This week I continued the strand of historiographical research that I began last week and looked at early approaches to Chinese American studies. This has been a particularly helpful exercise because I had previously only read a few older studies of European immigration as well as critiques of that immigrant paradigm. However, I am now finding – as I expected – that the early literature on Asian migration exhibited many similar but also different problematic features and approaches. I perused a book that Hsu recommended titled Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era, edited by Kevin Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan (Temple University Press, 1998). I paid particular attention to Henry Yu’s essay, “The ‘Oriental Problem’ in America.”
Yu defines the “Oriental problem” as “an intellectual construction”: “a set of questions, definitions, and theories about Asian immigrants and citizens of Asian
ancestry in the United States – which provided the vocabulary and the concepts for scholarly discussions about Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans between 1920 and 1960.” (192).
Yu argues that the formulation of an “Oriental problem” had a twofold impact on actual Chinese and Japanese Americans who studied this sociological question. The “Oriental problem” served as a way for many of these immigrant intellectuals to frame their existence as the “marginal man” caught between two worlds. Particularly among women who were involved in the Chicago school of sociology, they saw themselves as part of a Chinese immigrant community who could also leave it to become a “modern American,” which often meant “being freed from restricted gender roles” (192).
The other impact of this intellectual framework is that it created a dichotomy between “white America” and “Oriental” immigrants. It reinforced the generalized categorization of disparate migrant groups who typically identified themselves along national lines as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Filipinos. It is obvious that bulking these different groups into one term is problematic, but this theory of the “Oriental problem” may have “created a consciousness that the dilemmas an situations faced by the Chinese and Japanese in America could be understood together” (192). During the 1970s, many Asian migrants and those involved in academia rejected the label “Oriental” because of its long history of defining these migrants as a “problem.” They worked against a paradigm that viewed all adjustments of immigrants as following a four-stage pattern: competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. The Chicago Sociologist Robert Park and many others had previously depicted the “Orientals” as failing to assimilate, unable to get past an “uncomfortable accommodation with nativist whites” (195).
The “Asian-American” immigration history that replaced “Oriental history” still identified its subjects largely along the same lines. Yet, the methods and arguments were different. Yu points out that many Asian-Americans had worked within and reinforced the Oriental paradigm in their own scholarship, which is interesting because Madeline Hsu is a Chinese American woman who demonstrates how radically recent Asian-American scholars have abandoned an assimilationist model.