In 1893, China boycotted the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in protest of the Geary Act, which renewed Chinese exclusion for ten years. In the absence of an official Chinese exhibit, a group of Chinese American merchants drew upon a set of theatrical elements associated with Chinatown tours to construct the Chinese Village attraction. For two decades, Chinatown tours had functioned as a form of aggregate entertainment featuring a set of archetypes—including the Restaurant, the Joss House, the Opium Den—that advanced the idea that Chinatown was a “Yellow Peril” to white Americans. The Chinese Village took this aggregate entertainment and attached a different cultural message, one which promoted the Chinese Village as a nonthreatening experience defined by consumption, surface aesthetics, and theatrical performance. In advancing this message, the Chinese Village contributed to a cultural shift that redefined understandings of Chinese immigrants for much of the next century.

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This article examines the history of lapel buttons and stickers used by Chinese Americans to identify their ethnicity during World War II. Most of these buttons and stickers were produced by Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations (CCBAs) immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor to differentiate their members from Japanese Americans. In examining this history, this article focuses in particular on Los Angeles, the city with the largest Japanese American population on the West Coast. In Los Angeles, U.S.-born Chinese American and Japanese American youth attended many of the same schools and often formed close friendships with one another. As a result, the questions that the buttons and stickers posed for this generation of Chinese American youth were particularly fraught. Drawing on oral history interviews, sociological studies of the Southern California Chinese American community from the period, and archival newspaper reportage, this article approaches these lapel pins and stickers as items of cultural contestation through which a variety of historical actors—from Chinese consular representatives, to immigrant leaders in the CCBAs, to Chinese American youth—negotiated questions of ethnic and national identity after the U.S. entry into World War II. I argue that rather than reflecting the complex ways that most Chinese American youth understood their own identity, the buttons and stickers represented the official viewpoints of the Chinese consulates in the United States and their allies in the nation’s CCBAs.