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25 A Letter from My Friends in America (1894–97) Becoming Chinese American implied making a commitment to the United States and adopting American ways, but Wong had never asserted that it required turning one’s back on China. He himself certainly never did so. And while his knowledge of events in China got hazier, less accurate, and more starry-eyed as time went on, his patriotism was undimmed by the fact of his American naturalization certificate. Like most Chinese in America, Wong had strong opinions about China’s internal politics, its domestic conflicts, and its international entanglements, and he cherished hopes for its future. Nor was he ever shy about expressing them. The history of late nineteenth-century China is one of a relentless wearing down of the Manchu dynasty and the nation itself by a succession of wars, conflicts, and rebellions for which the Opium Wars were only a prologue. Even from their distant vantage point, the Chinese in America were aware of these developments. When the French fought the Chinese for control of Tonkin (northern Vietnam) in the mid-1880s, and when Meiji Japan went to war with China to annex Korea in the mid-1890s, Wong was Johnny-on-the-spot for the American press, always ready with a point of view and a pithy quote. Whether his information was accurate or his perspectives insightful is another story. He predicted confidently—and erroneously—that China would win both conflicts, for example.1 In the case of the latter war, Wong fully expected China to prevail. He dismissed the prediction of many American newspapers that Japan would triumph because it had acquired Western technology and modern engines of war, while China had remained backward and failed to adapt to changing times.2 Wong’s reasons were silly and had little to do with military preparedness. “Japan,” he explained, “is an Oriental nation, but not a virile one, and she has succumbed to 252 The First Chinese American Western influence and become the entering wedge for the Western form of civilization into the East.” By contrast, he continued “the virility of Oriental civilization is founded in China,” whose “older, manlier, grander civilization will triumph over the woman-ruled races and effeminate creeds of the West.” Wong rather grandiosely portrayed the battle between the two Asian nations as an inevitable Armageddon, “the final struggle between the manly, virile civilization of the East and your besotted, foppish, woman-ruled, debt-burdened and divided civilization of the West.”3 He did not attempt to explain how this overly negative view of Western civilization squared with his earlier expressed wishes that China import the models of the West to recast itself as a modern democracy. But then, in an even more bizarre disclosure, he revealed that he actually favored Japan, and for reasons that seem, like his East-West theory, to have come wholly from his own fertile imagination . He told a reporter: The Japanese are the real Chinese . . . They represent the patriotism , the literature and the best elements of the Mongol race. The Tartars, who are the ruling power in China, came from Central Asia and are foreigners. The so-called Chinese of New York are from southern China and are really descendants of Malay pirates and other hybrids . . . the Tartars 300 years ago pushed the Chinese proper into Japan, where they settled, bringing with them their archives, religion and national feeling.4 In other words, neither the Cantonese—little more than mixed-race, Malay rabble—nor the Manchus—usurpers from Central Asia—had any claim to be “true” Chinese. That honor belonged to the Japanese, the proper heirs to China’s greatness, who just happened to be fighting China for suzerainty over Korea. It was an outlandish theory that stemmed from Wong’s prejudices and it was neither widely shared nor fact-based. Wong, however, advocated it passionately nonetheless. At about this time, Wong published an article that was the highwater mark in his denunciation of his Cantonese brethren. Entitled “High and Low Life in China,” he made it clear that he considered virtually all inhabitants of Guangdong Province to be “low life.” Wong was embarrassed by the Cantonese he saw all around him, and never missed an opportunity to use them as scapegoats for the weaknesses of Chinese in the United States. He described the Cantonese as “ingenious and shrewd, great traders and artisans, feared by the merchants of other provinces and hated by every other class of Chinese...

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