Review: Rethinking the Center from the Margins

Reviewed Work(s): Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture
by Gary Y. Okihiro
Review by: K. Scott Wong
Source: American Quarterly , Jun., 1997, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp. 415-422
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30041589

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to American Quarterly

This content downloaded from

129.2.19.102 on Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:11:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Rethinking the Center from the Margins

K. SCOTT WONG

Williams College

Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. By

Gary Y. Okihiro. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. 203 pages.
$25.00 (cloth). $12.95 (paper).

SINCE THE 1968-1969 THIRD WORLD STRIKE AT FRANCISCO STATE

College and University of California-Berkeley, when Asian American
studies emerged as part of the political/educational agenda of Ethnic studies,
the field has attained a fair degree of respectability and maturity.' A number
of universities and colleges now offer courses in Asian American studies, a
variety of English department courses often include Asian American litera-
ture, and most recently, the University of California, Santa Barbara has
established the nation's first Asian American studies department. In addition,
the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) has grown into a
nationally recognized academic association with an annual meeting, and the
AAAS regularly sponsors a panel at the yearly American Studies Associa-
tion conference. The maturity of the field, in terms of published scholarly
work, was exemplified with the publication of Ronald Takaki's Strangers
From a Diferent Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) and Sucheng
Chan's Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991). These two survey
texts of Asian American history marked the point at which enough research
had already been published to warrant and sustain the writing of two
synthetic, yet interpretive, studies of the histories of Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, Filipino, and South and Southeast Asian Americans. Utilizing primary
and secondary sources, these two scholars summed up a whole generation
of Asian American historical studies and thus provided the field with standards
by which future synthetic historical work in the field will be measured. With

K. Scott Wong is an associate professor of history at Williams College. He is the author

of "Transformation of Culture: Three Chinese Views of America" (1996).

American Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2 (June 1997) © 1997 American Studies Association

415

This content downloaded from

129.2.19.102 on Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:11:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
416 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

the publication of Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American

and Culture, Asian American studies has been advanced again b
Okihiro's adept blending of history, literature, sociology, and c
studies, all of which come together to provide a provocative and ins
reading of the Asian American experience and how it fits into t
themes of American history, Ethnic studies, American studies, and
porary debates on what it means to be an "American."
This book is made up of six chapters, each originally presen
lectures (printed here with slight modification) at Amherst College
spring of 1992 during Okihiro's tenure there as the John J. M
Professor of American Institutions and International Relations (Okihiro is

an associate professor of history and director of the Asian American

studies program at Cornell University). As he mentions in the preface,
these lectures were written and presented during a time of cultural debates.
During this period, there was a "fervent and oftentimes heated debate
about the idea of a mainstream, about the core of American history and
culture, about intellectual 'ghettoization' and ethnic 'balkanization'" (ix).
Thus with debates of this nature in the background, these lectures take up
the issues of where and when Asian Americans enter and become part of
the larger American cultural and historical landscape. There is also a
bittersweet irony that these lectures were commissioned by the John J.
McCloy Distinguished Visiting Professorship. During the Second World
War, McCloy served as the Assistant Secretary of War (and later as the
High Commissioner to Germany and the president of the World Bank) and
was a staunch supporter of the wartime internment of Japanese nationals
and Japanese Americans. Okihiro, one of the foremost historians of
Japanese America, must have relished the opportunity to deliver these
lectures under the auspices of McCloy's legacy.2
A general theme that reappears throughout these lectures is the conten-
tion that

the core values and ideals of the nation emanate not from the mainstream but
from the margins-from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and
American Indians, women, and gays and lesbians. In their struggles for
equality, these groups have helped preserve and advance the principles and
ideals of democracy and have thereby made America a freer place for all. (ix)

Viewing American history in this way requires a recentering of our

perspectives. Herein lies the book's main contribution to the currrent
discourse about race and ethnicity, gender studies, American studies, and

