Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (review)

In American social and political thought, Asians have been portrayed as either a racial "problem" or as a "solution." Historian Henry Yu persuasively argues that the two representations are intimately linked through their shared evocation of the "Oriental" as a symbol of exotic difference. Thinking Orientals, in a provocative challenge to the dominant black/white understanding of race, reveals "how crucial thinking about Orientals has been to the formulations of the most prominent theorists of race and culture in modern American intellectual life" (vi).

The theorists in question were sociologists affiliated with the University of Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. Yu argues that the Chicago school of sociology created a body of knowledge about Orientals — defining who they were and their place in America — that dramatically shaped not only how Asian Americans were popularly viewed but also, more intriguingly, how Asian Americans understood themselves.

Theatrical metaphors abound in the writing of the Chicago sociologists. In their description of social life, roles were performed, costumes were donned, masks were worn, and stages were set. Yu eloquently adopts and engages these metaphors in his own analysis of the dramatis personae of the Chicago School, their scholarly contributions, and personal reflections.

The book is divided into two main "movements." In the first movement, American missionaries — J. Merle Davis, Galen Fisher, and George Gleason — initiate and help to fund the ambitious Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast in the early-1920s. These missionaries connected religious conversion efforts in Asia to the prospect of the cultural assimilation of Asians in America. Famed sociologist Robert E. Park of the University of Chicago was picked as the research director for the Survey and consolidated a research team of former Chicago graduates including Emory Bogardus, William Carlson Smith, and Roderick McKenzie.

The great legacy of Park and the sociologists of the Oriental Problem, Yu argues, was their categorization of knowledge of Orientals. "Like a sorting machine," Yu states, "Chicago sociology transformed random information into examples of general categories." (161) Their research generated or elaborated key sociological concepts regarding culture, social distance, and racial consciousness. Park's race relations cycle — with its distinct, linear stages of contact, competition, accommodation, and assimilation — was consolidated as a hegemonic frame to understand the incorporation of distinct racial and ethnic groups. The belief in cultural assimilation, as both a theory and desirable ideological goal, came to dominate the studies that emerged. As Yu observes, "the Oriental Problem as a set of research questions reproduced itself in study after study for the next forty years." (84)

Central to this reproduction was the training and mentoring of Chinese and Japanese sociologists — the subject of the book's second, and far more engaging, movement. Between 1924 and 1960, around twenty graduate students at the University of Chicago worked on topics dealing with the Oriental Problem. Most of these students were first or second generation Chinese or Japanese Americans who were valued by the Chicago sociologists as insiders and translators — researchers who could provide insights into the heart and minds of Orientals that were inaccessible to white investigators.

In being groomed as professional sociologists, these Asian Americans experienced a curious bifurcation of their identity. In an ironic twist, these individual researchers became classic examples of the "marginal man" theorized by Park. Reflecting on his research among Japanese Americans, S. Frank Miyamoto said, "One is an actor within a drama and feels the forces which shape it; but one is simultaneously an outsider, a member of the audience who observes the drama as it is played out by others." (153)

Throughout the second movement, Yu offers fascinating but sometimes all too brief portraits of an important generation of Asian American sociologists such as Paul Siu, Tamotsu Shibutani, and Rose Hum Lee. Lee, who became both the first woman and first Chinese American to chair a sociology department, was a vigorous...