Book Review: Sons of the Yellow Emperor
Sometimes when my wife and I travel, we take note of the local Chinese community. No matter where you go in the world, there is always a Chinese restaurant. As a Chinese American, I'm always curious as to how life is for other overseas Chinese. My parents are prime examples of the wide and varied range of the Chinese Diaspora: my father grew up in Kentucky, my mother was born and raised in India before moving to Hong Kong.
A great book to read on this very topic is Sons of the Yellow Emperor by Lynn Pan.
As someone who majored in Ethnic Studies and minored in Asian American Studies, I found this book to be an excellent complement to Asian American history books. In fact I would say I enjoyed this book much more than Ron Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore or Sucheng Chan's Asian Americans: An Interpretive History.
Sons of the Yellow Emperor is more focused in that it concentrates solely on the Chinese, but at the same time it is far more global in it's scope than any of the Asian American Studies books I've read. Because Asian American history books focus solely on America, the historical, political and social context of the overseas Chinese is very limited.
Sons of the Yellow Emperor, however, puts Chinese immigration in a larger perspective. Why are Chinese communities all over the world?
A lot of it has to do with the European colonization of Asia, Africa and the Americas. When slavery was abolished, the European and American powers still needed labor to exact a colony's natural resources and to build its infrastructure. The Europeans also needed merchants to purchase goods and services. So the Chinese filled in the gap, which caused a lot of resentment on the part of the natives. As a result the Chinese were the victims of pogroms in a lot of these countries.
What I like about this book (as opposed to some of the Asian American history books) is that despite the overwhelming racism the Chinese experienced worldwide, the author presents plenty of stories about individuals who overcame the odds and resisted or circumvented the racist establishments of these various countries.
The only negative about the book is that it focuses primarily on the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia and the Philippines. But this is a minor quibble, because the author covers a lot of topics, a lot of historical ground (1600-1980) and a lot of countries in addition to Southeast Asia, such as the Americas, Africa, Europe and Australia.
It's a fascinating and entertaining read. I highly recommend it.
Comments
Whenever I travel somewhere, I look in the local phonebook to see how many Asians there are in town. Just curious to see how diverse the place is. Even in Appalachia (I was in W Virginia not too long ago), there were a handful of Chinese names in the phone book.
I've traveled a lot in Latin America and have found Chinese in Mexico, Panama, Venezuela....we're all the world. This one Peruvian woman, first generation I believe, who used to cut my hair at my local cuttery told me that her grandfather was Chinese.
Chinese of Peru
Gavin Menzies, however, makes an argument that the Chinese had settled Peru even earlier:
In northern Peru, principally in the department of Ancash, there are 95 geographical names which are Chinese words and have no significance in Quechua, the Inca tongue, or Aymara, or any other local dialects. There are also 130 geographical names in Peru which correspond to names in China! Peru in Chinese means 'white mist', something that covers Peru's coast during the long winter months. Also curious is the Quechua word, qipu, which describes the famous knotted strings with different coloured threads used by the statisticians of each village in the Inca empire to record statistics. In Chinese, gi pú, means 'to keep records'!
As to artefacts, bronzes with Chinese inscriptions have been found on pots in Trujillo and Nazca, as well as on a silver idol and clay figurines. Music? In the Peruvian Andes, you will find Chinese pentatonic scales (C D E G A ) widely used. These scales have not been found in Central or North America. Games have also been found in Peru that originated in China as well as sacrificial customs, burial rites, and castration of criminals. It is estimated that 10,000 migrants settled in Peru between 1421-1423, 25,000 in Australia, and 5,000 in Mexico.
Probably one of the most interesting discoveries is that related to “Juanita”, a young Inca girl that was conceived in approximately 1425 and was a victim of human sacrifice in the year 1440. After an eruption of the volcano Ampato in the high mountain range of Arequipa north of Machu Picchu, the intact body of this young girl was discovered and put in a deep freeze display cabinet. During a visit to Japan in 2000, a DNA test was run on Juanita at the University of Tokyo. Her DNA was found to have substantial Chinese (Taiwanese) admixture. In other tests run by the Novick report, it was found that Inca DNA is so close to Chinese, that “one can reasonably argue that some of them were Chinese.”
Even Francisco Pizarro had a Chinese junk in his coat of arms. Charts used by Columbus to search for a new route to Asia were all based on those historically prepared by the Chinese who were already mating with the Incas before he set sail.