Abstract
The establishment of the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) in the 1880s was in the midst of a series of federal laws excluding Chinese people from entering the United States, along with a wave of scientific racism that was also pervasive in American society. While Asian Americans and their folklore were not included in the goals of AFS, there was a voice to consider the Chinese American customs as part of American folklore even in 1890. The fact, however, is that in the first 60 years of JAF, there was no publication by an Asian American folklorist in today's sense. So, where were and are Asian American folklorists? How do we understand the invisibility, untellability, and absence of Asian American folklorists in American folklore studies? This essay addresses these questions by revisiting some publications in the first decade of JAF and engaging with some current discourse on folkloristic reconstruction.
in the initial essay in “engaging the past,” a new section in the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), Shirley Moody-Turner traces “the first time an African American voice entered the pages of the Journal of American Folklore as a folklorist representing and reporting on Black folklore, rather than as ‘folk’ being represented and reported on by one of the many white folklorists who had taken up pen and paper to relate tales of Black folklore within the journal's pages” (Moody-Turner 2021:346). Lisa Gilman, the current editor-in-chief of JAF, kindly invited me to write a similar essay to contextualize a writing by the “first” Asian American folklorist in JAF, and I instantly accepted and began the journey. However, a quick survey of all JAF publications from its inception in 1888 to 19491 revealed that there was simply no article or field report by a “first” Asian American folklorist: none of the eight publications by authors or coauthors identified as Asians were about Asian American folklore practice; neither was there an Asian American folklorist in today's sense (though I have a different view on this concept, with two individual cases, to be discussed below).2 Meanwhile, there were more than 60 pieces on Asian or Asian American folklore practice, which, clearly, were “being represented and reported on by one of the many white folklorists” (Moody-Turner 2021:346), and most of them were simple descriptive reports, not studies.
I knew about this fact about 10 years ago when I discussed the same issue with Anthony Bak Buccitelli when he wrote about the “reluctant folklorist” Jon Lee as “the first Asian American to work professionally as a folklorist” (Buccitelli 2014:419–20n4; 2016), though Lee's publications were in the 1940s and not in JAF. Pondering this fact, I had to twist the original question to ask: Where were the early Asian American folklorists? How different is the current situation from the past? How can we understand this reality that Asian American folklorists and their works have been absent or “implied nowhere” (Ingram, Mullins, and Richardson 2019) in American folklore studies?
To briefly answer those questions without deviating from the goal of this essay, I limit this discussion to the publications in JAF from 1888–1898, by focusing on three founding folklorists of AFS and JAF—William W. Newell, Daniel G. Brinton, and Stewart Culin, who, I believe, were representative of the early AFS and JAF in terms of disciplinary trends and broad social and historical realities. To go back to that decade and relate it to the present, one particular reminder should be made here, namely, the three US federal laws: the Page Act (1875) prohibiting the entry of Chinese women: the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) banning all Chinese; and the Asian Exclusion Act (1924). These laws were not changed until 1965, while similar racial discriminative laws in some states were not removed until the 1980s. In contrast, the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act was signed in May 2021 by the President of the United States, as a response to the recent rampant racist crimes and activities against Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) communities. It reminds people that there were many massacres of Chinese people just about a hundred years ago across the United States as a result of people blaming Chinese Americans for the socioeconomic and moral crises in the United States; most of the killers were never prosecuted (e.g., Los Angeles Chinese massacre of 1871, Wyoming's Rock Springs massacre in 1885, and Oregon's Hells Canyon Massacre in 1887).
