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By Root 1505 0

from the United States. To avoid the humiliation of having their people turned away from American shores, the Japanese government in 1907 signed the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” in which Japan would voluntarily restrict and police contract-labor immigration to the United States. However, some of the Japanese émigrés began to buy and lease farmland in California, which so alarmed the state’s politicians that they lobbied the federal government for legislation to stop Japanese immigration. When these efforts came to nothing, they decided to focus on state legislation. Believing that the Japanese would be reluctant to migrate to California if they could not acquire land, the California legislature passed the Alien Land Act, which, until its repeal in 1948, barred all Asians from owning real estate in California.

18

As early as 1858, a San Francisco herbalist, Hu Yunxiao, used English-language business signs to bring in white customers, and, beginning in the 1870s, Chinese herbalists ran advertisements in English-language newspapers in California, some as large as half a page, with pictures of Chinese men taking the pulse of white patients.

19

By obscuring the truth, they promoted the myth of easy American success, and inspired others to emigrate. The myth persisted for decades. When researching To Save China, to Save Ourselves, his book on Chinese hand laundries in New York, author Renqiu Yu learned from his field interviews that as late as 1979 many descendants of laundrymen still had no inkling what these “clothing stores” had really meant.

20

The School Law of 1870 specified that the education of black and Indian children would be provided in separate schools.

21

During the early twentieth century, many ABCs used the terms “white” and “American” interchangeably, even though they were, like whites, American citizens. Such language only served to reinforce their sense of themselves as foreigners in the United States.

22

As more immigrant families possessed the financial means to let their children participate in leisure activities, softball, tennis, and golf became popular among the Chinese middle class.

23

This racism cooled Pardee Lowe’s teenage ambition to be elected president of the United States, a fever he later called “Presidentitis,” contracted when his teacher, Miss McIntyre, told the class: “every single one of you can be president of the United States someday!” As Lowe later recalled, “I broke down and wept. For the first time I admitted to myself the cruel truth. I didn’t have a ‘Chinaman’s chance’ of becoming president of the United States. In this crash of the lofty hopes which Miss McIntyre had raised, it did not occur to me to reflect that the chances of Francisco Trujillo, Yuri Matsuyama, or Penelope Lincoln [Pardee’s classmates] were actually no better than mine.”

24

Another date cited for the crash is October 29, the day on which the market took its worst beating.

25

Many whites believed the manufactured myths. “Last summer, on a day early in the afternoon, a big, husky, middle-aged American gentleman opened the [YMCA] door and asked in broken English for the location of the underground tunnels and opium dens,” one observer in San Francisco noted. “On being told that no such places existed, he was quite disappointed and ‘Chinatown’ lost its glamour [for] him.” White teenage girls, fed images of Chinese men as white slavers, seemed titillated by Chinatown’s reputation. According to the Chicago Tribune, they searched for Chinese men in alleys on their way to mission schools and toured Chinatown in groups in New York.

26

Both winning essayists ended up doing precisely the opposite of their written intentions. After graduating with a degree in international law from Harvard, Robert Dunn worked in Nationalist China as secretary to a delegate to the United Nations. Kaye Hong stayed in America, where he became a successful businessman.

27

Chinese American women took to the skies as well. One of the first female aviators of Chinese descent was Ouyang Ying, who resolved in the 1910s to help China