William Wei | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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William Wei | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882. By John Kuo Wei Tchen. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xxiv, 385 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8018-6006-7.)

John Kuo Wei Tchen has written one of the most engaging cultural studies of America in recent memory. Adapting Edward W. Said's critique of "orientalism," Tchen deconstructs the "orientalist" discourse on China and the Chinese from the birth of the American nation in 1776 to the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to show how it was an element in the construction of a national identity. 1

As part of this orientalist discourse, the Chinese represented the foreign "other," a necessary contrast to what Americans imagined who they were or what they hoped to become. By the eve of exclusion, the American public had found its polar opposite in the image of the Chinese. For Americans the Chinese symbolized herd mentality, servility, and stagnation; Americans represented individualism, freedom, and progress. By definition, Americans considered themselves superior to the Chinese (as well as others). Ironically, in one way Americans and Chinese were equal: they both suffered from an acute case of ethnocentrism. The Chinese "Middle Kingdom" syndrome found its match in American exceptionalism! 2

Refining Harold Isaacs's chronological framework of American images of the Chinese, with the eighteenth century constituting the "age of respect" and the nineteenth century the "age of contempt," Tchen divides the orientalist discourse into three overlapping categories: patrician, commercial, and political. . . .

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