Chinatown, Honolulu: Place, Race, and Empire

For most tourists roaming around Honolulu's state capitol, central business district, and Chinatown while enjoying a harmonious blend of Hawaiian, Western, and Asian architecture and cuisine, downtown Honolulu perfectly manifests Hawai‘i's reputation as a racial paradise. Yet, in Chinatown, Honolulu: Place, Race, and Empire, Nancy E. Riley traces the history of Honolulu's Chinatown and the assimilation of Chinese immigrants in Hawai‘i within the larger context of US settler colonialism and empire building, revealing the complicated dynamics of America's racial politics obscured by the prevailing narrative of neoliberal multiculturalism. Since recent scholarship on America's Chinatowns has expanded its traditional focus on California and New York to include a broader range of cities like Denver, Boston, and Philadelphia, this book is a timely attempt to add Honolulu to the widened spectrum of Chinatown studies. As Riley deftly marshals historical context and archival materials into five major periods, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, her research illustrates how the development of Honolulu's Chinatown coincides with the evolving role of Hawai‘i in America's global strategy.Beginning with a brief review of the Chinese experience in Hawai‘i before 1898, Riley charts the trajectory of early Chinese immigrants from plantation laborers to rural farmers and then Honolulu dwellers. Though severely discriminated against and restricted by both elite haoles and native Hawaiians, especially after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, previously money-saving Chinese laborers took the chance to purchase native lands and operate retail businesses during the haole-led privatization of Honolulu lands. Continuing to track Chinatown's ups and downs after the United States annexed Hawai‘i, Riley draws our attention to the 1900 Chinatown fire. Initially part of the haole authority's measure to contain Chinatown's bubonic plague but accidentally burning the whole Chinatown to the ground, this great fire, Riley argues, fostered the growing bifurcation within the Chinese community. While low-income laborers tended to return to the reconstructed Chinatown, affluent families moved to better-off neighborhoods in Bingham Tract and Makiki.Given Hawai‘i's growing geo-political importance during World War II, Riley further explores the relationship between US military maneuvers in Honolulu and the socio-economic mobility of Chinese residents. For her, the booming job market created by the war economy, fueled by the official denial of Japanese access to crucial local industries, provided hard-working Chinese employees with a convenient stepping stone to Hawai‘i's middle class. In her critical analysis of America's Cold War politics, Riley examines the exemplary roles that Hawai‘i and Chinese Hawaiians played in promoting postwar America as a tolerant multi-racial democracy. To counter the Soviet Union's harsh attack on America's racial inequality, incorporating the multi-ethnic Hawai‘i into the States and accepting Hawai‘i's ethnic Chinese as a model minority constituted America's urgent need to vie for influence among newly independent third-world nations. Following up on the federal government's project to demolish and renovate Chinatown in the post-statehood era, Riley records the Chinese community's resistance to this trend of urban gentrification. Though Chinatown has gradually shifted from an exclusive Chinese settlement to a multi-racial Asian American neighborhood, Chinese Hawaiians still struggled to preserve most of their cultural relics as a registered National Historic Site.In addition to weaving detailed observations, interviews, census data, newspaper reports, and personal and family memoirs into the chronological discussion of Honolulu's Chinatown, this book's strength also lies in Riley's investigation of the intricate relationships among different non-white groups in Hawai‘i. She repeatedly reminds readers of the neglected history of native Hawaiians, laying bare the fact that Asian Hawaiians thrive at the expense of Indigenous people's loss. Within the haole-dominated racial hierarchy, while Chinese Hawaiians fit themselves into the model minority paradigm through public education and economic achievement, native Hawaiians find themselves marginalized for their unwillingness to conform to racialized inclusion. More specifically, Riley emphasizes the economic motivations behind the haoles’ molding of certain ethnic groups. The Chinese, distinguished by their financial accumulation and proper consumption, are chosen to demonstrate Hawai‘i as a place where the ascent of non-white groups is possible. As Riley laments, however, the often-told story of the economically successful Chinese overshadows alternative narratives of other ethnic groups, particularly native Hawaiians, making Chinese Hawaiians both victims of and collaborators with America's ongoing settler colonialism and racial construction in Hawai‘i.Chinatown, Honolulu is a well-researched and thought-provoking work. Besides its central focus on the transformation of Honolulu's Chinatown and the changing status of Chinese Hawaiians, the book also offers a panoramic view of the tangled relationship between Hawai‘i and the United States over the past two centuries. Considering Riley's special concern for native Hawaiians, she should have recounted the United States’ colonization of the Hawaiian Kingdom and concretized native Hawaiians’ significant losses in US empire building. Despite minor imperfections, this incisive book makes valuable contributions to Chinatown studies, Asian American studies, and race and ethnic studies. Intriguing research-worthy issues that Riley briefly hints at but leaves unexplored, such as the collaboration and tension among various Asian groups in Hawai‘i, will undoubtedly beckon further inquiry and prompt follow-up studies.