Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War by Cindy I-Fen Cheng (review)

In this welcome new study, Cindy I-Fen Cheng reorients our understanding of what Mary Dudziak has termed “Cold War civil rights” by examining the influence of intertwined U.S. foreign and domestic policies on Asian American racial formations—and vice versa. The book uncovers “how the shift in U.S. Cold War policies toward Asia greatly enhanced the ways Asian American racial formation shaped discourses on civil rights during the early Cold War years” (20). Work by scholars such as Dudziak and Brenda Plummer have shown that the U.S. government was eager to prove to Soviet communists that Jim Crow racism could be resolved through American democracy by instituting a number of equal opportunity measures aimed at African Americans. Cheng’s book introduces two major interventions: first, that African Americans were not the only signifiers of racialized experiences and circumstances in the racial imaginary of the time; second, contrary to the view that the U.S. Cold War agenda produced progressive civil rights reforms, a study of the Asian American subject reveals that the realization of this agenda meant expanding and infringing upon the rights of Asian Americans. Cheng illustrates this in five chapters, four of which explore how Asian American figures navigated the legal and social contradictions of this racial formation; the fifth details how Chinese American communities responded to Red Scare government monitoring.

In chapters 1 and 2, Cheng turns to housing discrimination against Asian Americans in order to think through the ways in which civil rights were (or were not) figured solely in terms of African Americans. Chapter 1 examines the 1948 Supreme Court ruling in which racial restrictive covenants were made unconstitutional. Cheng observes that lawsuits by two Asian Americans had initially been accepted for review, but the Court focused instead on cases that dealt with housing discrimination against African Americans only. By doing so, Cheng argues, the Court continued to perpetuate the belief that civil rights was primarily the domain of African Americans and missed an opportunity to address the particular experiences of Asian Americans and the complexity of racial formation in the United States more broadly. The ruling advocated a trickle-down model that posited blackness as the “archetypal racial category in future civil rights cases” (54).

In chapter 2, Cheng reads English and Chinese-language periodicals to examine the social ramifications of this ruling. She follows the case of Sing Sheng, who was asked to leave a South San Francisco neighborhood in 1952. Sheng offered to hold a town referendum on the issue, citing his faith in the American people and the democratic process. Both Chinese and American newspapers reported on the story, acknowledging it as a crucial test of American democracy. Cheng is particularly interested in how the U.S. media promoted Sheng and his family as successfully assimilated model minorities. She reads these images not as testimonial proof of assimilation, but rather as a media strategy to make racial integration palatable in the first place to recalcitrant white residents. Sheng’s story opens up the surprising way municipal affairs had international stakes on both sides of the Pacific.

In chapter 3, Cheng focuses on publicly embraced Asian Americans. She usefully identifies the early Cold War period’s obsession with the “culture of the first” (86) in popular magazine stories that aimed to showcase U.S. political superiority via racialized minority trailblazers like baseball player Jackie Robinson. Olympic gold medalist Sammy Lee, best-selling author Jade Snow Wong, and Los Angeles judge Delbert Wong became state-sponsored storytellers of the American Dream fêted in the press, but they were not without ambivalence: in particular, Delbert Wong turned his experience as the first Chinese American judge into a critique of being the only Chinese American judge.

In chapter 4, Cheng counters these stories by examining how easily Asian Americans...