Pearl Harbor Revisited

 Amerasia Journal 27:3 (2001)/28:1(2002): 63-68

The laughter stopped on September 11, 2001. A day America likened to Pearl Harbor. Till that day we were still laughing at the foolishness of the Organization of Chinese Americans, a self styled civil rights and education organization, linking up with the Japanese American Citizen's League, the group known to have used and abandoned the title "civil rights organization" at their convenience. The OCA might not know what their civil rights organization is or does, in fact there's real doubt that the Organization of Chinese Americans knows what a Chinese American is. In their scrambling around to match their name and title with meaning, I would think the OCA would know that the JACL is the one organization that would sink their credibility as a civil rights group. Everybody knows that. But obviously the OCA didn't.

They invited Norman Mineta, the Japanese American Secretary of Transportation, and former congressman, to speak and the JACL to give them instruction. Norman Mineta told them, that in WWII, his people, the Japanese Americans, had been unfairly interned in concentration camps, and had their civil rights stripped from them. Mineta did not say that the leader of the JACL had asked for the camps, and had advocated the drafting of the Nisei from the camps while their families were held hostage. The JACL, at the time was led by Mike Masaoka, Mineta's brother-in-law and political mentor. 

Mike Masaoka had convinced congress that the JACL was the only national organization with the membership and the leadership to represent Japanese American civil rights. He used the words: "civil rights" in describing the JACL.  And civil rights described the cases of Gordon Hirabayashi, arrested in Seattle, and Minoru Yasui in Portland, for violating a curfew that applied to Japanese only.  Mike Masaoka and the JACL refused to support Hirabayashi and Yasui's case saying, "The JACL is unalterably opposed to cases to determine the constitutionality of the military orders at this time. " An act blatantly against civil rights, and there's more, much more. 

(Mike Masaoka)

Masaoka offered a hundred thousand of his people—men, women and children—in concentration camps, as hostages to ensure the loyalty of the men of his proposed "suicide battalion." The army refused the suicide battalion idea, in name only. They did accept an all Nisei combat unit. Masaoka convinced the army that the Japanese Americans were so anxious to "prove their loyalty" that they would volunteer in overwhelming numbers, and leave their families hostage in the camps. Masaoka was embarrassed when Japanese America proved him wrong. It seemed the Japanese Americans were interested in the return of their civil rights before they volunteered. But not the JACL. 

In 1944 the government reinstated the draft for Nisei whether they were in camp or not. Now was the time for the JACL to prove they were a civil rights organization. They proved they were not. "Perhaps we Japanese Americans have not yet earned our right to unqualified citizenship." Thus spoke Masaoka, on April 22, 1944. Instead of defending the citizenship of the American-born-and-raised Japanese Americans, he offers a formula for the subjects of the white race to be accepted. 

 "Therefore, in order to be in a position to legitimately demand that our full citizenship rights and privileges be restored and maintained for all time to come, JACL has worked unceasingly for the reinstitution of the Selective Service ever since the War Department changed its policy and announced that Japanese Americans were not wanted for military service. That arbitrary classification of 4-C granted us was embarrassing and humiliating." 

(Colorado Japanese American Concentration Camp)

What was embarrassing and humiliating was the JACL's slavish acceptance of concentration camps and white approval— instead of the law—as a condition of their Amencan citizenship. Perhaps embarrassing is the wrong word for what the JACL did. The JACL whipped up America's war of revenge against Japanese-America. They abandoned civil rights and the Japanese culture of their people for one man's vision of a "better American for a greater America," enforced with lies and an intimidating identification with Masaoka's vision of a monstrous white man. 

The Organization of Chinese American has come across the interesting fact that all of the mainland Japanese Americans to achieve elective office, at any level of government, from dog-catcher to either house of congress have been members of the JACL.  The JACL is rightfully known as a patriotic organization that encouraged Nisei men to accept being drafted from camp. The JACL was wrong in its assertion that their recruiting for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was responsible for the closing of concentration camps. The 442nd might have helped mightily to win WWII, but everything they—and the whole American army—did was irrelevant to any of the issues of camp. 

