: My parents have rice with every meal and criticize me when I don’t want to eat rice. It always annoyed me. . . . I couldn’t understand the importance of rice or food for that matter. Growing up, I lived in abundance, surrounded by women and girls my age who purposely starved themselves for the sake of beauty. My perception of food and rice is different from my parents’.

Alice did not understand the significance of rice for elders who had endured starvation during the genocide in Cambodia and for whom rice is literally ingrained in their generation’s survival amid poverty-centered realities of refugee resettlement in the United States. Meanwhile, burdened by media images and peer pressures of white-dominated beauty norms for young women and girls “who purposely starved themselves”—an irresolvable difference from her family’s killing fields survival—Alice makes sense of such contradictions through reflectively juxtaposing her parents’ needy love for rice and her own feelings of needless guilt from consuming rice.

Scars as Sources for Health, Housing, and Environmental Justice Kim’s digital story more directly challenges mainstream media representations that perpetuate oppressive Western-dominated standards of beauty through the perspective of a Khmer American young woman who has internalized images of being “too dark” with “unruly hair” and has agonized obsessively over scars on her body due to eczema.14 Her story is grounded in the early period of Cambodian refugee resettlement, when Kim was a young child and her family was relocated to a cheap rental apartment in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her Khmer-speaking parents were told by doctors that she had a disabling health condition due to dangerously high levels of lead in her blood that had the potential to cause long-term physical and cognitive developmental delays. Over time, through family care and her own resilience, Kim eventually proved the doctors’ diagnosis wrong. Her story reveals the dangers and disparities facing Cambodian refugee families, including lead paint poisoning from their substandard rental housing, which was the underlying cause of her eczema and disability diagnoses.15 Kim’s video concludes with her performance poem, titled “I Am Beautiful,” in which she exposes the “scars” of her skin as “residues of lead” and “residues of genocide.” Facing the camera, she demands, “Define beauty to me. The scar-free skin or is it the scar-free soul? Scar-free? Why can’t you just leave me whole? Reclaiming me and my identity . . . and the skin that is mine. . . . This is me. In my entirety.” Kim’s

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Figure 26.2. Kim Soun Ty, a co-author of this chapter, examines the scars on her body and declares, “I am beautiful” and “beauty resides in me.” This photo is a screenshot from her digital story on her scarring. Permission provided by Kim Soun Ty.

revelatory scar-based reclamation of beauty inverts the moral hierarchy of US dominant discourse about “indebted” or “grateful” refugees by exposing the traumatic history of forced migration in the 1980s and 1990s. The Khmer American herstory documented in Kim’s video disputes refugees’ and immigrants’ presumed social, legal, political, and psychological obligations to the nation for “the gift of freedom,”16 and shows how conditions of danger, injury, and survival are not only consequences of the killing fields from which Kim’s family fled but are also rooted in their supposedly safe resettlement, where poverty, poison, and pain further scar the family’s US-born daughter. In both the process and product of Kim’s digital story, she clearly renders visible the lingering effects of lead on her body and soul.

Embodied Resilience and Step-by-Step Mobility Khmer American women have portrayed the economic, emotional, and spiritual costs experienced by family members living with and dying from cancer, dementia, and PTSD without equitable, culturally responsive access to Boston’s world-class health care system. Kolap provides a vision that links Kim’s assertion of beauty amid refugee family poverty, Alice’s experience with bullying, and Linda’s and Lizzy’s depression and questioning about life. Struggling with severe financial barriers and limited health care support, Kolap’s digital story provides the step-by-step process she demonstrates daily, independent of the multiple

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forms of discrimination and exclusion she experiences because of her race, gender, and culture as well as her mobility- and speech-affecting disability due to cerebral palsy. She explains: Whenever I walk into a local Khmer grocery store, I will get at least fifteen heads looking towards me like I’m some kind of poor creature or some shit because I use a walker, like I’m crippled because of how I walk. . . . My own Khmer people don’t understand a thing about disability. They give words of sympathy, criticisms, and shame. They probably think I had some bad karma in my past life. My mother [is] questioned. . . . “What happened to your child?” No wonder she doesn’t like to take me out in public or even in the Khmer community. I have overheard people talking behind my back, whispering, and asking about my disability. My Khmer isn’t fully advanced, but damn, I can understand every sentence running out of their mouths. . . . After experiencing such discrimination among my own Khmer people, I want to just stay away. . . . Where do I belong? . . . It leads me back to the question of my own identity as a Cambodian American, a woman, and an individual with a disability, living in a society where people can judge you every moment by appearance, race, culture, socioeconomic status, disability, and so on. . . . I am also trapped in a body that limits my dreams and happiness.

Kolap’s video opens with a close-up of her feet in gray Converse sneakers, moving forward with the assistance of a metallic blue walker. The sound of the walker along the street jangles as Kolap narrates, “No one knows what it is like to be in my shoes.” She describes the judgmental stares she has received every day growing up in Revere and asks: “Is it because I’m Asian? The way I speak? The way I look? Or is it the way I walk?” These oppressive experiences are the context for Kolap’s mental health struggles, including depression and suicidal ideation. In one scene, she hugs her legs with her head hung low and poignantly asks: “Why am I born like this?” Sitting near the edge of a building with the moving images and text tinted with red hues, she further reveals past thoughts of taking her life. Fresh text appears on screen in red: “I felt like a bother to my family. I felt like an undependable daughter. . . . I wanted to give up.” She then vocalizes the fundamental and devastatingly ironic question as a US-born daughter of the Cambodian genocide: “What’s the point of living?” The background music shifts as Kolap answers her own question. She writes on the screen: “My living may be different from other people’s, but it doesn’t mean that my life isn’t worth anything.” She adds, “My people raised me to be strong,” confirming the integral role of Kolap’s Khmer refugee family and community history in her persistence to continue moving forward with her life. At the video’s climax, Kolap describes her relationship to her walker, which has enabled her to journey to many places in her life. She recalls that someone stole her walker during her first year of college. The video shows Kolap sitting on the ground staring at

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her walker, which is no longer in arm’s reach. Her hands reach for the walker, but she cannot grasp it. The scene cuts to an image of a young Kolap laughing with her father and fading into her sitting by the ocean along Revere Beach as she narrates, “Everything can disappear before you realize it.” Kolap ingeniously connects losing her walker to losing her father, a survivor of the genocide, to cancer. Kolap makes meaning out of these experiences of loss through her resilience and determination to continue living a beautiful life despite the negative messages she receives from society and her own community. She narrates over a slow pan of her bare and natural legs and feet, “My life may not be perfect, but there are other beautiful things that I could live up to.” The concluding scene cuts to Kolap taking a few short steps without her walker, revealing her dreams of independence with the groundedness of her walking. Kolap’s gray Converse sneakers reappear as she walks down her neighborhood street with the metallic blue walker. The Five for Fighting song “Superman” plays in the background with the lyrics, “Even heroes have the right to dream, and it’s not easy to be me.”

Matrilineal Knowledge and Intentional Cultural Inheritance Because so many young adult men were killed by war and genocide during the 1970s, Khmer Americans have an extremely high proportion of women to men in the age range of sixty-five and older.17 As this generation of Khmer refugee grandmothers pass on, so do their complex stories of war, migration, loss, adaptation, and resilience. Though they typically do not record their own life stories, Kim models a process of documentation and expression with her grandmother’s herstory: But you are so strong. You had to be, right? Being a female merchant in a maledominated field meant you had to be stronger, smarter, and bolder. . . . You turned your own home into a grocery store. . . . You’re like a chameleon, always able to take on the challenges . . . life throws at you. You even found your children when the Khmer Rouge regime fell apart. When you went to the refugee camps, you were once again forced to separate from your children, but you found your way to the US ten years later. You found your way to a country whose language you didn’t speak. You found your way to us—your family—no matter the obstacles. You are strong.

Kim created a photo-collage book based on her grandmother’s life herstory. The book’s Khmer title, em kao, refers to her grandmother as “an intricate, complex, beautiful, courageous, brilliant, kind, strong, and resilient woman.” Rich with family photos and quotes from interviews on themes of life and death, Kim’s book ends with her reflections on the second generation’s engagement in Khmer American home making, “Maybe it starts with asking our grandparents to share their stories and to see what their wrinkles, each and every wrinkle, on their faces really mean.”

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Kim also learns traditional healing practices, such as coining, from her grandmother and mother. During the process, a metal coin is used to scrape the skin in order to , or “chase the wind out,” of a person’s body, which is believed to cause sickness. Kim writes: I was sitting in the living room watching T.V. when Ma [grandmother] came downstairs and told me she needed to teach me coining. . . . I always thought I would never learn the traditional Cambodian health practice. . . . It was awkward at first, having to carve a coin into my grandma’s back with baby oil, but I learned that coining was an important part in Cambodian culture and my family history through the conversations with my grandma. I may be the last person to learn the practice of coining in my family.

Sophea uses home-based food stories to explain the significance of , “prahok,” a fermented fish paste that is a Cambodian staple. Sophea grew up hearing her mother’s stories of being very poor in Cambodia and depending on and rice to survive. When Sophea eats the , the pungent taste transports her to her mother’s resilience. Through , Sophea feels proud of her heritage and identity as a Khmer American woman in a society that, at times, ignores and devalues her home culture. Intentionally documenting traditional family recipes is also a powerful means for Khmer American women and girls to learn about Cambodian history and culture as Saroun shows in her food story focused on desserts in family and community gatherings: My mother placed so much importance in preparing desserts such as sarai. . . . The distinguishing characteristic of sarai is the human experience of connection and relationships that matter most. My mother . . . made [sarai] for everyone because sarai is about community, celebration, and togetherness. This is . . . why sarai is my favorite dessert. . . . Sarai is there to sweeten our lives and remind us that life is to be enjoyed with those we love and those we cherish. . . . I can take on the role of making sarai that is about honoring my family tradition and celebrating life. I would like to make sarai someday so that I can share this tradition with my family and live up to the delicious legacy.

