Porcelain, Yellowface, and Immigration Exclusion: Orientalism and American Identity

New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882. By John Kuo Wei Tchen. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. 385 pages. $42.50.

In the summer of 1776, as George Washington prepared to defend Manhattan against Sir William Howe's British forces, the military leader of the revolutionaries provided detailed instructions for the purchase of costly Chinese porcelains for his personal use at his New York abode. The American general's desire for "genteel" trappings contrasted starkly with the makeshift living arrangements of his ragtag troops. Beginning with this question of why the founding elite desired Chinese luxuries, John Tchen's study of American orientalism argues that "Chinese things, ideas, and people in the United States, in various imagined and real forms, has been instrumental in forming this nation's cultural identity." ¹

Tchen's study of orientalism and American national identity represents a bold departure from both the scholarship on orientalism as well as Asian American history and culture. The book is clearly inspired by Edward Said's insight that the "Occident" invented the "Orient" as "its contrasting image" and then used this representation as a means to define western "civilization and culture." ² Whereas Said focuses predominantly on British and French notions of the Orient, based on their interactions with and imaginings of the Middle East, Tchen examines a distinctively American form of orientalism that developed in relation to China. ³ In contrast to Said, who dates the ascendancy of American orientalism following World War II, Tchen begins his study with the founding of the American nation. The chronological as well as geographic focus of the book also challenges the dominant narrative in Asian American history. Most scholars identify the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush in California or the plantation societies of Hawaii as the origins of Chinese American history. In contrast, Tchen examines the development of an East Coast city that becomes the nation's commercial and cultural capital over the course of the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. The title of the book, New York Before Chinatown, reveals his interest in tracing American perceptions of and relationships to Chinese objects and people prior to the arrival of large number of immigrants and how these attitudes evolved to result in immigration exclusion, political disfranchisement, and residential and commercialized segregation.

Tchen identifies three forms of American orientalism that correlated with shifts in the nation's economic, cultural, and political development. During the early decades of the new nation, a patrician form of orientalism emerged among the revolutionary elite that embodied their contradictory desires to formulate an independent national identity even as they envied and emulated European society. Reflecting the influence of European tastes for chinoiseries, American elites like George Washington and Gouverneur Morris sought to possess Chinese luxuries as indicators of their rising social status. In the American context, however, the desire for Chinese goods and perhaps more importantly the promotion of trade with China were viewed as indicators of the developing national economy, now freed from the despotic control of Great Britain. In striving to create the foundation of a capitalist economy, the Chinese "were viewed as friendly, nonthreatening . . . in brief, . . . as procapitalist, Protestant-like 'mandarins.'" ⁴ Revolutionary thinkers even sought lessons about republicanism from an "idealized Confucian court culture" that linked "personal virtue with the affairs of the state." ⁵ However, even as American economic and political elites admired and sought contact with the Chinese, they also increasingly expressed disdain for a Chinese form of "despotism" that sought to limit American trade, for Chinese luxuries that might pollute American virtue, and for Chinese coolies that represented slave labor. In seeking mastery over Chinese goods and people, the emerging American elite shared European sensibilities of the Orient as the other.

From the antebellum period to the end of the Civil War, a commercial form of orientalism emerged, reflecting the "era's...