Strangers from a Different Shore

Takaki reminisces about his childhood in Oahu, Hawaii, where he grew up in a diverse community of many Asian American ethnicities. He and his peers had different backgrounds, and spoke with each other in a pidgin English that combined aspects of their different languages. As a child, the author noticed that his community's diversity was not represented in school textbooks and that his teachers did not address the local history of Asian Americans such as himself. As a young man, Takaki pursued university studies in the Midwest, where locals treated him as a foreign student because he was Asian, forcing him to explain that he was a third-generation American and English was his native language.

Asian Americans are a diverse group with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and varying life experiences. Once a fairly small minority in the US, by the late 1980s they have become more populous and visible, with some neighborhoods becoming predominantly Asian American. The Immigration Act of 1965 liberalized immigration laws and prompted an increase in immigration from Asian nations. Despite their long history in the US, Asian Americans are still often considered less “American” than other ethnic groups, and they experience explicit as well as casual racism. This bias is often evident in people’s approaches to history. For instance, the history of pioneers in the West often focuses on white people moving west to settle and farm new land. However, simultaneously Asian immigrants were arriving by boat from China and other countries, and they also played a large role in settling the West Coast. Takaki argues that there is a prevailing stereotype of Europeans as “Settlers” while Asians were merely “Sojourners”; this misconception is not supported by the evidence. Indeed, European workers also came to the US temporarily to work, and then returned home, just as many Asian laborers did. Many Europeans and Asians came to the US with the intention of working temporarily, but ended up becoming permanent settlers.

The history of Asian Americans can be told through statistics and explained with social processes such as “push” and “pull” factors, but historians and learners should also pay attention to the primary sources left to us by individuals. These stories shed light on little-known historical events and humanize Asian Americans as individuals. For instance, Asian immigrants who were detained at the Angel Island detention center carved poetry into the walls of their cells, revealing their inner thoughts and experiences.

Historically, Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants experienced discrimination at the hands of Anglo-Americans. However, because of their shared racial and cultural characteristics, these settlers often found it easier to be accepted into the American mainstream. Asian Americans did not have this choice, as their race was seen as setting them apart. Moreover, Asians faced explicit discrimination by employers: They were paid lower wages than their white counterparts for the same work. This tactic pitted Asian and white workers against each other, prompting many white people in the West to lobby for Asians to be excluded from immigration and citizenship. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, federal laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act formally limited or banned certain Asians from emigrating to the US. The 1790 Naturalization Law, which stayed on the books until 1952, deemed naturalized citizenship a whites-only privilege. This means that no matter how long an Asian settler lived or worked in America, they would be denied citizenship. As “aliens” rather than full citizens, Asian settlers were denied the right to own land or vote. Only by being born in the US could an Asian person have citizenship. During World War ll, discrimination worsened as the federal government forcibly imprisoned over 100,000 people of Japanese descent—even though two-thirds of them were American citizens.

Takaki connects these many instances of discrimination to the American government’s explicit privileging of white people, plentiful evidence of which he finds in legal and government documents from the founding era well into the 20th century. Despite all this racism and discrimination, Takaki argues that multiculturalism has always existed in the United States, and most Asian immigrants were hopeful about what they could accomplish and experience during their new lives in the US.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, American businessmen and government representatives saw cheap Asian labor as an opportunity to expand agriculture and transportation systems in the western US and Hawaii. In the Hawaiian islands, then an independent Kingdom, white American planters began establishing sugar cane plantations and required inexpensive labor to reap large profits growing this valuable cash crop. While they coerced some indigenous Hawaiian people into working for them, the planters were generally dissatisfied with their work, and their ability to sustain themselves through traditional means such as hunting and fishing meant that the overseers had little control over them. Asian laborers, on the other hand, would work for little money and were considered more disciplined and productive than indigenous people. In 1850, plantation owners formed the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, which began contracting laborers for Hawaiian plantations. Asian workers were frequently commodified and dehumanized by their plantation employers, who ordered them as goods alongside other materials. Asian laborers worked for whatever low pay was offered to them, as they had no recourse to confront poor working conditions, abuse, or lack of food.

Employers noticed that strikes were more common among ethnically homogenous workers, so to prevent these workers from striking together, they ensured that their employees were ethnically and linguistically diverse. This prevented them from communicating with each other and forming plans to confront plantation owners. Because of this, planters ordered laborers from a variety of Asian countries, including the Philippines, Korea, Japan, and China, as well as people from Portugal.

The same dynamic existed in the continental United States, where farmers and railway bosses in California employed a variety of Asian laborers, whom they kept as mixed groups and paid less than white workers. Usually, these Asian workers were did menial or dangerous work that white Americans would not do for such low pay. Takaki posits that the US government and white American employers did not perceive Asians as settlers or future citizens, but as a labor class serving a country they would never belong to.

The author considers how Asian immigrants perceived the situation. Many were prompted to leave their homelands due to conflicts, rebellions, or severe economic hardship. One of the largest exoduses came from China: From 1840 to 1900, 2.4 million Chinese people left China, moving across Asia or to New Zealand, the US, or Canada. Tens of thousands of these Chinese workers agreed to work in Hawaii or the western US, perceiving these as places of abundance and opportunity where, after a few years of work, a poor man could become rich and return home to China. While some Chinese laborers were “coolies,” or people who were kidnapped or coerced into slavery in Peru and Cuba, those who came to the US did so voluntarily, though usually out of desperation.