In her family oral history writing, Bopha shares two additional food stories: My mother went to the market and found canned food on sale, perhaps 2 for $1. She was so excited to find such a good sale. She bought $20 worth of canned food. She went home, prepared the dinner, and realized her soup was missing something. She put soy sauce on it and made it taste good and served her children. They

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were all contented. My dad arrived home after a long day at work and realized the food his wife had made was but cat food!! My whole family was in shock. We couldn’t help but laugh! This was an accident. My mother was new to the country, so she didn’t really know how to read English. . . . One day I . . . watched how my dad was eating fruit with rice and a little bit of dried fish. Finding this food combination weird, I teased my father. My father got really upset. . . . Later I found out that simple food like rice with dried fish and fruit is what kept my father and my family alive in refugee camps in Thailand . . . [where] they only had rice to eat and meats that would not rot—in this case dried fish. Fruits were an easy food resource to distribute. This dish was a way of survival and strength.

For Bopha, a young mother herself at the time, family food stories also serve as reference points to ground even younger third-generation Khmer American children about their grandparents’ refugee roots, rich stories of survival, and continuing legacies of resilience.

Discussion and Conclusion The examples of locally grounded voices, perspectives, and expressions from second-generation Khmer American women illustrate several important findings from the seven themes. First, with the theme of restructured refugee families, missing parents and poverty are on-the-ground realities for many Khmer American young women and girls. Sally and Lena drew on the strength of community elders and strong Khmer American women, respectively, to survive in school and in life. Second, the war and genocide in Cambodia continue to impact the current lives of not only the survivors but also their children. Melissa’s, Linda’s, and Lizzy’s intergenerational stories bring together powerful realities of history, displacement, family trauma, violence, and healing. Third, sexual harassment and bullying of Khmer American girls and young women have occurred in public spaces, including the Boston elementary school where neither authority figures nor family members intervened. Alice and Lizzy have courageously and publicly shared how young boys at school attacked their bodies, hearts, and spirits and well before the fall 2017 #MeToo movement disrupted the acceptance of sexual harassment within national politics, business, and the media industry. Fourth, Khmer American young women’s writings and digital stories offer original, important sources that challenge how heterosexist, white-dominated standards of beauty constrain how girls and women such as Alice think and feel about their bodies and behavior. Fifth, Kim’s digital story of her scars highlights

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health, housing, and environmental disparities, including the effects of lead poisoning caused by racialized poverty, and challenges the notion that refugees are indebted to US society. Sixth, Kolap’s video and written work of life using a walker clarify the intersectional complexities of gender, race, poverty, and disability while also claiming her place along the pathways lain by her ancestors, step by step. Though one generation removed from the genocide, her own lived reality shows her resilience yet compels her to ask and then answer the fundamental existential question: What is the point of living? Finally, family is not all trauma; it is also an asset. Khmer American young women have developed ways to cultivate a process and practice of herstorycentered, intergenerational culture and language preservation that draw on the experiences and wisdom of their grandmothers and mothers in everyday life. Kim’s loving photo collage and learning healing practices and Sophea’s, Saroun’s, and Bopha’s food stories serve as valuable sources of cultural knowledge that can be preserved and protected between (grand)mothers and (grand)daughters. They represent critical sources of pride, not simply as traditional cultural artifacts but also as embodiments of refugee resilience. Nearly fifty years have passed since the first Khmer refugees arrived in the United States. Yet Khmer American communities still struggle with some of the starkest challenges of any Asian American population, including educational disparities, poverty, trauma and violence as well as linguistic, cultural, spiritual, and political disempowerment. The stories, voices and visions of secondgeneration Khmer American women and girls in this study highlight their need for tangible resources to overcome everyday realities of inequality, including financial support, women-of-color mentoring, holistic health care, and access to higher education. Given that nearly four out of ten Cambodians in Massachusetts have less than a high school diploma and only 3 percent hold a graduate degree, the educational achievement gap facing Cambodian Americans is daunting.18 Yet it is insufficient to simply recommend further disaggregated data as the lever of change to achieve Khmer American (or Southeast Asian American) equity. Instead, in our own work, including the examples in this chapter, we have prioritized creating, modeling, documenting, and sustaining campus and community environments with long-term ecologies of support and relevant resources that enable Khmer American women and girls to empower and believe in themselves, individually and collectively, as keepers and makers of Cambodian American history, now and into the future. We return to our opening poem: Did I ever tell you that who you are, the strength you have built, is a beauty that struggles bear?

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1 We use the terms “Khmer” and “Cambodian” interchangeably throughout to refer to the people, language, culture, and history associated with the homeland and diaspora of the Kingdom of Cambodia, also known as Kampuchea, or . See chapter 11 by Yến Lê Espiritu in this volume. 2 Shirley Suet-ling Tang, “Challenges of Policy and Practice in Under-Resourced Asian American Communities: Analyzing Public Education, Health, Development Issues with Cambodian American Women,” Asian American Law Journal 15 (Fall 2008): 153–75, https:// doi.org/10.15779/Z384G4C; Tang, An Assessment of Khmer American Community Needs in Lynn, Massachusetts (Lynn, MA: Khmer Association of the North Shore, 2004), 1–29; Peter N. Kiang, “When Know-Nothings Speak English Only: Analyzing Irish and Cambodian Struggles for Community Development and Educational Equity,” in The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Boston: South End, 1994), 125–45; Sucheng Chan, Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 3 Linda Wetzel, Jennifer Huong, and James Heng, “Cambodian Cultural Profile,” EthnoMed, January 2, 1995, https://ethnomed.org, updated October 2008. 4 Nancy Price Graff, Where the River Runs: A Portrait of a Refugee Family (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993). 5 Mark McGeachie and Gerry Power, “Co-production in Scotland—A Policy Overview,” Scottish Co-production Network, 2015, www.coproductionscotland.org.uk. 6 Shirley S. Tang, “Digital Stories in Asian American Studies and Co-Producer Knowledge in AANAPISI Contexts,” Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions Research Brief, 2017, 1–20; Tang, “Chinese Diaspora Narrative Histories: Expanding Local Coproducer Knowledge and Digital Story Archival Development,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives (2016): 41–46. 7 Nancy J. Smith-Hefner, Khmer American: Identity and Moral Education in a Diasporic Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 10. 8 “Who Are Cambodian Americans?,” Center for American Progress, April 2015, https://cdn. americanprogress.org. 9 Hieu Minh Ngo, Shirley Suet-ling Tang, and ManChui Leung, In Our Own Voices: Asian and Pacific Islander Women and HIV/AIDS (Oakland, CA: Asian & Pacific Islander Women’s HIV/AIDS National Network, 2006), 1–26; Tang, “Challenges.” 10 Francois Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero (New York: Henry Holt, 1978). 11 Min-Fong Ho, The Clay Marble (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991). 12 With the exception of work by co-authors, pseudonyms are used for privacy purposes in relation to source materials in this chapter. For the protection of family members, the digital stories in this chapter are part of the UMass Boston Asian American Studies archive but are not available online. 13 Shirley S. Tang, “Learning to Build a Healthy Community: Youth Development for Street-Involved Cambodian American Young Women,” in Asian Americans: Vulnerable Populations, Model Interventions, and Clarifying Agendas, ed. Lin Zhan (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2003), 171–95. 14 Kim Soun Ty, “Scarred,” UMass Boston Asian American Studies Program, 2012, available online at AsAmSt370, “Scarred by Kim Soun Ty,” YouTube, June 12, 2015, video, www. youtube.com/watch?v=_6ztlnhcjPc. 15 Kim Soun Ty, “ Leadmines in the Homes of Cambodian Refugees in Lynn, Massachusetts” (MS capstone project, University of Massachusetts Boston, 2017).

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16 Mimi T. Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 17 “Southeast Asian Americans at a Glance: Statistics on Southeast Asians Adapted from the American Community Survey,” Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), 2011, www.searac.org. 18 Shauna Lo, “Data for Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Korean Americans in Massachusetts, 2010–2014,” Institute for Asian American Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston, 2014, www.umb.edu.

Reflections Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura

When the editors embarked on this volume, we sought out chapters that would center Asian American and Pacific Islander women and their perspectives, voices, and diversity. We also sought to underscore women’s agency and forward-looking approaches, especially studies featuring new dimensions along with newer topics and understudied groups and locations. As we have now seen, our contributing authors have done that and more. We view this resulting anthology as another step toward reenvisioning Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories and in making the new scholarship more available to a wider audience. With our encouragement, most of our authors have revealed aspects of their personal journeys in conjunction with their research. In asking our authors to share their voices and stories, the editors feel an obligation to also recount parts of our own academic journeys as early scholars of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s studies, a field that was only in its formative stage when we began researching and teaching. We take a moment here, separately and together, to briefly reflect on our career paths to illuminate how much has changed, and not changed, in the study of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s lives and to draw from the new work in this volume to spotlight future possibilities. Shirley Hune. My interests in migration and women originated in my family and location. I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, a city of immigrants. My non-sounding-Chinese surname, Hune (許), is from my paternal grandfather’s immigration documents, revealing its Toisanese pronunciation. The journeys and experiences of my parents opened my eyes to the Asian diaspora, transnationalism, and women’s agency long before I would pursue them in academe. Born in Canada, my father spent his adolescent years in China before returning to his Vancouver birthplace. Trained as a Cantonese opera singer and living in Zhongshan, China, my mother and a few of her friends accepted an invitation from the Chinese Benevolent Association to come to Canada to perform just prior to World War II. She was in her late teens, and for more than a decade, she toured with fellow opera performers to major cities in Canada and the United States and stayed in touch with them as they settled elsewhere. Through her, I was introduced to other complexities as she would remind me of her friends 457

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in Jamaica, New York City, Chicago, and Hawai‘i, and, of course, my “aunty” at the local coffee shop in Toronto, who was mixed race indigenous Peruvian and Chinese. As an undergraduate, I majored in Western history, intending to become a social studies teacher, then changed course. Coming to the United States at a time of social protests, I found Asian American studies and earned a PhD in American studies with a dissertation on the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. One of the few Asian Americanists on the East Coast, I joined the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) in its initial years, served as an early president, and was a founding member of the East of California group. Through my publications, I have sought to counter master narratives of race, gender, and immigration studies in history and in the present and to provide new scholarly interpretations and policies to change the knowledge base and academia respectively.1 My years as an academic administrator provided insights into the structure and workings of academe and led me to extensively detail the biases and obstacles that Asian American and Pacific Islander women face as students, faculty, and administrators and to make visible their voices and issues.2 Central to my teaching, research, and career are the inclusion and agency of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and women in scholarship and as scholars. Gail M. Nomura. I was born, raised, and educated in Hawaiʻi, a state with a majority population of Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans. My undergraduate history major focused on Asia and the Pacific/ Oceania. I spent three years of graduate research in Japan and wrote a dissertation on the reform of Japanese labor policy affecting women under the Allied Occupation of Japan. I entered the field of Asian American studies with a background in East Asian, Pacific/Oceania, US, and women’s history, became a founding member and president of the Association for Asian American Studies, and helped to found and develop what was then called Asian/Pacific American Studies Programs at the University of Michigan and Washington State University. When I taught my first Asian American women’s course in 1979 with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, there were no textbooks that I could assign. Instead, I compiled a course packet reader of an assortment of journal articles, excerpts of some book chapters, and other miscellanea. I chose material which provided students insights into the agency of women in making strategic life choices and taking action to implement these choices. I went on to teach Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s studies courses throughout my academic career and through my teaching, research, and publications sought to contribute to a better understanding of the diverse histories of Asian American and Pacific Islander women. I was always interested in hearing the voices of women in the past to learn from their own perspectives of their history of strength and resilience and their formation of families, communities, and nation. One of my first publications

