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

The post-Second World War period in North America featured many significant battles in the name of equality and justice for many racial minority groups. Cindy I-Feng Cheng’s book, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how Asian Americans challenged pernicious and persistent pre-war notions of “race,” citizenship, and belonging. At the same time, Cheng highlights how America’s Cold War politics, its foreign policy, and its internal debates on these issues complicated the campaigns by Asian Americans for equality in an unstable America. The case of Asian Americans in this historical period is particularly fascinating, as Asian Americans were often cast as both “like whites” and “like blacks” but also as “unmediated extensions of people in Asia.” (10) Chinese Americans could be “friends” due to World War II alliances, while Japanese Americans were distinct as “enemies.” Amidst these dichotomies was the campaign against communism which situated Chinese and Korean Americans as suspect persons caught in evolving midcentury geopolitical struggles. Using race as both an ideological construct and as a discursive symbol, Chen places most of her attention on the ways that Chinese and Korean Americans were affected by the social and political developments of the early Cold War period.

As Cheng maintains, her work aims to unsettle “the practice of using African Americans as the only signifiers of race in the historiography on Cold War civil rights.” (8) Cheng does so by providing accounts of Asian American encounters with restrictive covenants, politically motivated deportations, and labour activism in five chapters. The first chapter explores the battle to end racially restrictive covenants using the cases of Tommy Amer and Yin Kim, both of which eventually were reviewed by the US Supreme Court. Neither case aroused much national attention; indeed Cheng notes that the Supreme Court privileged hearing only cases of residential discrimination against Blacks. This limited focus led to Black ghettos being seen as the preeminent symbol of residential segregation, rather than including the equally as problematic Chinatowns, Little Tokyos, and barrios. That these battles also involved interracial struggle and cooperation was also obscured. Chapter 2 shifts the attention on residential discrimination and housing patterns of nonwhites to the American suburbs. Cheng uses the popular presses of the day, in particular, to examine how Asian Americans were portrayed as “assimilated subjects” that could be integrated into suburbs and also as “nonwhites to be excluded from whites-only locales.” (84) Here Cheng provides another case-study, that of Sing Sheng and the residents of Southwood, a suburban development of San Francisco, and Sheng’s battle to move into this neighbourhood to highlight the debates that were taking place in American society about the nature of American democracy, belonging, and identity.

Chapter 3 turns the reader’s attention to the issue of postwar “firsts” as a way to interrogate Asian American assimilation: Sammy Lee, the first Asian American to win an Olympic gold medal; author Jade Snow Wong whose book, Fifth Chinese Daughter (New York: Harper, 1950) was the first nationally acclaimed and commercially successful book written by a Chinese American; and Delbert Wong, whose appointment as the first Chinese American judge served to counter communist sentiment that America was undemocratic. Cheng asserts that these firsts figured prominently in the promotion of state agendas, highlighting American democracy through racial progress.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on questions of immigration and belonging by examining the suppression of the rights of communist supporters and the foreign born (in Chapter 4) and the advancement of civil rights through immigration reform and specifically through the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Cheng uses the cases of Koreans David Hyun, a labour activist, and Diamond Kimm, the editor of a pro-communist newspaper. Both Hyun and Kimm were persecuted under the 1950 McCarran Act as aliens charged with subversive activities and issued orders...