'Being good Chinese': Chinese scholarly elites and immigration in mid-century America.

Abstract

Oral histories of Chinese student immigrants reveal the contours of interdependent U.S.-China nation-building projects in the mid-twentieth century. This dissertation traces the motifs of status, space, race, and gender present in four oral history narratives that echo and respond to nationalist and internationalist projects deployed by China and U.S. The conditions of both Chinese and U.S. nation-building produced a new formulation of Chinese American identity that responded to existing stereotypes of Chinese in the U.S. while producing a distinct community among broader Chinese American identities. Chinese elite students in the U.S. played both symbolic and functional roles in the assertion of U.S. and Chinese nationalism in a transnational context. My chapters move from American missionary projects in China and post-Qing republicanism through U.S. cold war cultural exchange projects and mid-century American gender and domesticity to trace the emergent conditions that produced this immigrant cohort. The deployment of gender in the racialization, demonization, and idealization of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. erected gendered discourses that figured prominently in the construction of national identity on a global level. Abstract notions of nation and nationalism require embodiment in order to resonate with the national citizen; calling upon motifs of gender biologized more abstract narratives of power. In characterizations of self and other, gender was central to U.S. international relationships, not only between the U.S. and China, but also Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Due to this gendered nature of national discourses, elite Chinese women immigrants themselves held particular resonance for national and international ambitions. Methodologically, the dissertation follows the oral history narrations of four Chinese student immigrant women, as their stories unfold to expose the dominant motifs of U.S. and Chinese mid-century nationalisms. '<italic> Being Good Chinese</italic>' utilizes institutional archives, government documents, journalistic publications and secondary sources that work to contextualize the life experiences and narrative strategies of this immigrant group. Ultimately, this history not only uncovers previously undocumented aspects of Chinese American history, but makes a substantial contribution to understandings of U.S. nationalism and internationalism in the twentieth century.