This page is referenced by:

• 1 2021-04-22T08:20:35-07:00 Adored and Mocked: Japonisme in American Culture 158 plain 1074742 2021-05-29T13:24:19-07:00

  After treaties of the 19th century ended Japanese isolation, a fascination began in all things Japanese in both North America and Europe. The opening of the ports fostered an active market in screens, fans, vases, kimonos and other Japanese goods. Few Americans had a clear understanding of Japanese culture just as Japonisme began to draw popular attention. Europeans and Americans alike perceived Japan through the lens of Japonisme and Japonaiserie .⁴¹

  Everyone was going to the famous Paris Exposition- I, too, was going to the Paris Exposition…If I met a dozen individuals…who were not going to Europe shortly, I have no distinct remembrance of it now. 
  – Mark Twain, 1867⁴²

  The Exposition Universelle in 1867 was a showcase for international progress and attracted over ten million people all around the world from royalty to common citizens. Acrobats and jugglers also traveled from Japan to perform for the Exposition's crowds. Coinciding with the beginnings of Japonisme, Japanese acrobats and peformers introduced themselves to the Western audience and brought a new spectacle diversity to the entertainment industry.⁴³Japanese acrobat troupes grew very popular in circuses and variety shows in the 1860s. Blackface minstrelsy also took part in the popularity of Japanese acrobatics, either adding actual Japanese troupes or performed by their blackface imitators to the minstrel performance. Minstrel companies advertised this new act as “jap-oh-knees”, “The Flying Black Japs” or the single word “Jap.”⁴⁴
  
  Thomas Dilward  (1842-1887) was an actor initially known as Little Tommy in minstrel shows, but with the popularity of Japonisme, changed the name to Japanese Tommy. He was reported to be of Native American and African American ancestry. His name referenced Tateishi "Tommy" Onojirō Noriyuki, an admired young interpreter for the Japanese diplomatic embassy, who was frequently reported in the newspapers. Japanese Tommy presented in acts such as the “Japanese Ballet” with slapstick humor. Dilworth performed with white minstrel troupes and was one of the only two African American men to do so before the Civil War.⁴⁵
  
  This cultural prestige for Japan, novelty of Japanese acrobats and Japonisme would not equate to acceptance of Japanese persons in America; like the Chinese, they also endured anti-Asian discrimination and violence.⁴⁶ “The Japanese were regularly referred to as saffron-colored, copper colored, swarthy, ugly, oily, and small, and the children as 'little monkeys.' If referred to postively, it was often with a condescending type of cultural humor. Reporters reflected their readers’ fear of and disdain for many aspects of Asian culture, including food, dress, fashion, and music.”⁴⁷

  An account in the New York Times, May 11, 1867:

  On the whole, it can’t be nice to be a Jap. Setting aside the hari-kari business, and the color and the hair and the grease and the prevailing notions in regard to clothing, there are insuperable objections connected with their ideas of privacy – brother, sister, another man and wife, a third man and two boys, all sleeping in a little box for a room – their tastes in food, their habits of squatting, their infernal music, and all that sort of thing…which would forever interfere with the naturalization of a genuine Yankee into a regular-built Jap. These specimens are civil, quiet, orderly; kind and peaceable- - they certainly are wonderful in their line of art but beyond that nothing.⁴⁸

  The Chinese American population dropped soon after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. “With the rise of Japanese immigrants, studies on race presume that contempt for Chinese transposed itself onto the Japanese as the new “Oriental.” Anti-Chinese sentiment, too, had originally been a transference of anti-Black sentiment in the wake of emancipation. White supremacists with little creativity had simply overlaid old hatreds onto new people.”⁴⁹ 
  
  
  

  Commercial Orientalism and Commodified Bodies

  During this period, exhibits, circuses, theaters, such as the Exposition Universelle in 1867, and the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair  (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) promoted the commodity of racialized bodies. These fairs offered the middle classes a commercial orientalism, Asian objects and people for consumption.

  
  

  Much in the way aristocrats and patricians engaged in travel writing, the urban middle classes could now consume a visual array of commercial 'edifying curiosities' to discover their own personal relationship to other cultures, peoples, and parts of the world. To survey a panorama of China, a miniature of a primitive village, or a living animal or exoticized human on display or to witness an “oriental conjuror” all evoked a sense of wonderment and situated one’s place in the world.⁵⁰

  
  
  
  
  
  
  In the performance of The Geisha and the Knight by the Kawakami Troupe in 1899, reviews reported a conversation between two women, "she looks just like a picture on a fan," and “describing the Kawakamis as kakemono (wall hangings) come alive or as animated figurines, thus objectifying the actors as commodities available for purchase.”⁵¹The comparison clearly displays the dehumanization of the performers for the audience’s pleasure. The viewers allowed themselves permission to impose this critique upon persons in the guise of appreciation of Japanese art and aesthetics.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   

  Japanese-ness was associated with commodity objects, and how the performance of Asian-ness by white female bodies often erased or commodified actual Asian women.⁵²

• 1 2021-04-21T08:05:59-07:00 Afong Moy: The Museum and Commercialization of Chinese Bodies 153 plain 1074741 2023-03-28T19:36:52-07:00

  Americans such as George Washington and Phineas T. Barnum had embraced Chinese things and ideas to “suit their own agendas" ⁸

  Afong Moy, the first known Chinese woman in the United States, arrived as valuable cargo aboard the ship Washington in 1834.⁹

  Merchants Francis and Nathaniel G. Carnes with Captain Benjamin Obear acquired Afong Moy from Guangzhou, China to exhibit her with Chinese decorative merchandise goods for eager American middle-class consumers. The story is not clear due to China’s insulation and the confinement of Chinese women at the time - newspaper accounts and promotional materials explain that Obear reached an agreement with Afong Moy's "distinguished citizen" father "residing in the suburbs of Guangzhou (Canton)." Obear paid Moy's father to take her out of the country with the promise to bring her home on the captain's next voyage to Guangzhou.¹⁰ However, there is no historical record that Afong Moy ever returned to China. 

