As a recent ethnic Chinese immigrant to California (via Southeast Asia) I am always stunned by the random acts of violence committed against Chinese immigrants not too long ago.
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The Chinese fishermen were not allowed to fish during the day time, so they went out at night and pretty much pioneered squid fishing in the area. And when that got successful.. you know what happened next.
From San Francisco to Sacramento and all around where the early Toishan people went, extreme violence and massacres followed them.
What we have today: to me, a pretty good place to be Chinese American, because I have activism and orgs, was built on that bloody history.
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NeonPurpleStar :heart_pan:replied to Adrianna Tan last edited by@skinnylatte ehm, i am bit ignorant, do people from south east asia not call themselves by their respective ethinicity? aka vietnamese laotian cambodian thai etc?
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Adrianna Tanreplied to NeonPurpleStar :heart_pan: last edited by
@NeonPurpleStar southeast asian national identity is new (post WWII), during colonial times the Europeans kept us apart from the locals, didn’t let us integrate, and whether or not we were integrated today depends on many factors (Indonesia had several anti-Chinese pogroms in RECENT history). People are proud to be Vietnamese / Malaysian / Indonesian, but we also have a diasporic identity with each other
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Adrianna Tanreplied to Adrianna Tan last edited by [email protected]
@NeonPurpleStar not to mention in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia the Chinese population was often singled out and killed or oppressed in other ways. So there is a strong sense of ‘I was born in Vietnam but I am Vietnamese Chinese which is its own thing’. That’s evolved, but it hasn’t been that long. All of the Vietnamese Chinese people in San Francisco still id themselves as Chinese first, same as the ones in Paris. Same as me. (0 to do with mainland Chinese identity tho)
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@skinnylatte it's wild and ridiculously widespread. My great aunt married a Chinese man in California in the 60s and no church would marry them because she looked white and they were considered an interracial couple. On top of that, her Mexican family stopped talking to her for DECADES because they were racist AF about it.
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And I wrote a thing about my experience with racism in San Francisco in.. 2023
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@skinnylatte here's another component to the whole situation on the Monterey peninsula: https://www.montereycountynow.com/blogs/news_blog/breaking-the-feast-of-lanterns-board-votes-to-end-the-pacific-grove-tradition-forever/article_9438180e-912e-11ec-be17-1bd1fb211bba.html
The one time we went (not really knowing anything about it ahead of time), it made us really uncomfortable.
At least they finally cancelled it.
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@skinnylatte I love how I get to learn more by following you! thank you so much for sharing your stories with us.
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@fixiemama thanks for reading
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@douglasvb oh wow i did not know about that
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@skinnylatte the https://www.pgmuseum.org/exhibits has an exhibit on the fishing village and if I'm remembering right also some coverage of the feast of lanterns. If you've got the time while you're in town, it's worth a quick stop. Although fair warning: there is a lot of taxidermy in one wing of the museum.
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@douglasvb thank you! i will check it out
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@motoridersd i love the story about how during the chinese exclusion act, people would come to the US via mexico because people couldn't tell they were chinese if they came that way.
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@skinnylatte
There's the town of Locke, in the delta:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locke,_California -
@PJ_Evans ah yes. I saw a photo book about the people here
