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Editorial

Pearl S. Buck’s experience in China can’t compare to Asians’ in U.S.

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Standing in solidarity with Asian Americans is welcomed, but equating Pearl S. Buck’s experience is disingenuous
Pearl S. Buck’s experience as a Christian missionary in China during the rise of Communism is no different than what tens of thousands of missionaries are martyred for year since the first century. But to suggest her ordeal is the same as today’s anti-Asian prejudice and violence diminishes the Asian American plight and exploits the Pearl S. Buck legacy.

Asian immigrants began coming to the United States in large numbers in the 1850s to take on menial work and they hoped for a better life. However, Asian Americans also faced government-legislated racism, dehumanizing them solely for their ethnicity:

  • In 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled that people of Asian descent could not testify against a white person in court.
    - In 1882, the Immigration Act was the first and only U.S. legislation to explicitly suspend immigration for a nationality.
    - In 1900, the city of San Francisco cordoned Chinatown with barbed wire and armed guards, claiming residents were a “constant threat to public health,” forcing vaccinations and health certificates for Chinese and Japanese Americans.
    - In 1924, the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed, banning Chinese immigration. The act was heavily influenced by the growing eugenics crusade, which asserted that Asians (and other non-Aryan races) were hereditarily inferior.
    - In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (against Eleanor’s pleading) forcibly incarcerated over 120,000 people (62% of whom were U.S. citizens) of at least 1/16th Japanese ancestry into concentration camps, declaring them “alien enemies.” Those imprisoned included my beloved friend and mentor, the late William “Mo” Marumoto, who went on to become a White House presidential aide.
    - In 1944, in Fred Korematsu (a 23-year-old Japanese American who refused to relocate) v. United States, dissenting justices criticized the exclusion as “racially discriminatory and despicable treatment.” But the justices were overruled 6 – 3 that it was constitutional to take away a U.S. citizen’s Bill of Rights.
    - During this same period, the state of Hawaii, where my father, Richard S. Oshita (a decorated Army veteran), was born, kept 150,000 Japanese Americans under martial law, issuing ID cards, closing schools and newspapers, and imposed other restrictions.
    Anti-Asian racism in America is not limited to state-sponsorship – it has manifested in nearly every part of modern society. In the 1970s, I witnessed a white gas station attendant (after my Dad asked to use the restroom) shout, “Sorry, no Japs Allowed.” Today’s prejudice of Asian Americans can be best summed by New Yorker editor Michael Luo’s 2016 open letter in the New York Times to the white woman who roared, “Go back to China!” where he penned, “but the insults you hurled at my family get to the heart of the Asian American experience ... that no matter what we do, how successful we are, what friends we make, we don’t belong. We’re foreign. We’re not American.”

Even in 2021, Maura Moynihan, the daughter of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was caught on camera engaging in a hate-filled, anti-Asian tirade. Millions of Asian Americans can share experiences (overt and covert) of bigotry and/or violence long before iPhones, social media and the recent wave of anti-Asian hate crimes.
Instead of centering the attention that Buck “knew what it felt like” (anti-Asian racism), why not raise consciousness about the long history of intolerance and violence of Asians in the U.S.?

Given her career in China and legacy of publicizing social injustices, why not rally Pearl S. Buck International to rid America of the negative stereotyping by educating others about the shameful history against Asian Americans?

Perhaps even consider a permanent exhibit in the Pearl S. Buck House?

Yancy Oshita, New Hope
#Stop Asian Hate


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