This content downloaded from

129.2.19.102 on Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:11:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 RETHINKING THE CENTER FROM THE MARGINS 417

most centrally, Asian American studies. By creating new centers,

"pivots," in Okihiro's terminology, around which our understandin
Asian American history can revolve, Okihiro challenges the field to ret
and reposition our sites of reference. The lectures cover a broad ran
topics: the history and legacy of Orientalism, especially in regard to As
Americans; the position of Asian Americans in American racial formati
the marginality of women in Asian American history; the sites of race
class in that history; the circular relationship between the concepts of
"Yellow Peril" and the "Model Minority"; and the position of A
Americans in the broader reconceptualization of American culture.
The first chapter, "When and Where I Enter" (taken from Paula
Giddings' When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race
and Sex in America, 1984), immediately sets the tone for a transnational
perspective of Asian American studies by coupling images from Tiananmen
Square of Chinese dissidents rallying around a "goddess of liberty" figure
modeled on the Statue of Liberty with that of Ellis Island itself, and off the
coast of San Francisco, the wooden barracks of Angel Island. Here,
between 1910-1940, Asian immigrants were detained, sometimes for more
than a year, as they waited to enter the American province. These islands
represent two extremes in American attitudes about immigrants and their
countries of origin. While European immigrants certainly faced consider-
able prejudice and discrimination at the hands of nativists, the image of
Lady Liberty and Ellis Island has been constructed as one of welcoming
those "yearning to breathe free." Asians, on the other hand, were barred
from immigrating due to racial and class stipulations, and were denied the
right of naturalized citizenship because of their race. (Those of African
nativity or descent were granted citizenship in 1870. The racial criterion
for citizenship was not eliminated completely until 1952.) Because of this,
Asian immigrants were politically disenfranchised and thus rendered
politically unimportant and invisible.3
Okihiro does not attribute this treatment of Asians solely to racism in
America, but places it within the context of the legacy of Orientalism.
Following Edward Said and other's position that Asia was constructed as
Europe's Other, and thus inferior, Okihiro traces this ideological position
to ancient Greek literature. Reading the Greek historian Ctesias (fifth
centrury B.C.E.), one finds some people of Asia depicted as "dog-faced
creatures" and "creatures without heads." For Hippocrates, Asia was
different from the west "in every respect" and "very widely." Later,
Alexander the Great was recorded as saying that Greeks were a "free

This content downloaded from

129.2.19.102 on Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:11:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
418 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

people" and Asians "a nation of slaves" (8-10). In a cultural sense,

therefore, Asia was set apart from the European model of civilization
rather early on.4
However, Okihiro does not make the simple claim that Orientalism
simply migrated to the Americas with Europeans, or that there is a
necessary relationship between European and European American percep-
tions of Asians. Instead, he maintains "that there is a remarkable familiar-
ity to Orientalism's face on both shores of the Atlantic and that its
resemblance extends to European constructions of American Indians and

Africans (19-20). He makes this link by drawing on Shakespeare's The

Tempest and the figure of Caliban. Though Caliban was mixed African and
Indian, Okihiro points out that Indians were often linked to Asians during
this period, and that the imagery attributed to the two were often similar. In
this way, Okihiro introduces Asians to the American cultural landscape
through Caliban in the Caribbean rather than in California during the Gold
Rush as is usually the case. At the same time, Okihiro points out that
"Asians did not come to America; Americans went to Asia. Asians did not
come to take the wealth of America; Americans went to take the wealth of
Asia. Asians did not come to conquer and colonize America; Americans
went to conquer and colonize Asia"(28-29). Therefore, the "when and
where" of Asian American history is located within the European and
American expansion into the Pacific which in turn faciliated the movement
of Asians to the Americas.

The theme of Orientalism is picked up again in Chapter Five, "Perils of

the Mind and Body." In this chapter, Okihiro compares American images
of Africans and Indians to those that developed around Asians, marking a
similarity as seen in the concept of the "Yellow Peril," the fear that Asians
would physically and culturally overrun the country. While many other
scholars are content to label the Yellow Peril irrational or fantastic, Okihiro
contends that it is "constructed with a purpose in mind and function[s] to
sustain the social order" (137). By maintaining a fear of Asians as
threatening, they could be kept as the Other, and outside of the American
polity. When viewed in a "positive" light and embraced by American
journalists and politicians as an example of an assimilable minority, Asians
have been cast as the "model minority." The now-famous U.S. News and
World Report article from 26 December 1966, declared, "At a time when
Americans are awash in worry over the plight of racial minorities--one
such minority, the nation's 300,000 Chinese-Americans, is winning wealth
and respect by dint of its own hard work."5 This however, was more of an

