"The Chinese in America" by Iris Chang (2003)

"The anti-Chinese backlash engendered much soul -searching and debate within the Chinese American community.  The late 1990s and early 2000s saw endless, frantic discussions on how to prove one's loyalty to the United States, or whether to confront these attitudes with organized protests.  Some immigrants began to blame themselves for being too complacent - for immersing themselves in their careers and families, and not braving the risks of participation in affairs of the larger world.  On Internet chat groups and in public forums, they openly questioned whether they had been giving the right message to the next generation.  Was it, perhaps, short-sighted to discourage their children from careers in the media and the arts, careers that could influence public perception of Chinese Americans, in favor of the more anonymous fields of science and technology?  Could the putative security offered by such fields have been nothing more than an illusion?  Were they wrong to warn their children to avoid politics?  Could their own memories of repressive regimes in Asia have nudged them toward a safe haven of political apathy in the United States?"

Iris Chang is a Chinese-American author.  She began her career as a reporter, and later switched to the writing of history.  She has won numerous awards, and her most famous book is probably The Rape of Nanking, which I read some time ago.

The Chinese in America starts where you'd expect it to start: in America in the 1800s.  It then moves to a snapshot of Ching Dynasty-era China at the same time.  From that point on it advances through the history of Chinese Americans decade by decade, stopping to examine The Chinese Exclusion Act, racism against Asian Americans during World War II and more recent, racially motivated acts against Chinese Americans.

The author writes well, and with a fluid command of her subject that precious few historians possess.  Some of the typos I encountered near the beginning of this book were slightly embarrassing, but that's not something I can hold against the author.  Her arguments are always predicated on both facts and the ideals upon which the United States is, or at least pretends to be, built.

I can't say this book was consistently fascinating, but overall it's very good.  The most interesting thing about it is the interactions between American and Chinese governments.  In The Chinese in America one sees that these two countries have developed in tandem, and the modern history of China is in many ways also the modern history of America.  The labor shortages, economic upheavals and political changes in one nation were constantly effecting the other, and a kind of feedback loop developed over time.  

It's in some ways easy to see the Chinese immigrants building the Trans-Pacific Railroad as cut off from their country, but the reality was something more complex, more subtle.  I think The Chinese in America does a good job of illustrating this human relationship between the two countries, even if this relationship isn't always at the forefront of the discussion.

Compared to The Rape of Nanking, a book that's bound to provoke more extreme reactions among readers, The Chinese in America is, I think, much better.  In this book the author shows that she can write history in the absence of racially-charged atrocities, and that her understanding of the subject exceeds what's usually supplied by propaganda.

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