(442nd in Camp Shelby, Mississippi)

The JACL was performing for the whites, the JACL sent Japanese Americans to camp for the whites, turned against civil rights for the whites, and wanted to prove Japanese American loyalty to the whites. During the forties of WWII, when the Japanese were the despised people of the day, it took no courage for the JACL to satisfy the whites. Such craven behavior was precisely what the whites wanted and expected. It took real courage for a Japanese American, in camp to say he would not answer the call to go to war, like a normal American, until he was a normal American. In Hawai'i, the site of Pearl Harbor, Japanese were not interned, and produced 10,000 volunteers and answered the draft with less resistance than the mainland, where only 805 volunteered from the camps. The numbers suggest that, if the mainlanders were not in camps, they would have responded to the call for volunteers and the draft more positively. But the Japanese Americans on the mainland weren't treated like normal Americans, they were interned. In a mimeographed bulletin March 4,1944, the draft resistance tells everyone where they stood: 

Without any hearings, without due process of law as guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, without any charges filed against us, without any evidence of wrong doing on our part, one hundred and ten thousand innocent people were kicked out of their homes, literally uprooted from where they have lived for the greater part of their life, and herded like dangerous criminals into concentration camps with barbed wire fence and military Police guarding it, AND THEN, WITHOUT RECTIFICATION OF THE INJUSTICES COMMITTED AGAINST US AND WITHOUT RESTORATION OF OUR RIGHTS AS GUARANTEED BY THE CONSTITUTION, WE ARE ORDERED TO JOIN THE ARMY THRU DISCRIMINATORY PROCEDURES INTO A SEGREGATED COMBAT UNIT!  Is that the American Way?  No. 

And it took real courage for Frank Emi to write and insist on the words he knew would get them arrested:

We feel that the present program of drafting us from this concentration camp is unjust, unconstitutional, and against all principles of civilized usage, and therefore, WE MEMBERS OF THE FAIR PLAY COMMITTEE HEREBY REFUSE TO GO TO THE PHYSICAL EXAMINATION OR TO THE INDUCTION IF OR WHEN WE ARE CALLED IN ORDER TO CONTEST THE ISSUE. 

All the draft resisters wanted was the camps closed, then they would accept the draft. The JACL as a civil rights organization should have supported this clear cut civil rights stand, but instead, they accused the draft resisters of sedition, cowardice and treason, and stood against their civil rights. Whether or not the JACL has ever been a civil rights organization has been a matter of internal debate since Pearl Harbor. Outside of Japanese America and the JACL, there is no debate. It is not a civil rights organization. 

Mineta and the JACL's insistence that the WWII monument include Masaoka's words exalting the government moved National Park Service Director Robert Stanton to reject petitions signed by more than a thousand Japanese Americans. Stanton, likewise, refused to read a protest pamphlet prepared by two members of Stanton's board, Francis Sogi, who'd seen service m WWII, in the Military Intelligence Service, and Kelly Kuwayama, a member of the 442nd. "JAPANESE AMERICANS DISUNITED: How a memorial to unify the Japanese American community became a symbol of disunity" at the very least, is an indication of how deep the controversy of the JACL runs through Japanese America. 

The Organization of Chinese Americans says it is a civil rights and an education organization. Because of the events of September 11, 2001, its Washington office finds itself in the right place at the right time to speak for us. But don't count on OCA to stand for Chinese America. When asked what Chinese America is, they say, they're really more than Chinese American, that they have Korean American members and Japanese Americans in the organization. When asked to define Korean American and Japanese American they offer double talk and distraction but no answer. 

As an education organization, they seem to be equally inept. Chinese stories one would expect every Chinese to know are foreign to the ears of OCA. Their members manning the phones of their Washington office can tell any number of European children's stories The Ugly Duckling, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, a few Jewish stories, The Golem, and not one Chinese children's story.  Why is it that only in America do we find this contempt for the Chinese children's story?  So what Chinese or Chinese American knowledge do they teach? 

Their magazine IMAGE is full of self-congratulatory stories on working with Norman Mineta and the JACL. The OCA membership is saying things like, "We're the Chinese JACL." 

