She is a historian of race and migration in the United States , specializing in asianAmerican History. Chinese must go. Fmaps the tangled relationship between local racial violence, and u. S. Imperial ambitions. Williams earned her b. A. From Brown University and phd in history from stanford. I believe he just spoke at sanford this afternoon. Thank you, beth, for coming and speaking this evening with us. David has worked as a social worker in San Franciscos chinatown with atrisk youth before starting his business in 1981 in exporting Consumer Products to mexico. He sold his business in 2003 and retired at the end of 2005. So now we get to work with david all the time, which is really lovely. David has a passion for building communities, social change, and improvements, Youth Education , the arts. He actively participates in the following nonprofit. The chineseamerican community fund, the dance troupe, the academy of chinese performing arts, so many places. I think the center for asianamerican media as well. So much of what david does is linking to other people. Oftentimes email goes around that says, come to this event. Thats the really lovely thing of both beth and david is the sense of openness, community and being ones guest. So, you are all our guests this evening. We thank you for that. Im going to hand over to beth to present first. David will present second, then it is your turn to ask questions. Well have roving mics. We suggest to please use the mic as im doing right now. Right in front of your safe your face so it is very clear. So we can all hear you. Many people have challenges with their hearing. I always say, we dont have 20 20 hearing. Enjoy the program. Enjoy this evening. And im going to hand it over to beth. Thank you. Beth thank you. [applause] can you hear me . Yes. Ok. So first i wanted to just thank patty and the California Historical society for having me , for having both of us. Im particularly excited to come here in part because the archive here is amazing. And as a history nerd, i spent time here as a student back in graduate school and i came here this summer. Its such an amazing collection here. Its an amazing place. Its an amazing place to work. Im also excited to be here tonight because i have family here, and my family is not sick of me talking about this book so much that they didnt come. So its very, very nice. Ok. So before what im going to do is give you a taste of the book that i wrote that came out just last year. But first i want to say a few words about why i wrote it. Its about chinese exclusion in sort of a broad way. Chinese exclusion is something that touched me before i even knew what it was. I mean, probably, like many of the people in this audience, you may also have been touched by chinese exclusion. For those of you dont know, chinese exclusion was a period of ban on all chinese immigrants. It lasted from the 1880s until the 1940s. And i think that in this sort of an audience, in the San Francisco audience, most of you know that this had a profound effect not just on the chineseamerican community, but also on our Immigration Laws even to this day. So i really learned something about chinese exclusion just through my familys experience and my grandfather, who came through angel island when he was just nine years old. Him just talking about those experiences gave me a sense of this history. But what i didnt get along the way was any sort of education about chineseamericans or chinese exclusion in Elementary School or secondary school. And so when i went to college, i took asianAmerican History and i learned some. But i found the more that i learned, the more questions i had. I wanted to know more than just the chinese exclusion existed, but to really understand the meaning of it. And what question really drove this book in particular was about the role of violence in the making of chinese exclusion and also in the shaping of chineseamerican communities. So the question that drove this project was, why was there so much violence against the chinese in the u. S. . And why has it gotten so little attention from historians . When historians do write about antichinese violence, they tend to write about it in what i found to be be a dissatisfying way, a sort of disturbingly flat story of either victimization, how these chinese communities were victimized by violence, or , you know, all about resistance, without sort of stopping to think about what this violence meant in a more complicated way. So this is the book that i set out to write. A more systematic look at antichinese violence in the late 19th century. And so today what im going to do is give you sort of a dip in and out of the book a little, moments. So im going to read a little bit, talk, and show you images from it as well. Ok. So they left in the driving rain. 300 chinese migrants trudged down the center of the street, their heads bowed to the elements and the crowd. They were led, followed, and surrounded by dozens of white men who were armed with clubs and pistols and rifles. As if part of a grim parade they were encircled by spectators who packed the muddy sidewalks,. Peered fromwalks, peered outways, and of secondstory windows to get a better view. One of the chinese tried to protest but later he remembered the mob answering in a single voice. All the chinese. You must go, everyone. So this incident took place on november 3, 1885, in tacoma, which was in washington territory at the time. But in some ways this particular time and place doesnt matter , because this story, the story of the expulsion of the chinese, was recreated in so many places. So in the period in 1885 and 1886, the chinese were driven out or there were attempted expulsions in, i found at least 168 communities across the u. S. West. Sometimes these purges involved racial violence in its most basic and brazen forms. That is, physical force motivated by racial prejudice and intended to cause bodily harm. But once, sort of, that violence had been meted out in particular areas, then it didnt take so much to drive the chinese out of town. Once that threat of violence was real, the chinese started to be expelled from communities based on intimidation or harassment or boycott. Other, sort of, things that we may not always see immediately see as a formt i of racial violence as well. Let me show you a few images to give you a sense of this. This is i attempted to map the sites of antichinese violence and this gives you a sense of their spread. This is only over the course of about 14 months. These are places that attempted to expel the chinese in the mid 1880s. They center, these dots center around essentially where the chinese were in the west. Thats sort of the basic pattern we see here. This is an image from one of the deadliest of these expulsions , which occurred in rock springs, where at least 27 people were murdered. But the expulsions also drove out the rest of the chinese out of town. This is an image again from harpers weekly that shows the attempted expulsion out of seattle. In seattle it was not entirely effective. Here we see white americans on both sides, both the part of the mob but then also the force of law and order attempting to end this expulsion. Here is a little closer to home in san jose. This is the burning of the original chinatown in san jose , which occurred in 1887. You can see spectators in the front. So, things like this, where arson was a very common tactic in expelling the chinese. But often in the newspapers they would just say, well, you know, chinatown lit on fire and they would suggest it was the chinese themselves that had lit their community on fire. Here is some of the chinese houses in tacoma which i was talking about a minute ago , before the expulsion. You can see in this below this image it says, the few chinese shacks in the foreground were burned in 1885. This is also from tacoma. This is a commemorative photograph that was taken after the expulsion by the leaders, the vigilantes at organized that organized the expulsion of the chinese from tacoma. I think it is very striking that they decided to get together in a photograph and to make very public their involvement in this expulsion. It is particularly interesting who is in this image. It is not just the fringe people of town. We have, for example, the sheriff, the mayor, the head of the fire department, a probate judge, leading men within the Tacoma Community that were involved. I often get a question on who is the woman and child, which are very striking. As far as i can tell, the answer is that shes the wife of the newspaper man in town and so my guess is that hes behind the camera and shes standing in to represent him in this image. Im going to back up on that. Ok. So historians often claim that racial violence is fundamental to the making of the United States. But when they do so theyre not usually thinking about the chinese. Instead, theyre thinking about other violent processes. Colonization, enslavement, segregation. So antichinese violence is routinely left out of those larger narratives, even when people are talking about violence in the United States. I think part of this has to do with numbers. There were comparatively fewer chinese in 19th century america. It was only the census in 1880s says about 105,000 chinese in all of the u. S. , although they were concentrated here in california. And there were fewer chinese and fewer still actually lost their lives to violence. In this period, 18851886, i was able to count 85 men who perished during this peak of violence. But these numbers dont really capture the extent of violence, in part because it was not the violence was not always recorded, deaths were not always recorded, but also theres a lot of this violence was not intended to be fatal. These