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History in the Making

Dr. Franklin Odo’s Columbia Asian American History Reader

By Terry Hong | Special to AsianWeek

Franklin Odo is not one to rest on his laurels. As a man of many firsts — first from his Hawai‘i high school to get into Princeton, first Asian Pacific American to break into the most prestigious, lily-white, eating club there, co-author with Amy Tachiki and Eddie Wong of the first bona fide APA breakout text, Roots: An Asian American Reader, first director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Pacific American Program, and, most recently, the first APA curator at the National Museum of American History — he’s gotten used to being a trailblazer. So it’s no surprise that he has just published the first book that brings together a canon of the documents that are of utmost importance to APA history, the just-released Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience (Columbia University Press).

Together with Gary Okihiro’s Columbia Guide to Asian American History, published in December 2001, the two titles offer a comprehensive overview of the APA experience over several hundred years in the United States. Both texts bear witness to our sense of entitlement, to claiming our own important portion of American history: We’re here. We’ve been here a long time. And we will continue to be here as long as this country is here.

AsianWeek: How did the book evolve?

Dr. Franklin Odo: Altogether, the book was a six-year project. I had been teaching APA history for several decades, and I knew that we as historians often refer to a set canon of very important documents. I started with the documents that are generally considered to be most crucial, such as the 1882 exclusion acts, the 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision that irrefutably established that anyone born in U.S. was automatically a U.S. citizen, the 1924 and 1965 immigration acts and several World War II Japanese American constitutional cases. These were the landmark legislation pieces that helped define what the field of APA history is all about. From there, I sought out letters, political cartoons, lyrics, editorials and speeches that illustrated important trends or events that might be interesting for researchers or students to explore. Some of the choices were just intuitive. Others were chosen to reflect the changes in APA history, to give a sense of what was important that was taking place in American history. For example, while pre-1965 documents are heavily Chinese American, Japanese American, Korean American and Filipino American — although primarily Chinese American and Japanese American due to early immigration patterns — post-1965 is replete with huge numbers of different kinds of documents to reflect the influx of significant numbers of other APA immigrants. The last section has far more pieces that reflect South and Southeast Asian Americans and gay/lesbian APAs. I did make particular effort to look at what people might consider popular culture — I didn’t want to be too much of an old fogey — including Hawai‘i’s pidgin writers and troubadours of the APA movement like Nobuko Miyamoto.

AW: !ow did you secure the documents?

Odo: Many of them are public domain and widely available — it was a matter of getting to the most authoritative source. For example, a supreme court decision might have multiple versions on the web, so you have to go back to the National Archives in order to be able to compare Internet versions to printed sources, then figure out which was the most suitable. My assistant, Noriko Sanefuji, was instrumental in compiling the documents.

AW: I would posit that the three most important moments in APA history moments would be the 1882 immigration anti-Asian exclusion acts, the World War II internment of Japanese Americans and the 1965 lifting of immigration quotas. What might be the next five most important moments in APA history?

Odo: In chronological order, I would suggest the following: the 1898 Spanish American War treaty, which officially made the United States a Pacific imperial power by taking over Guam and the Philippines from Spain; the 1924 immigration act, which solidified U.S. commitment to quantify immigration numbers depending on ethnicity/nationality-based on quotas of who was here in the U.S. in 1890 — that sealed the fate of APA immigration to a quota of zero; the 1927 Tokushige Supreme Court decision, which determined that efforts in the Northeast and Hawai‘i to close down Japanese language schools were unconstitutional — that decision provided breathing room for ethnic groups who were considered undesirable by insisting that even the undesirable have rights that had to be protected; the 1987 Southeast Asian Refugee acts, which attempted to try to keep people from clustering together to form communities — the government policy was to keep immigrants spread out, which is why there are communities in such diverse places as Wisconsin, Kentucky, Texas, Minnesota and Florida, because they did not want ethnic communities to form, although they formed anyway; the 1988 Japanese American Redress, which was a major victory for all APAs in terms of having our rights acknowledged.

And I have to add one more: Sa-I-Gu, the April 29, 1992 riots in L.A., which the media insisted were caused by conflicts among people of color in inner cities — the Latinos, the African Americans and the Koreans. But the media successfully used these groups to basically misdirect people’s attention to surface events rather than the critical political, economic and racial conditions that are endemic to that area, which keep people mired in poverty and at each other’s throats.

AW: I notice that the last entry is pre-Sept.11. What might you include in the next edition?

Odo: There are lots of things that are not in there yet, particularly references to more recent immigrant groups that are now much larger. It always takes awhile for events to percolate so that we know which events are lastingly important in history. Events that seem important at the time, might later get buried by other things of greater significance, or become a small part of a larger current.

Next time, I would want to see entries on domestic violence, especially South and Southeast Asian incidences, where recent immigrant women are powerless, as opposed to middle-class established APAs. Of course, in all of our communities, there are hidden terrible things happening, but such things are very difficult to ferret out and combat. As to 9/11-related entries, I would definitely include racial profiling in transportation, particularly targeting Arab Americans and Sikh Americans. Also the rise in hate crimes.

AW: What can we expect in the next 10, 50, 100 years?

Odo: Maybe in 150 years, I’ll think about retiring. But seriously, I think things are going to be as problematic or worse for the foreseeable future for APAs. I don’t see our society seriously grappling with all these emerging developments as a result of growing numbers of immigrants.

There are things we can do, however, as individuals, as families, as a society, and that is to provide space for and support of groups and people to enjoy what this country has to offer. There is a Hawaiian word for refuge, kipuka, which describes the process when a volcano erupts and devastates a region, there are always tiny spaces in which new seeds can grow and become the shrubs that become the beginnings for new forests, new terrain. We need more cultural kipuka in this lava-strewn terrain.