  The Chinese woman hidden from society equated to fantasy and mysterious ideas from Chinoiserie objects in Americans' collective consciousness. In patrician orientalism, China was a place of exoticism, dignity, and revered history.¹¹ The Carnes took advantage of this perception and promoted Afong Moy as a beautiful eminent lady with a focus on her visual difference - her bound feet and clothing.¹²

  The Carnes opened the public exhibition displaying ancient Chinese artifacts alongside Afong Moy with everyday Chinese imports to advertise them to the middle class. Additionally, an accompanying exhibition catalogue featured the exotic personification of Afong Moy. Promotional materials highlighted images of Afong Moy seated on a raised platform to indicate royalty in order to entice the public to view her as a person of prestige. Her fame quickly spread with the US tour not only through her presentations but also in newspaper articles, children’s magazines and inspired poems. ¹³

  Exhibit of Persons

  Human exhibit appearances were common as amusements and curiosities during the 19th century. Moy's appearances are not especially different in the context of other human exhibits of the time. In 1810 Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, one of the "Hottentot Venus," was put on display in Europe. In the US, similiar presenters included Chang and Eng Bunker known as the Siamese Twins; Black Hawk, a warrior and leader of the Sauk Tribe; and Joice Heth, an African-American slave woman who was billed as George Washington's 161-year-old enslaved nurse and the oldest living woman.¹⁴
  During the 19th century, polygenesis was a very popular and widespread belief among naturalists, doctors, and ethnographers. The visual ordering and hierarchy of racial identity contributed a profitable piece in commercializing the spectacle.¹⁵ This is noticeable in the descriptions of persons on display such as Afong Moy in the identification of her as "a specimen of oriental magnificence." The description on the juxtaposition of Chinese women's bound feet and African women's calves reduced them to body parts. Science and spectacle were interdependent activities.¹⁶

  Her ladyship has been imported expressly as a 'lioness,' for exhibition. The feet of the Chinese are fair, are the points of beauty, as the calf of the leg is with the belles of Africa
  -New Hampshire Patriot, November 24, 1834¹⁷

  Merchant Philip Hone in his description of Afong Moy’s 1834 appearance described her as a figure on a Chinese decorative object with no intellect: 

  Her appearance is exactly the same as the figures on tea chests a large Head, small features and a countenance devoid of expression . . . from want of Education . . . she is deficient in ideas.¹⁸

  The association of Afong Moy with an inert image on a tea chest demonstrates typical opinions of the period. Most Americans envisioned the Chinese from illustrations on their tea chests, china ware, fans, lacquer, or wallpaper.¹⁹ Men in the audience tended to obsess on her small feet, as “anatomical fascination, moral disgust, or erotic pleasure.” Women were intrigued with her feet, but equally drawn by the Chinese home furnishings and decorative objects. Men and women both intently consumed her performance for their own pleasurable reasons.²⁰
  
  One writer was certainly enamored by Afong Moy: 

  At length her ladyship . . . presented herself in the rich costume of a Chinese lady—an outward mantle of blue silk, sumptuously embroidered, and yellow silk pantalets from beneath the ample folds of which peeped her tiny little feet, not over four inches in length. . . . Her head has a profusion of jet black hair, combed upward from her fine forehead and brunette temples, and filled on the top with bouquets of artificial flowers and large gold pins, which dress we suppose will be henceforward quite the ton. . . . Her features are pleasing, her forehead high and protuberant, and her face round and full with languishing black eyes placed with the peculiar obliquity of the outer angle, which characterizes the Mongolian variety of the human race. . . . She then walked without seeming difficulty to her cushioned chair . . . and there sat in . . . quiet repose for us to gaze at.²¹

  It was odd to find explicit description in a woman's physical form in a mainstream newspaper during the 1830s. The dehumanization of Afong Moy for public scientific display and entertainment due to her foreignness allowed such writings to persist. 

  Of course, he could justify his suspiciously thorough physical description by pointing out that the extreme rarity of a Chinese person in America - and a lady, no less - demanded that extreme attention be paid to detail. Despite his scientific-seeming insight that the ‘peculiar obliquity’ of her eyes ‘characterizes the Mongolian variety of the human race,’ his interest in the Chinese Lady was almost certainly erotic in nature. Yet by camouflaging his mildly pornographic description in the garb of ethnographic observation, he could elude moral censorship.²²

  Afong Moy functioned simultaneously as entertainment and enlightenment. The audience visually consumed her presence for their own thoughts and desires, no different than material possessions.

