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23 Big Milestones in Asian American History

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23 BIG MILESTONES IN ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY


August, 1914: The first Asian Hollywood star
     Sessue Hayakawa became the first Asian to star in a Hollywood film with the release of The Typhoon. Hayakawa was cast in the film when producer Thomas Ince became impressed by Hayakawa's unusually subtle and naturalistic acting style. He paid $500 for Hayakawa's services in that film, a handsome price for an unknown actor.
     Hayakawa had been a nobleman's son who had come to the U.S. initially in 1909 to study at the University of Chicago where he played on the football team. He returned to Japan and founded a touring troupe of entertainers. Returning to the U.S. in 1913, he had been acting in stage productions with a Japanese American theater group in Little Tokyo when discovered by Ince.
     Impressing American audience with his looks and unique acting style, Sessue Hayakawa quickly became a star. He starred in many successful films but they were mostly in villain or anti-hero roles. Frustrated by Hollywood's unwillingness to cast him in leading-man roles, in 1918 Hayakawa borrowed $1 million from a former University of Chicago classmate and founded Hayworth Films. Over the next three years he made 23 films and earned $2 million a year — a princely amount in those days. He later moved to Europe to escape American racial prejudices and enjoyed considerable success there. Near the end of his career, he was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of a vicious POW camp commandant in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).

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Anna May Wong was a Los Angeles native who came to resent Hollywood's exploitation of her as an exotic sex symbol and longed for roles as an independent modern woman.
September, 1921: First Asian American female Hollywood star
     Anna May Wong became the first Asian female to receive “star” billing in a Hollywood film when Bits of Life appeared. Her role was small, but the 16-year-old displayed a distinctive flair, screen charisma and sex appeal. After several more minor roles, Wong landed a more substantial role in The Toll of the Sea (1922), a Madame Butterfly knockoff. The film's only distinction was being Hollywood's first true Technicolor feature.
     Its success and flattering notices for Wong's performance didn't spare the Los-Angeles-born actress from a series of supporting roles that increasingly exploited her as exotic flesh. The most famous was playing a Mongol slave in the Douglas Fairbanks costume fantasy The Thief of Baghdad (1924). The high point of Wong's Hollywood career was co-starring with Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express (1932).
     Wong became increasingly angered at being forced to play vamps, villainesses and rape victims while white women performed in yellow-face. MGM considered her “too Chinese to play a Chinese” she once complained. Her biggest disappointment was losing the lead in Pearl S. Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good Earth to Louise Rainer. The male lead had gone to a white actor and anti-miscegenation laws prevented Hollywood from casting a non-white to kiss him. Rainer won an Academy Award for her performance.
     In the 1930s a disillusioned Anna May Wong moved to Europe where more liberal racial attitudes gave her a broader range of roles. Recently Anna May Wong has been rediscovered as an Asian American woman with modern ideas whose first-order talent was stunted by Hollywood racial prejudices.

January 17, 1943: First Asian American to lead combat battalion
     Colonel Young Oak Kim became the first Asian American officer to exercise command in a combat battalion. Upon graduating as a second lieutenant from Infantry Officer Candidate School in Fort Benning, Georgia, Kim chose to join the newly-formed all-nisei 100th Battalion though, as a Corean American, he could have joined a regular Army unit.
     Kim's most famous exploit was a daylight mission in Anzio. Having volunteered to capture German soldiers for intelligence, he and another soldier crawled more than 600 yards directly under German observation posts without cover. They succeeded in capturing two prisoners and obtaining information that significantly contributed to the fall of Rome, for which Kim was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. His 100th, along with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, became the most decorated unit of its size and length of service in U.S. military history.
     Even after participating in four deadly battles in Italy and France during World War II and suffering severe injuries that forced him out of action, Kim felt obliged to resume service as a battlefield commander when the Korean War broke out. He became the first Asian American to command a non-segregated U.S. combat battalion as CO of 1st Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th US Army Division. Kim retired from the U.S. Army in 1972 as a full colonel after 30 years of active duty and became a respected leader in the Japanese American community. He remains history's most decorated Asian American soldier.

April 17, 1952: Property rights for Asian immigrants
     The California Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the state's Alien Land Act in Fujii Sei vs State of California. The 1913 law had been used to prevent Asian immigrants from owning property, regardless of their length of residence in the United States. The Japanese American Citizens League lobbied to place a measure on the general ballot to repeal the Act. It won by popular vote on November 6, 1956.

June 27, 1952: The right to become naturalized citizens
     McCarran-Walter Immigration Nationality Act abolished the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of February 5, 1917, but set an overall limit of only 2,000 immigrants per year from the region defined as “The Asia-Pacific Triangle.” Filipinos were allowed the more liberal 2,000 per year quota. The Act's primary benefit to Asian Americans was making Japanese- and Corean-born immigrants eligible for U.S. citizenship.
     It reversed the The National Origins Act of May 26, 1924 which had excluded immigration of all Asian laborers with the exception of Filipinos who were considered U.S. colonial subjects.
     It also reversed the Supreme Court's November 13, 1922 opinion in Takao Ozawa vs. U.S. which upheld denial of citizenship to a U.S.-educated, 20-year resident on the grounds that Japanese are neither white nor African.

August 1, 1952: First Asian American Olympic gold
     Major Sammy Lee, a 31-year-old Corean American army doctor who had served in two wars, became the first Asian American to win an Olympic medal when he took the gold medal for the 10-meter high dive. “The Oriental from Occidental” later coached Greg Louganis who went on to win record numbers of diving gold in the Seoul Olympics.

August 21, 1959: First Asian American U.S. Senator
     Hiram Fong became the first Asian American to be elected to the U.S. Senate. At that time Fong was already one of Hawaii's most prominent citizens and successful businessmen. After graduating from McKinley High school and the University of Hawaii, he worked for several years to save money to attend Harvard Law School from which he graduated in 1935. After working as a Honolulu deputy city attorney and founding a law firm, Fong won a seat in the Territorial House of Representatives in 1938 at the age of 31. He went on to become a Speaker of the house who was popular with both Democrats and Republicans.
     During WWII, Fong served as a judge advocate in the 7th Fighter Command of the 7th Air Force. He then founded numerous successful businesses. When Hawaii won statehood in 1959, the 14-year veteran of the state legislature had little trouble winning election to the U.S. Senate as a Republican. In 1964 he became the first Asian American to seek the Republican party's nomination as President of the United States. He retired from the Senate in 1977 to return to running his business interests. PAGE 3

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