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was on Issei (Japanese first-generation immigrants) working women in Hawaiʻi,3 and I recognized the resilience and agency of these immigrant women in my own Issei grandmothers, Tsuma and Ushii, who were widowed early and had the courage to go on and somehow raise their children through their own strength and resources. When asked to write a chapter for an anthology on women in the Pacific Northwest, I noticed that the women in the other chapters had names and included, for example, the first woman mayor of Seattle. Not wanting to write in generality of nameless Asian American women in the Pacific Northwest, I recalled a conversation with a woman who had told me about her Issei pioneer mother, who wrote tanka poems all her life. Tanka are Japanese short poems consisting of five units or lines with a pattern of syllables per line of 5-7-5-7-7 for a total of thirty-one syllables. When I interviewed that Issei woman, Teiko Tomita, I not only learned about the active literary world of Issei women but discovered that her tanka poems were an untapped historical resource. Her tanka were like intimate diary entries providing a view of her life, emotions, and motivations. I decided to write my chapter focusing on Teiko Tomita,4 a seemingly ordinary woman who was, in fact, extraordinary.5 Throughout my career I have focused on transmitting this history of seemingly ordinary lives that are extraordinary. Over the years, the editors have jointly pursued making the histories and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women better known. Our first edited volume, Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: An Anthology (2003), has been widely adopted in Asian American studies and women’s and gender studies courses among others. Since then, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States have become more diverse, post-1965 immigrants and refugees are well established into second and even third generations, earlier ethnic communities persist, and new generations of scholars are transforming how we do and understand women’s histories. We saw a critical need to incorporate more recent Asian American and Pacific Islander groups and topics and the latest research into a new anthology for use in the classroom. In completing this volume, the editors conclude that a new state of the field in the study of Asian American and Pacific Islander women is emerging in conjunction with dimensions of globalism and transnationalism, exclusion, empire and colonialism, and gender and intersectionality. We offer four observations below of how our authors’ scholarship advances the field further and provides exciting new developments to pursue. Voices. Scholars often speak of giving voice to subjects of their studies, but in this anthology, our authors are not giving voice to women, they are rather hearing and transmitting their voices, for the women have never been silent. Our authors seek to convey what these voices are telling us of the women’s experiences as they bring visibility to their lives and perspectives, which have often been made invisible by the willful ignorance and marginalization of the dominant patriarchal society. Their passionate voices resonate with readers who can

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then better understand and empathize with the first-person accounts of Asian American and Pacific Islander women who challenge racism, sexism, classism, nativism, colonialism, anti-LGBTQ and gender bias, sexual harassment, negative stereotyping and stigmatization, traditional hierarchical intergenerational relations, and other issues. Individual Histories or Life Stories. Given the editors’ earlier encounters with history that presented women largely as nameless and too often as victims, we are particularly excited by the individual histories of so many Asian American and Pacific Islander women that are provided by our authors. Their work represents leaps in historical recovery over recent decades. Still, many voices remain lost or still to be (re)discovered, and some perhaps never will be. New and underused archives, including community materials, help recover women in past history, while self-histories, oral histories, and interviews of Asian American and Pacific Islander women are also contributing to contemporary history. The ability to provide thicker descriptions of individual women, as exemplified in the chapters of this book, enriches interpretations of their everyday and exceptional lives. Life Course and Family/Generational Course. Historians are accustomed to documenting lives around particular events and situations. Several chapters in this book take a different approach as authors examine women’s lives over a lifespan and ask their subjects to recall their experiences in different times of their lives. Other chapters focus on a family’s life course and through generations to consider legacies of both pain and trauma as well as positive support and guidance. By shedding light on immigrant, 1.5-, and second-generation women in various eras and locations, the anthology encourages comparative studies of different generations. These approaches offer additional factors to ponder in assessing individual and family life development and change as well as continuity over time and generations as part of the history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and of women’s history. Expanding Diversities. Our authors include additional diversities to appreciate Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s lives. Some chapters introduce new activities, venues, and types of women’s participation than have been previously examined, such as engaging with churches and in legislative change. Others include studies of less-known ethnic groups, as well as mixed race, lesbians, and adoptees, and newer topics, such as opportunities and disadvantages of class differences and language as politics, to fill gaps and stimulate new research. The editors sought out contributors studying Asian American and Pacific Islander women in different regions of the United States and the Pacific Islands. Their findings are impressive in bringing to light the women’s histories in less-studied locations. To close, a 1993 publication projected that in 2020, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, given their rate of growth, would number about twenty

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million.6 In fact, the US Census estimated their populations together in 2017 to already be 23,113,887 (21,646,070 Asian Americans and 1,467,817 Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders), which includes those who are mixed race (the vast majority being of two races). Of these, females are estimated to be 52.2 percent of all Asian Americans and 50.6 percent of all Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.7 Barring changes in immigration policies, a follow-up study estimates that their population will be thirty-eight million (35.7 million Asian Americans and 2.3 million Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders) in 2040,8 nearly one-tenth of the US population, and a majority of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders will be women.9 New refugees, including those from Burma/ Myanmar, Bhutan, and Nepal are reminders of ever-changing diversities and circumstances.10 The greater numbers of Asian American and Pacific Islander women, their expanding opportunities, and own ambitions and capabilities are reflected in their increased participation in all facets of US society. More of them are in public service, ranging from elected office on school boards to the US Congress. They are serving in leadership positions in the corporate sector, communitybased organizations, and public institutions such as higher education. More have gained prominence as artists, authors, actors, entertainers, entrepreneurs, sports figures, and in other areas. We have not listed names as they would surely be outdated quickly. Yet barriers persist in employment access and advancement, namely, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and glass/bamboo ceilings regardless of the sector. In academe, Asian American and Pacific Islander women face major challenges, especially in gaining tenure and promotion.11 Moreover, the widening economic gap requires more attention to poverty, limited English language proficiency, access to health and mental health care and basic rights, and other disparities across and within ethnic groups. At the same time, the persistence of the model minority success story renders disadvantaged Asian American and Pacific Islander women and their concerns invisible. In presenting new histories and women’s voices and perspectives, this anthology has sought to advance interchanges exploring boundaries, frontiers, and borderlands of interactions and separations to open up new conversations and collaborations. What, then, will tomorrow’s Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories bring? As in the past, how much will change, and not change, about their lives? The women featured in this volume are the survivors. We are cognizant that other stories are untold here. Through the voices and lives of the subjects of our contributing authors and given the editors’ focus on agency, what comes through is the optimism of the women, the can-do, let’s try, just do it, risk-taking to attempt new things, to push against multiple barriers to make new lives for themselves and their families and to create new kinds of communities. The editors look forward to what unfolds in the future.

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Notes

1 Early examples include Shirley Hune, Pacific Migration to the United States: Trends and Themes in Historical and Sociological Literature, Research Institute on Immigration and Ethnic Studies, RIIES Bibliography Studies 2 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1977), which was one of the first uses of the term “Pacific Migration” in reference to Asian Americans and focused on how dominant themes of American exceptionalism, immigrants as Atlantic migrants, and assimilation omitted and distorted the experiences of peoples of Asian descent, including lack of attention to women and the diaspora; Hune, “Migrant Women in the Context of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families,” International Migration Review 25, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 800–17, which addressed women’s labor, inequality, and issues in a global context; and Hune, Teaching Asian American Women’s History (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1997), which is an early synthesis and reinterpretation of Asian American women’s lives and includes extensive bibliographic sources. 2 For example, Shirley Hune, Asian Pacific American Women in Higher Education: Claiming Visibility & Voice (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 1998); Hune, “Asian Pacific American Women and Men in Higher Education: The Contested Spaces of their Participation, Persistence, and Challenges as Students, Faculty, and Administrators,” in “Strangers” of the Academy: Asian Women Scholars in Higher Education, ed. Guofang Li and Gulbahar H. Beckett (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2006), 15–36; Hune, “Asian American Women Faculty: Navigating Student Resistance and (Re)Claiming Authority and Their Rightful Place,” Women of Color in Higher Education: Turbulent Past, Promising Future, Diversity in Higher Education 9 (2011): 307–35. These and other studies challenge stereotypes of the model minority and women’s proper place, offer strategies for survival, and make recommendations for institutional change. 3 Gail M. Nomura, “Issei Working Women in Hawaii,” in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings on Asian American Women, ed. Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 135–48. 4 Gail M. Nomura, “Tsugiki, A Grafting: A History of a Japanese Pioneer Woman in Washington State,” in Women in Pacific Northwest History: An Anthology, ed. Karen J. Blair (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 207–29. 5 As a result of this one publication, Teiko Tomita was recognized as an extraordinary person. She became the subject of a Washington State centennial video and a part of the first exhibit done by the Japanese American National Museum, was referenced in numerous publications, and was the subject of encyclopedia and biographical entries, including Susan Ware, ed., Notable American Women, A Biographical Dictionary, Completing the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 640–42. 6 Paul Ong and Shirley Hune, “Policy Recommendations,” in The State of Asian Pacific America: A Policy Report: Policy Issues to the Year 2020 (Los Angeles: LEAP Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1993), xvii. 7 “Selected Population Profile in the United States, 2017 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates,” United States Census, www.census.gov, accessed December 23, 2018. The US Census uses the term “Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander” (NHPI); for simplicity, we have adopted “Pacific Islander” to include Native Hawaiian here and throughout the volume. 8 Paul Ong, Elena Ong, and Jonathan Ong, “The Future of Pacific Islander America in 2040,” in “Special Issue on AAPIs 2040,” aapi nexus 14, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 1; Jonathan Ong, Paul

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Ong, and Elena Ong, “The Future of Asian America in 2040,” in “Special Issue on AAPIs 2040,” aapi nexus 14, no. 1 (Spring, 2016): 14. 9 Jennifer Chou, Priscilla Huang, and Miriam W. Yeung, “Building Power: Asian American and Pacific Islander Women in 2040,” in “Part 2: Special Issue on AAPIs 2040, Creating the Future in an Uncertain World,” aapi nexus 14, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 19. 10 Chia Youyee Vang and Monica Mong Trieu, Invisible Newcomers: Refugees from Burma/ Myanmar and Bhutan in the United States (Washington, DC: Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund, 2014). 11 Ethnic and gender stereotyping and the delegitimization of research by and about Asian American and Pacific Islander women by white male faculty, who are the majority in academe, are examples of barriers to their tenure and promotion as well as hiring. See Edith Wen-Chu Chen and Shirley Hune, “Asian American Pacific Islander Women from PhD to Campus President: Gains and Leaks in the Pipeline,” Women of Color in Higher Education: Changing Directions and New Perspectives, Diversity in Higher Education 10 (2011): 163–90; Kieu-Linh Valverde and Wei-Ming Dariotis, eds., Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars’ Resistance and Renewal in the Academy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019).