  The Chinese Museum

  Following the lucrative marketing campaign of Afong Moy's exhibition, trader Nathaniel Dunn published Ten Thousand Chinese Things in 1838 to accompany the opening of his Chinese Museum in Philadelphia. Shortly after the Treaty of Wangshia signing in 1844, the treaty members opened the Boston Chinese Museum, facilitating the political agenda to promote trade with China. The museum contributed imaginary narrative fantasies and aggrandizement of China to publicize Chinese commodification under the guise of cultural education.²⁶The treaty offered new access to Chinese goods specifically for a growing American middle-class population.²³

  The museum promoted the idea that “the Chinese had achieved a high level of cultural, if not artistic, production that clearly raised them above the primitive.” The collection contained paintings, porcelain, musical instruments, everyday material goods, and life-size wax sculptures of Chinese figures robed in imperial dress. The owners also hired two Chinese men, Le-Kaw-hing and T'sow-Chaoong. They dressed in "native costume" and served as interpreters, played instruments, sang and demonstrated calligraphy.²⁴
  The museum was well received and attracted many visitors. It relocated to New York City and P.T. Barnum took over the museum in April 1850. He installed a Chinese lady, Pwan-Ye-Koo with bound two-and-a-half- inch feet in the "Chinese Family.” The act drew crowds and went on tour, while the museum later closed.²⁵ Characteristic of Barnum's promotions, controversy surrounded the origins of the performers. He had reported the family arrived on the vessel Ianthe from Guangzhou in April 1850, however none of the members were on the Ianthe’s passenger list. It was recounted in the newspapers that Pwan-Ye-Koo was born in New York City and the child of a Chinese father and Caucasian mother. An observer also overheard Pwan-Ye-Koo speaking in a “low Yankee slang.”²⁶ Furthermore, Soo-Chune, who was a musician with the family, had actually arrived in Boston six years before 1850 and worked as a musical performer alongside T’sow Chaoong at the Boston Chinese Museum under the name of Le-Kaw-hing. This may all be very plausible. Chinese and Chinese Americans in the 1850s had limited options for employment, but the theatrical arts were open to them. Both Chinese and American-born men and women presented their racial differences and lived and worked under terrible conditions.²⁷

  Changing Perceptions

  Barnum knew the "Chinese Family" attraction would work, as he had already profited from the commercial market for Chinese exhibitions a few years earlier. In 1847 the Chinese junk ship Keying from Hong Kong welcomed visitors for the price of twenty-five cents to view Chinese objects in glass cases with “almost everything produced or used in the Chinese empire.” The Keying advanced commercial orientalism²⁸ and Barnum saw opportunity to bring Afong Moy back to the public. However, for Afong Moy’s return, Barnum promoted her identity much differently than in the 1830s. The Keying’s public promotional pamphlet described the Chinese people as “false and faithless, trifling and shameless.”²⁹

  From this period until the early 1850s, Afong Moy performed under contract with Barnum. She shared the exhibition space with another Barnum performer, Charles Stratton known as Tom Thumb, the famous American for several years. The promotional pamphlet deviated from the earlier portrayal of Afong Moy and the Chinese with connections of enlightenment, royalty and prestige. Instead the description claimed “’her appetite for fancy goods, finery, and gold had induced her to escape China with her ‘advisors’ for the riches of America.’" Barnum invented a completely new origin story for Afong Moy in which her American presence was of her own free will. The pamphlet continued to describe her disparagingly as “vain, conceited, prideful, and shallow" and “reads little or nothing, as a very limited degree of education is bestowed on women in China, a few accomplishments making up the sum total of their intellectual training.”³⁰

  This unfavorable depiction of Afong Moy differed from the admiration of Tom Thumb with his large personas of Frederick the Great and Napoleon and his worthy qualities of humor and wit. This intentional comparison with Tom Thumb mocked Afong Moy and spread the idea of the West’s superiority over China.³¹

  Barnum's representation of Afong Moy added to the growing anti-Chinese sentiment in America due to the aftereffects of the Opium War and the increasing competitive labor environment. Prior the war, Americans recognized China as a powerful nation with a long-standing civilization. The press shifted popular opinions when it reported quite the opposite in its coverage on the war with Britain's subsequent successes. Americans now viewed the West as the stronger, dominant power over China, and thus Asia.³² Simultaneously, the number of Chinese immigrants along the West Coast increased in the late 1840s due to economic opportunites in the possible discovery of California gold and the rise of the American contract labor system. Chinese labor populations were steadily increasing and American resentment started to form over job competition.³³ Disdainful rhetoric with negative characterizations of the Chinese spread rampant. This popular derogatory poem typified the new sentiment of mockery towards the Chinese in 1845:

  Mandarins with yellow buttons, handing you conserves of snails; Smart young men about Canton in Nankeen tights and peacocks' tails. With many rare and dreadful dainties, kitten cutlets, puppy pies; Birds nest soup which (so convenient!) every bush around supplies.³⁴

  Barnum’s exhibits combined the fetishism of racial difference and physical abnormality.³⁵

  As demonstrated with Afong Moy, Barnum commonly illustrated his subjects’ racial inferiority through the juxtaposition of performers. He easily promoted racist and othering ideas onto the masses with this ploy, as already constructed in printed discourse on racialized bodies of the period. Barnum did not view them as persons, but specimens without any intellectual ability fitting his fabricated racial categorizations for profit.⁴²This view changed with the presentation of two Chinese performers, "Chang (Chang Yu Sing, Chang Woo Gow, Zhan Shichai) the Giant" and "Che Mah, the Chinese Dwarf," in the early 1880s. Typical performances of Chang illustrated what Robert Bogdan has identified as the aggrandized mode. This aggrandizement emphasized the performer’s cultural or intellectual achievements rather than the physical abnormality.”³⁶

  A Barnum advertisement described Chang as "the Chinese Giant, not the ogre of Fairy Tales, but [a]Gentleman, Scholar and Linguist-the tallest man in the world." 

