“Accepting the Social Order and Harvesting Brilliant Success”: Chinese Physicians in Twentieth Century Hawai‘i

Abstract: The story of Chinese in Hawai‘i often focuses on how they moved from immigrant labor on sugar and pineapple plantations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the highest levels of economic and social life by the mid twentieth century. This article argues that this story deserves closer scrutiny. Using a focus on the over-representation of Chinese in medicine, dentistry, and in public health, my analysis offers a window on several processes underway during those years that have continued to have resonance, in Hawai‘i and in the larger American society, including the racial politics in Hawai‘i; the relationship between Hawai‘i—a settler colonial society—and the U.S.; the role of health and disease in the construction of race; and the nascent model minority and neoliberal multiculturalism frameworks that were advancing during those years.