Exoticizing Asian Folklore and Ignoring Asian American Folklore Practice
William W. Newell (1839–1907), a key founder of AFS and JAF (being the editor of JAF for its first 12 years) whose contributions to the field have been well-documented (e.g., Bell 1973), had a keen academic and personal interest in Asian culture and folklore, but not in recognizing Asian American folk groups. Here, we should remember that “when Newell spoke to the public in his capacity as editor, he spoke as the ‘voice’ of American folklore scholarship. . . . Whatever appeared in the Journal can be taken as the official definition of folklore or as somehow under the rubric of that definition” (Bell 1973:10). In terms of his academic interest, we can see from the publications in JAF under his editorship (meaning he determined every publication) that there were 17 pieces on Asian folklore (including four on Chinese American folklore) from volume 1 to volume 12. All of the pieces were by non-Asian authors except for one by Michitaro Hisa, who was a student from Japan who had befriended Newell at Harvard University during his four years in the United States. For example, in volume 1 in 1888 (edited by Franz Boas), there was a reprint of a newspaper report about a Chinese funeral two years earlier in Boston. In volume 3 in 1890, there were two writings by Stewart Culin about Chinese people in the United States (more about Culin below). Newell's personal interest in Asian folklore was shown through his interactions with Hisa. Newell encouraged Hisa to publish his piece on Japanized Chinese proverbs in JAF and sought inquiries from Hisa concerning Chinese poetry. Hisa then provided some translations, including some poems by Li Bai (Li-T'ai-Po, a Chinese poet of the eighth century), which Newell “was especially interested” in and “made it his first object to reproduce sentiment and language as closely as possible” by printing it into a book “not for circulation or public notice, but for the sake of record, and as memorial of a friend” (Hisa died in 1902 after a long illness). The book of 26 poems was eventually circulated after Newell's death as Lyrics of Li-T'ai-Po (Chinese Poet of the Eighth Century) (Laufer 1907:655). He also made a reference to a poem by Li Bai when he wrote about individual and collective characteristics of folklore (Newell 1906:15).
It seems clear that Newell kept his interest in Asia as the remote “Other” while, possibly, having limited access to more information about Asian and Asian American folklore, as seen by the fact that several pieces on Asian and Asian American folklore were basically reports or descriptions of customs, for example, in one or two sentences in JAF's Notes & Queries section. Such factors as his personal resources, the relatively small population of Asians in the United States prior to the 1880s (Chinese immigrants began to move from the West Coast to the East Coast only in the 1870s), and the anti-Chinese social reality might well be related to his exclusion (or, not specifying) of Asian American folklore in his famous “four goals” (i.e., “Relics of Old English Folk-Lore; Lore of Negroes in the Southern States of the Union; Lore of the Indian Tribes of North America; Lore of French Canada, Mexico, etc.” [Newell 1888:5]) set for AFS and JAF.
In contrast, a different ideological and methodological approach greatly impacted AFS and JAF, at least in their early decades. This view was represented by Daniel G. Brinton, who was the second President of AFS starting in 1890 and also the President of the International Congress of Anthropology and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Brinton was a strong advocate of pervasive scientific racism. In the “Bibliographical Notes” in JAF (vol. 7, no. 26, 1894), Newell reviewed a book by Brinton and wrote: “In an examination of the supposed relation between American and Asian races, Dr. Brinton holds that there has not been proven the slightest trace of such influence in any respect” (1894:259). Despite that both Newell and Boas at AFS and through JAF fought in multiple ways against Brinton's racist ideas and approaches (Baker 2000:408; 2010:126), Brinton's crucial role in the shaping of American anthropology and folklore exerted a lasting impact on denying Asian Americans as equal folk groups to those mentioned in the “four goals.” Clearly, even within the small AFS and JAF circle, two historical trends were reflected: exoticizing Asians and their folklore and ignoring the connection between Asians and (Asian) Americans. Both trends have lasting impact, which disregards Asian Americans’ inseparable role in the fabric of US history, society, and culture.
Recognizing Asian American Folklore/Folklorists
There was a lone voice from Stewart Culin (1858–1929) suggesting the consideration of Chinese customs practiced in the United States “as part of our [American] own folk-lore” (Culin 1890:191; see the original essay below), which was and is particularly meaningful in the context of anti-Chinese movements in the late nineteenth century and at present. Culin, being a merchant and a museum curator for most of his life and a founder of AFS, took the position of the president of AFS in 1897. Culin made distinctive contributions in the early history of AFS and JAF through a number of publications on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean material folklore (mostly on games) practiced in Asia and in the United States, in addition to those of Native Americans, though his contributions are only recognized by a few folklorists (Bronner 1985, 1989).
In my opinion, Steward Culin is a pioneering folklorist of Asian American folklore studies whose words and actions were precursors in this folklore research area. I believe that an Asian American folklorist, or a folklorist of Asian American folklore, is not necessarily a biologically or “racially” Asian or Asian American. It's high time to break the “racist” boundaries that define people and their folklore by the racist categorization based on physical features and ancestral/regional heritage of the practitioners or researchers. We should look at the folklore practice and research that shape one's identity and meaningfulness of living a life, and see how practitioners and researchers of any background enable the continuity of certain folklore traditions because of “folkloric identity” (Zhang 2020:220) based on the shared folklore in practice, rather than being of the same “race” (or skin color).3 The conflation of race with cultural identity is a concept that was constructed to serve colonialism and colonization, and that is at the root of ongoing systemic racism. In fact, the folklore studies by Franz Boas (1909) a hundred years ago and genomic studies today have proven that human differences in physical features are the result of lifestyles and modes of production shaped by the natural environment, and that mixing and sharing folklore practices is true to the nature of the development of human cultures.