  To tarnish Chang’s image of kindness and intelligence, Barnum promoted him juxtaposed to another Chinese performer, Che Mah. ³⁷

  [He] is cunning, crafty and a diplomat, whose tact and ingenuity have been a source of great annoyance and bloodshed to his government. In Western China, on account of his diminutive physique and superior erudition, he became an oracle and was WORSHIPED AND SET UP AS A GOD! whose commands became law among his fellow men. Recognizing the threat represented by Che Mah's power, the emperor declared him a rebel and sent an army against him.³⁸

  Barnum labeled Che Mah as a sneaky and dangerous Chinese man. The message of Che Mah with the Chinese reinforced the current anti-Chinese sentiment: the Chinese could not be trusted and with any agency, they will become dangerous. While the circus still promoted Chang’s intellectual traits, it stressed more dominantly his racial and physical differences. At an 1884 Ethnological Congress he was exhibited as "The Goliath of His Race and the Tallest Giant Alive" and led the circus opening with the Ethnological Congress into the big top.”³⁹

  Chang also led the inaugural procession for the Barnum Circus in 1886, as seen in the Barnum Budget or Tent Topics of The Season of 1886 route book:

  Barnum sensationalized and reduced his performers to their race and body, deliberately strengthening notions of white supremacy to the audience. Chang commanded high payment of the time from Barnum for his performances, at $500 a month.⁴⁰ He recognized his valuable attraction in circuses and exhibitions and it is most likely he was aware of Barnum’s tactics. However, it did not deter him from the industry. Even at retirement, he returned to the circus as a guest in London, as reported in the Gleanings at Olympia During the Winter Season of 1889-90, in London, England, with P. T. Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth route book:
  
  The negative perception of the Chinese increasingly grew more widespread within America’s popular culture in the concluding half of 19th century well into the 20th century, not only projected through the circus, but in all forms of entertainment and media.

   

• 1 2021-04-26T11:44:24-07:00 Tracing the Origins of Yellowface 123 plain 2021-05-28T14:00:01-07:00
  Japonisme and Japonaiserie fueled the creation of two admired operas, Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado in 1885 and Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in 1904. Both instill fantasized, imagined racial perceptions of the Japanese people and culture. These operas were performed in yellowface and continue in present day due to the operas' popularity.  The racial interpretation manifested in the performance imparts imaginary ideas of what Japanese meant in everyday life and in the unconscious and conscious minds of the audience. The humanness and reality of the Japanese person are eliminated in these creations.⁵³  
   

  The Mikado - Playing Japanese and Yellowface

  In 1885, Gilbert & Sullivan created an imaginary, fictional Japan for their comic opera The Mikado with white actors. Setting the opera in a faraway place from Britain - the exotic Japan, allowed Gilbert and Sullivan to satirize British politics and institutions. The costumes, settings and decorations were completely Japanese. The Mikado takes place in a make believe Japan with stereotypical attitudes, and comical "Japanese" names like "Nanki-Poo" and "Pooh-Bah." Due to the opera's wide acclaim and positive critical reception, at least 150 companies produced the opera to play throughout America and Europe by the end of 1885.⁵⁴
  
   The Mikado is an example of Japonaiserie, a term that signals, unlike Japonisme, a lack of authenticity. Both Japonaiserie and Japonisme represent a larger combination of orientalism into Western decorative arts and thought. The Mikado shifted the desire for Japanese goods onto the stage with imaginary Japanese characters personified with decorative objects such as swords, fans, and screens. It disseminated the notion of racial impersonation with the use of objects, gestures and songs of the opera.⁵⁵
  
  In “Our Captious Critic: Gilbert and Sullivan’s New Opera,” Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, March 28, 1885:

  Heavens! why, I know her already! Long before setting foot in Japan, I had met her, on every fan, on every teacup with her silly air, her puffy little face, her tiny eyes, mere gimlet-holes above those expanses of impossible pink and white cheeks.
  - Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthème⁵⁶

  
   

  
  
  The static human figures depicted on lacquer trays, screens, plates, and vases became actionable humans in the opera.
  
  In the opening lyrics of The Mikado, the characters announce:

  If you want to know who we are,
  
  We are gentlemen of Japan;
  
  On many a vase and jar—
  
  On many a screen and fan,
  
  We figure in lively paint:
  
  Our attitude’s queer and quaint—
  
  You’re wrong if you think it ain’t, oh!⁵⁷

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   

  The 1880s marks a shift in attitudes toward Japan where the image of an unreal Japan became firmly established and began to exert a broader influence. The late 19th century shift into a mass consumer culture increasingly makes commodity fetishism a part of everyday life. Yellowface is a transparent disguise in which racial impersonation is performed simply by picking up the right objects. Toys, dolls, kimonos, swords, and fans became common elements of masquerades for private photography sessions and parties. Yellowface practices were spread by advertising as well as by performances of the opera. Many of these images were copied directly from cabinet photographs of the U.S. Mikado production with no racial representation. Japan had become an invention of one’s creation, no real Japanese representations or bodies, just things. This is a defining property of commodity fetishism. ⁵⁸ 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  The success of Gilbert and Sullivan’s make-believe world in their comical opera initiated yellowfacing as an acceptable expression in society for Europeans and Americans. Japonaiserie crossed over to masquerading and playing Japanese in every day life. They socially dressed up in kimonos for entertainment as the aesthetic movement spread. "White women who bought fancy kimonos or dressed for Japanese-themed tea parties gained cultural capital as worldly women."⁵⁹

   

  
  The Mikado generated many parodies. Soon after the American production opened, Thatcher, Primrose, & West's Minstrels began a run of The Mick-ah-do on November 2, 1885 and other minstrel shows followed to profit from the opera’s fame. The Black Mikado later performed that year into 1886.⁶⁰
  
  The perceptions and references to The Mikado in daily life conveyed the widespread popular characterization and belief on real living Japanese persons. In this circus route book, the writer describes a Japanese circus performer not by his chosen name but as Nanki Poo, a character from The Mikado, yet there is no reference to a performance of the opera for the circus.