Acknowledgments

This anthology could not have been possible without our contributing authors. They are a remarkable group of scholars; a small number are emerging scholars and starting their careers, a few continue their distinguished careers or are recently retired, and most are in between, holding notable positions as academic researchers and leaders. They worked with us through all kinds of professional and life changes, joys and sorrows, and busy work and travel schedules. We are most appreciative of their vision and research in Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories and their commitment to this endeavor. We are indebted to the Asian American and Pacific Islander women whose voices and lives were shared in the chapters of this anthology. We also thank our University of Washington departments for their support and our students, colleagues, community members, and other readers of Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology (2003) for inspiring us to complete this new volume. We thank Barbara Sumida for allowing NYU Press to use and adapt an image of her original oil painting titled Passing Barge for the beautiful book cover design for this anthology. The editors are especially grateful to New York University Press for their confidence in and support of an entirely new anthology on Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories. Special thanks go to our editor, Jennifer Hammer, who provided key advice and worked with us through this volume and our previous one. We are very appreciative of Martin Coleman, Abby Graves, Lauren Bailey, and the staff of NYU Press for their assistance. We benefited greatly from anonymous reviewers; four critiqued the book proposal, and two commented on the entire manuscript. The final manuscript reflects many of their helpful suggestions. Special thanks go to our families—Kenyon S. Chan and Skipper, Stephen H. Sumida, and Emi, Kyle, Clare, and Alice Suzuki—for their loving support, understanding of our time availability, and never-ending patience. Shirley Hune Gail M. Nomura

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About the Contributors

Maria W. L. Chee is Senior Administrative Director for Faculty Development and Institutional Compliance in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Taiwanese American Transnational Families: Women and Kin Work (2005) and other published articles as well as the recipient of several grants, including a Fulbright and a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. Margaret M. Chin is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is affiliated with the Roosevelt House. She wrote the award-winning Sewing Women: Immigrants and the NYC Garment Industry (2005, 2015) and is working on two books—Stalled Ambitions: Second Generation Asian Americans in the Professional Work World and The Peer Effect: Lessons from the Best High School in America for Improving Our Educational System (with Syed Ali, a sociologist from Long Island University). Monisha Das Gupta is Professor in the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. A scholar-activist, she writes about migrant-led social justice movements in the United States. One of her first organizing efforts was her involvement in the 1990s to collectively formulate responses appropriate for South Asian survivors of domestic violence in the greater Boston area. Her publications include Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (2006). Yến Lê Espiritu is Distinguished Professor and former Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. An award-winning author, she has published widely on Asian American panethnicity, gender and migration, and US colonialism and wars in Asia. Her most recent book is Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (2014). She is a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. Ofa Ku’ulei Lanimekealoha Hafoka is a Tongan-American woman, born and raised in Hawaiʻi. She has a PhD in counseling psychology from Brigham Young University and is Assistant Clinical Professor at Brigham Young University. She is passionate about exploring, researching, and addressing the mental health concerns of underrepresented and underserved populations. 467

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Anne Perez Hattori is Professor of History and Chamorro Studies at the University of Guam. Born and raised on Guam, she is the author of Colonial Dis-Ease: US Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam (2004). Her research and teaching interests revolve around Guam, the Pacific Islands, gender, and colonialism. She is president of the Pacific History Association (2016–2020) and editor of the Journal of Pacific History (2018–2020). Mana Hayakawa is an Asian American dance studies scholar and educator. She is an academic administrator at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned her PhD in culture and performance. Her research centers on Asian American dancers and ways in which they negotiate their artistic identity within and against histories of empire and shifting terms of race, gender, and citizenship. As a dancer, she has also performed with several companies in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Shirley Hune (許佩娟) is Professor Emerita of Urban Planning at UCLA and Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Washington and previously served as Associate Provost, Hunter College, and Associate Dean, Graduate Division, UCLA. Her publications encompass Asian American history, women’s and gender studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander education, and the global politics of developing states. An early president of the Association for Asian American Studies, she received its Engaged Scholarship Award in 2011. Masako Iino is former President and Professor Emerita of Tsuda University, Tokyo. Her publications include Another History of US-Japan Relations: Japanese Americans Swayed by the Cooperation and the Disputes Between the Two Nations (2000); A History of Japanese Canadians: Swayed by Canada-Japan Relations (1997), which received the Prime Minister’s Award for Publication; People Who Supported Umeko Tsuda (co-editor and author, 2000); Searching Ethnic America: Multiple Approaches to “E Pluribus Unum” (editor, 2015); and Ethnic America (co-author, 2017). Krittiya Kantachote earned her doctoral degree from the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation, “Thai Entrepreneurs in Los Angeles,” examines Thai business owners in Los Angeles. As a recipient of the Royal Thai Scholarship, she currently holds a faculty position in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Srinakharinwirot University, in Thailand. Her research interests include gender, immigration, labor, and economic sociology. Nazli Kibria is Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of family, immigration, race, and childhood,

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with a focus on South Asia as well as the Asian American experience. Recent publications include Race and Immigration (with Cara Bowman and Megan O’Leary, 2014) and Muslims in Motion: Islam and National Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora (2011). Barbara W. Kim is Professor of Asian American Studies in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University, Long Beach. She is the co-author of Caring across Generations: The Linked Lives of Korean American Families (2014). Her research areas include intergenerational relations, aging, second-generation identities, and intersections of race and space in Asian American community and identity formations. Erika Lee, Regents Professor and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, is the author of multiple award-winning books, including most recently The Making of Asian America: A History (2015; Chinese edition, 2019) and America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (2019). Dawn Bohulano Mabalon was Associate Professor of History at San Francisco State University and author of Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California (2013), Filipinos in Stockton (2008), and other publications. Cofounder and board member of Little Manila Foundation, she received the Community Service Award from Asians and Pacific Islanders in Historic Preservation in 2016 and the Mid-Career Award from the Filipino Section of the Association for Asian American Studies in 2018. In Memoriam. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon (August 17, 1972–August 10, 2018) died suddenly in Kauaʻi, Hawai‘i, while with her family on vacation. Born in Stockton, California, she earned a BA and MA in Asian American Studies at UCLA and a PhD in American history from Stanford University. A respected teacher, historian, author, filmmaker, poet, community leader, and activist, Mabalon specialized in Filipina/o history and situated everyday culture, such as foodways, as ethnic and women’s history. Colleagues say that she dedicated her life to giving to others. Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor is Professor and founding member of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Director of the department’s Center for Oral History. Her book Kuaʻaina: Living Hawaiian Culture (2007) won the Kenneth W. Balridge Prize for best book in any field of history written by a resident of Hawai‘i from 2005 to 2007. As a member of the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana, she helps provide stewardship of the island of Kanaloa Kaho’olawe.

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Kimberly D. McKee is Director of the Kutsche Office of Local History and Associate Professor of Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies at Grand Valley State University. She is the author of Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States (2019). Soniya Munshi is Associate Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York, where she teaches sociology and Asian American Studies. She has worked in the antiviolence movement for more than twenty years with groups such as Manavi—An Organization for South Asian Women, INCITE!, and Project Hajra. Her current research concerns relationships between gendered violence, the carceral state, public health, abolition feminisms, and racialized migrants in the United States. Phonshia Nie is an independent scholar who has served on the board for the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum, previously worked as the Asian American Community Archivist at the Austin History Center, and taught courses at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a PhD in history from Northwestern University. Gail M. Nomura is Associate Professor Emerita of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. She served as Director of the Asian/Pacific American Studies Program at the University of Michigan and Washington State University. Her publications include Asian/Pacific Islander American Women (co-editor and author, 2003) and Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest (co-editor and author, 2005). She is a founding member and past president of the Association for Asian American Studies. Trinity A. Ordona is a recently retired Instructor of LGBT Studies at City College of San Francisco and the recipient of numerous awards for her transformational teaching and community organizing work. In 2008, she was named among the “20 Most Influential Lesbian Professors in the US” by Curve magazine. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the labor and migration of women from the Philippines. Her latest book is a revised edition of her classic study on Filipino domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles, Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work (2015). Joy Sales is a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. She received her PhD in history at Northwestern University and is a recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship in the

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Philippines and the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. She is a scholaractivist involved in GABRIELA, an international alliance dedicated to women’s liberation and genuine democratic change in the Philippines. Sharleen Santos-Bamba is Associate Professor of English and Chamorro Studies at the University of Guam and serves as Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. Her research interests include Chamorro language and literacy, Chamorro women, identity, and language and literacy acquisition. M. Luafata Simanu-Klutz is Associate Professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she teaches Sāmoan literature, respect and ceremonial languages, and history. Her most recent publications include the special issue of the Amerasia Journal titled “Pacific Island Languages in Diaspora” (2017) and ‘O Tāfaoga a ‘Ālise i le Nu‘u o Mea Ofoofogia (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Sāmoan) (2013). Shirley Suet-Ling Tang (鄧雪齡) is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies in the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has nearly two dozen publications in print and received the Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at UMass Boston in 2016, making her the first woman of color to gain this honor in the university’s history. Cathy J. Tashiro is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is the author of Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed Race Americans (2013) and other publications on mixed race and the use of race in health care research. Linda Thiem is Instructor in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Program Specialist in the Asian American Student Advancement Program at Middlesex Community College. Kim Soun Ty is Instructor in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is a PhD student in the Global Inclusion and Social Development program at UMass Boston, with a research focus on intergenerational healing, health, and education in the Khmer diaspora. Halaevalu F. Ofahengaue Vakalahi is a Tongan-American immigrant woman, born in Tonga and raised in Hawaiʻi. She is Professor and Dean of the College of Health and Society at Hawai‘i Pacific University. Publications include numerous peer-reviewed articles, chapters/references, and co-edited/co-authored books,

