The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo by Scott D. Seligman
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I am chagrined to admit that I had never heard of Wong Chin Foo. Whether he really was the first “Chinese American”, as Scott Seligman would have it, is perhaps a matter of definition, but Wong arguably seems to have invented the term—he founded a newspaper by that name—as well as the concept. Wong also seems—based at least a reading of this lively biography—to have been the first ethnic Chinese to engage the American public politically and intellectually for an extended period of time.
He was apparently quite well-known as a prolific writer in eloquent if sometimes florid English—both in his own publications as well as leading newspapers and journals—and his essay “Why Am I Heathen?”, which appeared in the North American Review in 1887, created nationwide controversy. Seligman quotes the following section, which gives a good flavor of Wong’s writings:
I was bewildered by the multiplicity of Christian sects, each one claiming a monopoly of the only and narrow road to heaven. I looked into Presbyterianism only to retreat shudderingly from a belief in a merciless God who had long foreordained most of the helpless human race to an eternal hell. To preach such a doctrine to intelligent heathen would only raise in their minds doubts of my sanity, if they did not believe I was lying. Then I dipped into Baptist doctrines, but found so many sects therein, of different “shells,” warring over the merits of cold-water initiation and the method and time of using it, that I became disgusted with such trivialities; and the question of close communion or not, only impressed me that some were very stingy and exclusive with their bit of bread and wine, and others a little less so. Methodism struck me as a thunder-and-lightning religion — all profession and noise. You struck it, or it struck you, like a spasm, — and so you "experienced" religion. The Congregationalists deterred me with their starchiness and self-conscious true-goodness, and their desire only for high-toned affiliates. Unitarianism seemed. all doubt, doubting even itself. A number of other Protestant sects based on some novelty or eccentricity—like Quakerism—I found not worth a serious study by the non-Christian. But on one point this mass of Protestant dissension cordially agreed, and that was in a united hatred of Catholicism, the older form of Christianity. And Catholicism returned with interest this animosity.
Wong lectured throughout the country, debated, wrote letters to the editor and lobbied legislators. He was, all in all, a man of the age, just one who happened to be born in China.
Whether Wong Chin Foo was “important”—a relative term at the best of times—depends, I suppose, on how interested one is in the history and role of ethnic minorities in American society and politics. It is a debate I’ll leave for others. But Wong does provide the narrative for a fascinating and topical exploration of the development of Chinese ethnic and political consciousness in the United States, the relevance of which is likely only to increase in the years to come. And anyone who thinks that today’s immigration debate is benign and without ethnic and racial overtones would do well to re-read the story of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other anti-Chinese legislation and regulation. Wong was one of the rare Chinese who was able to nationalize before the portcullis came down.
But Seligman’s achievement, in my eyes anyway, is to make Wong come alive as an individual—and an individual he most certainly was. He seems to have been a poseur, intellectual butterfly, hopeless when it came to women, a serial (if serially unsuccessful) entrepreneur, showman, a Chinese patriot and dissident, a good friend to many and a thorn in side to many others—both Chinese and whites. He was beaten up, imprisoned and threatened with death more more than once. He fought, debated, lectured, lobbied and never knew when to hold his peace. He comes across as naive, annoying, impulsive, utterly committed to his cause of the moment—an American who threw himself head-first into the rough and tumble of American life. How this came about in the mid-nineteenth century is something of a mystery, at least to me. There is something about America, I suppose: Chinese, and people from all over the world, still come to America—when they are allowed to—to be themselves.
Seligman manages to be complete but never boring. This is a satisfying book, whether as a entertaining biography of an American (and Wong was American) original, as an evocative history of post-Civil War America, or as an in-depth introduction to the Chinese struggle for equal rights.