Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

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Davis, reeking of Chinatown smells. Within this humble home, Flora Belle Jan slept in a half loft, one side of which was divided into a place for clucking hens. Davis was fascinated by the young woman. This was his second visit, and despite her surroundings, he saw enormous potential in her. Jan was witty, poised and talkative, with a penchance for being "modern" and "unconventional" in the manner of a young flapper. Armed with a vivacious intelligence and imagination, she had ambitions to be a writer, and several of her stories had been published in William Randolph Hearst’s prestigious San Francisco Examiner. During his visit, Davis chatted with Jan about her parents’ disapproval of her conduct, and how she was afraid that they would not support her wish to attend Berkeley and further her career. Afterwards, he left convinced that with the “right handling and leadership she might make a great deal of herself and become a real help to her own people.” 2 What was going on here? Why was this missionary from Boston through Japan so interested in this young Chinese American flapper in Fresno? From this initial location in the Yet Far Low chop suey restaurant in Fresno, I would like to fan out in a number of directions and answer certain questions. How did it happen that J. Merle Davis, and behind him a network of American Protestant missionaries, came to this 2 Descriptions and quotes are from letters, J. Merle Davis to Robert E. Park, June 1 and June 5, 1924. J. Merle Davis Correspondence Files, Papers of the Survey of Race Relations, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Biographical information on J. Merle Davis from his correspondence and from his biography of his father, Soldier Missionary: A Biography of Rev. Jerome D. Davis, D.D., Lieutenant-Colonel of Volunteers and for Thirty-Nine Years a Missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Japan (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1916). For more on Flora Belle Jan, see the extensive research on her in Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese American Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 2
small Chinatown in California? What did he see in her? And what did his interest have to do with the American institutions of Orientalism in the 1920's? This essay will trace how American missionaries of the YMCA International connected the conversion of "Orientals' in Asia with the sociological study of 'Orientals' in America. 3 Beginning with the Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast of the 3 I use the term "Oriental" not because I condone its use as a name or marker, but because it reflects a specific historic usage and category. The current usage for people who can trace their heritage back to Asia or the Pacific Ocean is "Asian Pacific Islanders," a label which encompasses Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Samoan, Hawaiian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Indonesian and other such ancestry. The term "Asian American," which replaced "Oriental" in the 1970's, still works as a more pleasant and politically useful label for many of the same people who were formerly known as "Orientals." There has been a voluminous literature on the history of the term "Oriental," spurred especially by Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). For a larger discussion of American "Orientalism," particularly in the form of social scientific definitions, see Henry Yu, Thinking About 'Orientals:' Race, Migration and the Production of Exotic Knowledge in Modern America (Oxford University Press, manuscript in progress). Relatedly, I use the term "white" for that constellation of people who benefit from inclusion into the category of "whiteness" by being defined as different from those Americans of "color." For the central role of race in American history, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1986). See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (London: Verso, 1990); Virginia Dominguez, White by Definition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986) for 3
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Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

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