were expulsions, trying to drive people out as opposed to murder them. There were also a lot of violence against chinese that happened both before and after this period. Im going to show you one which i accidentally showed you or for a second there, a disturbing image, so i meant to warn you before i did. This gives you just an extent of the violence. In 1887, this is a little after and its not part of the expulsion. The citizens of colusa, california took this commemorative photograph of hong di and his lynching. So there was moments when antichinese violence turned very violent and fatal in ways that we recognize in other forms of racial violence. But this is not the norm. So i think that the violence in part is not understood because it is expulsions as opposed to things like this, like lynching. But i also think this can be explained by the violence itself. That the violence in many ways was effective. You know, that chinese were pushed to the sort of outer recesses of american society, and with that, American History and memory during this period. So successful expulsions often left very little behind. Even in the way of memory. And we can see this in tacoma, for example, where there was no chinatown or chinese in tacoma after the expulsion. Only just recently they put together what they call a reconciliation park to mark where the chinese once were. But it is part of this effort, this attempt to find descendents of the original chinese but couldnt find any. So thats how effective this violence could be. So i think that this history in part has been neglected because its been misunderstood. You know, that the violence the antichinese violence is not sort of a weak imitation of racial violence elsewhere. It was a distinct phenomenon that must be understood on its own terms. And so what im going to do today is not talk as much about what caused the violence but more about its consequences, just to and what im going to do is talk start at the local level. And in general at the local level, i argue that antichinese violence was designed to create racial boundries, you know, to draw lines within communities across the geography of the west, it also within communities and within the economy. And there is many ways to im this, im what but im going to talk just about one way today, which is the literal drawing of lines and the mapping of chinese communities. So how is it that violence affected how where people could live, where they could work within the west. And to do that i look at a bunch of sources. This is my these are some of my favorite sources. This, if you have never seen one, is an insurance map. So the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company went around to towns all over the United States and made map like this. Theyre amazing, and you can find them many, many places, and they did so in order to insure people against fire damage. Because, you know, they wanted to know what structures had been there before any fires happened. In general, the sanborn Fire Insurance maps were much more interested in whether it was a wood house or a brick house as opposed to who lived there, but with the exception of the chinese. So the sanborn insurance map part everyingly, chineseoccupied building on them. They dont mark any other racial group across the u. S. Only the chinese. And as far as i can tell, the sanborn, the descendents wouldnt let me into their archives. But as far as we can tell, what we why they would have marked chinese is because there was an assumption that just being chinese was increased the risk of fire. That this was just their occupancy alone was a fire risk. So but for me what this means is that i can map the presence of chineseoccupied buildings, and often the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company would come through every few years and sometimes they happened to map a community right before and after violence, expulsions, and this allows me to see what it looks like. So an example so theres different patterns we see in these maps. In eureka, california, where there was a very successful expulsion for those of you can see, in the center here it has marked out chinatown and written across it is vacant. Chinatown, which is only the square block, is vacant after the expulsions. In other places, ive used the sanborn insurance maps to then build my open map to give you a sense. In riverside, california, if we map before and after the expulsion riverside we see that the chinese population has not moved too far. Theyve move from the center of whats known as the square mile of riverside, the original community, to the outskirts of town. So this has been an expulsion, but a short one. And in places like seattle where the violence was not as effective, what we see is the reduction in the number of chineseoccupied buildings, and sort of their proxmity is tighter and closer. There is other ways we can look at the change in the built environment. Where could Chinese People live. In tacoma we have redress hearings, we have lists of the buildings that have been burned. And then here is from a chinese urgents notebook in seattle merchants notebook in seattle, and he catalogs in the side of his notebook the camps lost, that is workers camp in washington territory. So, the expulsions in general moved the chinese from places that they knew to places where they didnt know. From communities where they were known, to communities where they were not known. So i think of it as the violence turned to what were neighbors, People Living in these communities for long periods of time, into strangers, both figuratively and literally. For some chinese this process was a process of segregation. So, lots of chinese, probably descended on000, San Franciscos chinatown, fleeing Rural Communities when where they were being expelled and finding safety in numbers. But also in some places was an experience of isolation, where chinese were driven out of western communities and went to the midwest. Four to the south, where there were very few chinese but there was also less violence. So this process of expulsion reified thewords, chinese as outsiders, as strangers and as aliens in american society. So now i want to talk about the National Consequences of this expulsion. Because not only did the expulsions make the chinese alien in the context of their local communities, it also helped to cement the idea of alienage. What is an alien in modern america at the same time . And im talking there, im shifting from more of the more metaphorical and social to the legal here. I will backup for second. Historians have spent a lot of time thinking about citizenship, when citizenship was born. One of the thing that is historians spend a lot of thing talking about is the 14th amendment. Back in the news again. The 14th amendment not only granted citizenship to the formerly enslaved people. It also gave citizenship new meaning. It gave new rights, and it pledged federal protection of those privileges and immunities. That was 150 years ago in 1868, was the 14th amendment. But as it did this and cemented citizenship, it also bridged, i think, a lot of new questions about what alienage was going to mean in america. So i link this process of chinese exclusion and antichinese expulsion to this moment when the United States was making citizenship this newly valueable status within society. And so it became more important to draw those lines about who should stay outside. And so as citizenship became more of a clear and fundamental concept in our society, i think it left open lots of big questions. You know, who is an alien in america . Who is not a citizen . What aliens would be allowed into the nation . What power did the government hold to exclude and expel unwanted aliens . What rights did an alien possess . What could unauthorize aliens to who possess those same rights . The chinese were not americas first aliens. First immigrants. But America First drafted national answers to these questions for the explicit purpose of excluding the chinese. And so, as the state and the public made the chinese into sort of the epitome of alienage, a process that was born in these local communities as well as in the federal level, they were starting to delineate what it meant to be an alien in american law and practice. And there is some irony to this, because at the moment in which the congress is in the process of inventing the modern american citizen in order to give black men rights and at the same time theyre inventing modern american alienage in order to exclude the chinese. Its a complicated moment. Of course, both were not fully realized. Right . Black men did not get full citizenship and chinese were not entirely excluded. But that was the intent. So, what i want us to understand is that these expulsions were not just local means directed toward local ends. They were not about keeping the chinese further outside of town. The vigilantes at the time made this very clear. They translated their violence by sending petitions, writing to congress, talking to journalists, and they made clear this violence was a demand for chinese exclusion. For those of you who know this history well, this sounds strange because we think of today, the chinese sick chinese exclusion act that happened before this violence. Ist i found in my research in that first law, the 1882 law, they call that the chinese restriction act. They did it because it was a. Eek law with poorly funded they ran out of money within months of the first year. Here is temporary and only against new chinese immigrants. Law, it was poorly enforced. What are produced is not exclusion of chinese, but an increased a change from fromthat had existed migration that had previously existed, it was contrary to law, it was illegal. It changed that stream of migration and it was seen as illegal immigration. They this is what the expulsion amounted to. Ok. I need to find where i am again. 