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including Transnational Pacific Islanders and Social Work (Vakalahi & Godinet, 2014) and The Collective Spirit of Aging across Cultures (Vakalahi, Simpson, Giunta, 2014). Chia Youyee Vang is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee. She is the author of Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora (2010) and Fly until You Die: An Oral History of Hmong Pilots in the Vietnam War (2019). In 2016 she co-edited the anthology Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women. Linda Trinh Võ is Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and former president of the Association for Asian American Studies. She authored Mobilizing an Asian American Community (2004); co-authored Vietnamese in Orange County (2015); and co-edited Contemporary Asian American Communities: Intersection and Divergences (2002), Asian American Women: The “Frontiers” Reader (2004), Labor Versus Empire: Race, Gender, and Migration (2004), and Keywords for Asian American Studies (2015). Judy Tzu- Chun Wu is Professor of Asian American Studies and Director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. She authored Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (2013). She is collaborating with Gwendolyn Mink on a political biography of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color US Congressional Representative and the namesake for Title IX, renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act after her death in 2002. Alice Yang is Provost of Stevenson College and Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She codirects the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories and has served as a director of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program. Her publications include Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (2007), Major Problems in Asian American History (2003, 2017), and What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? (2000). Christine R. Yano, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa has conducted research on Japan and Japanese Americans with a focus on popular culture. Her publications include Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawaii’s Cherry Blossom Festival (2006), Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways (2011), Pink Globalization:

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Hello Kitty and Its Trek across the Pacific (2013), and Straight A’s: Asian American College Students in Their Own Words (2018). Grace J. Yoo is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She has co-authored/co-edited four books, including Caring across Generations: The Linked Lives of Korean American Families, Handbook of Asian American Health, Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today, and Koreans in America: History, Identity and Community.

Index

Figures followed by n refer to an endnote, followed by an f to an illustration 1.5 generation: definition, 4, 419n1; Vietnamese American women, 205–18

Anti-Violence Advocates Against Deportation (AVA), 339, 346, 347–48, 349, 353n20, 353nn24, 25; end to ICE-police collaborations Abiko, Kyutaro, 53, 61–62, 64 and detainers, 349 Abiko, Yona, 53, 60–63, 62f; education, 60; fun- API LGBTQ (Asian and Pacific Islander draising for Joshi Eigaku Juku, 63–64, 66–65; lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer), 211, Joshi Seinen Kai, 62; Kengaku Dan, 62–63; 218, 321–337; and children, significance marriage, 61 of,  325, 331, 333; “coming out,” 326, 329; adoptee: adoptee authored productions, 357– “coming out resources”: Beloved Daugh69; angry, 361, 364; and Korean War, 357; ter (MAPBLN), 329–31, 330f; Coming Out, orphan, 357, 359–60, 361, 366–68; overseas Coming Home (API-PFLAG Family ProjKoreans, 369 ect), 327, 329; Fire (Deepa Mehta), 324; adoption: humanitarian, 360, 363, 368; Honor Thy Children (Molly Fumia), humanitarianism, 360; child-saving, 360, 328; Saving Face (Alice Wu), 324– 363, 366, 368; marketplace, 367; sponsor325, 333; There’s No Name for This (Ming ship advertisements, 359; transnational Yuen S. Ma and Cianna Pamintuan adoption industrial complex, 368. See also Stewart), 329; The Wedding Banquet (Ang adoptee Lee), 323–24; community and family African American, 88, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, rejection, shame, and fear, 322–23; family 140, 142, 305, 309 and parental acceptance of, 322, 325, 332– agency, 5, 8, 11, 49; defining, 12, 16n10 34; organizations: API Family Pride, 322, Aguon, Katherine, 297, 300 328, API for LGBT Equality-Northern Aizeki, Mizue, 347, 348, 349, 351n1, 353n20 California, 332, API for LGBT EqualityAlliance of Filipinos for Immigrant Rights and Southern California, 332, MAPLBN Empowerment (AFIRE), 270, 279 (Mandarin Asian/Pacific Lesbian and Alofaituli, Susie Ruta O’Brien, 163–64; Quality Bisexual Network), 329–331. See also Image, Inc., 163 LGBTQ; marriage equality; Taiwan: and American Sāmoa, 3, 157–58; deed of cession, same sex marriage 157; matai (chiefly system), 157; rights to apparel industry. See garment industry customary land and titles, 157; outmigration, Armington, Mariano “Bob,” 82 158; religion, 157; Tripartite Convention of arranged marriage, 381 1899, 157; unincorporated US territory, 157– Asian American: diversity of groups, 2; as 58; US nationals, 157–58 mixed race, 4; population census/statistics, Americans for Democratic Action, 304 4–5, 460–61; as a social and political conAngel Island Immigration Station, 46–49 struction, 2 anti-Asian exclusion movement, 60–61, 65, 66; Asian American dancers, 106–20; choreograopposition to, 65–66 phy, 107–9, 110, 114, 119; friendship network, anti-miscegenation laws, 142, 146; and Asian 107, 113–15, 118; novelty acts, 109–10, 112, ethnic groups, 142–43. See also Loving v. 115; and Orientalism, 106–12, 118–19, 120n7; Virginia (1967) training in, 108, 110, 111, 114, 116, 119. See also anti-Muslim racism, 340, 343–44, 345, 346, 350, Chin, Patricia; Tam, Ivy; Toy, Dorothy; Toy 351, 352n6 and Wing; Yee, Cynthia 475

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Asian American mixed race women, 141, 142, 143–53; of Chinese heritage, 143–44, 148– 49; of Filipino heritage, 146–48, 150–51; of Indian (South Asian) heritage, 149–50; of Japanese heritage, 144–46 Asian American movement, 115, 224 Asian American Studies, 8, 9, 10, 11 Asian Americans for Action, 178 Asian immigrant women: as “cheap labor,” 233–34; educational attainment, 226–27, 233; as entrepreneurs in small businesses, 223, 229–31; and labor force participation, 224–27; as laborers, unskilled, 223, 227–29, 233–34; as professionals, health care, 224, 232–33; as workers, low wage/service, 224, 227–29, 235n2. See also caregivers; specific Asian American ethnic groups assimilation, 137, 362; gendered, 126, language as gendered performance of, 128–29, 137 Bagai, Kala, 45 Bahadur, Sujaria, 39 Bangladesh, 374–75; and immigration to the US, 376–77; and labor migration, 375, 385 Bangladeshi Americans, 376–77; community organizations, 383–85; immigrant women, 374, 376 Bantillo, Virginia, and daughter Angelina and husband, 77–79 Bautista, Anita, 76 Beltran, Maria Abastilla, brother and husband, 77 Bemis, Polly (Lalu Nathoy), 49 Bernstein, Elizabeth, 339. See also feminism(s): carceral Bhagat Singh Thind US Supreme Court decision (1923), 45 Bishop, Bernice Pauahi, 26; estate, 26, 35n33 Bohulano, Conception M., 75, 76f, 80; and husband, Delfin, 79; and labor migration, 375, 385; Bourdieu, Pierre, and social class reproduction, 254, 256, 265 Brigham Young University, 158, 392 Bryn Mawr College: and education of Ume Tsuda, 53, 56; influence on Joshi Eigaku Juku, 58; Japanese Scholarship program, 57, 58; support for Joshi Eigaku Juku, 64 Buell, Evangeline Canonizado: and family members, 78; and food celebrations, 81 Cambodia, 439 Cambodian American refugees: and instability and PTSD, 439–40, 445. See also Hmong;

Khmer/Cambodian American Women; Khmer/Cambodian Americans; Vietnamese American 1.5 generation women; Vietnamese American refugees Cambodian women, 189, 196, 198, 201; and gender relations, 196, 198; and mental health, 200; and reproductive rights, 200– 201; and sexual abuse, 193, 195; and welfare, 198–99 Cao, Lan, 207–8, 210, 218, 219n12 caregivers, 227–229; ambivalence about being, 412, 414–15 caregiving, 407, 417–18; from afar, 411, 414; 419n1; community and organization-based, 418; costs of, 417, 421n35; cultural expectations of, 409, 412–13, 419; by daughters, 407, 412–13, 416, 417, 419; and financial support, 410, 415; gendered, 409, 413; and health, 412, 415; in immigrant families, 408; and in-laws, 415–16; and institutional barriers, 408, 417; Keiro, 418; motivations for, 410; from near, 410–11; On Lok, 418; paid, 409; Penn Asian Senior Services (PASSi), 422n40; and sibling negotiation, 411–12, 413–14; and support for caregivers, 412, 417; unpaid, 409. See also older adults Carido, Camila Labor, 46, 73–74, 75, 77; and Leon Carido, 77 Castillano, Bibiana Laigo, 78 Chamorro (CHamoru, Chamoru), 4, 6n2, 287–88; cosmology, 289; Fino’ Haya, 301, 303n48; Inifresi, 287, 299; Kumision I Fino’ Chamorro (Chamorro Language Commission), 297–98, 300–301; language, 287–88, 290–302, 302n5, 303n48; 303n39; social and political organization, 289–90 Chamorro women: language activism, 297– 300, maga’haga /maga’lahe, 289–90, 302; as mothers, 288, 289–90; matrilineal, 289–90; and mother tongue, 288, 292–97, 301–302 Chang, Mai Lee, 423, 426 Chang, Yer, 428 Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant, 129–32; opening opportunities for women, 138; queens, 131–32, 134, 136, queens as representative of Japanese community, 137; and “Standard English,” 130, 131,132; 134 Chin, Patricia (Pat), 106, 108, 110, 112–13, 114, 116, 118, 119. See also Asian American dancers Chinatown nightclubs, 106–8, 109, 110–11, 113, 115, 119; employment and wages, 110–11; Forbidden City nightclub, 106–8, 110–11, 115, 117, 119, 120n5

