Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

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The missionaries were not the only people who were interested in the ‘Oriental’ as a symbol of the exotic and the foreign. It was no coincidence that Robert Park used the phrase ‘racial uniform’ to describe the ‘skin color’ of ‘Orientals’ and ‘Negroes’--he recognized the connection between clothing, costumes, and skin color in a semiotic system of producing perceived difference, of creating a sense of otherness. 53 Just as Donaldina Cameron cleverly used the juxtaposition between ‘exotic’ native costumes (one wonders whether the ‘racial costume’ of ‘Oriental’ skin color and physical features might have been enough) and Christian hymns to display the striking difference between ‘heathen’ and ‘saved,’ and thus the success of her mission, the sociologists found in the ‘Oriental’ the same extreme example of the great gap which assimilation could bridge. The sociologists’ fascination with the ‘Oriental problem’ revealed the heavy load of meaning which the ‘Oriental’ could bear. Possessing a permanent ‘racial uniform’ which was distinct and different from ‘white’ Americans, Oriental Mission Work On the Pacific Coast of the United States of America, Addresses and Findings of Conferences in Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA. Oct 13,14,15, 1920, published by Home Missions Council and Council of Women for Home Missions, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York. Much has been written about Donaldina Cameron, including the hagiographic biography Chinatown Quest: The Life Adventures of Donadina Cameron (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1931), Peggy Pascoe’s Relations of Rescue: The Search for Femaile Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford, 1990); for a quick overview, see Laurene Wu McClain, “Donaldina Cameron: A Reappraisal,” Pacific Historian 27 (1983):25-35. 53 “The Jap is not the right color. The fact that the Japanese bears in his features a distinctive racial hallmark, that he wears, so to speak, a racial uniform, classifies him.” From Park’s “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups,” Publications of the American Sociological Society 8 (1914):66-72. 38
the ‘Oriental’ was nonetheless capable of cultural assimilation through social interaction. During the Survey of Race Relations, individual ‘Orientals’ became examples to be displayed, and symbols in a political and moral contest. Arguments over assimilability and over Americanization and Christianization were tinged with an undercurrent of exoticization, using ‘Orientals’ as symbols of both ‘otherness’ and ‘sameness.’ Flora Belle Jan, the young American woman who wore both the costume of the ‘flapper’ and the ‘Oriental,’ served as a walking and talking symbol of the possibility, if not the complete success, of cultural assimilation. If she had been ‘white,’ her value as an example would not only have been diminished, but more importantly, imperceptible. Her visibility as an exotic ‘Oriental’ made her meaningful to the missionaries as well as the sociologists. At the conclusion of the survey, Park wrote about an incident which echoed Donaldina Cameron’s display of her ‘saved’ Chinese slave girls: I recently had the curious experience of talking with a young Japanese woman who was not only born in the United States, but was brought up in an American family, in an American college town, where she had almost no association with members of her own race. I found myself watching her expectantly for some slight accent, some gesture or intonation that would betray her racial origin. When I was not able, by the slightest expression, to detect the Oriental mentality behind the Oriental mask, I was still not able to escape the impression that I was listening to an American woman in a Japanese disguise. 54 The ‘racial uniform’ of the young woman, a ‘Japanese disguise’ not unlike the ‘native’ dress of the Chinese ‘slave girls,’ marked her as different and foreign, but 54 Park, “Behind Our Masks,” Survey Graphic 56 (May 1926):136. 39
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Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

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