How can transnational histories illuminate the dynamics of a racialized nation-state? In what political, legal, and economic contexts might people claim and/or reject citizenship? Who counts as a citizen? In her talk about Chinese American citizens who immigrated to China in the early twentieth century, Charlotte Brooks shared vivid stories of lives left unexamined by historians while also raising questions that critically resonate with contemporary issues of immigration and inequality.
Between 1900 and 1937, one in five Chinese American citizens returned to China with the intention to settle and stay for the rest of their lives. Many were second generation Chinese Americans who, having seen and experienced the individual discrimination and structural inequity resulting from white supremacy in immigration laws, schooling, employment, and housing, anticipated downward social and economic mobility despite their overall educational success in the U.S. system. Almost all eventually resided in China’s Treaty Ports where foreign residents typically benefited from the imposition of unequal/imperialist treaties in both economic opportunity and the rights of extraterritoriality, or extrality, which meant that their crimes and legal disputes would be governed by the laws of their own nations. Many took advantage of an informal version of Chinese citizenship to work, enter Chinese government positions, or sometimes even own land outside of the treaty ports, opportunities not available to foreigners. However, as the lives of those studied by Brooks illustrate, issues of citizenship, race, identity, rights, and belonging intertwined in complex ways for the Chinese Americans attempting to create new lives for themselves and fit into these polarized cities.
One of many stories of inclusion/exclusion, in 1929 an athlete and a lawyer named Wai-yuen “Nick” Char got into a fistfight on a baseball field in the French concession and was accused of injuring a Chinese citizen. Although he lived in the international settlement and believed he was protected, when Nick Char left for business he was arrested, charged with assault, and found guilty. He claimed extrality and the U.S. government demanded his release. But Chinese officials declared that extrality didn’t extend to him because the children of Chinese fathers are Chinese citizens, and, in fact, he had used that criterion to justify his right to practice law. At that point, the U.S. consulate deserted him and he remained in prison for two months. However, Nick Char’s status as an athlete, a lawyer, and a WWI veteran, along with a possible intervention by Chiang Kai-Shek, eventually saved him. He went back to Honolulu and never returned to China.
The United States’ exclusion and abandonment of its own citizens was not unusual in the treaty ports during this time. Within the ultranationalist, anti-immigrant U.S. context in which citizenship was (and still is) narratively, if not legally, defined according to racial and cultural terms, an unmistakable pattern of discrimination surfaces in the stories Brooks uncovered from newspapers, consular records, and immigration records/interviews. For example, by forcing Chinese Americans to communicate only in English, not registering their businesses, or even refusing to grant passport renewals, the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou regularly and effectively stripped Chinese Americans—but not white Americans—of their citizenship rights and protections without any due process at all. Justifications included statements alleging that Chinese Americans “have little regard for American ideals of institutions” or are “too Chinese” or are “living as a Chinese.” To what extremes the racialized U.S. nation-state will go to protect whiteness is worth examining, both then and certainly now.
Ultimately, Brooks problematizes a dominant assumption in U.S. history and politics—that this country tells the tale of itself as a nation of immigrants, a supposed magnet and light of justice and freedom attracting all—when she asked, “Who wants to leave the United States?” and then answered, “A lot of people it turns out.”
~ Alisa Algava