1888, it wastil not until after this violence, that Congress Responded with a law that had more heft. That they called at the time, the chinese exclusion act. That was in 1888. This law had 10 times the funding of the first one and it went into effect immediately. One of the effects of that was that there were lots of Chinese People already on ships crossing the pacific, since it took about early days. And who arrived in the United States and suddenly their arrival had been made illegal. Was im going to skip that what this did was spur a Supreme Court 1889. On, which was in the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that 1888 exclusion act. They did so in blatantly racial terms. Migration,he chinese hordes of chinese, and they declared this was an urgent matter of national security. [laughter] yeah. Doesnt sound familiar . They asserted the right of any nation to protect against invasion and Domestic Violence. If we think about this, it is really profound. Migration, chinese and the Domestic Violence are these expulsions. The violence against the chinese. This ruling declared that the power to exclude foreigners was an incidence of sovereignty and cannot be granted away. It rested with the Political Branch of the government, with congress, and with the president. This, legal scholars caused called the plenary document. The document says that the president and congress have absolute power to exclude aliens. At the time it affirmed their ability to do so on the basis of race and class. And it exempted those immigration cases from judicial review. It said, those cases cannot come up through the legal system. We are going to have a separate, eventually an entirely separate administration of immigration court. What i see is that the modern concept of alienage was born at this highly contingent moment. When defined by hordes of chinese at americas gaetz, and white vigilantes taking matters into their own hands. This is a moment that the Supreme Court, we can see aliens as invaders and Border Control as a form of national security. Class routinely, and potentially based on religion and race as well. Aliens, noncitizens as we would preferably call them today, although im using a legal and a historical term, can seek many rights under their status of persons, but those are mostly civil rights, not in immigration court. What this system made was an entirely different set of courts, immigration courts, where immigrants lack many of the constitutional guarantees of due process. Thats what results in what we see in the news, fouryearolds in Court Without legal representation. We see mass trials of adults, and we see immigrants deported without trials at all. They dont have the same due process laws. Alienage their has made them vulnerable. What i would like to end on i talked about the locals abstractly, the national level, but i want to talk for a minute about the individual consequences of this violence for the chinese. For me, this is the hardest thing to get at. Because our source base is so thin. I mean, david is going to show us what we do have, but theres lots of things we dont have because the population was transient, some of them were illiterate, lots of them were workingclass. And of course, this violence destroyed records. So im going to give you two snapshots of individuals just so you can see the individual life. The first is about an unknown woman who i can only describe as someones wife, because that is how she appears in the records. She has no name in the records. When a merchant, driven from the , testified at a hearing, he claims his wife as an unquantifiable loss. He said this is his legal testimony from the excitement, the fright and the losses we sustained in the riot, my wife lost her reason and has ever since been hopelessly insane. He said, she threatened to kill people with a hatchet or other weapon she can get a hold of. A local white doctor corroborated this testimony of the merchant. He said in his Expert Opinion that her present insanity is due to the experience had by her when driven from tacoma. And as i said before, the woman herself never testified and was not even named. And even a little snapshot like this in the records is ambiguous, what exactly it means. Perhaps she was declared insane for simply declaring a very unfeminine desire, which was physical retribution against those who had taken her home from her, or maybe it had truly driven her, this expulsion drove her to insanity. I know that her reaction was a far extreme, but it still gives voice to the anger and anguish that was the result of this violence. My second snapshot is an anonymous poem, which captures a more common experience, which is the fate of chinese migrants that were made undocumented by the chinese exclusion laws. So this comes from an anonymous cantonese poem that was published in San Francisco. And i have it here in translation. I will just read it and end with that. Ok. I roam america undocumented. White men blackmail me with many demands. I say one thing, they say another. I want to complain of injustice but my tongue stutters. At a loss for words i rack my brain for a solution avail. Thrown into a prison cage, i cannot fly away. Dont you think this is cruel . Dont you think this is cruel . Thank you for listening. [applause] a great audience. Thank you for coming. I think half the audience are my friends and relatives because theres no warrior game on tonight. So im glad youre all here. So you have another 30 minutes of bitterness. Thats me. And the chinese always say bitter in, sweet out. So i have candies for you on your way out to get rid of the bitterness. [laughter] ok. Im going to talk about the collection here. I picked a few objects. And the California Historical society just came out with this. You have one on your seat it tells you something about the collection that is here. And this really feels like home for me sometimes. Ive known francis back there for more than 20 years. Hes the librarian back there. I will start off can you see . Do i have it reversed . Sorry. Here we go. Oh, this side. Sorry. This is a contract for a Contract Labor for three years by jacob lee. They have three of these here. 1849. This is from the very beginning. This jacob lee, he contracted about 13 chinese to come here to work for three years. This one i think is for a cook. At 15 a month, advanced 30 to wages forf from his transportation to get here. But three of these contracts still exist here. Now, he did this in hong kong. Why hong kong . 1849. Well, you have to think about it. All these miners came to San Francisco, 1849. And they needed to be supplied. All of a sudden, you have 25,000 people more here, the next year 125,000 and so on. And if you were to bring things from the east coast by wagon train, it would take you six months. You cant carry that much. And if you took a boat around the horn, you get blown to the sandwich islands, hawaii today, and then have to tack back because the trade wind takes you back out, thats five months. So whered you get the supply . Whats the nearest port . Hong kong. 45 to 60 days. So as a result, hong kong supplied the miners here. Without hong kong, you cannot have had this gold rush. Their flour, coffee, butter, came fromir buildings hong kong, many of them prefabs. So we have three here. This is more. And the last one is too small to read. We do not know what happened to two of them, but we know what happened to jacob. He left two linear feet of his own paper here. And this is the problem with doing research here you ask a question, who is this guy . Then they have the answers here . I looked into it. He was the second resident here in San Francisco. The first one was richardson. Richardson bay is named after him. He had a tent on dupont street. 800 block. You can still walk by, right in the heart of chinatown. Jacob lee built his more permanent building, the frame house on the corner of grant and clay. It is still there. And as he married there in 1837. And he married there in 1837. Believe, july 4. He built it in two days. So must have been a magnificent place, right . He built it into dante days in two days. The first white child born in San Francisco was in his house, near the corner of portsmouth square and clay. So we know a lot about jacob lee, but we dont know a lot about the chinese. Thenderstanding, most of chinese did not honor their contracts. Because if they leave, how are you going to find them . Until the Sixth Company and the District Association form in the 1860s. Then they kept these contracts because they can control the exit to leave back for china, to buy your steamship ticket, you needed to go to the association to get permission to exit. So if you signed a contract and was registered, they know you have to pay. So these initially did not work out that well until later on. This is the golden hills newspaper, the First Chineseamerican paper we have is bilingual. They have a copy here. This is may 27, 1854. Every week, the Methodist Church did this. Methodist minister, they were sympathetic to the chinese, trying to convert the chinese. So they came out with this newspaper. Lasted, oh,h it less than half a year. Then the Presbyterian Church took over. The minister there wrote one in chinese. It was bilingual. The english is normally very sympathetic to the chinese, why you shouldnt treat the chinese so poorly. But on the chinese side, this line here says that the prostitutes in sonora are being kicked out. Thats important news, if you are in the bachelor society, i guess. So this is the first paper we have here. And the next one was in sacramento. This on the right side, we have anthea harding. She is the executive director here, soon to leave to be the executive director of the National Museum of American History in that part of the smithsonian on the mall. Their budget is about 7, 8 times this. They have about 300 staff, 10 times what they have here. 3. 