Asian Americans are living through years of great hatred, lives of his fellow migrants were “cheaper than those of dogs” forcibly shoved off the streets when they showed resistance. 亞裔美國人生活在多年的仇恨中，他的移民同胞的生活“比狗還便宜”，當他們表現出抵抗時，他們被強行趕出了街道.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/more-about-san-francisco-chinatown-banner

Those words were published nearly 80 years ago, and yet they echo loudly as Asian faces continue to be targets on America’s streets. By Theodore S. Gonzalves

Please also refer to: Thousands Miles Home 萬里尋根歸家路 By Johnson Choi 蔡永強, Oct 6 2022

Thousands Miles Home – by Johnson Choi

More about the San Francisco Chinatown Banner

“The banner affords us an opportunity to consider the complicated histories of Asians in the Americas, stories that have been centuries in the making.”

Asian Americans are living through years of great hatred. That’s how the Philippine writer Carlos Bulosan referred to the anti-Asian violence in his memoir, America is In the Heart. He wrote that the lives of his fellow migrants were “cheaper than those of dogs” and that they were “forcibly shoved off the streets when they showed resistance.” Those words were published nearly 80 years ago, and yet they echo loudly as Asian faces continue to be targets on America’s streets.

As a curator of Asian Pacific American History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, I work with colleagues to ensure that our museum presents the fullness of the humanity of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. With the COVID-19 pandemic as the backdrop, I also want to make sure we seek out objects for the national collections that will help us make historical sense of our present moment.

Not long ago, I learned from a retired superior court judge active in San Francisco’s Chinatown about a rally and a march that took place in the earliest days of the pandemic, on February 29, 2020. I wondered: Could an object from that rally be a candidate for the national collections? Judge Julie M. Tang (ret.) sent me photos and video of the San Francisco demonstration. At the front of the march, a bold banner stood out.

Made of vivid red vinyl, the banner—approximately 11-feet wide by four-feet high—has black felt lettering outlined in white. The topmost line is in English and reads: “Fight the Virus, NOT the People!” The lower two lines are in Cantonese; the text translates to: “Together we support the businesses, [we are] against discrimination” and “[We] support fighting the global pandemic, add oil.” That last bit about the oil, it was explained to me, is a famous Chinese idiom, meaning “keep it going” or “keep it up with courage and determination.”

Judge Tang informed me of a diverse coalition that came together for a 1,000-person strong demonstration. She said: “We decided to go out to the streets and shout out our concerns. We want everyone to know what we were worried about: Our lives, our jobs, our businesses, and our survival in the United States.”

Just 11 days after the San Francisco rally, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a global pandemic. I asked myself, “How could this community have predicted what was about to happen?” That was the wrong question. The residents of the oldest Chinatown in North America didn’t have special powers to look into the future. Instead, the organizers of the march seemed to make sense of both the present and the past by grappling with what historians James and Lois Horton have referred to as the “tough stuff of American memory.”

The banner affords us an opportunity to consider the complicated histories of Asians in the Americas, stories that have been centuries in the making. The demonstration’s sponsor, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, was founded in San Francisco in 1882, in part to push back against anti-Chinese violence. That was the same year as the passage of the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act, a federal ban on immigration to this country based on ethnicity or national origin. Just a few weeks after Congress passed the law, a political cartoon ran in the San Francisco-based popular weekly The Wasp, depicting three ghoulish figures hovering over the port city. In each of their gowns were sewn the words “malaria,” “smallpox,” and “leprosy,” repeating public officials’ common refrain of associating Chinatown residents with public health crises.

The histories of Asians in the Americas often focus almost exclusively on acts of victimization and hardship. But this one-hundred-year period, from the 1840s to the 1940s, reveals complex dynamics about labor migration, settlement, and resistance.

Consider the contradictions between business’s need for inexpensive labor and combine it with nativists’ vision for their narrowed version of what the nation should be. Capital welcomed thousands from Asia and the Pacific Islands to the United States and its territories to work in fields, factories, hotels, and restaurants. Years of attracting “undesirables” stirred nativist panics over jobs, sexual jealousies, and health scares into a potent mix resulting in federal exclusion laws: Chinese in 1875 and 1882, South Asians in 1917, Japanese in 1924, and Filipinos in 1934.

When students and community organizers in the 1960s started using the term “Asian American” to define themselves, they staked out what they felt was important about their understanding of United States history. It was not simply an identity born of victimization. To be sure, it is important to make plain in the historical ledger the facts of who did what to whom. But what happened to these groups is incomplete without understanding how they responded. The term “Asian American” was premised on resistance and solidarity.

Banners like the one that is now part of the nation’s flagship history museum bear the hopes and fears of their makers, the dreams as much as the nightmares of ancestors, and challenges to others for a more just shared future. They serve as portals to many more stories about how to face the tough stuff of American memory with courage and determination.

—Theodore S. Gonzalves, curator of Asian Pacific American History

Grace Young: Wok Whisperer and Chinatown Activist

Grace Young stands in a doorway. The door is decorated with the text, “A Love Letter to Chinatown.”

Grace Young, a New Yorker with family roots in San Francisco, is a tireless advocate for support of AAPI communities and historic Chinatowns across the country. As an historian of Chinese cuisine and the author of three award-winning cookbooks, Young has worked for decades to enlighten American home cooks on aspects of Chinese history and culture. Known as the wok whisperer and stir-fry guru, she has long practiced the art of gastro-diplomacy to bring people together through food.

Since 2020, when the global pandemic unleashed acts of discrimination and violence against AAPI communities across the United States, Grace Young embraced a more direct form of activism. Risking her own health and safety, she embarked on a project with Poster House museum in New York to document the impacts of COVID-19 on Chinese restaurants and workers. The video series, Coronavirus: Chinatown Stories, records the stories and voices of people facing economic uncertainty and community devastation. Young also organized a campaign to provide Chinatown residents with hand-held alarms for their personal use as incidents of anti-Asian hate escalated.

Grace Young is the 2022 recipient of the Julia Child Award, an annual award presented by the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts to an individual who has made a significant impact on the way America cooks, eats, and drinks. Presented at a ceremony at the National Museum of American History, the award recognizes Young’s extraordinary culinary, cultural, and activist work, and will further amplify her message of support for Chinatowns, AAPI restaurants, and small businesses in communities across the country.

For more information about Young, Julia Child, and the award, please visit the exhibition FOOD: Transforming the American Table on 1 East.

—Paula Johnson, curator and project director, American Food and Wine History Project