Citizens of Asian America is a welcome addition to the scholarship on race and the Cold War. As a significant body of work has demonstrated, important changes in civil rights were tied to Cold War dynamics. Cindy I-Fen Cheng argues that while the rights of different racial minority groups were affected, seminal works focused initially on African Americans. The literature has since become more diverse, including Christina Klein’s work on Asia in American Cold War culture, (Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961, 2003). But Cheng is correct in saying that Asian American Cold War history deserves more attention, and that Asian American history illuminates broader features of Cold War era politics, culture and rights.
Scholarship on race, civil rights, and the Cold War can appear in various forms. Some works are focused on the way international affairs affect domestic politics or social movements, such as James Meriwether’s Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (2002); others are focused on the way domestic dynamics affect foreign relations, such as Thomas Borstelmann’s The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2001). Some works examine the domestic and international engagement of particular groups, like Carol Anderson’s Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (2003). Other works have a more internal focus, so that the “Cold War context” refers to the era of domestic anti-communism and repression after 1945. Some scholarship is transnational, with elements of the domestic and international histories intertwined, as in Brenda Gayle Plummer’s recent work, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (2013). All of these approaches are important. Distinguishing among these approaches is essential because different approaches rely on different kinds of archival sources, and the breadth of the claims a scholar can make depends on the particular realm of her research. There is, as yet, no deeply synthetic work that covers the broad range of domestic minority rights politics and their relationship to Cold War-era U.S. foreign relations and global affairs.
Cheng’s contribution to this broader literature is principally focused on the domestic sphere. Her primary sources are oral histories and archives of local groups and institutions, as well as sources that illuminate state and federal politics and anti-communist efforts. These sources are well matched when her focus is on Asian American politics and racial formation. Global events, particularly the Chinese communist revolution and the Korean War, play a role in the domestic story because they frame the experience of Chinese American and Korean American communities. They also affect the way other Americans regarded these groups: for example, when tense relations with China after 1949 led to fears that Chinese Americans might act as spies. Cheng examines the differences among Asian Americans, thereby illuminating the ways in which Asian American culture was “a site that generated competing stories about race and U.S. democracy” (p. 5).
Cheng does not rely on foreign relations-related archives, but they are not needed when her focus is on the way international affairs, as configured in domestic politics and culture, affect the citizenship rights of particular communities in the United States. When she ranges beyond this, however, there is a disconnect between the arguments made and the sources relied on.
The book is at its strongest when Cheng turns to the concrete narratives that underly her analysis. For example, chapter one discusses 1940s housing discrimination cases in Los Angeles, California, against Tommy Amer, a Chinese American, and Yin Kim, a Korean American. Yin Kim and his wife secretly moved into their new home while it was in escrow so that they were already living in the home when they were served with notice of a lawsuit over the breach of a racially restrictive covenant covering the property. For Kim (and also Amer), the support of churches and community groups aided their efforts in fighting the lawsuits aimed at removing them from their homes.
When the United States Supreme Court took up the constitutionality of racially restrictive covenants, it initially slated the Kim and Amer cases for review along with five others. The Court later decided to hear only four cases of the original seven (including African American homeowners), excluding the cases of Kim and Amer along with the case of a mixed-race individual. Cheng argues that the Court’s actions framed housing discrimination by turning African Americans into a representative of other non-white groups. At the same time, a leading account of the litigation treated the Kim and Amer cases as involving the rights of aliens, conflating Asian Americans with Asian nationals. This supports Cheng’s argument that Asian Americas were racialized as “foreigners-within” (p. 3).
Cheng also effectively examines the impact of the identity as “foreigners-within” in her powerful discussions of the threatened McCarren Act, deportations of Korean Americans in chapter four, and the crack-down on the international Chinese ransom racket in chapter five. These examples illustrate her point that it is this understanding of identity that positioned the inclusion as well as exclusion of Asian Americans “from dominant society as responses to the demands of Cold War internationalism and communist containment” (p. 3).
Cheng turns to Asian American “firsts” in chapter three, including Korean American Sammy Lee, the first Asian American to win an Olympic gold medal. Cheng writes that widespread media coverage of such firsts, like African American baseball player Jackie Robinson, “depicted racial injustice as foremost a personal and not a societal problem” (p. 87). She argues that racial minority firsts also contributed to a Cold War narrative: “[S]tories of the first were vital to showing an international community that the United States was superior to communist countries” (p. 87). Lee’s story is compelling, and the author illustrates the robust discussion in U.S. based newspapers (including Asian American and mainstream papers), about the international attention given to Lee, and the way he sought to reinforce U.S. Cold War arguments about the superiority of democracy. Her account is fascinating and original.
But Cheng’s discussion of Sammy Lee’s story also illuminates the limitations of her book. Cheng’s discussion of international news coverage of Lee comes from the New York Times, rather than foreign papers themselves. More important, Cheng appears not to have consulted U.S. State Department records, which should have documents on Lee’s interactions with Soviet reporters, his warm relationship with Republic of Korea President, Syngman Ree, and his appointment by the State Department as an official sports ambassador. U.S. diplomatic records would also enable a broader assessment of global news coverage since reports from foreign posts often include translated copies of news articles. Most importantly, these records would include the assessment of American diplomats on how Lee’s actions and statements impacted American prestige in Asia and other parts of the world. These are the sources that would have enabled Cheng to develop and substantiate her claims about the impact of Lee and others on the U.S. Cold War mission. Similarly, Cheng is unable to shed light on the full story behind the McCarren Act prosecutions or actions against the Chinese communist ransom racket without INS, State, and Treasury Department records.
In these examples and elsewhere in the book, Cheng can do without foreign relations records if her focus is on the way arguments about international affairs affected domestic civil rights and the discourse of racial formation. The book succeeds when she pursues this goal. When she ranges beyond this, the book is disappointing. Cheng certainly shows that there is a story to tell about the impact of Asian American civil rights on U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War. Pursuing this story through research in foreign relations archives will have to await another book.