At first, nearly all of these migrants were men. Takaki attributes this to Chinese cultural customs which deemed that women should stay at home with their families or their husbands’ families. Moreover, upper class Chinese women were subjected to foot binding at this time, leaving them deprived of their full mobility and making travel and physical labor impossible. However, some missionaries and plantation owners became concerned about the male-only populations on Hawaiian plantations. Believing that women’s presence would have a domesticating effect on the laborers, some planters required laborers to bring their wives with them. These women also worked on the plantations, but for a lower rate of pay than the men.

Takaki compares the experience of Chinese immigrants in California and Hawaii. In California, where white Americans constituted a huge majority of the population in the 19th century, whites tended to view Chinese laborers as temporary, transient workers—and as fierce competitors for jobs, undercutting white workers by laboring for less pay. Asian workers, recognizing the constant displacement of these frontier towns, were less likely to relocate their wives and children to California. The US government also greatly restricted the immigration of Chinese women to the mainland to reduce the number of sex workers (many Chinese women who immigrated to California before 1870 were sex workers). The tension between white working class men and Asian laborers in California led to discrimination and even violence against Asians. In Hawaii, on the other hand, Asian workers tended to sign long-term multiyear contracts to work on one plantation, giving them stability and making family relocations more feasible. Because white people were a small minority in Hawaii at the time, Asians there generally experienced less racist hostility than on the mainland.

In the late 1800s, the Japanese government ended centuries of cultural isolation by allowing some Japanese men to go abroad to work. Due to increased taxes on farmers, hundreds of thousands of Japanese families fell into debt and lost their land; poverty became widespread among rural people. This prompted many Japanese men to contract their labor in the US for several years in the hopes of making money and ultimately returning to Japan. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, over 300,000 Japanese men, mostly in their twenties, moved to Hawaii or California to work. Japanese women also emigrated to Hawaii and the US in greater numbers than Chinese women. Takaki attributes this to Japanese women’s increased mobility and engagement in wage-earning jobs in Japan, such as tea processing, paper making, textile manufacturing, and innkeeping. Unlike Chinese women, they even engaged in traditionally male occupations like construction and mining. Women’s education and professions were actively encouraged by the Meiji government of the time, who allowed Japanese women to move abroad since their experiences could benefit Japan upon their return. Many Japanese women migrated as “picture wives”: Their families had arranged their marriages and exchanged photos, and the women met their husbands for the first time in the US. Once in the US, many Japanese women worked at the same menial jobs as their husbands, but for less pay ($6 per month for women, $10 per month for men). Others labored as seamstresses and cooks.

Plantation owners noticed that male Japanese laborers were more content—and more likely to stay on at the same job—if they had wives and families, so they hired more couples. At the same time, some Japanese women were abducted or coerced into sex trafficking in the US.

In the early 20th century, about 8,000 Korean people moved to Hawaii or the US. Unlike Chinese and Japanese immigrants, the Koreans came from more diverse professional backgrounds. Many had already been exposed to Western culture through missionaries and had converted to Christianity. Because Japan was occupying Korea at the time, many Koreans left as political refugees. Other Koreans were facing poverty and perceived the US as a land of riches. Korean immigrants also practiced arranged “picture marriages,” which encouraged Korean women to come to the US.

Filipinos arrived during these years too. Because of the American occupation of the Philippines, they were not technically immigrants, and many had been exposed to American educational curricula and customs. Like other Asian workers, Filipinos considered working in Hawaii and the US a route to wealth. This perception was aggressively encouraged by labor agents from Hawaiian plantations, who traveled the Philippines and showed romanticized movies about workers’ experiences in Hawaii. Since many farmers in the country were struggling, being a “sojourner” or temporary laborer was an especially appealing prospect, as wages in Hawaii and the US were higher than in the Philippines.

In the early 20th century, people from the Punjab region of India also began moving to the US. These immigrants were largely Sikh, a religious minority in India, and 99% were male. Because the British government, which was colonizing India at the time, had changed agricultural laws, many Indian smallholders were under financial pressure. This prompted them to look abroad for opportunities. Like so many other immigrants, they intended to make money and return to their families’ properties.

The author reiterates that Asian American migrants were “enormously diverse” in terms of their ethnic, linguistic, educational levels, and religious backgrounds. Despite their many differences, all of these immigrants viewed the US as a place of prosperity where they could reach personal or financial goals that would be impossible in their home communities.

The first step on their journeys was enduring the conditions on board the ships. Confined to the steerage compartments, travelers confronted seasickness, disease, bad food and drink, and crowded conditions during their multi-week journeys at sea. They slept in bunk beds and had no privacy. Most were overjoyed to finally arrive in Hawaii or the US. Women immigrants often arrived as “picture brides,” sometimes meeting their husbands for the first time upon their arrival. This was the cause of much disappointment, as the men tended to be decades older than the young brides. Another difficulty was encountering racism; some immigrants were verbally or physically assaulted in racist attacks by white Americans as they disembarked their ships. Once in the US, many Asian newcomers were overwhelmed with homesickness as they confronted a new reality that was not as prosperous as they had hoped.