The Yellow Peril

This study examines the way Americans of Chinese descent were portrayed in American literature between 1850 and 1940. Their depictions are compared to historical events that were occurring at the time the works of literature were published. This edition has additions and corrections compared to the original hardback edition published in 1982.

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My purpose in writing this work has been to explore the depiction of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in American fiction, from the mid-nineteenth century entry of the first Chinese immigrants in significant numbers, to the eve of World War II. I consider both the immigrant Chinese and the American-born generations that followed them to be Chinese Americans, but will sometimes identify the groups separately in recognition of the fact that the historical experience and treatment of the immigrants in fiction has been different from that of their descendants. The fiction treated in this study includes short stories and novels both by white Americans and Asian Americans.

I am defining the term Yellow Peril as the threat to the United States that some white American authors believed was posed by the people of East Asia. As a literary theme, the fear of this threat focuses on specific issues, including possible military invasion from Asia, perceived competition to the white labor force from Asian workers, the alleged moral degeneracy of Asian people, and the potential genetic mixing of Anglo-Saxons with Asians, who were considered a biologically inferior race by some intellectuals of the nineteenth century. The Chinese immigrants were the first target of this attention, since they were the first Asian immigrants to reach the United States in large numbers. This study will focus on American fiction about Chinese Americans in an attempt to analyze the growth and development of attitudes about them.

My thesis is that the Yellow Peril is the overwhelmingly dominant theme in American fiction about Chinese Americans in the years with which this study is concerned. It is expressed through the variety of images of the Chinese Americans that appear, especially in their relation to, and their role as part of, the United States. The historical causes and literary subject matter change, but the theme neither disappears nor abates.

Each work of fiction has been studied individually for the images it contains. Prior to the turn of the century, the Yellow Peril is perceived only as stemming from the Chinese. In the twentieth century, especially in the pulps, the Japanese joined the Chinese as a perceived menace to Europe and North America. The overall process of evaluation relies primarily on detailed analyses of the characters under consideration. This has been done with an awareness that the American public as a whole sometimes did not distinguish carefully among Asian ethnic groups, so that events involving one Asian ethnic group often affected the image of another. Some works are obscure and these have been quoted at greater length than more available ones.

Relatively few critical sources have been cited; this is due to a dearth of relevant studies. The less important works of fiction have naturally received little critical attention and, often, when such attention was concerned with pertinent stories, the authors had little or nothing to say about the depiction of Chinese Americans. This observation is intended only as an explanation, and not as a value judgement of earlier scholarship with different goals.