“Multiple Histories”: Audrey Wu Clark on Catherine Ceniza Choy’s *Asian American Histories of the United States*

Asian American Histories of the United States is an excellent, innovative, accessible, and very present history of Asian America. In particular, it employs an unusual reverse chronological structure in its history. It also makes a point of tracing the multiple “histories” of Asian Americans. Writing from the vantage point of the Stop Asian Hate movement of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Choy writes a genealogy of the joint stereotypes of the model minority and the yellow peril that resulted in so many crimes against Asian Americans during the pandemic.

Few comprehensive, intraethnic Asian American historiographies exist: certainly, field-defining works such as Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1975) and Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore (1989) come to mind, as do Deepa Iyer’s We Too Sing America (2015), and Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America: A History (2015). Yet Chan’s, Takaki’s, and Lee’s histories give the history of the largest Asian ethnic groups, and Iyer’s history explores the history of discrimination against South Asians, Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, that came to the fore after 9/11. Choy’s history, in contrast, aims “to narrate and to integrate less well-known stories about Asian Americans that spotlight specific ethnic group and thematic experiences, such as Indian, Korean, Filipino, and Cambodian Americans, as well as mixed race and adopted Asian Americans, among others.”[i] For Choy, Foucault’s concept of a “history of the present” or a multiple genealogy comes into play when attempting to construct “histories” of such a diverse group of people that Asian Americans are.

A much-needed “history of the present” following the COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States, this book traces hate crimes and legal discrimination against Asian Americans back to the nineteenth century but also bears witness to the historic bravery of Asian Americans in challenging these social blights of their time. The very structure of her historiography reflects her value of genealogy by going further back in time to reconstruct present dynamics. To reflect this deeper value, the chapters proceed in reverse chronology: Chapter One, “2020: The Health of the Nation”; Chapter Two, “1975: Trauma and Transformation;” Chapter Three, “1968: What’s in the Name ‘Asian American’?”; Chapter Four, “1965: The Many Faces of Post-1965 Asian America;” Chapter Five, “1953: Mixed Race Lives”; Chapter Six, “1941 and 1942: The Days That You Remember”; Chapter Seven, “1919: Declaration of Independence”; Chapter Eight, “1875: Homage”; Conclusion, “1869: These Wounds.” Most importantly, Choy works against the “historical erasure” of Asian Americans that “haunt[s] us in the twenty-first century.”[ii]

Choy prefaces her history by stating, “Asian Americans are not a monolith. They are a heterogeneous group with multiple histories.”[iii] In her book, she holds herself to this statement in giving voices to various underrepresented Southeast and South Asian American and Pacific Islander groups in Asian America. Her rhetorical devices of first-person narration and second-person address are particularly effective in evoking empathy for historical figures. For example, she uses plural first-person narration when she states, “Thus, Asian Americans find ourselves at a crossroads. As we celebrate these breakthroughs, we remain targets of hate. How did we get here?”[iv] Plural first-person narration creates a sense of solidarity among Asian Americans and allies as they read and are activated by this text. Moreover, when discussing Japanese American internment during World War II, she uses second-person address:

If you are married to a non-Japanese American, you may be anxious like Mary Ventura, née Chiyo Asaba, who is a native of Washington State. She and her Filipino American husband, Mamerto Ventura, have built a life together in Seattle’s International District. At first, they politely request exemption for mixed race couples. When their requests are denied, they hire a lawyer and file the first known courtroom challenge in the United States to Japanese internment. Mary Ventura insists on her loyalty and devotion to the Constitution and its laws. Federal district court judge Lloyd Black rejects her claim, setting a dangerous precedent.[v]

Atypical of historiographies, second-person address is particularly poignant insofar as it draws the reader into what seems to be a distant history.