This content downloaded from

129.2.19.102 on Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:11:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 RETHINKING THE CENTER FROM THE MARGINS 419

attack on African American poor than it was "praise" for Chinese

Americans. In recent years, however, "hard-working" Asian Americans
have become a "threat" to the social order. As Asian American enrollments
increase in the nation's prestigious colleges and universities, there has been
a backlash against them. M.I.T becomes "Made in Taiwan" and UCLA has
been called "the university of Caucasians lost among Asians." Thus the
diligent model minority has become the new yellow peril. Okihiro
skillfully brings these two concepts together as engendered images that are
not opposites, but which

form a circular relationship that moves in either direction. [T]he yellow peril
denot[es] a masculine threat of military and sexual conquest, and the model
minority symboliz[es] a feminized position of passivity and malleability.
Moving in one direction along the circle, the model minority mitigates the
alleged danger of the yellow peril, whereas reversing direction, the model
minority, if taken too far, can become the yellow peril. In either swing along
the arc, white supremacy is maintained and justified through feminization in
one direction and repression in the other. (142)

The second chapter, "Is Yellow Black or White?" attempts to place

Asian Americans in the broader discourse concerning race in America. The
question is an important one. "It is a question of Asian American identity,
of Third World Identity, and of American identity, or of the nature of
America's racial formation"6 (33). Acknowledging that race in America is
perceived essentially along bipolar lines-black and white-Okihiro points
out that Asians, along with American Indians and Latinos, are often
rendered invisible in American racial politics, and are thus denied a place
in the larger picture of American society. Instead, Asian Americans are
perceived as "near-whites" or "just like blacks"(33). This, of course,
negates any history unique to Asian Americans or where their history may
intersect with other groups. Okihiro makes a case in this chapter that
African and Asian Americans, despite their long-standing tensions, actu-
ally share certain historical commonalities. They

share a history of European colonization, decolonization, and independence

under neocolonization and dependency. [They] share a history of oppression
in the United States, successively serving as slaves and cheap labor, as
peoples excluded and absorbed, as victims of mob rule and Jim Crow. [They]
share a history of struggle for freedom and the democratization of America,
of demands for equaity and human dignity, of insistence on making real the
promise that all men and women are created equal.(34)

This content downloaded from

129.2.19.102 on Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:11:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
420 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

Unfortunately, due to the pressures of Anglo-conformity and the divisive

politics of race, these connnections have been forgotten. The chapter begins
with a verse from Ice Cube's "Black Korea" in which he warns Korean
merchants to respect the "Black fist" and it ends with a report of a Korean
American minister reciting Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream"
speech at an African-Korean Christian Alliance prayer vigil in Los Angeles.
The anomosities between the two groups do indeed exist, but perhaps
through remembering their historical ties, bridges of unity can be built.
Okihiro opens the third chapter, "Recentering Women" by referring to
Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" chapter of her The Woman
Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1975). This vignette
captures much of Asian and Asian American women's history. They have
been relegated to the margins of both societies and are thus nearly
excluded from the writing of Asian and Asian American history. Due to a
combination of Asian cultural factors, economic strategies, and American
legislation which greatly restricted the immigration of Asian women, far
fewer Asian women than men entered the United States before 1965.

Because of this, the common image of early Asian immigrants was that of
heterosexual male laborers living in "bachelor" societies, unable to raise
families, and cut adrift from their home cultures. This chapter, however,
seeks to recenter Asian American history, and position women in Asia as
intimately involved with the men who left home to venture to America, and
to tell the stories of the many women who did manage to journey to the
United States. Those women who stayed in Asia raised families, took care
of in-laws, and maintained (and sometimes transformed) the cultural
continuity of tradition until their men-folk returned to Asia. Other women,
however, decided to make the journey to America, despite great hardships.
Maria Hwang, left her husband in Korea because he had taken a concubine.
He took her children and sister-in-law to Hawaii to work on a sugar
plantation. When she left Korea, she told her husband, "I am no longer
going to live with you, I am taking my three children to America and
educate them. I shall become a wonderful woman"(75). This and other
tales of Asian women in America reveal a wide range of motives,
arrangements, and results of their immigration experience.
Okihiro argues that the recentering of women in Asian American history
has opened up new perspectives in reconstructing the past. It "extends the
interpretive and geographic boundaries of Asian American history and
identity-Asian America's bachelor society was neither exclusively male
nor splendidly isolated from Asia; recentering women positions gender as

