|
|
|
Reviews
| Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans. By Jean Pfaelzer. New York: Random House, 2007. xxix + 400 pp. Photos, notes, and index. $27.95 (cloth).
|
|
Driven Out tackles the "tough stuff" in Chinese American history, the anti-Chinese movement in the American West during the nineteenth century. Immediately, author Jean Pfaelzer raises the stakes, calling these campaigns to drive out Chinese immigrants "ethnic cleansings" and "pogroms." Most compelling is her treatment of the hundreds of violent expulsions in California and the Pacific Northwest, which were systematic and not merely scattered outbursts of malcontents on the fringes of society. Everyone is implicated—legislators who endorsed racism, newspaper editors who encouraged violence, employers who bowed to pressure to fire Chinese, and judges who awarded the guilty light sentences. |
1
|
|
Pfaelzer introduces readers to many previously unknown events and people from the anti-Chinese movement, such as the ominously named "601" (six feet under, zero trial, one bullet) in Truckee, California. She also describes Chinese and white allies' efforts to secure justice, such as Wing Hing v. City of Eureka, in which a Chinese plaintiff sued the city on behalf of his countrymen after a brutal purge. A memorable figure is the white American attorney Frederick Bee, who filed suit on behalf of Chinese driven out of Placer and beseeched state and federal officials to protect victims during a riot in Truckee. |
2
|
|
The strengths of Driven Out are its gripping descriptions of the anti-Chinese purges. Pfaelzer powerfully reconstructs several of these, such as the 1877 Lemm Ranch murders in Chico. This began with a meeting of the Supreme Order of the Caucasians and culminated in a nighttime ambush on nearby Chinese ranch workers, some of whom were shot in the face while asleep. Most of the participants were acquitted, and those found guilty of murder received lenient sentences. The remaining Chinese left town and white residents celebrated. As a meditation on the cruelty of human actions driven by racial antipathy, Driven Out delivers many gut-wrenching moments. |
3
|
|
The book's strengths, however, contribute to a major weakness, the absence of an overarching narrative. Pfaelzer's town-by-town approach, while affording richness of details, limits the book's analytical potential. The structure makes repetition almost unavoidable and charting change over time nearly impossible. Stepping back, the reader is hard-pressed to tell one expulsion from the next. After Pfaelzer has taken us through a few episodes, the rest of the book settles into a predictable rhythm of one violent encounter after another. In place of a narrative structure, she utilizes "Driven Out" as a conceptual thread, but this breaks down in a chapter on women. Without sufficient attention to the qualitative differences between the sexual enslavement of Chinese women by Chinese men and the violent expulsions of Chinese men by angry whites, she awkwardly conflates the two, concluding, "The system of enslaved prostitution in itself constituted a form of genocide, or 'Driven Out'" (p. 118). |
4
|
The subtitle, "The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans," suggests that Driven Out is not targeted at specialists. Still, I wish Pfaelzer had made some effort to locate her study within the robust field of Asian American history and explicitly acknowledge the efforts of ethnic studies scholars who have been uncovering this "forgotten" history for nearly forty years. The legal dimensions of Chinese exclusion and resistance, to which she devotes considerable space, have been effectively covered elsewhere (notably in the work of Lucy Salyer, Erika Lee, Charles McClain, and Andrew Gyory), and her interpretation of whites' motivations seems to borrow heavily from the work of Alexander Saxton. The book does contain stunning revelations (e.g., some anti-Chinese vigilantes were Mexican and Indian), which, if developed, could have complicated the common view of anti-Chinese violence as unadulterated white supremacy and enhanced the book's originality. To be fair, Pfaelzer is probably striving for a synthesis rather than a recasting of the anti-Chinese movement. In that regard, Driven Out is a notable achievement, and to the extent that many Americans remain unfamiliar with this history, it should be read.
Shelley Sang-Hee Lee
Oberlin College
|
5
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|