  Madama Butterfly - Yellowface Prevailing

  Madama Butterfly the opera by Giacomo Puccini first premiered in the US on February 11, 1907 in New York City. Three successful and well-received variations of the story from 1885-1900 existed prior to Puccini's creation. First was Madame Chrysanthemum in 1885 by French writer Pierre Loti; Madame Butterfly in 1898 by American lawyer and writer John Luther Long; and Madame Butterfly in 1900, a play production based on Long’s story. The plot involves the doomed relationship between a Western man and a Japanese woman and parallels the thoughts of the period, Western imperialism and dominance over the East, Japan specifically. The narrative reinforced the idea of the Asian person as an outsider and the consumption and disposal of the Asian female person; all acceptable and strengthened by Western government policies and laws of the period. Film versions followed after Puccini’s opera and it still continues to be popular and performed today.⁶¹
  
  Puccini’s Madama Butterfly tells the tragic story of a Japanese bride, Chou-Chou-San who is married and abandoned by her American husband, Lieutenant Pinkerton in 19th century Japan. In the end, the bride commits suicide. Pinkerton is stationed at the same city Nagasaki that US Commodore Matthew Perry threatened to attack if Japan did not open their ports in 1853. Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues the opera also communicates exclusion-era ideas about Asian racial difference. The story involves the exclusion of Cho-Cho-San’s family from Pinkerton’s home. Chambers-Letson suggests this scene reflects the debates about Asian exclusion occurring in both federal and state courts at the turn of the twentieth century. The opera is an example of a place where law and performance blend together to promote the racialization of Asian immigrants as outsiders of the law and the nation. Aihwa Ong suggests the opera continues to contribute greatly to the collective thought about Asian and Asian American racial differences. Madama Butterfly has played a significant role in the shaping of cultural stereotypes of Asian races in US law and Asian feminineness.⁶²
  
  

  Changing Perceptions

  The overwhelming success for the fantasized portrayals of the Japanese in The Mikado and Madama Butterfly ironically coincided with the rising anti-Japanese attitudes in America. While these two operas indicated the acceptance of "Japanese" stories and characters during this period, the opposite proved true for the human Japanese person living outside of this imagined and contained world.
  
  Similarly to the Chinese, Japanese sentiments changed as their population grew due to competition for jobs and agricultural land. Also contributing was the fear of Japan’s rise as an international military power, as they defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The United States government now viewed Japan as a threat and an aggressive imperial nation over trade and territorial agreements.⁶³
  
  In the 1912 film, Girl at Gate a white character states that the Japanese are “bright alright but they don’t remain servants!” and “There’s only one thing worse than a Jap!...another Jap.”⁶⁴

  The same journals that had previously spoken favorably of Japanese masculinity now did the opposite. As Japanese men “invaded” U.S. farmland with little moral integrity, “poor whites” would be robbed of their financial resources to build families—the foundation of American morality. Many grew anxious about the “invading horde of brown men” who encroached on California’s “rapidly vanishing fertile soil.” Japanese “politeness” had deceived Americans. They had “cunningly” devised ways, such as the Gentlemen’s Agreement, to bring “their women” into California for “propagation.” An article on the Alien Land Law illuminated the distinct shift to villainize Japanese men in mainstream print.⁶⁵

  
  
  By the time World War II broke out, the Japanese faced heightened negative treatment but the Chinese now were treated more positively. To suit the US government’s agenda to keep China as an ally in the war, President Roosevelt’s administration quickly worked to improve the perceptions of Chinese Americans and the Chinese Exclusion Act was partially repealed on December 17, 1943.⁶⁶ Simultaneously as the country's treatment on the Japanese worsened a racial divide developed with the Chinese. After the Pearl Harbor bombing, President Roosevelt enacted an Executive Order which placed any person of Japanese descent on the West Coast into internment camps.⁶⁷ 
  
• 1 2021-05-01T18:27:08-07:00 Interracial Encounters: Unexpected Circus Connections 102 plain 2021-06-07T09:35:25-07:00
  The rising anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiment in the second half of the nineteenth century coincided with the growth of the Chinese labor population in America. The discourse on the Chinese (immigrant) question occurred during America’s development in relation to the roles of African Americans, Native Americans, white women, and Irish immigrants during a reconstructed post-antebellum America.⁷² The Chinese immigrant posed an added threat to these disenfranchised populations in America’s racial hierarchy. Overlapping relationships among African Americans, Native Americans and women with the Chinese reveal the groups often opposed each other in order to help their own cause for identity and belonging.⁷³ At the same time harmonious relationships occurred among the communities which further illustrate the complexities of race divisions.
  