Seen in action, the OCA is right to liken themselves to the JACL. They don't know and don't like Chinese Americans. Where do we go when we need an organization that knows Chinese America—knows the stories, knows the history, knows the facts and knows the difference between a real Chinese-American spy and an FBI face-saving fake, or between a real Chinese American threat and a fake. When the government moves to put us into concentration camps for our own protection—will the OCA, defender of our civil rights—go to the Supreme Court, or will they sacrifice our rights as a proof of our loyalty?

- Frank Chin

Letter correspondence from Michi Weglyn to Frank Chin

Available thanks to Densho:

https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-csujad-24/

Frank Chin in Bruce Lee Documentary

ESPN's Be Water has a short clip of Frank in it. More information here.

Frank commented on Bruce before. Check it out:




[The youtube channel this video clip comes from is not Frank Chin's official youtube site, he doesn't have one yet.]

Did Frank Chin say he will beat up Maxine Hong Kingston?

"Frank does terrible things. He tells me when he sees me at a conference he's going to beat me up."

- Maxine Hong Kingston on Frank Chin (source)

What gave Kingston the idea that Frank wanted to beat her up?  Allegedly, it was in a letter correspondence she had with Frank back in 1976.  Says Kingston:

"He even wrote me a letter that he's going to beat me up if he sees me."
(Source)

The only letter I (Eddie) am aware of was mentioned in Curtis Choy's documentary on Frank (those letters were dated in 1976, too).  There was no mention of Frank looking to physically hurt Kingston in the film.

Just recently, a number of close associates of Frank's were asked from a fact-checker from The New Yorker about any 1976 letter where Frank supposedly made this threat.  The fact-checker was working on a forthcoming article on Maxine Hong Kingston (which was just released) and wanted to look further into this.

Unless we missed it, we were unaware of any letter of this kind, and we never witnessed first-hand where Frank had the idea of beating up Maxine Hong Kingston.  The only person I'm aware of who knows about this threat is Maxine Hong Kinston.

The fact-checker told me she found the 1976 letter in question.   According to the aforementioned New Yorker article,

Chin once wrote her a heated letter saying that the only reason for meeting would be for 'a public fight, but I’m not anxious for that.'

Frank was obviously talking about a public debate, not an effort to show off his physical prowess as a martial artist on a female author.  Furthermore, Kingston left her return address on the envelope (watch the documentary and you'll see it).  It would be awfully strange to tell your perpetrator where you live if you think they'll come and beat you up.

The idea that Frank wanted to physically beat up Kingston is absolutely absurd.  Frank accused Kingston of making up white racist stories of Chinese History.  It appears she's making up stories of Chinese men.

This rumor of Frank has been going around for decades.  I thank the fact-checker and author for quoting Frank.  I often find rumors of Frank lacking in substance and merit.  This is yet another one of those cases, I'm afraid.

More here.

Wynn Handman, Asian America, and the American Place Theatre

"He's a master. Master of his craft. He'll help you get your craft, and it's up to you to make it art."

- Frank Chin on Wynn Handman
from It Takes a Lunatic

Wynn Handman

(May 19, 1922 – April 11, 2020)

Frank Chin's plays (Chickencoop Chinaman and Year of the Dragon) had their openings at Handman's American Place Theatre in New York.  His theatre was responsible for having the first Asian American play (Chickencoop Chinaman) done off-Broadway.  Condolences to his family and friends. 

Catch Netflix's documentary on Handman's life and career in "It Takes a Lunatic"

Wynn Handman and Frank Chin

The Most Popular Book in China

[An article written by Frank Chin in response to Maxine Hong Kingston's version of Mulan]

by Frank Chin

THE MOST POPULAR book in China is the autobiography of a white woman born and raised in a French hand laundry in south China. The meek, sycophantic nature of the French of her childhood clashed with the aggressive, individualistic nature of the un-revolulionized Chinese, who embraced her as one of themselves.

A female and raised a French Catholic, she is, by the terms of her thousand-year-old religion, the meekest of the meek, the mildest of the mild, basking in the grace of God. She is forbidden by French culture to speak of herself except in the third person, and must limit her use of the first-person pronoun "I" to quoting the exact words spoken by card-carrying Judeo-Christian white men.

