Chinese Americans on the Home Front

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www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2007-07/Pickets_and_Protests.htm

The Chinese in America responded to Japanese aggression with great speed. Soon after the Mukden Incident, the Chinese-language newspaper Chung Sai Yat Po advocated that China declare war on Japan. In addition, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) wired both the Nationalist and Communist factions in China, calling on them to join forces to defeat the Japanese. Organizations with names like Anti-Japanese Association, National Salvation Association, and National Salvation Fund Savings Society were formed in Chinatowns across the country. Throughout the early and mid-1930s, as the Japanese army continued to attack parts of China, Chinese Americans raised money to send to China, and frequently urged other Americans to support their cause. Demonstrating a new sense of political enfranchisement, they petitioned the American government and the League of Nations to intervene in the conflict in China.

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Americans First
Chinese Americans and the Second World War
K. Scott Wong
Honorable Mention, 2005 Book Award in History from the Association for Asian American Studies
World War II was a watershed event for many of America's minorities, but its impact on Chinese Americans has been largely ignored. Utilizing extensive archival research as well as oral histories and letters from over one hundred informants, K. Scott Wong explores how Chinese Americans carved a newly respected and secure place for themselves in American society during the war years.

Long the victims of racial prejudice and discriminatory immigration practices, Chinese Americans struggled to transform their image in the nation's eyes. As Americans racialized the Japanese enemy abroad and interned Japanese Americans at home, Chinese citizens sought to distinguish themselves by venturing beyond the confines of Chinatown to join the military and various defense industries in record numbers. Wong offers the first in-depth account of Chinese Americans in the American military, tracing the history of the 14th Air Service Group, a segregated unit comprising over 1,200 men, and examining how their war service contributed to their social mobility and the shaping of their ethnic identity.

Americans First pays tribute to a generation of young men and women who, torn between loyalties to their parents' traditions and their growing identification with America and tormented by the pervasive racism of wartime America, served their country with patriotism and courage. Consciously developing their image as a "model minority," often at the expense of the Japanese and Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans created the pervasive image of Asian Americans that still resonates today.