To make it clear: my argument about a person's scholarly identity is about one's research interest, specialty, and topical content in folkloristics, which is in line with the idea of “folkloric identity” for both practitioners and researchers in continuing a tradition, but not about one's personal/ancestral identity. “Self-identified” and “being-identified” identities are issues different from the current discussion (and the issue of self-claiming an identity [especially one not tied to one's own heritage] for political, social, or economic gain is fundamentally a separate matter). We must note that, for example, an Asian American folklorist (i.e., self-identified or not, by ancestral connection) is not necessarily a folklorist of Asian American folklore. By the same logic and reality, an African American folklorist is not necessarily a folklorist of African American folklore, nor is an American folklorist of any ethnic identity necessarily a folklorist of American folklore. I am against the practice in the past and the present that some minority groups were/are stripped of the right and opportunity to voice their thoughts and traditions by being represented or interpreted by the dominant group who has the power to do so. I agree that there is “white dominance” even within the field of American folklore studies (Gilman 2021:250). I am certain that the “white anthropology” phenomenon (i.e., theories could only be created by white anthropologists, and nonwhite anthropologists could only be “mere fact gatherers,” and nonwhites were “to confine themselves to their own native non-White cultures, and not to poke into the White preserves”) (Hsu 1973:5) also exists as “white folkloristics” in the United States; and I know that some folk/ethnic/minority groups (their folklore and the researchers of their folklore) are nowadays still absent or “implied nowhere” in folklore studies.
I must also hasten to add that we must not blind ourselves by categorically denying the good deeds done by white people when they denounce racism or white supremacy because if we do so, we are trapped in the vicious cycle set by the dominating minority of racist whites who are in absolute power to “divide and conquer” (i.e., the slave masters divided “the poor whites and the blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each” [Frederick Douglass 18664]). We must not go to the extreme of denying the work of, or even depriving the right and opportunity from the people who are considered to be “outsiders” (defined on the basis of racist categorization). Frankly, even with regard to folkloristics in the United States—not to mention any other social science or humanities discipline—without the early founders crossing the boundaries to study the “Other,” regardless of their ideological intention at that time, our current discipline would not exist. I often find myself in bewilderment: Why do we folklorists use more attributive adjectives to describe the people and their folklore that we study in order to highlight “racial/ethnic” categories while knowing these categories are the result of racist systems? Why don't we more often use our specialty to modify ourselves like “a World War II historian,” “a primary care physician,” or “a contemporary Jazz musician”? I feel that the more we hold tight to “racial” categories, the more we serve the systemic racism embedded deep in all institutions.
I believe that there are individuals who are able to cross the labeled “racial” boundaries and make truly humanist efforts by respecting the diversity of human cultures. I am aware of the issue of cultural appropriation (which shall be treated as a separate topic, though related), and believe that the essence of the issue lies in the “ideology” of the practitioner/researcher. In other words, the key to differentiating those rational humanistic individuals from those racists or supremacists is their ideological agenda, simply put, whether one can treat “Others” as equal human beings. This is why I think an ideological paradigm shift from the previous (colonial-based) one in folklore studies is urgent (Zhang 2020).
In this regard, Culin's point made in 1890, while scientific racism was pervasive, that the customs of minority groups like the Chinese in the United States “may be considered as part of our own folk-lore, [and] would form an entertaining subject for discussion” is worth further reflection. For this reason, I think it is meaningful to review his essay (published in JAF, vol. 3, no. 10:191–200, 1890) as representative of the early studies of Asian American folklore. Below are the beginning and ending sections from the original essay, while the middle section describing some customs was omitted due to the page limit here and its easy access via internet databases.