She cunningly transcends the religious ban on female first-person expression by writing of herself in metaphor. "Once upon a time, in a onceupon-a-time China, there lived a once-upon-a-time little French girl in a little French hand laundry, in the little Frenchtown on the edge of the mighty port city of Canton," the book opens. Very quickly this unusual autobiography of a Christian convert in China becomes a poetic evocation of a heroine of French feminism. She wrote a book about her imagined French ancestor Joan of Arc.

The old people of Frenchtown on the edge of Canton didn't like the book. They didn't have Smith Meijing's grasp of the Chinese language, the Chinese who loved her book said. The people of old Frenchtown said her book falsified history. They are conservative and old fashioned and don't appreciate good writing, the Chinese who loved the book said.

The picture of Joan of Arc as a man forced to dress and act like a girl and castrated after ceremonial incestuous relations with his father to satisfy the perverse sexual lusts of her parents was not historically accurate and was so inaccurate as to demonstrate that the woman had gone mad, the French people of Frenchtown on the edge of the port city said. The French girl is writing not history, but art, the Chinese who loved the book said, and continued: She is writing a work of imagination authenticated by her personal experience.

The French people of Frenchtown said, her own experience is an insane, paranoid distortion of basic knowledge common to all French. She mangles what no sane Frenchman could get wrong without going mad: Joan of Arc! the people oi Frenchtown protested.

And the Chinese who loved the book said, her personal experience was authentically French and her unique understanding of both the French and Chinese views of life brings the Chinese the closest, most human understanding of the French ever produced in the Chinese language. Her book gives the Chinese insights into the French mind and the French character, not French books, the Chinese who loved the book said, and declared Smith Mei-jing the hope of French literature written in Chinese.

She violates French history, culture and language, heaps contempt on her ancestry, and depends on the ignorance of her Chinese readers for her Chinese literary success, the old people of Frenchtown said, and waved old books over their heads.

Sour grapes, the Chinese who loved the book said. She's not writing history or about history, therefore the accuracy of any of her history is irrelevant to the question of her artistry, authenticity and psychological reality, her Chinese admirers said.

The French autobiographer's name is Smith Mei-jing, her autobiography, The Unmanly Warrior. The Chinese Children's Digest version of the book has been translated into English with the hope it will be adopted as an aid in teaching American fourth and fifth graders a little about France, French culture and the relevance of Joan of Arc in the world of personal experience.

UNMANLY WARRIOR by Smith Mei-jing

Once upon a time, in a once-upon-a-time China, there lived a once-upona-timc little French girl in a little French hand laundry, in the little French-town on the edge of the mighty port city of Canton. A lone white girl in the splendor and civilization of China. Am I so alien to my vague Europe? My far France? The French are a distant people. She dreams about my French self. How strange it is to be French in China. Surely the grandest place in the world to be born. In France they burned women. They held a lottery, and each year more and more women were burned.

Joan of Arc was the last woman to be burned by my ancestors. Surely Joan imagined herself Chinese, in China where ancient woman warriors abound in the heroic tradition from ancient times. And she thought herself born again someday in me. Poor Joan of Arc. Born a son to a family that craved a daughter. They dressed their boy as a girl. They forced him into homosexual relationships with the surrounding court society, while young and naked virgins pranced through the deer park singing Vivaldi with ribald discretion.

Joan of Arc grew up a strong and muscular boy. Yet his parents dressed him in gowns and wigs and powdered him and admonished him to seduce princelings and influential priests at the crown balls. Joan took to bright lipstick and shiny satin masks and riding rescue, snatching women from the flames of the lottery.

Soon Joan mounted an army of masked women fed up with the silliness of court life that threatened to topple France, determined to make it a nation ruled by women rescued from the flames of French male bigotry.

The Church would not be denied its divine right to burn women, and mounted a Catholic army of the church militant and all male aristocracy to destroy Joan's army, capture the female general, and burn her in a public place at rush hour.