index

Chinese Americans: as entrepreneurs in garment industry, 240–41; in the US South, 88, 89, 91, 92, 102. See also Chinese American women; Chinese immigrant women garment workers Chinese American women: as immigrants pre-World War II, 40–42, 46–48; Inez Lung, 87–89, 92–102; and Southern Baptist Church, 87–102; Dancie Yett Wong, 87–89, 95–102. See also Chinese immigrant women garment workers Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 37, 41, 90, 239 Chinese immigrant women garment workers, 242–50; and childcare, 241–43, 250; and family roles and responsibilities, 243–45, 251; and garment industry strike of 1982, 246–49; as ILGWU union workers, 245–49; as income earners, 243–45, 251; and workplace friendships and networks, 249–50, 251 Chinese School of Mississippi (Cleveland Chinese Mission School), 87, 91, 96–97, 99, 100–101 Chomet, Sun Mee, 368–69 Christianity: and middle-class respectability, 95–97, 101–2; and white American evangelical practices, 89–90, 102 citizenship (US): gendered citizenship, 130; global citizenship, 138; language as mark of, 127 Civil Rights Act (1964), 315 classism, 278, 280 Cold War militarism, 360 colonialism, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15n6, 38, 49; British, 38; Japanese, 38, 43–44; Spanish, 37–38; US, 38, 45; Western, 157 Columbia University Strike of 1968, 140–41 Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), 2–3 coolie women, 39–40 Cordova, Dorothy (Laigo), 76, 78, 79; and husband Fred Cordova, 79; and mother-in-law, Lucia Cordova, 79 Dacuyan, Henry, and sister Helen, 76 Delano grape strike and boycott, 81–82; and United Farm Workers, 82 de San Juan, Mirrha-Catarina, 39 deportation, 338, 340, 342, 344, 347, 348, 351; and criminal convictions, 347, 348, 353n21; fingerprints, 338, 347; New York State Working Group Against Deportation, 347, 353n20, 353n22; and the Trump administration, 353n21

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477

diaspora studies, 9, 14n4 domestic violence, 338, 339, 341, 342, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348; anti-dv movement, advocates and organizations, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342–43, 345–46, 347, 348, 350, 352n11; criminalization, 339–40, 346, 348, 349–50; and deportation, 338, 342, 347–350; faith and faith-based groups, 344, 345, 347; and police, 338, 339, 346; restraining orders, 338, 339; safety plan, 338; transnational, 339. See also gender-based violence; South Asian women’s organizations; Violence Against Women Act domestic workers, 272–73, 275–76. See also caregivers; Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, 272, 275, 276, 279; and Ai-Jen Poo, 276 Dong, Arthur, 324, 335n14 Dungca, Bernadita Camacho, 287, 297–99, 298f Dunkle, Margaret, 312–13, 314 EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa Program, 256, 267n7 education (US): busing, 314–16; childcare/ early childhood education legislation, 304, 306–10, 317; educational equity, 310–16; gender equity, 309, 311, 314, 316; integration, 314–16; physical education, 313; Russianizing/Russianization, 309–10; Title IX, 304, 306, 310–316 education (Japan): Kuroda, Kiyotaka, 54; Meiji “civilization and enlightenment,” 54; Peeresses’ School, 56, 60; sending students abroad in nineteenth century, 54–55, 57; of women, 53–54, 56, 58–60, 65, 66. See also Joshi Eigaku Juku emotion work, 408, 411, 417 empire. See colonialism Endo, Mitsuye, 174 English-only policies, 293, 295, 299–300 Eurasians, 143–44 exclusion, 10. See also anti-Asian exclusion movement; Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 Fa’a’amerika, (the American Way), 163 Fa’asāmoa (the Sāmoan Way), 155, 156, 157, 158, 163, 164, 168; aga’ifanua, 155; aganu’u, 155; ‘āiga, 155; ancestral ethics, 155, 168; fa’alavelave (obligatory economics), 162, 165, 168; Fa’amatai (chiefly system), 166; fa’atamāli’i (chiefly), 156

478

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Fahu system (Symbolic Matriarch), 390, 393– 94, 400–401. See also Tongan-American women Fall of Saigon, 4 fanga fa’e (many mothers), 394–95. See also Tongan-American Women feminism(s), 304–6, 310, 317, 339, 340, 341; carceral, 339–40, 343, 348, 352n3, 352n4 feminization of labor, 271 Figiel, Sia, Where We Once Belonged, 170n13 Filipina American women activists, 269, 273– 80; as caregivers and domestic workers, 269, 272–73, 275–76; as nurses, 269, 271–75; in support of undocumented Filipina/os, 278– 80; and unionization of nurses, 274–75 Filipina American women: as caregivers, 22729; and community building, 71–84; constructed as epitome of “tender loving care,” 273; and cooking and cuisine, 75, 77–78, 81; and Delano grape strike and boycott, 1965– 1970, 81–82; as entrepreneurs, 78–79; and ethnic identity formation, 71; and families, role in sustaining, 71, 74–77, 83–84; gender roles and power, 71, 77–79, 83–84; as immigrants pre-World War II, 45–46; as laborers in agricultural camps (campos), farms, plantations, canneries, 71, 74–77; as nurses, 232–33; in post-World War II prosperity, 79–81 Filipina/o Americans: in Chicago, 269–71, 280; and families, 71; and food, significance of, 72, 83–84; and men’s cooking skills, 71, 80, 81; study of, 72 Freely Associated States (FAS), 3 Freycinet, Louis Claude de, 290 Funabiki, Kiku Hori, 181–82, 184f Gabbard, Tulsi, 160–61 Gadar (Indian Nationalist) Movement/Party, 45 garment industry, 239; in New York City, history of, 239–41; piece rate, piece work, 242; quicktime, 249. See also Chinese American women; Chinese immigrant women garment workers gender, 37–38; as a category, 10–12 gender-based violence, 342, 350, 351. See also domestic violence; South Asian women’s organizations; Violence Against Women Act gender justice, 340, 347, 351 gender roles, 101–2 Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907–1908, 42–43, 47

globalism/globalization, 9, 11, 12, 14n2, 223–24, 271, 280; and Asian immigrant women, 224–34 Gong Lum v. Rice: US Supreme Court decision (1927), 87, 98–110 Gould, Clotilde Castro, 297, 299–300, 299f Grant Avenue Follies, 116–18 Guam, 2–3, 288–89; American colonial rule, 288–89, 290–91, 302n18; colonization, 288–91, 295, 302; division from Northern Marianas, 288–89; English-only policies, 293, 295, 299– 300; indigenous Chamorro, 288; Japanese occupation, 291; Kumision I Fino’ Chamorro (Chamorro Language Commission), 297–98, 300–301; Liberation, 291–92, 295; Organic Act, 292, 295; Spanish-American War (1898), 290; Spanish colonial rule, 289–90; World War II, 288–89, 291–92, 294, 300. See also Chamorro; Chamorro women Guhuthakurta, Leelabati and Seeta, 48–49 H-1A visa, 271 H-1B visa, 225, 227, 231–32 H-1C visa, 232 H-4 visa, 225, 227, 232 Hafoka, Ofa Ku’ulei Lanimekealoha, 400–401 Hafoka, Tali Alisa, 389f haole (white) women, 125 Hapa, 140 Hart-Celler Act of 1965. See Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 Hawai‘i, 2, 3, 21; 1978 Constitutional Convention (ConCon), 32–33; early social system, 23–24; English Standard School system, 126–28; Hawaiian monarchy period, 24–28; Pearl Harbor, 19, 27; statehood years, 29–33; territorial years, 28–29; tourism, 125, 134, 138, volcano, 22–23, 30. See also Native Hawaiian; Native Hawaiian women Hawaii Creole/“Pidgin” English, 125, 127–29, 137, 138n3l, 311; code switch, 128–29; gendered, 128 Hayashi, May, 136–37 Her, Rev. Mao, 429–30 Her, Sia, 428–29 Her-Xiong, Chris, 426–27 Herzig-Yoshinaga, Aiko, 178–79, 185 HIV/AIDS, 322–23, 328, 336n27 Hmong: in Ban Vinai refugee camp, Thailand, 423; in Indochina/Cambodia/Laos/Vietnam, 424–25; patriarchy and gender relations, 425–26 Hmong American Peace Academy (HAPA), Milwaukee, WI, 426–27. See also Hapa

index

Hmong American professional women: and community organizations, 426–27, 433–34; gender inequality, 424, 426–33; 435; and political activism, 432–35; and RedGreen Rivers in Southeast Asia, 435 Hmong Americans: and colonial mentality, 426–28; demographics, 424; domestic abuse, 434–35; international marriages as form of sex trafficking, 434–435; as refugees in United States, 423; and sex tourism, 435; and sexism, intraethnic, 427–33, 435 Hmong Innovating Politics (HIP), 433–34 Hmong women, 304, 310, 311, 317, 318; and family life, 191, 193; as nurses, 192; as soldiers, 191; and story cloths, 196; and welfare, 198, 199–20 Holt, Harry, ā and Bertha, 359; Holt International (adoption program), 359 homophobia, Asian beliefs and values, 322–33 homosexuality. See API LGBTQ; LGBTQ  Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce (HJJCC): established 1949, 129; Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant, since 1953, 129–32 Hope Community Academy, St. Paul, MN, 433 hula, 38, 28, 30–31, 32 identity, 8, 10, 11, 12; formation of, 141. See also mixed race identity Iiyama, Chizu, 175; Women’s Concerns Committee, 183, 184f immigrant bargain, 375–76 Immigration Act of 1917 (Asiatic Barred Zone), 48 Immigration Act of 1924, 43, 48, 65, 74 Immigration Act of 1990, 236 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 347, 349, 353n21 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act), 4, 7n4, 49, 82, 148, 224, 226, 240, 256, 270–71; impact on immigration, 4 imperialism. See colonialism indigenous studies, 10, 15n6 indigenous worldviews, 5 Inifresi (anthem), 287, 299 Inosanto, Mary Arca, 74–75 intergenerational relations, 407; and conflicts, 414–15; emotional closeness, 412; financial support, 408, 411; and gender, 416; and in-laws, 415–16; parental sacrifice, 410; sandwich generation, 414. See also caregiving

