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This chapter examines how the effect of the model minority myth to deflect attention away from the realities of structural racism helps to explain why Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong is still read today and why many scholars also draw on this text to unsettle the trope of the “good immigrant.” Besides analyzing Wong’s memoir to trace the literary origins of the model minority construct, this piece highlights how US Cold War politics created conditions that made Wong’s account of the “good immigrant” commercially viable, especially in light of how Asian American espousal of the credibility of US democracy became critical to winning the Cold War in Asia. The desire to foster better “East–West understanding” further prompted the federal government to make use of Wong’s dual heritage as a Chinese and as an American and enlist her as a cultural ambassador to East and Southeast Asia. As Wong, like her memoir, promoted the superiority of US democracy at the expense of addressing the realities of structural racism, she fell short of pushing the nation towards the full realization of its democratic principles only to reveal the limits and contradictions of US Cold War democracy.
This chapter talks about three texts which establish the social and literary heterogeneity within the contested terrains of Chinatown and its literature. The two best-known Chinese American depictions of San Francisco's Chinatown from the 1950s are Jade Snow Wong's memoir Fifth Chinese Daughter and C. Y. Lee's novel The Flower Drum Song. Along with C. Y. Lee, Wong was one of a group of ethnic writers and artists whose efforts to promote America's influence abroad were valued, so long as they asserted and embodied the presence of opportunity for minorities. Lee's nuanced treatment of food, dialects, space and Chinese politics marks Chinatown and its representations as contested terrain. Hsi-Tseng Tsiang is arguably the first Chinese American novelist to publish in English. Poet, novelist, playwright, actor and activist, Tsiang combined formal experimentation and strategic appropriation from both Chinese and English literature with a lifelong commitment to left-wing activism. Tsiang's novel, And China Has Hands, indicates American capitalism and Japanese imperialism.
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