5 millionout objects, compared to half a million here, so this was major. I thought she might be here today, but shes not, but shes pictured here with a golden spike. Theres two golden spikes, one at stanford and one here. I didnt get to look at it, because i dont think they want to let people know they have five pounds of gold here. [laughter] so keep this quiet, but they have it. I think they have it here. I couldnt see it, so they gave me this picture just yesterday. Spike, 150the golden years ago as of may 10 this year, this famous picture of the golden spike, done by ajay russell. And all the chineseamericans see . At this and say, the chinese are excluded, the central pacific, the western side was maybe 90 chinese who built it, but then i have a different narrative why the chinese are not found here. This is an iconic picture because it is a good picture. Both trains are here, they are shaking hands and exchanging bottles of wine. This was a post picture posed picture taken after the ceremony. If you see pictures of the actual ceremony, it shows three chinese hammering the last spike. Because when Leland Stanford tried to hit the spike, he he missed totally and he hit the rail. And then when durrant tried to do it, he missed everything. So the chinese finally put in the last spike, so we know the chinese were there, and the trains trains were farther apart so they could put in the last two rails. They were 28 feet, the engines were further apart. So they were about 150 feet apart. So when they are together like this, you know it is afterwards. So we know the chinese are there. And why were they missing here . Its because right after the ceremony, all the vips left and the chinese were sent to this private car to be honored, toasted and fed. This picture was taken, the chinese were honored. There were eight of them at the ceremony. Crocker had to talk him into it by saying that the chinese built the great wall. Doubt this, because if you look into the 1852 special census for california, because california became a state and they took the new census, look at strawbridge. He owned in a hotel had owned a hotel and ranch near sacramento. On the same location, he had 18 chinese. He hired chinese to work for him a decade before he started construction on the railroad. And from one of the names, he was one of the First Chinese hired by strawbridge and became a supervisor of the chinese. Strawbridge had worked with the chinese for a decade before, he knew what the chinese could do. So i think crockers media machine gave him the credit. Anyway, this is the ceremony itself. But it is definitely a posed picture. Here, we have two directories by wells fargo express. It was known more as a transport company than a bank. Hough that ive although by then it was a bank. This is their chinese directory listing chinese businesses from San Francisco, sacramento, marysville, portland, stockton, san jose and virginia city. That was in by 1882, they added 1878. Oakland, l. A. , bc, and victoria. We can gather a lot of information about businesses from these directories. Next, i stole this from beth. [laughter] it looks like one of hers. About a month ago, a researcher in china emailed me and said did you know chinese in the 1800s were living outside of chinatown . Were there many people outside of chinatown . So i pulled this. This is based on the information on the 1882 directory. And you put in all the dots and you can see on Mission Street, Mission Street and south of market, there were a lot of chinese businesses. Mainly laundries. A lot of laundries and sewing factories there. So from these directories, we can make these maps if we want and locate many of them. I see andy chan back there with the chinese Historical Society of america. He is the registrar there. About half a year ago, we put together this map of 1905 based on these directories. An interactive map. One of these days, we will show it. Heres another map. This is the oldest map of chinatown i can find an english. Find in english. 1872, very early on, its a map of chinatown, but its kind of twosided. One, is telling you the swarm of chinese will be coming. Let me see if i can find this ok, ok. By h. J. Ut together west. Morning, the chinese invasion. The chinese are coming. Theres 900,000 more coming. I dont know why he picked 900,000, because it was about 3 million chinese in china at that time, and that would have really scared people. He picked 900,000. He goes on to say you must buy this map when you visit chinatown, its a great place. And he pointed out some very important places. Josh houses, theres two missions, the baptist and presbyterian missions. Josh houses are the chinese temples. Then he shows two restaurants, and theaters. Theres two theaters here. I cant see it from this angle, but they are appear, believe me up here, believe me. You can come here and look at the map. One strange one that popped out was lee bao thai. He was an herbalist. I dont know if he paid to get on this, on east dupont street. Down here ok. He moved to this corner, but at the time he was here. We see theres a chinese theater here and the chinese theater still on jackson street. There was one on washington street. So on the theater side, it was very important. By the way, the performers were allowed to come in during exclusion thanks to p. T. Barnum. He needed circus performers, so he had his lobbyists go to congress and allow circus performers, so the chinese theater hired his lawyer and got their actors to come in as circus performers. But there was a quota on them. So they were the exceptions that came. When they came back, they brought the latest fashion, the latest gossip. Because they also traveled the pearl delta area for their performances, they went to all the villages. Whenever they went to a village, the people there would give them a letter, saying, please give this to my son and tell him to send money. [laughter] that was normally the message. We have theaters here. He said you should go. We see the josh house, this one here. This, we know very little. Then i did a little research. Called the eastern glory temple. I found a sacramental Union Newspaper 1872, it says the chinese are having a general festival today to close up the annual feast of the dead. This is the ghost festival, which has been going on for the past week. Actually, it goes for a whole month. The temple directed by the herbalist on dupont street you can enter from dupont up this alley to st. Louis alley. It is gorgeously decorated and filled with grotesque statues, some of them which are 18 feet in height. This is the king of haiti. Its made out of papiermache. Its filled with visitors. This herbalist, one of the wealthiest persons and sentences go in San Francisco, he had about 350 patients a day, he owned this temple, which was making him a heck of a lot of money. We have a drawing of this temple. We dont have any pictures. Soon after he died here we go. Heres the bell. You go to the temple on waverly place, they got the bell. It got sold to them. And for the chinese, it is less religion than rituals. You are born into rituals. Its less of religion you go to temple, the temple caretaker, they dont give sermons. The monks there dont give sermons. You go there and do your rituals. We dont worship our ancestor, we venerate them. I think we need to rewrite our own history. I just gave a talk to the Parade Committee this year. They will bring in 100 gods of wealth for the parade they wanted me to talk about the god of wealth. My favorite coffee place, they have peace coffee there on grand avenue and i see the god of wealth there, the military god of wealth. Behind thee person counter, do you pray to the god of wealth . Do you believe in the god of wealth . She says yes, i do. Every day, i come in and light a stick of incense and and pay my respects, and then go on and wipe the table, wash the dishes, get ready for the customers. Its part of the job description. [laughter] so something is a ritual you do, many of the chinese do it that way. We dont have hell, we have purgatory. Youou something did something bad in life, the judge will judge you and nd it depends on how bad you are, how many years you stay in hell or purgatory. The biggest sentence is 500 years. So the chinese are very forgiving. The worst of this is 500 years. Anyone wants to guess what the worst offense is to be sent to hell . West, 18 cath theres murders, rapists the worst offense is if your wife gets into argument with your mother and you pick the side of your wife, you go to the worst hell. [laughter] i think this is made up by the mothers. [laughter] and the concept is, you can always get another wife. You only have one mother. [laughter] so these are some of the concepts when you go to this a man inelieve, is front of his temple. This is the only picture i have. Confident, i am guessing. So this is the Sixth Company, sixth Chinese Companies memorial. O congress this is in december 18, 1977, congress decided to investigate chinese immigration. And they came out with some very racist conclusion. And this is a reply by the chinese Sixth Company. This is in the chineses own words. And at this time, they hire a guy named frederick bea. He was the only lawyer who was willing to work on the chinese side. He was very effective, to the point where the chinese hired him as a counsel general for china here in San Francisco. So many of the lawsuits, you will find his name there. And there were