| 479

International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), 238, 243, 245–49 intersectionality, 10–11, 16n11 Itiliong, Larry, 81 Jamero, Apolonia and Ceferino, 76; and daughter Luna, 76, 79 Japanese American community, 53, 61–63, 66 Japanese American mass incarceration, 173, 174–75, 185, 186n1; changes in family and community life, 176; Crystal City camp, 185; Gila River camp, 178; Heart Mountain camp, 182, 48; impact on women, 176–78; loyalty questionnaire, 174–75; Manzanar camp, 179, 185; Nisei Young Democrats, 175; Pearl Harbor, 112, 181, 184, 185; Poston camp, 181; postwar educational and occupational opportunities, 176–77; postwar housing discrimination, 177; postwar silence and repressed memories, 178; Tolan Committee hearings, 174; Topaz camp, 112, 121n30, 145, 149, 175; US Supreme Court, 174, 179 Japanese American post 9–11 activism, 184–85; Arab American Discrimination Committee, 184; Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, 184 Japanese American redress, 173–74, 175, 179, 180–82, 184, 185–86; Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 173; Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, 173, 178, 179, 180, 181–82; coram nobis cases, 179; Day of Remembrance, 179; Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 179, 180, 182; Manzanar Committee, 179; National Coalition for Redress and Reparations, 182; National Council for Japanese American Redress, 179; Sansei activism, 179 Japanese American women: Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant, 129–32; as immigrants pre-World War II, 42–43, 48; mixed race, 144–46; Nisei stewardesses, 133–37. See also Japanese American women activism Japanese American women activism, 185–86; black reparations, 176; Congress of Racial Equality, 175; Equal Rights Amendment, 182– 83; for family and community, 180–82; feminist consciousness, 181; Freedom School, 175; and gender discrimination, 182–83; impact of civil rights, antiwar, ethnic pride, and women’s movement, 173, 178–80; in Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 179–80, 182–83; post9/11 activism, 184–85; redress, 173–74, 175–76, 178–82, 185–86; Women’s Concerns Committee, 183. See also Mink, Patsy T.

480

| index

Juanitas, Eidosia, 76–77 Jayasinghe, Tiloma, 346, 349, 350, 351n1 Jim Crow, 87–90, 92, 95, 99, 101, 102 Joshi Eigaku Juku (later Tsuda college/Tsuda University), 53; Anna C. Hartshorne, 63, 64, 65; educational ideas and methods, 58–60; founding of, 57–58; Great Kanto Earthquake (1923), 63, 66; rebuilding after earthquake, 63–66; and Yona Abiko, 60, 63–65. See also Tsuda, Ume Kahoʻolawe, 19, 30, 30, 31, 33, 34n13. See also Kohemālamalama o Kanaloa Kanakaʻole, Edith, 19, 20; Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation, 19, 20f Kameya, Harold and Ellen, and daughter Valerie, 326–27, 328, 329, 335–36n19   Kaneko, Susan, 312–13 Kennedy, Senator Robert F., 82 Khang, Mao, 432–33 Khmer Rouge, 189, 193, 200; Khmer Rouge genocide, 439–400, 442, 444–45 Khmer/Cambodian American women: disability and resilience, 449–51; food stories, 452–53; and healing practices, 451–52; and matrilineal (mother and grandmother) knowledge, 451–53; and second generation, 440–41; and sexual harassment and bullying, 446–47; resistance and resilience, 453–54; and trauma, intergenerational, 444– 46; and Western standards of behavior and beauty, 447–48 Khmer/Cambodian Americans: debt to America, challenging, 449; defining, 455n1; demographics, 442; educational achievement, 454; and families, restructured, 442– 43; family and intergenerational trauma, 444–46; in Massachusetts, 440, 441–42. See also Khmer/Cambodian American women; Cambodian American refugees; Southeast Asian women Kim Ok Yun, 48 Kimura, Lillian, 183 Klunder, Laura, 369 Kochiyama, Yuri, 175–76, 184 Kohemālamalama o Kanaloa, 19, 33 Korean Americans, 409; adoptee literature, film, and art, 357–69; and changing expectations of daughters and sons, 416, 419; and cultural expectations, 409, 416; daughters and caregiving, 407–19; and entrepreneurship, 410, 411, 421n22; and filial piety, 409, 416, 417; and in-law

relationships, 415–16; and matrilineal ties, 409–10; and retirement planning, 410–12; and structural barriers, 408, 417; women as immigrants pre-World War II, 43–44, 48 Kūpuna (elders), 19, 31, 32f. See also Native Hawaiian Kurose, Aki, 175 Ladies Agreement of 1921, 43 language: and Chamorro, 287–302; ceremonial, 162–63, 164, 166, and culture, 392–93, 395, 398, 399; as gendered public performance, 126; mark of citizenship, 127. See also Hawaiʻi Creole/“Pidgin” English Laos, 191, 192, 193, 196; Secret War in, 189, 191 Latin America: Asian migration to, 38–39 Latino Union, 275 Le, Ysa, 214–16, 218 LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer) organizations; PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), 326–27, 335n18. See also API LGPTQ.  Liem, Deann Borshay, 357–58, 360–61, 365f– 66, 369; Cha Jung Hee, 360, 364–66, 367–68; First Person Plural, 358, 364, 367–68; Kang Ok Jin, 364–366; In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, 358, 367–68 life course/stories, 12, 460 Lin, Koko, and Margot Yapp, 329–32 linked lives, 408, 410, 416 Little Saigon 210, 214–17 long-term care, 408, 409, 416–17. See also older adults los chinos, 39 Lott, Juanita Tamayo and parents, Anicia and Lorenzo Tamayo, 80–81; and family celebrations, 81 Loving v Virginia US Supreme Court decision (1967), 141, 146, 148. See also antimiscegenation laws Luce-Celler Act of 1946, 45, 79 Lujan, Pilar, 297, 300 Lung, Inez, 87–89; and international missionary spirit and First Baptist Church, 92–94; as transnational missionary in China and Southern Baptist Church, 93–95, 100–102. See also Southern Baptist Church Luu-Ng, Kim, 207, 208–10, 218 Mabalon, Dawn Bohulano, 6, 469 Magdael, Angelina Bantillo, 75 Maiv PAC, 433

index

marriage equality: and Asian American community support, 322, 334–35n4; and Asian American LGBTQ litigants, 336n33; and Japanese American community and Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 327–28; and state and federal court rulings, 334n1, 336n25, 336–37n36; Taiwan and samesex marriage, 334  mestiza, 150–51 Mexican Americans, 82, 93, 142. See also Padilla, Gilbert Mink, Patsy T., 304–6, 305f, 317; Americans for Democratic Action, 304; bridge feminism, 305–6; busing and integration legislation, 314–16; childcare/early childhood education legislation, 306–10; Democratic Revolution in Hawaiʻi, 307; education, 307, 311, 315; educational equity legislation, 310–16; family, 307–8; feminist legislative activism, 304–6, 317; labor, 306–9; Title IX (Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act), 304, 306, 310–16 mixed race identity, 140; dimensions of, listed, 151; historical contexts of, 152–53; and the life course, 152–53; and US Census 2000, 148. See also Asian American mixed race women model minority stereotype, 181, 206, 461, 462n2 Moua, Mee, 428, 431 Moy, Afong, 40 multiculturalism, 358, 362–63, 366; banal, 363 Muslim American women: and child raising, 379–81; and politics of identity, 374, 377–85; and religion as purpose to life, 381–83; as target of hostility (Islamophobia), 377–78, 385; and veiling (hijab), 378–79, 385 Nakano, Mei, 179–80, 183 Nakatami, Al and Jane, 328, 336n27, 336n28  National Alliance of Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), 270, 279 Native Hawaiian: cosmology, 19, 20, 22–23, 31; diaspora, 32; disease, 21, 25, 27; health, 21, 27, 33; intermarriage, 23, 29, 35n37; kūpuna, 19, 31, 32f1.2; modern renaissance, 30–31; movement, 19, 29, 30–31, 32–33; ʻOhana, 19, 23, 25; religion, 19, 23; sovereignty, 29–30, 32, 33; statistics, 21, 25, 28–29, 32 Native Hawaiian women, 19–33; chiefess, 23–24, 26, 33; in diaspora, 32; gender roles, 23, 24–25; health statistics, 21; in modern renaissance, 30–31, 31f; in politics, 29–30,

| 481

32–33; Queen Liliʻuokalani, 26, 27, 27–28; roles, 20–21, 22, 23, 24, 25; royal women, 21, 23, 24, 26–28; and voting, 25–26, 29; as warriors, 24; work, 23, 25, 28–29 neoliberalism, 224 New York City Chinatown garment industry, 239–41; and Chinese and Korean entrepreneurs, 240–41; decline of, 250–251; growth of, 240–42. See also Chinese immigrant women garment workers; garment industry Nguyen, Tricia, 216–18 Niaz, Robina, 344–45, 351n1 Nicolas, Asuncion and Sixto, 77 Nisei stewardesses, 133–37; breaking racial barrier, 135; Pan American World Airways, 129, 133–37; opportunities and careers,138; as representing the Japanese American community, 137; and “Standard English,” 133, 136–37 Ochi, Rose,174, 178 Office of Hawaiian Affairs, 21, 33 ʻOhana, 19, 23, 25. See also Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana Olamit, Eleanor Galvez, 77 older adults, 408, 416–17, 419n3; assisted care and nursing homes, 415, 417; community and organization-based support, 418; intimacy at a distance, 413, 415–16; need for support, 408, 416–17. See also caregiving Pacific Islander (Pacific Islander American), 2–3; in academia, 390, 398; diversity, 2; family and community, 392–93; impact of immigration, 389–90, 395–96, 399, mixed race, 4; Pasifika, 389; population census/ statistics, 5, 7n7, 460–61. See also Chamorro; Native Hawaiian; Sāmoan American women; Tongan-Americans Pacific Islander studies, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15n7 Padilla, Gilbert, 82 Page Act of 1875, 41 Palomo, Rosa Salas, 298, 300 Pan American World Airways, 129, 133–37; Nisei stewardess program, 133–37. See also Nisei stewardesses paradigm shifts, 9, 14n1 Pensionado Act of 1903, 46 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), 342, 349 Philippine Nurses Association of America (PNAA), 272