This content downloaded from

129.2.19.102 on Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:11:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 RETHINKING THE CENTER FROM THE MARGINS 421

a prominent social category in determining relations of power

trajectories of social change-race and class are neither the sole nor

principle determinants of Asian American history and culture"(91)

viewed in this way, Asian American history returns to its tra
origins and women are restored as equally vital actors in the m
Asian America.
In the final chapter, "Margin as Mainstream," Okihiro returns to the
theme that he introduced in the preface. He refutes the claims of the
political right that minorities, including women and gays and lesbians,
have led the nation astray by creating balkanized enclaves. In turn, he also
admonishes the Left which "celebrates a minority's exceptionalism, char-
acterized (and sometimes caricatured) by invention of tradition, affirma-
tion of fragile identities, and exclusion of others, who form their opposi-
tion"(150). Instead, Okihiro reminds us that

ethnic studies began with an alternative vision of American history and

culture that was broadly inclusive. It started with the idea that American
society consisted not only of Europeans but also of American Indians,
Africans, Latinos, and Asians. It went on to propose that the histories of all
of America's people were so intertwined that to leave out any group would
result in sizable silences within the overall narrative. . . . [E]thnic studies
fundamentally sought to to move the pivot, by fracturing the univeralism of
white men and by repositioning gender, class, race, and sexuality from the
periphery to the core, decentering and recentering the colors and patterns of
the old fabric. (150-51)

Citing cases of Asian American struggles for labor unions, school desegre-
gation, citizenship, civil liberties during WWII, and ethnic and women
studies programs, he argues that those on the margins have actually been
the ones to democratize the nation for the benefit of all.
Throughout the text, Okihiro moves easily between American, African,
Asian, and Asian American studies, offering the reader a wide range of
sources and avenues for further thought. Athough the "factual" informa-
tion he provides to present his cases may not be new, his fresh insights and
new approaches to well-established models in the field make this one of
the more important works to appear in Asian American studies in recent
years. His challenge to rethink the mainstream from the margins not only
pertains to the broader picture of American culture, it also invites Asian
American studies scholars to reassess our own approaches to our research
and teaching. This is an important collection of essays that I look forward
to sharing with my colleagues and students.

This content downloaded from

129.2.19.102 on Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:11:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
422 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

NOTES

1. For details on the Third World Strike and the origins of Asian American studies,
see the special commemorative issue of Amerasia Journal (15:1 [1989]) devoted to the
legacy of the strike; and William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia,
1993).
2. For a study that documents McCloy's involvement in the WWII internment of
Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans, see Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The
Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps (New York, 1976).
3. For studies about the exclusion of Asian immigrants, especially Chinese, and their
responses to exclusion, see Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the
Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943 (Philadelphia, 1991); Bill Ong Hing
Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990
(Stanford, Calif., 1993); and Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese
Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, Calif.,
1994). See also Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History
of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island (Seattle, Wash., 1991).
4. Although it is beyond the purpose of this chapter, Okihiro might have dealt with
the Other's (Asian's) perception of those different from themselves, thus problematizing
the simple one-way vision of Orientalism. It is important to realize that while the
Greeks were describing Asians as "dog-faced creatures," the Chinese were doing the
same to peoples to their west. Sometime between the sixth century B.C.E. and the first
century A.D., the Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Oceans) appeared,
describing the lands and peoples well beyond China's borders. There were "hairy white
people," "malodorous barbarians," and "heads that fly about alone, winged men, dog-
faced men, and bodies with no heads." For a description of this text, as well as a
comparison to similar images found in Greek and Roman texts of this period, see
Joseph Needham, et al. Science and Civilization in China, 6 vols., (Cambridge, 1959),
3:504-8.
5. For a critique of the model minority thesis, see Keith Osajima, "Asian Americans
as the Model Minority: An Analysis of the Popular Press Image in the 1960s and
1980s," in Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian
American Studies, ed. Gary Okihiro et al. (Pullman, Wash., 1988), 165-74.
6. For a definition and study of racial formation, see Michael Omi and Howard
Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New
York, 1986).

This content downloaded from

129.2.19.102 on Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:11:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms