Review: American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901–1949, by Charlotte Brooks

Abstract

American Exodus begins with a riddle about one of its subjects. "Louey Shuck was an American immigrant," Charlotte Brooks writes, "but he did not immigrate to America" (p. 1). Like many a good riddle, this one rests on unrecognized assumptions about its key terms. Louey was born an American, but Louey-along with thousands of other Chinese Americans like him in the early twentieth century-was forced to seek opportunity outside the land of opportunity. Brooks estimates that as many as half of the pre-WWII Chinese American second generation may have immigrated to China in search of better life chances-numbers that rival, albeit in percentage terms, the numbers of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South during the same years. Yet, despite its obvious significance, what Brooks at one point calls the "Chinese Great Migration" has attracted relatively little sustained historical attention. Drawing on archival collections in the United States, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, American Exodus remedies this deficiency with a finely grained, comprehensive examination of the origins of the exodus, its flourishing through the political turmoil of the late Qing and the early republican periods, its gradual curtailment during the Nanjing Decade, and its ultimate ending-along with the return of many of the migrants-during and after World War II.Throughout, Brooks pays close attention to the ways that the immigrants' hybrid identities-expressed most significantly in their dual nationality, but in other meaningful ways, as well-drew them to spaces in China that offered ready fields for realizing their pent-up aspirations. These "in-between zones" (p. 193) included places, like Hong Kong, where the local economy and social order were flexible enough to accommodate the ambitions of outsiders who were Chinese-though not Chinese in quite the same ways that the locals were Chinese.The slotting together of the immigrants' hybridity with zones of ambiguity in China made for a complex, shifting terrain of opportunities. Their dual citizenship, for example, conferred competitive social and economic advantages as well as potentially important legal protections. Unlike most other foreigners, as Chinese citizens they could live outside of the treaty ports and foreign concessions, and own property there, too. They could hold government or military positions denied to foreigners-even very high government 122