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| 91 3 White Is and White Ain’t Failed Approximation and Eruptions of Funk in Representations of the Chinese in the South Some are born white, others achieve whiteness, still others have whiteness thrust upon them. —Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian The Lumbee’s struggle for state and federal recognition was partly based on the segregation-era representation of the community’s upstanding qualities. The southern context exaggerated the connection between visibility and communal incorporation to produce an enduring narrative that continues to frame this ethnic community. They were “like” whites, which is to say, like those who shared American values of hard work and thrift. These efforts to reconcile anomaly to the national are likewise evident in the representation of Asian Americans in the South. Case in point: the Chinese in the Mississippi Delta. “[I]n the Delta, home of the blues and Muddy Waters, cooks are sizzling catfish and collards and crayfish every day and night. But you don’t expect to find those home chefs stir-frying them or steaming them in a giant backyard wok.” So begins a feature in the New York Times about the Chow family of Clarksdale, Mississippi, titled, “East Meets South at a Delta Table: Chinese-Americans bring the tastes of their ancestors down home” (Nathan 2003, D1). The hook for the reader’s attention is based on simple juxtaposition: Crayfish ? Woks? The unexpected hybridity produces what can be seen as quintessentially American—immigrant ingenuity and adaptability—or so we are led to believe as the Chows descend upon Washington to demonstrate the aforementioned stir-fry on the National Mall. In their anomaly, the Chows are made to represent American normativity, albeit through a circuitous route. They are only representable insofar as their eccentricity is both asserted as a point of interest (Chinese who say “y’all”) 92 | chapter 3 and reinscribed within dominant values and expectations (Ms. Chow is a finalist in the contest to find a new image for Betty Crocker). This progression is subtly reenacted within the feature as well; it introduces the Chow’s backstory, how they ended up in Mississippi as it is enmeshed in Reconstruction -era politics and racialized labor competition, only to end with the image of three generations linking hands around the table to say grace. The radical implications of the aberrant presence of Chinese in a region dominated by black-white relations and the sedimented class hierarchies of the plantation system become resolved by the Chow’s use as model citizens; they exemplify adaptation, proliferation, and belief in divine providence. A tall order for a piece about cooking, indeed. Such a portrayal reproduces a dominant narrative governing American racial representation since the Civil Rights Movement: a progressive chronology of racial uplift that buttresses a liberal vision of ethnic incorporation. The use of Asians as evidence of this movement has become ubiquitous in popular culture, hence, the simultaneously laudatory and derogatory designation of Asian Americans as “honorary whites” and model minorities. Inspiring distaste from both the white majority and other people of color against whom it is directed, the charge nevertheless becomes an instrument of Asian racial subordination. Thus, the comment, “the Chinese in Mississippi play the white man’s game better than white folks do” resonates well beyond southern regionalism, prefiguring a dominant representation of Asians in the United States (cited in Quan 1982, 54). Nevertheless, for this southern community during the era of formal segregation, the ability to “play the white man’s game” took on literal stakes. James Loewen’s influential 1972 study, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, argues that when faced with a binary racial system that had no accommodation for a third race, the Chinese engineered a shift in status from “colored” to white in the course of one generation. The Chinese in Mississippi, Loewen claims, “worked systematically . . . in order to rise from Negro to white status” (1988, 72) in the period following World War II, and once crossing over, left “the black world behind without a second glance” (194). While the Supreme Court Ruling Gong Lum v. Rice had formally established the “colored” status of the Chinese in Mississippi in 1927, by the time that sociologist Loewen arrived to do fieldwork in 1967, the Chinese were apparently card-carrying white people—or at least they were according to the “W” on their driver’s licenses. His study attempts to show what transpired between the years 1941 and 1966, the twilight of formal segregation. What he postulates...

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