  The forming of racial hierarchies and the popularity of anti-Asian entertainment, stories and imagery during this period exemplify how anti-Asian racism became deeply rooted and accepted in American culture. The othering tactic in entertainment equally crossed over to questions of American identity and citizenship.
  
  This 1876 jug is based on the poem "The Heathen Chinese" or "Plain Language from Truthful James" by Bret Harte satirizing against anti-Chinese racism. Instead readers saw it as story of white superiority over the Chinese. The poem became popular and reinforced the racism among the population. The jug is an enameled and glazed porcelain and depicts on one side, a man choking a Chinese man, an illustration of a scene from the poem. Imagery of this attitude towards the Chinese, like entertainment, contributed to the growing hatred on the community.⁷⁴ 
  
  Chinese yellowface characters started to appear on the stage in mid-nineteenth century. Blackface minstrelsy began to add yellowface performers like “John Chinaman” to the other comical racialized characters which they mocked, such as the Dutch, Irish, Jewish and African Americans. Comedy acts of the “chinaman” featured “queued coolie figures speaking in nonsense words and eating dogs, cats, mice and rats.”⁷⁵ Titled after the Workingmen’s Party of California anti-Chinese slogan, the popular play The Chinese Must Go included yellowface characters acting out stereotypes and belittling cultural traits speaking in pidgin English to “infantilize and emasculate or to render them into unassimilable aliens." Marriages between Chinese men and Irish women were also satirized in popular Irish songs, noting fears of mixed marriages that might threaten the white working class status.⁷⁶
  
  
  African Americans also performed yellowface regularly on the vaudeville stage. From the 1890s to the 1920s, African American comedians impersonated Chinese immigrants due to its popularity. ⁷⁷

  Krystyn Moon asserts that if white performers of blackface minstrelsy depicted both black and Chinese immigrants on the stage "to reaffirm the inferiority of both groups" but also to "highlight the foreignness of Chinese immigrants," then one way of understanding African American performers of comic Chinese characters is that they worked to differentiate themselves from the Chinese, thus "asserting their role in the creation of American identity and culture."⁷⁸

  This reflection of yellowface and Chinese foreignness by African American performers as an assertion of American identity deserves a look into portrayals of interracial encounters during this period. Attention to interracial relationships takes the counterpoint to the presumed white dominance and allows the Othered to be in a historical context rather than a binary viewpoint. Chinese relationships with other groups reveal American notions of citizenship, identity and racial difference.⁷⁹
  
  The act of building myths and constructing stereotypes about race populations was a fluid and changing process to fit current government and capitalist agendas. The nineteenth century anti-Chinese movement defined racial, cultural, and political thought in the country.⁸⁰ This page shares brief portrayals and perceptions of Chinese relationships during this period among the communities represented in the exhibit's chapters: African Americans, Women, Native Americans, and the Japanese. The accounts highlight the complexities of race relations in American society and intersectionality's importance. The circus provided opportunities for interracial interactions among these groups and of course, they equally formed close friendships and conflicting relationships during this time.

  African Americans

  
  
  Frederick Douglass supported Chinese immigration under his vision of “composite nationality” and conditions of “perfect human equality.” Douglass gave a 1869 speech in Boston where he advocated for the acceptance of Chinese immigration. Excerpts:

  I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man. If respect is had to majorities, the fact that only one fifth of the population of the globe is white, the other four fifths are colored, ought to have some weight and influence in disposing of this and similar questions. It would be a sad reflection upon the laws of nature and upon the idea of justice, to say nothing of a common Creator, if four fifths of mankind were deprived of the rights of migration to make room for the one fifth...⁸¹
  
  The grand right of migration and the great wisdom of incorporating foreign elements into our body politic, are founded not upon any genealogical or archeological theory, however learned, but upon the broad fact of a common human nature. ⁸²

  
  The African American community held disputes with the Chinese community of California in the late 19th century. This opposition manifested mainly in the workforce and politics. ⁸³ Susan Roth Breitzer asserts that "no matter how African American nativism evolved over time, its nub was always the belief that Blacks, born as Americans, should be chosen over immigrants for a 'good job and union membership.' Employers’ preference for Chinese therefore hurt them deeply, stirring them to 'support anti-Chinese legislation in the late nineteenth century.'" ⁸⁴
  
  In order to thoroughly cut off the profit enticements for Chinese laborers and work force, some articles suggested cooperation with the white population in The Elevator, a Black newspaper, in July 1, 1870.⁸⁵

  Let white and colored persons combine whenever it is practicable and advantageous, and have their interests in common.' In this context, black–white “interests in common” were conceivably the vanishing of the Chinese “menace."⁸⁶

  
  On several instances, Black newspapers revealed their shared interests with the Chinese. In other articles, notions displayed orientalist prejudices by African Americans with other native born Americans of the period. Provincial Freeman contained an article which called the Chinese petitioners “heathen idolaters,” and “Mongolian strangers.” Simultaneously, the editors also repeated the Chinese attacks of hypocritical American Christianity and criticized the “so-called democracy of the United States.” ⁸⁷ These contrasting views within the African American community reflects the period's complicated questions of American identity and democracy.