A third rhetorical move that Choy makes in the introduction is the repetition of “Asian American history begins in…”, which effectively demonstrates the multiplicity of genealogy. She marks numerous beginnings of Asian American history, beginning in 2020 with the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center and the work discovering the inordinate number of Filipino nurses dying from COVID-19,[vi] but also beginning in 1965 when the Hart-Celler Act, or the Immigration and Nationality Act, was passed.[vii] She also notes another historical beginning in 1919 when Korean delegates met in Philadelphia to communicate to the American people that Koreans all of the world had declared their independence from Japan. [viii] Another historical beginning Choy articulates is in  1875 with the passage of the Page Act, which barred the immigration of all Asian women to the US on the assumption that they were all prostitutes.[ix]  The multiple origin points of Asian American history allows the history to be variegated and flexible.

Most importantly, as a pandemic history, Choy traces the association of Asian Americans with disease that emerged during 2020 back to the nineteenth century when the San Francisco Board of Health determined that the Chinese in San Francisco were “contaminants” to US society in 1876.[x] In this manner, Choy brings the themes of her work together to note resonances across time and space. In addition to giving a genealogy of the yellow peril dating back to the nineteenth century, Choy also traces the 2021 hate crimes against the Georgia spa murders in which six out of the eight victims were Asian American women back to the legislated hypersexualization of Asian American women in the Page Act of 1875. The convicted killer Robert Aaron Long is cited to have committed the murders because of his sex addiction. Likewise, the 1875 Page Act barred Asian women from immigrating to the United States under the assumption that all Asian women were “immoral” prostitutes.[xi]

Choy furnishes readers with myriad untold histories such as the Sikh Massacre by the British in 1919.[xii] She goes into detail in telling of the Philippine President Ferdinand Maros’s dictatorial regime:

Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos’s backing of US military actions in Vietnam and American presidents’ continuing support of the Marcos regime, despite his dictatorial ambitions, motivated some Filipino American activists to work toward Philippines democracy as well as freedom from American racism. After Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines in 1972, they participated in various anti-martial law organizations in the United States.[xiii]

Choy does not shy away from underscoring U.S. imperialism in the Philippines in pointing out that although the US felt vindicated in colonizing the Philippines by securing for it public health, the Spanish-American War caused a cholera epidemic which caused 150,000 to 200,000 deaths.[xiv] While Asian American histories often discuss the Spanish-American War of 1898, she also covers the armed resistance against the U.S. in the Philippine-American War the followed suit from 1899 to 1902.

Asian American Histories of the United States does not only decry the unconscionable events against Asian Americans in history, but it also celebrates the courage of Asian American activists and historical figures. Choy commemorates Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first Congresswoman of color who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1865 and who later authored Title IX to protect gender equality.[xv] The book also mentions Grace Meng, the first Asian American Congresswoman from New York who spoked out against anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic.[xvi] Another Asian American senator, Tammy Duckworth made history by being the first US senator to give birth while serving on Congress and “secured a historic change in Senate rules that allows senators to bring their infant children onto the Senate floor.”[xvii] Choy also celebrates giants in the field of Asian American studies such as Cecilia Suyat—who played a part in the 1954 ruling of Brown v. Board of Education and who became the second wife of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice—and activist Grace Lee Boggs, who worked on joint African and Asian American civil rights. Choy makes a point to trace a radical genealogy of activist Asian American women from the present moment back to the civil rights era.

Although Choy doesn’t explicitly use the term genealogy itself, Asian American Histories of the United States is a crucial, multifarious genealogy of the anti-Asian hate crimes of the pandemic. It pays particular attention to historically underrepresented South and Southeast Asian American and Pacific Islander groups, particularly the Hmong and Bhutanese peoples. Genealogies are meant to be inclusive of those who have historically been left or erased from history and that is just what Choy’s book does. It documents told and untold Asian American exclusion—a history that continues to haunt the U.S. today.

[i] Catherine Ceniza Choy, Asian American Histories of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022), xvi.

[ii] Choy, xi.

[iii] Choy, xiv.

[iv] Choy, xii.

[v] Choy, 117.

[vi] Choy, 1.

[vii] Choy, 4.

[viii] Choy, 7.

[ix] Choy, 8.

[x] Choy, 13.

[xi] Choy, 158.

[xii] Choy, 134.

[xiii] Choy, 57.

[xiv] Choy, 140.

[xv] Choy, 163-164.

[xvi] Choy, 165.

[xvii] Choy, 166.