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WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER Gary Y. Okihiro A solitary figure defies a tank, insofar as a solitary figure can defy a tank. A “goddess of liberty” in the image of the Statue of Liberty arises from the midst of a vast throng gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The November 1, 1991, issue of Asiaweek carries the caption “Welcoming Asians” under a picture of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor awash in the light of fireworks.1 Contained within those images—vivid and memorable—is what Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal called the American creed. Democracy, equality, and liberty form the core of that creed, and the “mighty woman with a torch” has come to symbolize those ideals to, in the words of the poet Emma Lazarus, the tired, the poor, the huddled masses “yearning to breathe free.” On another island, on the other coast, stands not a statue but a wooden barrack . Solitary figures hunch over to carve poems on the walls.2 The sea-scape resembles lichen twisting and turning for a thousand li. There is no shore to land and it is difficult to walk. With a gentle breeze I arrived at the city thinking all would be so. At ease, how was one to know he was to live in a wooden building? In the quiet of night, I heard, faintly, the whistling of wind. The forms and shadows saddened me; upon seeing the landscape, I composed a poem. The floating clouds, the fog, darken the sky. The moon shines faintly as the insects chirp. Grief and bitterness entwined are heaven sent. The sad person sits alone, leaning by a window. Angel Island, not Ellis Island, was from 1910 to 1940 the main port of entry for Chinese immigrants “yearning to breathe free.”3 There, separated by cold currents from the golden shore, the migrants were carefully screened by U.S. Immigration 4 G A R Y Y . O K I H I R O officials and held for days, weeks, or months to determine their fitness for America. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act had prohibited entry to Chinese workers , indicative of a race- and class-based politics, because according to the act, “in the opinion of the Government of the United States, the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof.”4 In New York City, a year after passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Emma Lazarus wrote the poem that now graces the base of the Statue of Liberty. But the statue had not been envisioned as a symbol of welcome to the world’s “wretched refuse” by its maker, French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and at its unveiling in 1886, President Grover Cleveland proclaimed that the statue’s light would radiate outward into “the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression until Liberty enlightens the world.”5 In other words, the statue commemorated republican stability, and according to the October 29, 1886, New York World, it stood forever as a warning against lawlessness and anarchy and as a pledge of friendship with nations that “dare strike for freedom.” That meaning was changed by European immigrants, who saw the statue as welcoming them, and by Americanizers, who, in the 1920s and 1930s, after the 1924 Immigration Act restricting mass immigration, sought a symbol to instill within the children of immigrants patriotism and a love for their new country.6 The tale of those two islands, separated by the vast interior and lapped by different waters, constitutes a metaphor of America and the Asian American experience . America was not always a nation of immigrants, nor was America unfailingly a land of democracy, equality, and liberty. The romantic sentiment of the American identity, “this new man,” expressed by French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur was probably not the dominant view, nor did it apply to all of America’s people. Writing in 1782, Crèvecoeur exclaimed: What then is the American, this new man? . . . I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes...

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