“Coalescence” takes readers to 1921 Shanghai, site of the Fifth Far Eastern Championship Games. At the Games, athletes from China, Japan, and the Philippines gathered to compete in team sports, such as volleyball, soccer, baseball, and basketball; individual sports, such as tennis and swimming; and track and field events. This chapter follows not only the athletes and coaches who participated in the competitions on the fields, but also the pundits and observers who used those performances to create new meanings and spin new narratives. For instance, it highlights how pundits and observers used the lenses of race and gender to explain away defeat, account for victory, and claim ownership of civilization and modernity. It focuses in particular on how the male gaze dissected women’s dress and comportment in athletic demonstrations and carnival competitions alike. 1921 was a year of coalescence, and this chapter also treats the Far Eastern Championship Games as a window into a broader world of Sino–Philippine interaction. This chapter traces, for example, the concomitant study tours of Gan Bun Cho and Camilo Osias, the campaign against the Bookkeeping Act, and anti-Japanese politicking – all topics explored in earlier chapters.

“Disintegration” bounces back and forth between the boardroom, where negotiators discussed the future of the Far Eastern Championship Games, and the fields, where athletes fought for victory under the sweltering Manila summer sun. The boardroom bouts and athletic competitions both produced controversies, but the former ended up outweighing all the animosity, camaraderie, and complexity of the latter. Boardroom negotiators from the Philippines and Japan, including several who had studied at Springfield College, ended up dissolving the Far Eastern Athletic Association, which had up until that time governed the Games, replacing it with a new organizational entity that included the puppet state of Manchukuo. Chinese negotiators, who were unable to attend the final meeting, vented their frustration upon arriving back in China. The conflict on the field, which centered on a series of basketball competitions, as well as the drama of the boardroom negotiations, set the stage for the actual conflict that would take place when Japan invaded China and the Philippines in World War II. This chapter concludes the story of the monograph by tracing how things began to fall apart as the world sped toward conflict.