others. The chinese used three main firms. And during the exclusion period, the exclusion act, 1882 to 1905, when we had the law case that basically said, the courts would no longer handle any of these immigration cases because there were too many. 9 of the chinese sued the government 10,000 times, more than 10,000 times, with a population of 9000. Story, andhe real not that the chinese were excluded, but the chinese pushed back and hired these lawyers. More than 20 of these cases went to the Supreme Court to give people equal protection under the law. You have all heard about that. It was never tested. What does it mean . The chinese meant the execution of the law was as important as the writing of the law, but had never been interpreted that way or seldom interpreted that way. We have birthright citizenship that came out of this, the right to a public education, and would have the concept of political asylum, the pershing chinese, where 500 chinese who helped pershing when he went to mexico, when he came back, he got he is going to kill us because we help do. The pershings credit, he got congress to pass political asylum for them. All right. Here is a picture in our exhibit. Can i have my thank you. Is the larger picture of our exhibit is the pacific steamship line. The thing to notice is this plank going down or you disembark the boat and go down. This is in harpers weekly. And you can see the same going down. There are other illustrations out there without that you know, they were never there. Harpers weekly happened to be very proimmigration and was kind to the chinese. So they have some of these here. You can get this book easily, they have a First Edition here. Roughing it, by mark twain. A lot that we know from the chinese in San Francisco came from mark twain. I hate to say it here in california circles, but allow the bakers papers are bancroft. All we know about their practices, the reburial and shipping the bones back are from him as a reporter here in San Francisco. He was very sympathetic also to the chinese. He wasnt that way from missouri, but when he came out west and saw the chinese and met some chinese, he was very kind in his writing about the chinese. So you can come here and read that. Re is a map, another map that was made to be very racist, to show the vices in chinatown. But few people know that it came with a report, the municipal report here in San Francisco. Josh houses,ll the so religion is part of it, but , it wasntathenism christian, to show show that the chinese were not christians. The pink was the gambling places. The green was chinese prostitution. I think the light blue on the outskirts of chinatown was white prostitution. The yellow were opium dens. But mostas made people have seen this map, but few people have read the report. Arnold have gentz this is a collection of not only of the pictures but of the glass plates, about 140 of them. You can see what arnold gentz did to change some of them. You see them quite a bit. This is on washington street, right above wentworth. In those days there would be called washington place. He is really not selling vegetables, he is selling chicken. You can barely make it out. Then here, this is called the fish seller, and this is on waverly place. Piccolo cafe was. Alice barkley had her cafe there. Today it is the boiling shrimp restaurant. It was also called a pot sticker restaurant. This was right outside of that. But he was not selling fish. We know this guy, his name was bob. His father worked at a slaughterhouse in the Hunters Point area, and he got all the intestines delivered free, and his son brought them to chinatown and sold them. And he got very wealthy doing that. This is the Salvation Army in chinatown. And we know arnold gentz did certain things to make it more chinese call more chinese, more oriental. Here is a white lady with a bonnet. He made sure she was covered so that all you saw were chinese. Now, look at this guy. Ok. We know who he is. His name was fong, and he went to berkeley initially, then pomona, then graduated from berkeley, went back to china and became the manager of commercial press, which was the largest Publishing House in china. It still exist today. And he did more to promote english language, to make it a real study. He published all these books in english, how to teach english. He brought christianity. He did a lot of christianity. And later on, he came back to the states. So he was captured by arnold gentz right here praying. Here, i think about 70 of his pictures had chinese children. He had a thing for chinese kids. But we know that there were very few. It was a bachelor society. Around about half his pictures were taken during Chinese New Year because they are all dressed up. This is actually probably in chinatown in marin county. But surprisingly, we know who this person is. She turned out to be a very pretty young lady. Her name is alice su feng. Feng was her married name. She was quite incredible. We know a lot about her because of judy young posey book, unboundgs book, voices. She talked about going to the san Pacific International expo. She talked about the earthquake. She was interviewed as late as 1989 about the earthquake. She was a survivor. She was 17 years old. Her voice to talk about that, so you can listen to alice here. If you do a little research, you can find out a lot. This is a book, the servants handbook. We had about 10 Publishing Companies in San Francisco. We dont talk about this much. There were also about a dozen literary societies, of course, writing in chinese. This is what every person who would hire a chinese houseboy would need to teach them how to say certain words in english. So in chinese, gas would be gosse. Close, but no cigar. And they would teach you the recipes. They have this right here. Then they have the chinese digest. The publishers and the editors of this all turnout to be the founders of chinese Historical Society of america. This was in the 1930s. I had to give a talk on the bar because they had neon signs. I had to find history, and i found this ad from 1937 in the chinese digest. And gave me the owners name. So i talked about the li po bar. This was the gay hangout during world war ii. This is where the gays could congregate. But in 1937 in the same article nightmare,n because editors of the chinese digest said, this will be the death of chinatown. Flashing lights . [laughter] and right now, were trying to bring it back. In fact last week, there was a talk on neon lights. But in 1937, they thought it was the end of chinatown when you start doing this. And we have this great book of pictures. Beth talked about about us not having much written by these people. We know very little about them. But their faces tell the story. This one is they were mainly bachelors. And this is the poem by li bai. Chinese. L say it in almost every chinese will notice chinese] he is dreaming of home. These pages built the railroad, built california, and built this Museum Library you are in. A California Historical society was actually founded in 1871. And failed three times. Before c. Templeton crocker, started it in 1922, i believe. C Templeton Crocker who is he . The grandson of charles crocker, who left 400 million, like 40 billion today, maybe more, so that he could collect all these things. He left it here. He was the first president. These people contributed in building all this. My time is up. Im sorry, i have overrun a bit, but thank you for coming. [applause] i want to thank beth and david. What we are going to do, we have penny over there with a mic, i have a mic on this side, so we will go over here. Wewill start here, and then will go to the other side with penny. Hi. Thank you for sharing your information with us this evening, it is very educational. And speaking of education, i wonder if, beth, can you tell us what the asianamerican student population is at princeton, and do you have any comment about the lawsuit against harvard for discrimination against asians . It is amazing how often that is the first question i get when i give talks. Is this working . You can hear me . Ok. I just cant tell. So, at princeton right now no . Ok. Ok. At princeton right now, the asianamerican population hovers around 20 of undergraduate student body, and that does not count foreign students, it is only domestic. Although princeton is now being not being sued, i am well aware that harvard is being sued for discrimination against asian applicants. I think lets see what do i it is asay on this really complicated issue that we are facing at this moment in graduate education. Another it is far away from what i presented today, but i think it is related in some ways. What i hear from my students and from their parents and from others is a deep upset about the ways in which College Admissions may be unfriendly towards the increase of asian applicants. One of the things that i spend a lot of time talking to my students about is the fact that i think it is wrong to pit against each other. The idea of fear of discrimination against asian applicants, which is something that should be investigated and should be considered a failure but it is often paired with an antiaffirmative action message, that these seats in classrooms are going to other people of color and that affirmative action is the reason for any discrimination against asian americans. So, scholars look at this and they attempt to model admissions and have studied this. It doesnt make sense to me, looking at the scholarship, to pit these two things against each other. To say that we need to undo affirmativeaction and a raceconscious admission of communities that have not had the same opportunities educational and societal, economic, and take apart affirmative action in the fight to