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The Changing Face of the Yellow Peril: a Case Study THE CHANGING FACE OF THE YELLOW PERIL: A CASE STUDY OF USING NARRATIVES IN HISTORY EDUCATION A Project Presented to the faculty of the Department of History California State University, Sacramento Submitted in partial satisfaction of The requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in History by Wayne Wang Yip To SPRING 2012 © 2012 Wayne Wang Yip To ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii THE CHANGING FACE OF THE YELLOW PERIL: A CASE STUDY OF USING NARRATIVES IN HISTORY EDUCATION A Project by Wayne Wang Yip To Approved by: ______________________________________, Committee Chair Chloe Burke ______________________________________, Second Reader Donald J. Azevada, Jr. ______________________________________ Date iii Student: Wayne Wang Yip To I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credits is to be awarded for the project. __________________________, Graduate Coordinator __________________ Mona Siegel Date Department of History iv Abstract of THE CHANGING FACE OF THE YELLOW PERIL: A CASE STUDY OF USING NARRATIVES IN HISTORY EDUCATION by Wayne Wang Yip To Over 22,000 Japanese Americans and 13,000 Chinese Americans actively served in the U.S. armed forces during the Second World War. While there are numerous historical works on the Japanese American military experience, little research has been developed regarding the service of Chinese Americans in the U.S. military. The first two chapters of this project trace and compare the contributions made by both Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans through their military service during the First and Second World Wars. This portion of study also draws upon major periodicals and oral histories to examine how shifts in mainstream racial attitudes changed in favor of Chinese Americans over Japanese Americans during the early decades of the twentieth century. As most historical studies of recent years are narrow in scope, they have a limited applicability to the high school classroom. The third chapter utilizes the evidence v from this research project to demonstrate how to apply narrowly-focused historical research to the classroom through construction of historical narratives. _____________________________________, Committee Chair Chloe Burke _____________________________________ Date vi PREFACE Over six decades after the end of World War II in June of 2000, President Clinton and other members of his administration inducted twenty-two Asian American soldiers into the Pentagon‘s Hall of Heroes and awarded them with America‘s highest military honor, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Clinton remarked, ―It‘s long past time to break the silence about their courage…rarely has a nation been so well-served by a people it has so ill-treated.‖1 After almost two decades of political pressure, Japanese Americans were finally able to receive much belated apologies and reparations for being unfairly incarcerated during World War II. The political push also set forth an immense effort to preserve and educate others about the experience of Japanese Americans during the war. As a result, there was a renewed interest in the men who served and sacrificed in 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Combat Regimental Team which led to a reevaluation of the heroic actions performed by these men throughout the course of the war. It was discovered that twenty-two Asian Americans were worthy of the Medal of Honor, but due to the racist tendencies of the time, they had received lesser awards. The ceremony was conducted as a means to right an injustice. Interestingly enough, two of the twenty- two men honored that day were not Japanese American. One was Filipino American 1 Rudi Williams, ―22 Asian Americans Inducted Into Hall of Heroes,‖ American Forces Press Service, June 28, 2000, accessed March 18, 2012, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45241. vii named Rudolph B. Davila, who was still alive to receive his well-deserved Medal of Honor. The other was Captain Francis B. Wai, a Chinese Hawaiian officer who died in action near Leyte in the Philippine Islands. The posthumous medal bestowed to Francis Wai raises several major historical and historiographic questions about the role of Chinese Americans during the Second World War. In contrast to the well-documented Japanese American 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team, little has been recorded about the military experience of Chinese Americans. Captain Francis Wai, a man of Chinese descent, fought in an army that was considered racially segregated. Were they, like the Japanese Americans, forced to form their own units? Were Chinese Americans able to serve in racially-mixed units during World War II or in any other major American war prior to desegregation? If so, in what manner did they serve and did they encounter racism in the course of their service? Francis Wai was a commissioned officer who was promoted twice to the rank of captain. If he was an officer of a racially-mixed unit, which meant that in America‘s supposed segregated army, a non-white officer was commanding white men on the frontlines. Wai thus, upsets traditional historical understandings of race in an army that was not ―desegregated‖ until 1947. What was particular about Chinese Americans during World War II that appeared to make them more acceptable than Japanese Americans and African Americans? How then did this contrast with the laws viii and beliefs that restricted rights of Chinese Americans as well as Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century? These questions expose a sizable gap in American history. Professional historians have only recently started researching Chinese American history in the twentieth century. The goal of this project is to fill in this gap in history by discussing the agency and determination of Chinese Americans in their struggle for full citizenship in the United States through military service. The scattered evidence of Chinese Americans serving in the military also reveals changes in mainstream racial attitudes of white Americans toward the Chinese, both overseas and in America. However, racial attitudes toward Japanese Americans took a turn to the worse as the threat of Imperial Japan loomed large in the interwar period. This difference in racial attitude makes the Japanese American experience a good point of comparison with that of the Chinese Americans because both groups have endured the trials of restricted immigration, challenges over assimilation, generational gaps, social and economic racism. Both groups have also been marginalized by the black and white race dichotomy that has dominated American historical and societal landscape. Additionally, both groups must also be analyzed in a transnational setting where global politics and war play major roles in mainstream racial attitudes toward Chinese Americans and Japanese American alike. This analysis aims, thus, to ix uncover another layer of America‘s past and also to recover a piece of Chinese American history. E.P. Thompson, often considered the father of modern social history, famously stated in The Making of the English Working Class, ―I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‗obsolete‘ hand-loom weaver, the ‗utopian‘ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.‖2 Thompson hoped to discover the forgotten and the lost causes hidden deep in the past or ignored by previous historians. As opposed to retelling or readjusting the same narratives over and over again, modern historians have followed in Thompson's footsteps to ―present previously disregarded historical subjects, who could give access to a multiplicity of pasts.‖3 The practice of history today, as taught and executed at the tertiary level, revolves around questions of the past being answered through painstaking research, compilation and analysis of data, and narrative writing. History is about a process of discovering and rediscovering the past. Renowned Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis argues that historians have overwhelming chosen the narrative as the means ―to simulate what transpired in the past.‖4 It is of the utmost importance that students of history learn the process of communicating the past by writing narratives. 2 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 12. 3 Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 55. 4 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 105. x There is a major contrast in history education at the secondary and tertiary levels. Former high school history teacher and University of Michigan professor Robert Bain keenly observes, ―history at the university was a discipline…in high school, history was a subject students took and teachers taught.‖5 Take, for example, the state of California‘s history teaching standards. While the California State Standards for History-Social Science outlines topical and informational knowledge requirements, it fails to define the critical skills that students will need to become lifelong historical thinkers. Additionally, since textbook publishers all align their texts to the state standards, the most popular and easiest way to develop curriculum is to make the textbooks the central driving force for teaching history. In the educational climate of high-stakes testing,
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