“Customs of the Chinese in America”
By Stewart Culin
The subject of this paper is the life of the people of the little Chinese colonies that have recently been established in our cities, with especial reference to the modifications in language, dress, diet, religion, and traditions that have arisen among the Chinese in this country. But first I would like to say a few words as to the meagerness of our printed data concerning the social life of the Chinese. The opinions of their philosophers have been translated and discussed by the scholars of every European clime. Their country has been explored, and the main features of its natural conformation have been recorded. The ethnological characteristics of the people themselves have been carefully noted, while those externals of their civilization, such as laws and system of government and the forms of ceremonial and religious usages, have been earnestly and successfully studied. But concerning the life of the people, of the millions who till the soil and ply the loom, of those humble craftsmen whose peaceful invasion has alarmed the dwellers upon our coasts and furnished new problems to our politicians and lawmakers, we find much less available information.5 Most observers have been content to record only those features which appeared to them strange and unusual, and where they have not been influenced by prejudices of race and religion, and thereby led to dwell upon and exaggerate all that is bad and disagreeable, and pass lightly over all that is good and admirable in Chinese life and character, their results are usually too general to be accurate, and too superficial to convey a correct impression of the genius of the people.
It is the especial province of the student of folklore to collect and bring together these neglected elements in the history of nations, and a fitting illustration of the value and importance of his work is found in its application to the problems arising in the question of restricting Chinese immigration. What an interesting field is here presented, especially as I feel assured there is more folklore to be gleaned from any one of the sallow-faced Chinamen we see shambling about our streets than could be collected among our entire native population.
The popular notions about the Chinese, which may be considered as part of our own folk-lore, would form an entertaining subject for discussion [emphasis added]. The Chinaman has become a well-established character in our popular literature; the professional humorist has paid his regards to him, and the playwright has made him figure as an amusing personage in the drama, from the halls of vaudeville in the Bowery to the theatre in Madison Square. In most cases the popular conception, with all its errors, has been perpetuated. Thus the well-known minstrel songs make the Americanized Chinaman talk, or rather sing, in Pigeon-English, when, in point of fact, he is usually altogether unfamiliar with that jargon, as most of the immigrants come from districts remote from the cities where it serves as the trade language in communications with foreigners.
A desire to learn the language of his adopted country seems to be one of the highest ambitions of the Chinese immigrant, and his English speech is often strongly marked with the local peculiarities of the place where it was acquired. He realizes the intrinsic value of such knowledge, for it may enable him to obtain a well-paid position as interpreter in some shop in Hong Kong or Canton, upon his return to China, and so he studies his native textbooks,6 attends Sunday-schools, and tries to glean a word or two from every foreigner with whom he comes in contact.
There are several local patois spoken by the immigrants. These vary from the dialect of Canton city, sometimes in the sound of a few words, and sometimes, in those from remote districts, in the sound of almost every word in the language.7
The people from each district have their peculiar local customs and traditions. Men from the same village usually associate together, and certain shops thus become the headquarters for people from the same neighborhood. The little territory from which they all come is in greater part known as the Sám Yup, or “Three Towns,” and the Sz’ Yup, or “Four Towns.” The Sz’ Yup people, who are in the majority, are not so well educated as those from the Sam Yup, and seem much more susceptible to foreign influences. The professed converts to Christianity are chiefly from among them, and they comprise almost the entire membership of the secret society that has for its object the overthrow of the present Chinese dynasty.
The influence of the clan is strongly felt among the Chinese in this country. Those of the same family name are often able to trace their relationship, although it may be many times removed, and in disputes they usually side together (Culin 1890:191–3).
[The section that would go here has been omitted. It contains brief descriptions of such customs as speaking dialects, organizing secret societies, practicing death and marriage rituals, playing games, and celebrating festivals, as well as some descriptions of dress, food, drink, and hairstyles, with a brief mention of the small number of women and children within the community.]8
The migratory instinct, which seems to be found almost exclusively among the southern Chinese, and which in part has led them to seek their fortune in so many distant lands, does not desert them here. They never seem to hesitate to abandon any place and go where they can better themselves, no matter what the distance may be. They are constantly travelling from city to city, making long journeys to visit relatives and friends. They are probably by far the most generous patrons of railways, in proportion to their number, of any of our foreign population.
They make great use of both the post-office and the telegraph, going with reluctance out of the lines of communication with their kindred, and thus maintaining solidarity and concert of action.
