CSUSB - ANTH 365 (Prof. Hareem Khan)
Study journal: When and Where I Enter by Okihiro
(Personal thought about human historical consciousness – the perception of Asian and the
‘melting pot’ idea)
The article When and Where I Enter by Okihiro is started with the Statue of Liberty as
known as a symbol presenting democracy, equality, and liberty of America. History is an important
factor contributing a country. Especially, America itself develops based on a complicated history
background from a variety range of races. Due to the difference in races, there had been the
confliction about power, hierarchy, nationality among races, which leads to the suffer of American
citizen, who are immigrants, natives, slaves, etc.
Writing in 1782, Crevecoeur, a French immigrant, expressed his view: “What then is the
America, this new man?” This is an image that individuals of all nations are melted into a race of
men. This is an image of a melting pot. However, Okihiro argues: ”America wasn’t always a nation
of immigrants, nor was America unfailingly a land of democracy, equality, and liberty.” The view of
Crevecoeur cannot be applied in the case of Asian American, particularly Chinese immigrants. In the
nineteenth century, while Chinese labor is one of the main source building networks of roads,
railroads, communication links that connected East to West, they were exclude from the industrial,
masculine, and melting pot. Chinese labor immigrants, along with people of other colors, were
considered as a harmful for the melting pot of America. The statue of Liberty became a paradox
because its massage to Chinese immigrants is “Mother of Exiles” not the freedom in their hope.
What made Chinese percepted as foreigners? Perhaps historical consciousness would
reasonably explain it. The appearance of Asian through historical consciousness is before the
Chinese -immigrants event in the nineteenth century. Alexander Great, one of the most influences in
human history, had defined the Greeks as ‘free people’ and the Asians as ‘a nation of slaves’. The
ideas supporting the Greeks superiority over Asians kept continuously repeating through the
background of the West’s civilization such as Aristotle viewed Asians as “cannibal and barbarian,
and always in a state of subjection and slavery”; Edward W. Said and Marry B. Campbell defined
Asians by the European conception as “the Other” and “ stands in opposition to the world we
know and the laws that govern it”, etc. Those ideas came along with the expansion of colonism,
orientalism, slavery, invasions among countries in which the West or European was always the
dominance.
Thus, the perception of Asian is based on historical consciousness in which Asian did not
play as a dominated race but the West. “When and Where I Enter” by Okihiro draws a picture of
human historical consciousness about how was the mindset or perception of Asian formed, in which
Asian American immigrants are victims of those mindset and struggle with their identity in the U.S,
where the melting pot might not represent for them.
