Title: Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community
Abstract: Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community. Edited by Monica Chiu. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009. 252 pages. $50.00 (hardcover). Monica Chiu has compiled an overdue collection of scholarly articles on the Asian American diaspora in New England. Chiu, an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, sheds considerable light on long standing relationships among Euro New Englanders, Asians, and New Englanders of Asian descent. Provocative essays in the collection border on the polemical as the work confronts the reification of race and racism within the context of the history and culture of New England. Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community attempts to rectify the paucity of Asian American scholarship within the rich tapestry of New England history. Chiu documents New Englanders' relationship with Asia, Asians and Asian Americans from the cusp of the nineteenth to the first decade of the twenty-first century, exhibiting a confluence of complex themes revolving around ethnicity, religiosity, sexuality and gender. In her essay Copying Conversion: An 1824 Friendship Album from a Chinese Youth, Karen Sanchez-Eppler reminds us that the missionary ethos of New England (often in symbiotic relationships with trading companies) fostered the first interaction between Euro North Americans and Asians. Indeed, domestic objects made in China conveyed elegance, civility and refinement (21). positive objectification of Chinese wares, however, was not transferred to Asians themselves. At this time New England missionary schools educated Chinese 'heathen youth[s]' in order to promote Christianity and civilization (2). In an essay by Sanchez-Eppler, Chinese youth were to reinvent their ethnic self-identities while dependant on Euro Americans' paternalism and largesse for their education in 1820's Connecticut. Ultimately the voices of these young men were heard in the form of friendship albums used in schools as methods of rote learning and the inculcation of New England religious and values. In a different vein, the culture of masculinity at Yale (women were not accepted as undergraduates until the late 1960's) proved problematic for the first Yale graduate of Chinese descent, Yung Wing. A highlight of the collection is the article The New Englandization of Yung Wing: Family, Nation, Region, in which Amy Bangerter posits that Yung was forced to battle stereotypes of Chinese men as emasculated coolies (53) because he had to work at Yale fraternities due to his poverty while a Yale student. After graduation Yung determined that he would not sacrifice [his] manhood (54) to earn money in a position that was deemed servile, a comment redolent with racial self-loathing and selfemasculation. In the end, Yung's United States citizenship (attained while at Yale in the 1850s) was revoked in 1898 because he was now deemed non-white and racialized as Chinese; therefore, non-American and not a New Englander. Yung was now considered a desexualized eunuch by the country of his choice. Asian ethnic group that was considered closest to being the equals of Euro New Englanders in the ethnic hierarchical scale of the 1800's were the Japanese. Krystyn R. Moon analyzed newspapers documenting touring Japanese acrobats in mid-nineteenth century New England where opinions of the Japanese ran the continuum from comparing the acrobats to their European counterparts to generalities that the Japanese were awkward and uncouth (83). Japs was a common epithet. That said, most Euro New England missionaries, according to Moon, believed that cultural attributes (70) such as religion were the main cause of inferior or superior characteristics. …
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 37
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