Men who formed around Joan called themselves the Nazi party and named Joan their leader. No one knew Joan of Arc was actually a six-foot four, 225-pound man. At the head of his army, Joan was free of the homosexual affairs forced on him by his social-climbing parents. The inevitable happened. Fighting side by side with the sexiest and fiercest women of France, in battle after battle from Hastings to Waterloo, Joan fell in love with one of them. She fell in love with a militant lesbian of an aberrant Christian sect. The young girl warrior was at first seduced by the lovely Joan she had admired and defended and come to love, fighting side by side in the clang and gallop of battle as women.

The first kiss that night they kissed made them sigh. Their tongues touched and they shivered. The night the young lesbian militant grabbed Joan's naked male member vibrating at full tumescence, her mind snapped. A yelp squirted out of her throat. Her hand clenched in a deathgrip around Joan's throbbing hardon. She chanted Hail Marys and tried to face west, but had lost all sense of direction. Joan's member shrank out of the grasp of the only girl Joan of Arc ever loved. If Joan had only known the Chinese were using compasses at this time, she might have turned her dead comrade-in-arms' and lover's face to the west. Joan became the elected ruler of the new Franco-Germany created by a Nazi referendum, and became the first leader of a European democracy. She pitted her army of freed women, excommunicated nuns, and fed-up ladies of the court against the armies of the Roman Church.

Joan's parents betrayed her just as she was making advances on the body of a young lapsed nun who had confessed to years of desiring intimate contact with a male organ at full tumescence. The Christian concept of original sin made no sense to Joan of Arc. She would not accept its intimidating, bullying claim to prior ownership of himself. Yet the odd notion had a strange grip on the bodily functions and thought processes, and perversions about the mother we Europeans who have been more or less Christian since possibly the death of Jesus Christ all share. Christ lived about the time the Han was peaking. Five generations later, the Three Kingdoms period came on China and the mandate of heaven was renewed almost daily, for a hundred and fifty years. By then Christianity was in its first Dark Age.

Women in the Nazi Party wanting more power in the structure betrayed Joan to his parents, who betrayed him to the church militant of Rome. They captured him, castrated him in public, in the middle of Paris, then dressed him in underwear from Frederick's of Hollywood, and high fashion from Oscar de la Renta, Gucci shoes and coochie-coos. Priests of the Pope painted his face. They put false eyelashes on his eyelids, wigged him, pierced his ears, gave him a nose job, and cut half-moons under his breasts and slipped in bags of silicone to give him the breasts of a woman. They painted his nails, stockinged his legs. He bled from the nose job. He bled out of his nose and mouth. He bled from the half-moons cut under his breasts. He bled from the groin where he had been castrated. The faithful of the church chanted and rocked their censers and crucifixes, back and forth, back and forth. The army of women had abandoned Joan when there was no doubt about Joan of Arc being a man. The women set the torch to the faggots surrounding Joan's body, and they burned him.

I identify with me, Joan of Arc tells me. He might have been a great great-grandfather. How could he stand to read the scrawly, wormy, patsy writing of the French? Their first-person pronoun looks like a child's earring. Where are the solid weapons of the Chinese "I" 1 wonder, and pity the people confined to communicate with each other with an unarmed, uninhabited, passive first-person pronoun to assert themselves with, Joan would think if he were in China now.

Joan suffered for lack of a proud "I." Humiliated, he defended the honor and equality of French women, and they betrayed him. His parents betrayed him to better their positions in court society. The rituals and traditions of the Roman Church demanded he be burned as a woman. After they realized that they had burned a man—no matter that they had burned him as a woman, they had burned a man—they ended the burning of women. Thus Joan of Arc lived and died the daughter her parents had always wanted.

How lucky I am to be in China where civilization is whole and healthy. If only my own parents had been more adaptable and not brought all this misery to me. They make me feel so foreign. Their superstitions for every occasion have me dizzy. I like to think Joan of Arc would not have put up with this fanatical fear of life outside the small precinct of the white ghetto. Luckily the Chinese comfort and understand me. They treat me as a human being. The French do not. I come home at night and avoid my parents hunched over their Webster's Dictionary playing Scrabble again, and climb into bed and say, as I say every night, good night to my ancestor. "You're a good man, Joan of Arc."

