On New York Before Chinatown

This is an absolutely fascinating monograph. It diverges from earlier works in three significant ways: first, it starts with the American Revolution and continued until the Chinese Exclusion Act; second, it emphasizes cultural relations between white Americans and the Chinese (or, more importantly, the way white Americans received Chinese culture) over social history, political history, or labor history; third, its focus is entirely on New York.

In this book, Tchen argues that Chinese things, ideas, and people fundamentally shaped modern America. When I first picked up the book, I thought, “sure, this makes sense—Chinese exclusion and labor competition surely transformed the ways that Americans thought about race and difference.” Yet, that’s not what this book is about—it’s much larger than that. It’s about colonial ideas that human civilization started in the furthest east (China) and gradually moved westward (the US being the furthest west, we might even give it the term often granted to Morocco, مغرب الأقصى), causing the fall of civilizations in the east. It’s about the growth of the China trade and early Republican ideas about Chinese grandeur. It’s about Chinese people becoming jokes and circus acts over real humans. It’s about widespread racism against the Chinese in print media. The main line that runs through the text is that Americans generally viewed the Chinese positively during the revolutionary era, but by 1882 American perceptions of them had fallen to an all time low.

Tchen spends some time pointing out that although the shift from positively viewing the Chinese to negatively viewing them is broadly true, his real interest is in looking at contacts between the Chinese and Americans—real or imagined (in the case of the “Chinese Mandarin” aboard John Jacob Astor’s ship, for instance)—and how that shaped American culture and society. I love it, highly recommend.