There was an exhibit within the Museum of Chinese in America that focused on American perceptions of Asian-Americans and Asian immigrants. Included in the display was the 1938 children’s book The Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese, which depicts the Chinese men to be conniving, indistinguishable crooks. Another plaque focused on Arnold Genthe, who created, through photograph editing, an illusion of exotic and isolated California Chinatowns which falsely depicted Chinese immigrants as refusing to integrate into Anglo-American society, which later earned Chinese Americans the stigma of being “The Others.” The Anglo-American tradition of stereotyping Asians surpassed its original role in theater and film, becoming deeply rooted in the everyday lives of Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when Asian-American immigration was more diverse than ever.
The article by Chin, Kim, and Zhou creates a more accurate description of Asian immigrants in the 1960s; explaining that they were of many different racial, educational and socio-economic backgrounds. According to the MOCA exhibit, throughout the second half of the 1900s, there was a perception of all Asian immigrants as poorly educated, unskilled laborers from China who immigrated to the United States desperate for work, but were completely incapable of social integration. In reality, however, many Asian immigrants to the US were highly skilled professionals from Taiwan, as well as Mainland China, who were immediately given high-wage jobs. In addition, Chin, Kim and Zhou’s article further reveals the ridiculous falsity of Genthe’s doctored photos, as residential patterns suggest that many of these wealthy Asian immigrants settled outside of inner city Chinatowns and instead, settled into affluent, (arguably Caucasian,) neighborhoods. The factual depiction of Asian immigrants and the stereotypical depiction, widely accepted and recreated in media from the 1940s-1960s are in reality, nearly complete opposites.

How this discrepancy survived with the number of Asian-American immigrants rising at exponential rates in some of America’s most-watched cities remains baffling to me.