try to make our society as fair as possible to asians. It is a really complicated issue. But i think i will stop there, because that is not the topic of our program. I came especially because i was curious and concerned about the phrase with regard the making of an alien in america. Why that is, is because in recent months and years, i have heard that particular world applied with regard to chinese, chinese americans, and even at the root of contemporary china bashing. The last time i can recall the word alien being used was a long time ago when pasans like my father were just referred to as illegal aliens who were sneaking in. But somewhere along the way, someone brought to my attention that the word alien, is actually really even more derogatory and negative. It has very serious connotations. What this person shared with me was that it really means an individual in a country, whether a citizen, emigre, immigrant, green card holder, it doesnt matter someone in a country who identifies and allies politically and ideologically with a foreign government. In other words, we are like spies. In high school i remember vaguely something called the alien and sedition act. But i forgot the details. My concern, therefore, as of this is increasingly being voiced or hinted at, it might explain why we have these instances wherein chineseamericans are being suspected of nefarious activities, because they are actually aliens. That their allegiance may be to the mother country, etc. My question is, and i thank you, all those unanswered issues with regard to aliens, did any of them ever become like the chinese exclusion act, a formal body of law where lawyers can say, this is what an alien is, you are not an alien, but this person is, because of this, that and the other . And, do you think that long ago when it may have been a myth i learned from someone that, oh, the chinese came to america wi s sojourners, with the idea of coming here and making it, making money, and returning to the mother country. I concluded from that that that is the root of the use of the term alien as it may be applied to chinese. But i dont know if that is really true. Can you please . Thanks. That is a lot of questions. I will answer some of them. I do realize that the word alien is very loaded. I thought long and hard about what term to use. I think the preferred term and the term i would used to talk about people today is noncitizen. Alien inn that i used this historical work is because it is the term that was used at the time. And it is because noncitizens in ae 19th century could mean lot of other things other than alien. It could mean a slave, it could mean a colonized subject, it could mean native peoples on reservations, there were lots of noncitizens. And a want to talk specifically about aliens. We need to grapple with these ugly words. I know it has become a slur. This is the history that helps us understand how it has become a slur, the word alien. And my students say, wait, what about extraterrestrials . [laughter] what about those aliens . So extraterrestrials that connotation of alien is younger than this. This is the way that alien was sortuntil scifi and that of thing came about. Not in fiction before the early 20th century. Before that we had literature that featured the chinese alien, the alien that prefigures the extraterrestrial. So these are related things. So not only is the slur related to this, but also, that image of the extraterrestrial alien as well. In terms of the question about sojourners, chinese return rates were the same as almost every other ethnicity, even less than the british and the italians, i believe. So this was throughout, that the chinese were picked specifically for this, and they already sent money back. So if the chinese especially pointed out that if you look at the statistics, it is about the same across the board. Yeah. What a wonderful talk. Also, highlighting the collections we have right here. Excuse me. I just wanted to touch upon the education things. Im a graduate of lowell high school, and there was a chinese girls quota when i went there. I am proud to say it is the Oldest Public High School west of the mississippi. Speaking of education, how do we integrate these stories into mainstream america . People talk about ethnic studies, but i have always argued, this is not ethnic studies, it is American History, they just left out people with pigmentation. I think it helps dispel the perpetual foreigner label on chineseamericans. Especially multi generational americans. On my mothers side, we date back to the late 1880s in San Francisco. My father was an intimate was an immigrant who into the i am glad that you highlighted something that wasnt spoken about in my family, my grandfather was about 10 years old, his uncle was murdered when a white mob went through chinatown, but nobody would do anything about it. And because he grew up here, he he was proficient in english, and they called police, but the police did not come. He shared that with my father in his late 70s, so obviously that haunted him his entire life. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I think a lot about this, how do we get this history out of specialized events and into mainstream american education, understanding of u. S. History . I am disturbed that when students come to me at princeton from all across the country it is amazing i teach asian American History, and they come to asian American History knowing almost nothing. They know the chinese build the railroad and the japanese internment happened. Those are the two things they know sort of coming out of primary and secondary school, with some exceptions, but really, it is amazing how little they do know. So i think that there are a lot of people trying to work on this. It is difficult. I guess this is just more evidence that it is difficult part of it is an attitude toward this history that i can see just in the composition of my class. So last year i had 100 students and i would say that roughly 95 of them identified as asian or asianamerican. So even when i offer this class to an entire university community, it is selfselecting. Students who think that this is relevant history in general, or relevant to their lives, our our asianamericans. Are asianamericans. And i dont see the same thing in say, the study of african American History, where i think that, even today in our society, i would say that the Public Schools as well as our students understand that understanding african American History is essential to understanding American History. But i think that asianAmerican History is still in this margin. We haveof it, i think, to use our story of the core. Most teachers teach the core. They have to. So we can only be put in as example of the core, if you want to get into the Public School system, their curriculum. Then the other thing is supporting institutions like this. Deposit your history, your familys history into the institution. So that our stories are told. I always use the example of one when ken burns did a series on baseball. The chinese had Baseball Teams. Oakland, the club just got them to donate their album, their photo album of their Baseball Team to the bancroft. Unless we are an institution like the bancroft or here, why would a filmmaker like ken burns know that there were chinese teams . But he would go to the bancroft and would say, give me examples of those teams. Right now, they have this album to show them that the chinese also played baseball, and will be included. It upt of it is to gather and ask institution will they take your paper . You have to support them. Not only donate your paper, donate money for them to process or index them. 700 to 1000 to process a banker box full. So with your donation of papers, documents, also donate some money so that they can index them. That is very important. As a kid, i remember every year in january, i had to go to the post office to fill out an alien registration card for my mother. So my question is, when did that end . There was a yellow card, and every january does anybody know . I am not sure. I dont have an answer to that. Mr. Ou mentioned a lawyer, bea, who was very sympathetic to chineseamericans. But i wondered if either of you could speak to any journalists or newspapers or any white writers in the late 19th century who also expressed any kind of sympathy toward the situation of chineseamericans in print . Well, i mentioned mark twain. Harpers weekly, thomas nash, a lot of his cartoons were sympathetic. Sometimes they went the other way, but most times it were they were sympathetic. Do you know of any other . There were actually a lot of people were sympathetic. I write about that in the book as well, that yes, there were a lot of white americans who participated, but there were also key people who fought them. And the General Group of people that tended to be more friendly to chinese migrations and being in california and on the last coast were the people who were more elite, educated educated missionaries, republicans versus democrats are more likely to support this back then. People invested in chinese trade. For that reason, things like southern cotton planters hoping to sell cotton in china. There were all sorts of interests, people that were supporting them. Missionaries. A lot of missionaries. Because they have 350 million souls to save. If you are in that business, this was the biggest market. [laughter] but there is a cartoon in pop in 1900, one of the cutest i have seen. This chinese lady asks a missionary, why is it you want me in your heaven to be with you forever when you will not even let me into your country . Right . If you are not allowing them, but you want the chinese to be with you forever in heaven . Really . [laughter] so