Foreign inventions, and in fact our entire civilization, they look upon as a matter of course, seldom expressing comment or surprise to foreigners, and seldom rising, I fear, to a just appreciation of the many benefits we imagine we would confer upon them (emphasis added). They appear willing to borrow from us whatever they think will aid them in securing material advancement, just as they have borrowed in the past from all the nations of the East. From them they have accepted traditions and religions as well as useful arts, but with all their accretions they have remained an almost primitive people. How long will they so continue in this restless Western world, where change crowds change, and we, more conservative it may be than the rest, must join in united effort to preserve the customs of our very fathers from oblivion? (Culin 1890:199–200)
Certainly, Culin's fieldwork would be considered too superficial today, and some of his terms and comments are not appropriate in contemporary ways of thinking and writing about peoples and cultures. However, this writing can be considered to be like footprints in the development of our society and discipline. What is most significant is his call to recognize “the popular notions about the Chinese” “as part of our folk-lore,” especially when considering Newell's “four goals” and the anti-Chinese racism in the United States at that time. In the last paragraph, Culin presents some perpetual questions for folklorists: How do we draw the boundaries between “us” and “them,” between “civilized” and “primitive”? Isn't a long-lived culture the result of borrowing from others? Does (not) change imply replacing the old with the new? Can we preserve the old customs and make changes at the same time?
Representing or Implying Asian American Folk Groups
If Steward Culin is seen as the “first” Asian American folklorist who, in the 1880s, tried to include Chinese/Asian American folklore as part of American folklore, and if Jon Lee is seen as the first Asian American folklorist “work[ing] professionally” through his publications in the 1940s (Buccitelli 2014), where were, and are, other Asian American folklorists? How should we understand their absence, their being represented, or their being implied?
Certainly, the big picture should not be forgotten. The current generation of the US national leaders grew up in the social environment of the racist immigration laws that existed for more than 80 years and when Japanese Americans were being put in concentration camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Certainly, like any other disciplines, folkloristics always shifts and reflects the social changes and particular ideologies at any given time. Thus, in folklore studies, there are “things that have been implied to be nothing and the things that are nowhere implied,” which nevertheless shape “both ideology and actuality” (Ingram, Mullins, and Richardson 2019:7). A few examples are sufficient to illustrate the point that Asian American groups were not only excluded from the “four goals” for American folklore studies from the beginning, but that Asian American folklorists’ works continued to not be represented or implied anywhere (Magat 2015, 2018; Zhang 2015, 2022; Khan 2018).
As mentioned above, among the dozens of publications on Asian/Asian American folklore in JAF in its first 60 years, there was not a single article by someone known in today's sense as an Asian American folklorist. In an issue of JAF (vol. 36, no. 139) in 1923, two pieces were coauthored by Edward Sapir (president of AFS 1929–1930) and Hsü Tsan Hwa. The first piece contains two folktales with one short introduction of 80 words, beginning as follows: “The following Chinese folk-tales were written down by my friend, Mr. Hsü Tsan Hwa, Secretary of the Chinese Consulate in Canada, and corrected by myself” (Sapir and Hsü 1923b:23). The second piece contains seven jokes with an introduction of 136 words, explaining how Hsü wrote them down: “Here are a few whimsies which Mr. Hsü has written for me. My task has been the humble one of trimming words and showing them their places. I suspect there is a great folk-Rabelais in China” (Sapir and Hsü 1923a:31). So the one who “corrected” and “trimm[ed] words” was the first author and the one who wrote the content was the second author!
An even worse example, from the newly renamed journal Western Folklore in 1947, is the piece “Cantonese Riddles in San Francisco” without an author's name. In the brief introduction to the 12 riddles in four pages, it says: “Although these riddles are rhymed both in the Chinese originals and in the translation made by Mr. Shih-Hsiang Chen . . . the editors thank Mr. Chen for his skillful and witty translations” ([Chen] 1947:68). So why was Mr. Chen's name not shown as the author/translator, with his folklore knowledge and linguistic competence? Was he another “reluctant folklorist”?
The “reluctant folklorist” Jon Lee (1915–1986) was rediscovered by Anthony Buccitelli (2014:400) who dug through the archival materials and noticed that Lee's contribution in the 1940s was not properly recognized by his supervisors: Wolfram Eberhard and Paul Radin. For example, Lee was not listed as the author of Chinese Tales Told in California in the first edition in 1940, even though he was the person who collected those tales in 1933–1934. Even in the reprinted edition in 1971, The Golden Mountain: Chinese Tales Told in California, “the front cover and the spine of the book show only Radin's name. . . . But neither of them [Radin or Eberhard] mentions Lee's name or the original title” (Ting 1972:383). “More strikingly, Eberhard's preface to the new edition omits Lee's name” (Buccitelli 2016:4).