482 | index

Philippine Nurses Association of Chicago (PNAC), 271–72 Philippines: commonwealth status, 74; cuisine and diet, 72–73; and immigration to US, 74, 79–80; and labor export of nurses and domestic workers, 271; and US colonialism, 45–46, 73–74, 270; and US domestic science, 73–74, 75, 77 picture brides, 43, 44 police and law enforcement, 338–39, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343–44, 346, 347, 348, 349, 351, 352n13, 353n21, 353n25; as community betrayal, 338, 344, 346; and domestic violence, 338–43; hate crimes, 352n13; post-9/11, 340, 344, 346, 350, 352n13; and South Asian women’s organizations, 340, 341, 342, 346, 349; stop and frisk, 349, 354n30. See also anti-Muslim racism; deportation; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); Secure Communities precarity, 223, 224, 233, 234 Priority Enhancement Program (PEP), 353n21 Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana, 19, 30, 33n2 Queen Liliʻuokalani, 26, 27, 27–28 race, ideology of, 153 racial microaggressions, 361, 362–63 Radewagon, ‘Aumua Amata Coleman, 161 Raymundo, Rizaline and parents, 76 research methods and resources, 13; digital and written stories, 441; ethnography, 13, 424; life histories, 12, 141; oral history, 13; storytelling, 13, 16n12, 440. See also storytelling as digital stories resistance and resilience, 8, 10, 11, 12 resource theory, 258, 265–66, 267n15 revolutionary care, 270, 273, 275, 279, 280 Saikyo, Carole, 131–32 Salmoiraghi, Franco, 20, 31 same sex marriage. See marriage equality Sāmoa, 157, 158, 168; Independent State, 158; outmigration, 158; Western Sāmoa, 158 Sāmoan American women: 155, 158, 268; agency, 156; fai’oa, 168; beliefs and models— alofa, fa’amāoni, and lototele, 155–56, 167; ina’ilau a tama’ita’i, 155, 160, 167; pae ma le ‘āuli 168; Sāmoanness, 155, 156, 158; stereotypes, 156, 162; values and work ethics, 155, 156, 158, 160, 167, 168, 169 Sāmoan ancestral models: aso na i Namō, 159; Nāfanua, 158–59; Salamāsina, 159; 158–59;

Sināleana, 160; So’oa’emalelagi, 159; Taemā and Tilafaigā, 158–59 San Francisco Chinatown, 107, 109, 115, 116–17, 118 Sawada (Bridges), Noriko, 174, 177–78, 180 Secure Communities (S-Comm), 347, 348, 349, 353nn21 and 28, 354n29 Shiramizu, Shizuko, 174 Sigvigny, Deb, 369 Simanu, ‘Aumua Mata’itusi, 162, 164, 165–67, 166f, 170n20 Simanu-Klutz, M. Luafata, 161–63; “On Being Samoan, On Being Woman,” 170n13; Tofiga (chosen one), 162, 170n15, 166f South Asian immigrant women: Indian women in health professions, 232; in preWorld War II America, 44–45, 48–49 South Asian women’s organization (SAWO), 339, 340–41, 343, 344, 345, 350, 352n2; alternatives to mainstream feminism, 340–41; Manavi, 340–41, 345, 352n8, 352n11; Sakhi for South Asian Women, 339, 340–41, 343, 344, 345, 346, 348, 349, 351, 351n1, 352n8, 352n11 South Korea, 357, 409–10; family law code, 409; social changes in, 409, 415–16 Southeast Asia: wars in, 189, 191. See also Vietnam Southeast Asian resettlement policies, 197–98 Southeast Asian women: in refugee camps, 194–97; in resettlement, 197–201; in wartime, 190–94 Southern Baptist Church (SBC), 87, 88–91; and China, 90, 102; its Chinese home missions and the Chinese American community, 90– 91, 95–96, 102; its Foreign Mission Board, 93–95. See also Lung, Inez; Wong, Dancie Yett sovereignty, 29–30, 32, 33 Standard English, 125, 126, 127, 131–32, 136; affirming citizenship, 126; Hawaiʻi English Standard School system, 126–27, 128; gendered citizenship, 126, 130; gendered and racialized dimensions, 128–29; upward mobility, 126, storytelling as digital stories, 441; examples of, 443–51 Taiwan, 254–56, 266; education in, 257–58; and immigration to United States, 256–58, 265; and same sex marriage, 334   Taiwanese American transnational families, 254–55, 256–67, 258, 265–66; benefits of, 255, 265; children’s education, 254, 257–58,

index

266; marital strains, 263–65; raising children alone, 262–63, 266; women’s agency and spousal power, 254, 258–60, 265–66; women’s cost, gender roles, and responsibilities, 260–65 Taiwanese Americans, 254–55 Takei, George, and Brad Altman, 332 Tam, Ivy, 106, 112–13, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119. See also Asian American dancers Tape, Mary, 42 Thai women, 227, 229, 230, 231, 233 Thiem, Linda, 444–445, 445f, 453 Title II of the 1950 Internal Security Act, 179–80 Title IX (1972 Education Amendments—Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act), 304, 306, 310–16; athletics, 313, 312, 316; gender equity in education, 316; impact of Title IX, 316, women’s athletics, 316 Tomita, Teiko, 48, 459, 462n5; tanka, 459 Tonga, 391; family relations, 395, 401; global migration, 391–92; indigenous cultural practices, 392–95, 401; indigenous women’s position in, 393–95; sovereign constitutional monarchy, 391; spirituality, 391, 392, 393 Tongan-American women: Association of Tongan University Women (ATUW), 397; Fahu system (symbolic matriarch), 390, 393–94, 400–401; fanga fa’e (many mothers), 394–95; hyphenated identity meanings, 389– 90, 399, 400, 401; immigration experience, 389–90, 395–96, 398; spirituality, 624, 395, 631; transcultural adaptation, 398, 402. See also Tongan-American women academics Tongan-American women academics, 390, 391, 396–401; barriers to advancement, 397, 399, 401; and community, 396, 397, 399, 401, 402; hyphenated identity as nurturing space, 398, 399, 400, 402; navigating presumption of incompetence, 399; pipeline, 402 Tongan-Americans, 388, 391–92; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 392; health consequences of immigration; 395–96; identity, 395–96; identity and use of hyphen, 388–90, 395, 400; intergenerational relationships, 392, 395, 402; language and culture, 395; National Tongan American Society, 397; Tongan-American Health Professionals Association (TAHPA), 397; transnational identity and connections, 392, 395 Toy, Dorothy (a.k.a Dorothy Toy Fong nee Takahashi), 106, 111–13, 114, 115, 116, 120n4. See also Asian American dancers

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483

Toy and Wing (dance duo), 106, 108, 110, 111– 12, 116, 119, 120n8. See also Asian American dancers; Toy, Dorothy Tran, Diep, 210–12, 214, 218 Tranchi, Bao, 210, 212–14, 218 transnational adoption industrial complex, 368 transnationalism, 9, 11, 12, 14n3, 14n5 Trenka, Jane Jeong, 357–58; 360–64, 369; Fugitive Visions, 358; 363; The Language of Blood, 358, 361 Tsuda, Ume, 53, 59f, 60–61, 66–67; Alice Bacon, 56–57, 58, 60; American Scholarship for Japanese Women, 57, 67n10; Bryn Mawr College, 56, 58, 64; education in US, 54–55, 56–57; educational ideology, 58–60; founding Joshi Eigaku Juku, 57–60, 63; impact of US education, 55–56, 56–57; new woman, 55–56, 58; Peeresses’ School, 56, 57. See also Abiko, Yona Tsuda College/Tsuda University. See Joshi Eigaku Juku Tsui, Kitty, 323  Tuimaleali’ifano, Galumalemana Vao’au Leītuala Taiā’opo, 163–65, 170n17 Turning Point for Women and Families, 339, 340, 343, 343f, 344, 345, 350, 351n1 Tuthill, Nickie Delute and parents, 77, 78, 80 Ty, Kim Soun, 448–339, 449f, 453–454; “The Struggles You Bear” (poem), 439, 454 US national, 3, 4, 155, 157, 161, 168, 282n15 US-Japan relations, 53, 61, 63, 64, 65–66; bridges between, 63 vacant niches, 230 Vakalahi, Halaevalu Fonongavainga Ofahengaue, 397–99 Vang, Cha, 433–34 Vengua, Jean, 75, 79; and her mother, 75 Vietnam: Vietnam War 190, 192–93, 205, 206, 207–8, 209, 211, 214, 215, 217–18; women’s gender roles in, 206; women’s resistance, 206 Vietnamese American 1.5 generation women, 205–18; acculturation, 207, 213, 215; agency, 205–7; as bilingual, 207, 214, 215, 216; and community, 205–6, 207, 211–12, 214–17; as entrepreneurs, 205–7, 210–14; gender expectations and roles, 205–7; identity, 205– 6, 209, 211, 213, 214, 216, 218; as non-profit advocates, 205, 209, 214–17; queer, 211, 218; and racial stereotypes, 205, 211–13; in resistance, 205–6, 214, 215–16, 218

484

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Vietnamese American refugees, 205–6, 208– 10, 212–13, 214–15, 216–17, 218 Vietnamese Refugee Council, 195 Vietnamese women, 192–93, 197; representation of, 190–91; and sexual abuse, 195; and sex industry, 192–93; and welfare, 198 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), 341– 42, 352n11; Family Violence Option (FVO), 342, 349 voices, 459–60 Vu, Maychy, 433 War Brides Act of 1945 (1947), 49, 80, 224, 240 Weglyn, Michi Nishiura, 178–79 Wendt, Albert, 168; Inside Us the Dead: Poems 1961–1974, 170n22 women’s and gender studies, 8, 9, 10–11, 15n8; and Asian American and Pacific Islander women, 10–11, 15n9

Wong, Dancie Yett, 87–89, 95–97, 101–2; and China war relief, 97–98; and Chinese American education, 97–100; and Southern Baptist Church, 99–102. See also Southern Baptist Church Works Progress Administration (WPA), 89, 96 xenophobia, 278–280 Yamada, Mitsuye, 174, 185 Yamakawa, Sutematsu, 58 Yang, Brenda, 434 Yang, Kashoua Kristy, 430–32 Yee, Cynthia, 106, 108, 112–14, 115, 116–18. See also Asian American dancers yellow peril, 88 yellowface, 180, 192 Young, Lani Wendt, 170n13 Zia, Helen, and Lia Shigemura, 332