there was this twoway thing. And then another very important lawyer here well well, let me go. There are two statues in front of San Francisco city hall. Anyone know them . If you have heard my story before, dont say. They were only two. On one side we have lincoln. Why didnt they named that lincoln boulevard . Is sitting there on. Olk street on mcallister street side, there is a much bigger statue. Know who he is . The tall guy dressed very nice, pointing at a book that says lex, law in latin. His name was paul mcallister. His office was in chinatown. Today it is a Subway Sandwich place. His statue is there, and he was one of three big firms that the thousandne of cases that the chinese had. Up the equal protection under the law. Every time i walk by on mcallister street, i take a bow, and hopefully you too [indiscernible] mr. Lei ok. [laughter] [indiscernible] there were a lot of other people who hung out there, like jack london, there was rudyard kipling, mark twain, a lot of writers. But if you think about it, if we are going to go around changing all these names of institutions because they were antisomething, 95 were anti. So you would have to change them all. We cant live in the past to do this, because it will not end, someone will do it to us. It depends on the reasons. But if it was put up recently to support something that is very racist, then sure. But some of these other names, like hall, which was donated by the wife to honor the husband. It was not donated because of what he did as a congressman. But because his wife wanted to remember him. So we have allowed these things going on, that we have to look at more carefully. [indiscernible] everyone, im so side. I will give you the microphone, because cspan is here so sorry. Even if you read the Supreme Court justice, especially in the birthright citizenship case, you will see that they were actually very sympathetic to the chinese. Knowing that they were born in a United States, how could you send these back . Very much like what is happening today. I wanted to speak to how we get our stores up. We cant forget the arts. Because from myself, i created a play performing theater. My ancestors started in the fishing industry in the monterey bay area. Hopefully when the government opens again, we will be doing it at the smithsonian. We have photographers, musicians who write music about the history of this country, we have filmmakers here. I think we cant forget that the arts are very important in getting our stories out. Museums, places like this, the arts is threedimensional. If you can hear it, you can touch it, you can see it. So i think it is important we support the arts who are doing very wonderful pieces on asian historical stories. Mr. Lei talking about the arts, Templeton Crocker wrote a play that became the first america opera to be played in europe. It was based on the chinese theater. The guy who started this institution, we have his way here in french and english. So this has been going on a long time. In fact, the First Chinese play played in philadelphia in 1767, before the american revolution. A translated chinese play was performed. So america has seen a lot. By 1915, the most translated, most performed American Play worldwide was the Yellow Jacket based on the chinese theater here in San Francisco. It held the record until the 1970s. The most translated, most performed drama was based on a story in chinatown. Chineseamericans, his father had a lot of chinese employees, and he was taken to the theater. Another playwright went to see a lot of these chinese plays. I hate them, they are too squeaky and loud, but they were the mass media in those days. Chinatown in the 1930s had two theaters. Today one of them is called the great start the year. It is still there, with the original backed up. The other was the mandarin theater run by the mandarin china reform party. They were for a constitutional monarchy. The great start was for the republic. They were fighting, and the theater was of mass media, because a lot of people did not read, there was no radio, no tv. So they went to the theaters every day. So the arts is the best form of media. Thank you for your talk. Your initial map showing the locations where the chinese communities were driven out reminds me of an up skew a reference i came across to the city of roseville, east of sacramento. This is in the 1950s. It may have been the Sacramento Bee the reported that in 1954, 1955, the First Chinese family moved back. Some 60 years later. I wonder in looking at your maps, if the maps of where the explosion occurred, has anyone a committed a map as to where they went . Dr. Williams that is a great question that is very difficult to answer. There was reporting but a lot of chinese went to San Francisco chinatown. One of the reasons it is difficult is that one of the best places you can engage in is the census. The census is taken every decade. The expulsions happened in the middle of the decade, after there had been a large bump of chinese migration in the early 1880s. Between those two censuses, there was a lot of chinese migration and than there was expulsion. So it is difficult to compare 1890 and 1880 and get anything good. Also, the 1890 census was destroyed. That is the short answer. Where do we think they went . I think what happened was that there was some economic pattern to this. That the chinese were more likely to be successfully expelled from places where they were less essential to the economy in the mid 1880s. In particular, these are places like the mining and logging industries that were mostly in northern and central california. Where there were fewer expulsions and the less successful ones were in Southern California where the chinese were becoming essential to agriculture. So we see in general a move of chinese from areas where they were seen as economically superfluous in a way that they had not been earlier in the 19th century, to places where they were seen as more essential. But that is just a vague pattern. It is very difficult. A lot of the reason it is so difficult is because tracking individual Chinese People is very hard in these records. In part because their names were transliterated in so many different ways that we cant even say ok, we know this one man was driven out of say roseville, where did he go . We cant trace individuals in a way that you can trace american names through the census or through other documents. Patty we have two more questions. Two on the side. I am wondering if you could [indiscernible] thank you. If you could speak to the differences between San Francisco, which i believe is the largest chinese chinatown in chinese population in any city in the United States, and the new york chinatown where i grew up. When i first came out here, i was amazed by people who said they were fifthgeneration. Because all my friends in new york were like, my parents are immigrants, their parents were immigrants. Also, my father, my stepfather, my cousins, they were sailors. I couldnt find anything on this, except in one book that cannot of new york. Dr. Williams would you like to talk about it . Yes. The chinatown in San Francisco is older. That is a very quick answer. Chinese exclusion was in many ways effective in the that it didnt keep out everyone wanted to come in, but it deter generations of chinese immigrants attempting to come. I am probably telling you things that you know, but you see a large spike of chinese migration after the opening of Immigration Law of 1965. Im 70 years old. My relatives came here before exclusion. But my father and my stepfather who raised me, they came in the early 19th century. Dr. Williams i am just trying to say that one of the reasons that new york that the community is younger in new york generationally, more immigrant generation, is because of these Immigration Laws. But as far as sailors jumping ship, there were laws against chinese sailors entering the country. The exclusion laws also regulated sailors. For that reason, chinese sailors only, when they came into port, they were not supposed to get off the ship, they were supposed to just stay on it. You can imagine, after crossing the pacific, what that would have been like. But there was a fear that they would be another form of undocumented migration into the United States. I did find the documents, in particular, of chinese crew members who were listed as crew but then came into the country as undocumented immigrants. So, yes, this is a phenomenon that we see the coming of sailor is a way to have an avenue of undocumented migration. Mr. Lei first of all, San Francisco chinatown got started in 1848, 1849. The first to come were merchants, not laborers. We know that by 1849, there were two restaurants. You dont build a restaurant by the end of 1849 coming as a minor labor, you had to bring in furniture, the cooks, capital. And we knew 300 of them met at the canton restaurant on jackson street and hired a lawyer. Why would you need a lawyer if youre a miner. It was very organized. In the east coast you can get there until the railroad was built. So i wasnt until 1869 when it was finished. The first group that went was in 1870. The shoe strike. Kelvin sampson had a shoe factory and workers went on strike, so he brought in 75 chinese, and later on, more. They did have the steam laundry in new jersey. They brought in about 100 chinese. Beaver falls, pennsylvania, the cutlery brought in chinese. So, it was all during a 1870, 1871. When the contract ended, they settled in the east coast. That was later. And the infrastructure also wasnt set up yet in the east coast. In San Francisco, the people from the three districts, the merchants. They came first to open up boarding houses and restaurants so the rest could come. So it was very