   Krystyn R. Moon sees a similar mentality in Black music of the late nineteenth century. She says that since slavery had erased Blacks’ connection to a specific homeland and Americans considered Black culture as an important differentiator of America from Europe, Blacks could always claim an American identity. They often cited Chinese racial inferiority and foreignness to reinforce that claim and “ally with the whites."⁸⁸

  
  The Chinese in America and their foreignness was an accepted pawn to reinforce arguments for other populations. In the 1896 Plessy v. Fergusson case that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation with the "separate but equal" idea, Supreme Court Justice John Marshal Harlan gave the one dissenting opinion:

  There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union ... and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race. ⁸⁹

  While Justice Harlan’s dissenting opinion may appear as a beginning move from racial discrimination against African Americans, it did not apply to the Chinese. What is troublesome is Chinese individuals were not involved in this court case, yet Harlan chose to emphasize the Chinese as outsiders in the country to make his argument for African Americans.

  White Women

  White women saw the Chinese as an undesired presence due to competition for jobs. The connection between the labor of Chinese men and white women became a heated topic in discussions about women's role in the labor force and women's rights in general. In 1870, labor protests in San Francisco assembled under signs reading "Woman's Rights and No More Chinese Chambermaids." An 1876 newspaper editorial from Virginia City argued that because of Chinese men, "women cannot establish and make a success of laundries here".⁹⁰
  
  
   

  
  Native Americans

  The press strategically placed accounts on two differing populations next to one another, to disparage and compare them. This was also a tactic often employed by the circus for publicity on performers . Newspapers routinely juxtaposed articles of Native Americans and the Chinese to sensationalize the notion of the savage versus the civilized and exaggerate their complicated relationships. Native Americans and Chinese presented in opposition to each other served the interests of the dominant white population. ⁹¹

  Newspapers, because of their function as organs of commercial and political interests, have a particular relationship to the contradictions of democracy and empire. ⁹²

  
  An example of a direct comparison of the two populations is the description of the diseased Chinese alongside an article about the Native American gentleman Old Winnemucca, the father of Northern Paiute activist and author Sarah Winnemucca. ⁹³

  The whole outfit has a dirty appearance, causing people who have examined it to wonder how anybody not utterly debased can enter the filthy dens and indulge in a smoke from pipes which have undoubtedly been used by leprous Chinese, and run the risk of contracting contagious disease. ⁹⁴

  
  Below this article and equal in length was this favorable description of Old Winnemucca:

  He gallantly extended his hand to the ladies, but taxed the gentlemen a cigar for the honor, and for this privilege received a half dozen Havanas made by Chinese in Chicago. ⁹⁵

  
  The press framed the Native Americans and Chinese as enemies. A popular song "Big Long John, a Chinaman" published in 1874 described an Indian scalping Big Long John and cutting off his queue. ⁹⁶
  
  

  
  Other times the newspapers reported on the conflicts of violence between the two groups. There was an element of “funniness” in the reporting of the conflicts that indicate these stories were a sense of entertainment.⁹⁷ One describes:

   When one of these battles [between Chinese and Native Americans] is about to take place, the news is circulated far and near, and the occasion is observed as a sort of holiday and general merry-making. ⁹⁸

  Another describes:

  The Chinese, as a general thing, get the worst of it, and when they turn tail to run, no language can describe the laughter and hurrahs of the multitude. ⁹⁹

  Many populations opposed others to elevate their own cause. To further the Native American cause, Northern Paiute activist and author Sarah Winnemucca used the common anti-Chinese rhetoric. In a Baltimore speech:

  the negro. Chinaman and every other foreigner is welcomed here,
  but your hand, your doors, your hearts are turned against us. Broken down, we
  are worse than the negro, whom you fought for and set free
  - Baltimore American, January 6,1884 ¹⁰⁰

  
  She stressed the Chinese foreignness to illustrate the mistreatment of Native Americans and their connections to the land. She clearly indicates them as outsiders and not belonging. In this comparison of the Chinese treatment versus the Native Americans:

  The Chinese, said she, sometimes do fearful things, and commit horrible murders, but you search for those men for two or three years until you catch them, and when they are caught you punish them. You don't attack all the Chinese who are with you. No, you let them live with you. You take all the natives of the earth to your bosom but the poor Indian, who is born of the soil and who has lived for generations on the lands which the good God has given to them, and you say he must be exterminated. (Thrice repeated, with deep passion, and received with tremendous applause). 
  - Daily Alta California, December 4, 1879¹⁰¹

  Wong Chin Foo

  The Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo employed racist rhetoric in order to garner support for the Chinese cause. In speaking out against the Geary Bill which was set to renew the Chinese Exclusion laws for ten more years, Foo spoke against African Americans and Native Americans to advance the Chinese. ¹⁰²
  
  

  Why should the grown-up child of African parents, who were raised in the jungle and brought here in chains, be a citizen and voter when the educated child of Chinese parents, a race that boasts of a civilization dating hundreds of years back of this nation, be made an outcast? Why should the American Indian, who, when he chooses, slaughters and kills and is only subdued by the bullet and the bayonet, be preferred to the Chinese boy or girl born in the United States, educated in your public schools, and the descendant of a race that, so far, has never lifted a hand against the injustice of oppression by your people?¹⁰³
  
  I have just discovered that I am the only individual in New York that has no country. The very thought of it knocks all the light and hope out of a fellow. A man without a country, kicked out of China, disowned by the United States, and all for what? … Has the Federal government of the United States the right to make a law which would be retroactive, as in this case, to strip me of my citizenship and franchise?¹⁰⁴

  The fact that Wong generated sympathy from the speech proves this opposition of races was an accepted strategic practice that worked successfully. Others agreed with his views and the comments on letters display the complicated issues on race and immigration.