NONE OF THE historical facts and legendary heroes and touchstones violated beyond recognition by Maxine Hong Kingston and David Henry Hwang for white approval and entertainment are anywhere near as obscure and esoteric to the Chinese as Joan of Arc is to the French.

The violation of history and of fact and of Joan of Arc makes no difference to the pleasure and stimulation the Chinese get from Unmanly Warrior, so why should the falsification of history, the white racist stereotypes and slurs in Kingston's prose and Hwang's theater mean anything to the pleasure whites derive from reading and seeing their work? They don't, of course. People who know nothing about China, about Chinese-Americans, the railroad, the opera and who don't want to know more than they know—know Kingston and Hwang, and that's all they care to know. How Kingston and Hwang make them feel about Chinese and Chinese-Americans.

Well, folks, it's that same old feeling. Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Pearl Buck, Shangri-la of the Thirties has become Maxine Hong Kingston and David Henry Hwang in the Eighties, providing whites with an escape from the immediate and pressing terror of hard times, of empty gas tanks and payments to make. Whites have been using the Chinese as the metaphorical out for all their perversions and debilitating insecurities since the thirteenth century. The popular stereotype of the Chinese in white publishing, white religion, Hollywood and TV is a sickening pastiche of white perversions and socially unacceptable fantasies made speakable by calling them Chinese. Kingston and Hwang confirm the white fantasy that everything sick and sickening about the white self-image is really Chinese. That is their service to white ego. Reviewers and critics ripe for the cycle of Christian Chinese-American autobiography and Charlie Chan become accomplices to making the fake China and Chinese America of Kingston and Hwang real with the force of history. The source of their vision of Chinese- American art and history is white fantasy, not Chinese-American history. They're more Charlie Chan than Chang Apana.

Charlie Chan was short and fat and walked with the light, dainty steps of a woman, in white fantasy. Chang Apana was tall and wiry, and he walked through sun and shadow with a bullwhip over his shoulder, in Chinese-American myth and history.

[Chin, Frank. 1984. "The Most Popular Book in China." Quilt 4: 6—12. Reprinted as "Afterword" in Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co.:" Eight Short Stories by Frank Chin. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1988. I—IV.]

Happy birthday, Frank

Another great site on Frank Chin:

The Frank Chin Archive: 

https://www.facebook.com/frankchinarchive

This facebook site is maintained by Calvin McMillin.

Goong Hay Fot Choy 2020

One of the best books to read about how Chinese America celebrate Chinese New Year right over here.

Also, more on the 3rd edition of Aiiieeeee!:

Tara Fickle's foreword can be read here:

I initially encountered Aiiieeeee! in the winter of 2003, during my first Asian American literature course at Wesleyan University. My professor deftly outlined the major critiques that had been leveled against the anthology over the years—the narrowness of its definition of Asian America, its overtly masculine tone and underrepresentation of women, its American-born, monolingual perspective—and with each contention, I grew more indignant. The magnitude of my indignation was perhaps out of proportion with the size of its source, based as it was on my thin reading of a thin selection: no more than the twelve pages that made up the original 1974 preface. We did not read the introduction that followed, nor the selections that constituted the bulk of the anthology (although we did read two of the excerpted novels, America Is in the Heart and No-No Boy, in their entirety). I am ashamed to admit that not until recently did I actually read the entire anthology, cover to cover. Yet I would venture that this oversight is not uncommon among Asian Americanists of my generation. Indeed, if what defined Asian Americans for the editors of Aiiieeeee! was that they “got their China and Japan off the radio, off the silver screen, from television, out of comic books,” then for years perhaps what defined me as an Asian Americanist was where I didn’t get my Asian America: which is to say, from Aiiieeeee!

[CONT'D]

More articles* on Aiiieeeee!:

• Revisiting the Seminal (and Controversial) Anthology that Named the Asian American Canon
• “Aiiieeeee!, An Anthology of Asian American Writers”: If you think you’ve read it, you need to read it again
• Silicon Alleys: Creators of Asian American Literary Anthology Recount Their Struggle to be Read
• Pioneering Asian American anthology turns 45

* - the views expressed do not necessarily represent the views of Frank Chin's