organized. I want to address the question earlier about how we get our stories out. I am historian, an oral historian. One of the things that has been difficult with the chinese community, a lot of these stories survived generationally through oral histories, through our descendents. As i was growing up, we knew these stories within our families. We knew our relatives, what happened to people. But these were stories that we still are very reluctant to share publicly. I spent this afternoon in a meeting with people that work on Genealogy Research and family stories, their history. There is still a great deal of, i dont know whether to call it shame or stigma, attached to publicly addressing these stories. And until we Start Talking about them publicly and share them in a way that we can document them, our sources are relying on what was written about us by people who were excluding us, a lot of white sources. Even sympathetic white sources, who were often times writing sympathetically for their own purposes. So, my point is that the emphasis is that this is something that we have to as a community, be willing to overcome. I think japaneseamericans, it took a long time to the state of to destigmatize their experience and share these stories publicly, share them in a public way. That allowed us to read about it. I think chineseamericans the need to do that. We need to acknowledge the experience of undocumented migrant workers, because we share that experience very much. Everyday i have students in my class who talk about their experience of what is happening to their families, and they are very cognizant. When they hear those stories, it resonates for me in terms of the stories shared by my family that we kept secret within our families. That we were told not to publicize. But often times we kept from our children, our descendants, because we didnt want the stigma in our community. This is something we have to make the willing steps. I think a lot of people share these important stories today. But we need to connect them, they need to be publicly shared with historians. I work with people who say, i do want my family to worry, i do want my relatives to be stigmatized by these stories. But we need to destigmatize our experience. We are caring shame from that experience. Africanamericans did not need to feel shame that they were subjected to slavery. We should not be ashamed of that we were subjected to exclusions. We were singled out as a race. Immigration laws were not set up to include people, they were designed to exclude people by race. They classified as as aliens and ineligible for citizenship. Until exclusion laws were repealed, we were denied the right to citizenship. That is important. We grew up with these stories, we know them in these fragmented ways, and we have to be willing to share them and tell them without feeling ashamed or stigma. Dr. Williams thank you very much for saying that. When i run into people that ask me why and we need to talk about his history . Do we need, especially with our present moment and with the turn against undocumented immigrants in our present moment, i have had people from the chineseamerican community say, yeah, dont get us mixed up in that by talking about this history. I think what you said is beautiful and it is true. Being able to tell stories from within the community, we can help destigmatize. We can tell the story of what undocumented people have been through in this country that is not linked just to our presentday moment. We can see that this has been a longterm experience in america, and the earliest people were chinese. I think being willing to tell the stories is very powerful. So thank you for your work. First of all, i want to thank both of you for your presentation. It was very wonderful. Thank you so much. I wanted to address the issue of asianamerican, chineseamerican performers. I am a Founding Member of unbound feet. We were the first group of asianamerican women, writers and performers, we got together in 1978. In a 1979, we became unbound feet and be performed at the james moore theater. There is a book that was written about tibetan women, in tibet that is occupied by china. There is a chineseamerican poet, i believe she has a street and school named after her in oakland. We have jenny li who isn, now a poet laureate. Nancy is an artist. She has a 30year retrospective now. She also does mandalas. I am also a poet. We give a performance at the chinese Historical Society in 2016. On march 30 we will also do a performance again at the chinese Historical Society. So this is about telling our story. And getting them out. Myself, i have a connection to San Francisco and chinatown. My grandmother was a very famous Chinese Opera singer, one of the two most famous Chinese Opera singers in the golden age of Chinese Opera, 1920s to the 1930s in San Francisco chinatown. I want to talk about the smithsonian Pacific American center. In 2014, they did a project called a day in the life of Asian Pacific america, to commemorate the fact of that iconic photograph of the east and the west trains meeting, and there was not one chinese there. So in 2014, the smithsonian did an exhibition with i believe several hundred asianamericans sending in their videos for a day in the life. This month, i am proud to say that i am one of 12 queer asian Pacific American poets who will be doing a day in the queer life of Asian Pacific america. We are doing poetry, video and exhibits. Thank you. Were here. Patty thank you, everyone. That is the last question. We have evaluations, please complete those and give them to the front desk as well. And, everyone can leave their plates and take them to the garbage cans. Thank you everyone. Thank you, beth and david. Mr. Lei thank you, patty. [applause] there are also some collections to view right here on those cases. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] x American History tv is on social media. Follow us at cspan history. Nickis sunday, peter coos gives a tour marking the 70th anniversary of hiroshima and nagasaki. Heres a preview. Is after the decision to drop the bomb. It has the reasons. The official narrative says the United States dropped the bomb to expedite the end of the war without having to invade. Truman says an American Invasion would cost a half a million lives. The number keeps going up. Lives,says thousands of tens of thousands of lives, than a quarter of millions of lives. Then a half million lives. There is no record of that anywhere. But it would have been a lot of americans lost in an invasion and a lot of japanese killed. Thats the official narrative that we dropped a bomb to avoid an invasion. Theres no truth to that. Maybe a little truth to that but no basic truth to that. The reality was the japanese, from the battle of saipan onward they could not win, but they hoped to get one more victory and better surrender terms. The big obstacle was the emperor. They wanted to make sure they could keep the emperor. Across the southwest command, they issued a report in the summer of 1945 that says hanging of the emperor to them would be the crucifixion of christ to us, all would fight to die like ants. That is what macarthur said and almost every advisor of truman urged him to change the surrender terms and let the japanese know they could keep the emperor. America planned all along to let them keep the emperor, but we called for unconditional surrender. What else was going to possibly end the war . At delta in february of 45, roosevelt finally got a promise from stalin that three months after the end of war in europe, at the the big massive red army was going to come into the war against japan. Truman says he wants to pot stem went to pot stem to make sure the soviets were coming in. He gets the agreement from the soviets and writes in his journal that night stalin will be in the jab war the jap war. He writes to his wife, the russians are coming in, the war will end soon or now, think of all the boys who wont be killed. Intercept as ae emperor from the jap asking for peace. We all knew the japanese were finished and american intelligence reported repeatedly that the entry of the soviet union into the war will convince all japanese that defeat is inevitable and will lead to the end of the war. So the question is, the confusing thing is why truman who was not lead thursday, who is not a hit, he did not take pleasure in killing people, why would truman use the atomic bomb knowing the japanese were defeated and trying to surrender, knowing they were not militarily necessary . What we assume as historians is that a big part of his motivation was that he was sending a message to the soviets and if the soviets interfered with american plans in europe or asia, this is the fate they were going to get. The astounding thing is that the soviets interpreted that way. As a physicist said, suddenly, the day of judgment was tomorrow and has been ever since. See more of the exhibit this sunday at 6 00 p. M. Eastern, 3 p. M. Pacific here on American History tv. Reel america, on august 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on hiroshima, japan, instantly killing 100,000 of the estimated 300,000 residents. Injuries and deaths from radiation haunted the city for decades. The spirit of hiroshima is a documentary produced for the 50th anniversary of the bombings stories of several survivors and a young family in hiroshima trying to make sense of the events. Eugene talks, about his assignment to the manhattan project, recorded by the National World war ii museum. 6 00 p. M. Eastern, 3 00 p. M. Tour of an exhibit on the bombings. As was created in cooperation with the Peace Memorial museum, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and the American University museum