As Sucheng Chan’s detailed account of the ostracization of Chinese women illustrates, the odds were skewered steeply against this demographic group. There were obstacles through legislations, social attitudes, socio-economic conditions, alienated cultural experience, etc. The most stressful passage for Asian American women was the decades preceding the turn of the twentieth century, when many from this demographic grouping were readily equated with prostitutes. For one customs officer all it mattered were the cheap clothing and submissive demeanor of a group of 22 Chinese passengers in a ship to be declared as prostitutes. The laws were none too helpful for the women, with its inherent discriminatory overtones and vague clauses susceptible to subjective interpretations. The Tsoi Sim v. United States case of 1902 is a classic illustration, where, the appellant was arrested
“upon a complaint charging her with being “a Chinese manual labourer” now within the limits of the Northern district of California aforesaid, without the certificate of residence required by the act of congress entitled ‘An act to prohibit the coming of Chinese persons into the United States,’ approved May 5, 1892, and the act amendatory thereof, approved November 3, 1893”. (Tsoi Sim V. United States, 1902)
Works Cited:
Sucheng Chan, Chapter 4, The Exclusion of Chinese Women 1870-1943, p.94+
Jew Law Ying’s Coaching Book, Lessons from My Mother’s Past, p.32+
Tsoi Sim V United States, No. 738, Circuit Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, 116F.920; 1902 U.S. App. Lexis 4393, May 5, 1902
Jew Law Ying’s and Yung Hin Sen’s Testimonies, April 2-3, 1941.
Jennifer Jihye Chun, George Lipsitz, and Young Shin, Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, Signs, Vol. 38, No. 4, Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory, (Summer 2013), pp. 917-940
Joan W. Scott, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053-1075, Published by Oxford University Press
Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter, Published by University of Washington in 1989