  From The Dispatch:

  he tells his story and tells it well. It remains for intelligent American citizens to determine if under a literal rendering of the Constitution of the United States he is not right.¹⁰⁵

  Anonymous letter:

   not have as good a right to vote as an ignorant and superstitious negro or as the toughs and thugs of "New York’s East Side,” asking rhetorically, “is he not cleaner, whiter and more intelligent than the average Italian immigrant?¹⁰⁶

  The Japanese Community

  In San Francisco, the Call frequently reported on the feuds between Chinese and Japanese communities. In 1902, it predicted and sensationalized a prolonged feud between Chinese and Japanese residents in San Francisco when a member of the Chinese Sam Yup merchants allegedly shot and killed a Japanese cook. The newspapers highlighted their conflicts rather than alliances, even though many Chinese lived and socialized alongside the Japanese. The press intentionally reinforced an imagined racial divide more than real. ¹⁰⁷

  
  Contradictions and Collaborations

  The range of opinions on the Chinese and the contradictions, whether true or fabricated, spread rampant. Unfortunately, the popular anti-Chinese sentiment carried into the country’s consciousness and the government’s agenda, resulting in the 1882 Exclusion Act barring the Chinese from entering the country. It was not fully dismantled until the Civil Rights era in 1965.¹⁰⁸
  
  In 1873 a journalist noted the contradictions he heard about the Chinese in California:

  He is patient, docile, persevering, quick to learn, no eyeservant, the best cook or waiter you ever saw. Last week he stole $600 out of my drawer, and is now in State Prison He is sober. Last night you saw him smoking opium in the most horrible of dens. He saves his money. And takes it out of the State to spend in China. He is indispensable. But he is a curse to the community. He will make a useful citizen. His whole race is vicious and degraded. ¹⁰⁹

  
  It is important to consider other evidence that show moments of joy and amicable collaborations. While these populations formed often violent, close and complicated relationships, they were not always fraught with conflict.

  
  Native Americans and the Chinese worked alongside one another with the Nevada railroad. Evidence suggests that Chinese and Native peoples developed supportive and friendly relationships in the midst of tension. Living sites of Chinese and Native people indicate trade between the two groups. Past interviews with Native Americans and Chinese also share stories of close friendships formed by the railroad that included intermarriages with children. ¹¹⁰
  
  Jordon Hua studied the relationships between the Chinese and Native Americans during the 19th century:

  A Chinese man who owned a restaurant in Hawthorne, California served mostly Native Americans. He was reported to be a “great favorite” with the Native Americans, but less admired by fellow Chinese men. ¹¹¹ 

  A Chinese physician near the Colville Reservation in Washington was preferred by the Native American residents in the area over the agency doctor. ¹¹²

  Chinese men also frequently married Native American women. As the population of Chinese women in the U.S. was extremely low and laws existed that blocked marriages between Chinese and Euro-American women, American Indian and other ethnic women were the most likely potential spouses of Chinese men. It seems that intermarriage between the two groups primarily occurred from 1880 onwards. ¹¹³

  Wong Bow, a Chinese man, married a Yurok woman and lived with her tribe in California. They had two children together. ¹¹⁴

   

  
  
  James Presley Ball, Jr. served as editor on the Black-owned newspaper, Colored Citizen, in Helena, Montana. His father, James Presley Ball, an  African-American photographer of the J.P. Ball & Son Studio and an abolitionist, took portraits of Chinese immigrants during the height of US discrimination policies; suggesting perhaps amicable interactions with the Chinese community and the Balls. ¹¹⁵
  
  
  Also in Montana, a marriage between a Chinese man and Swedish woman before the miscegenation law was passed in 1909:

  George Washington Taylor came to Montana from Hong Kong in 1873 and settled in Helena as a lawyer’s servant. Shortly after his arrival in Helena either by death of his mother or by abandonment of his uncle, George, whose Chinese name is unknown, started learning to speak and write English. Sometime after his mother’s death, Jesse F. Taylor of the Sands and Taylor Cattle Company adopted the Chinese boy and renamed him George Washington Taylor George Taylor stated in 1942 that he renamed himself, as “my imagination and fancy were drawn toward George Washington, the father of this country.” Through the 1870s George worked as a stockman and cowboy for the state and had numerous interesting adventures as part of his life working the range in the Choteau and Cut Bank area of Montana.¹¹⁶
  
  In the 1880s George married a Swedish woman named Lena from Minnesota, and by 1900 they had two children. The 1900 census lists the Taylor family living in Dupuyer Township, in Teton County, and involved in farming. According to other sources George and family established a small stock ranch near Birch Creek. According to several reports, the Taylor family established a steady operation in the Birch Creek area, and their home was one of the finest in the local country and a favorite stopping place for travelers. George and Lena Taylor, luckily, avoided the adverse effects of Montana’s miscegenation law. In 1909 Montana’s legislature passed the state’s first miscegenation law barring intermarriages between “whites” and other ethnicities, such as African Americans, Chinese, or Japanese. Sadly, others in the African American, Chinese, and Japanese community felt the repressive effects of this racist law until 1953, when it was finally repealed by the legislative assembly. ¹¹⁷  

  
  And performers at the circus, albeit with the questionable descriptor "simon-pure Americans":

  ...draws its supply of talent from every quarter of the world. Here the Japanese and the German, the Frenchman and Swede, the Englishman and the Turk are liberally sprinkled among the simon-pure Americans, all on terms of equality and good fellowship.