From its very beginning, AFS (and JAF) was an exclusive fraternity, more tolerant to racism as seen in Brinton's role in AFS than to folklorists of color (or even counting the debate for the past seven decades or so about academic folklorists versus public/independent folklorists in the definition of who could be a folklorist). Clearly, the power of the editor(s) in determining what and who can publish should never be underestimated, though the impact can be even greater than what the editors might realize at the time.
Furthermore, there were and are folklorists who published outside JAF, but who were not attracted, or perhaps accepted, to the AFS circle. For example, Yan Phou Lee, a graduate from Yale whose wedding with a woman from Connecticut was reported in newspapers across the country, published When I Was a Boy in China (1887) and The Chinese Must Stay (1889), among other writings, and was involved in a number of folk groups and events in different parts of the United States. Jung Hung, one of the first Chinese students in the United States and the first Chinese person to become a naturalized US citizen in 1852, published My Life in China and America (Hung 1909). Francis L. K. Hsu, who was the president of the American Anthropological Association in 1977–1978, began to publish in JAF in the 1940s. Nai-Tung Ting, with a PhD from Harvard, published dozens of articles and book reviews in JAF and other folklore journals from the 1950s to the 1980s, along with a groundbreaking work on a type index of Chinese folktales (Ting 1978). However, he decided to withdraw from AFS in 1982 because he was upset with the reluctance of AFS to engage in communication with its Chinese counterparts.9 We begin to know more about similar examples from other Asian American communities as we research our ancestors, for example, through the AFS project of Notable Folklorists of Color.10
Engaging the Present and Uniting Asian American Folklorists
The institutionalization of folklore studies has built an ivory tower that excludes numerous folklorists who work on many aspects of the humanities through social and public service, education, and other walks of life by documenting and using folklore. While occupations may be divided, the folklore practices that shape the core of individuals’ identities in their everyday lives have no boundaries whatsoever. When we try to recruit young folklorists within US university folklore programs, we often hit a dead end; we should also reach out to those in other spheres with diverse backgrounds. The history of AFS and JAF shows that when a concrete project on “public folklore” is set, interests and results emerge from those “reluctant folklorists” who can record, collect, and translate folklore materials and theorize about what they do. In terms of Asian American folklore, hundreds, if not thousands, of people are already working on collecting, categorizing, and analyzing their folklore traditions at their jobs (e.g., museums, libraries, classrooms, and historical societies at city, county, and state levels in the United States) or homes (e.g., documenting family histories). Thus, walking out of the AFS ivory tower and reaching out to those hidden or reluctant folklorists are essential not only to the growth of the AFS membership, but also to the core of folklore studies.
While we must engage the past, engaging the present is even more important. It requires an ideological paradigm shift by treating all folk groups with appropriate methodology and with a mentality of equality. The history of AFS is not different from that of the broader American society in terms of the creation and maintaining of “minor feelings” among Asian Americans (Hong 2020). According to Cathy Park Hong, “minor feelings” are negative emotions that are buried within a person's mind-set for a long time; they “occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance” (Hong 2020:56). Often labeled as a “model minority,” Asian Americans tend to retain their “minor feelings” and are often desensitized when being blamed for the problems caused to, not by, themselves. When we say that only insiders have the right to claim their ethnic group identity, we must also realize that their right could have been stripped away by those who were entitled to do so (e.g., through publications). How often are the writings by Asian American folklorists rejected for publication at first sight because of some grammatical or stylistic errors? How often are the works by Asian/Asian American folklorists (there are quite a few!) cited or referenced by Eurocentric white folklorists in articles or books, even when they are on related topics? How often do their books get deserved reviews in relevant journals? Even in the most recent publications on antiracism and development of folkloristics with such topics as critical folkloristics today, race and racism in the practice and study of folklore, advancing folkloristics, and theorizing folklore from the margins, one can rarely find discussions about Asian American groups, nor can Asian American folklorists be found as contributors.11 I must add that my mentioning these examples should not be taken as personal criticism to anyone; rather, these examples represent the current trends in our discipline and our society, which perpetuate a pattern that has existed since the inception of the American Folklore Society.
Here, by “Asian American folklorist,” I mean any folklorist, with or without Asian ancestral legacies, who holds Asian American folklore as their primary research area and, for most of them, as their personal identity. Even with this controversial definition, Asian American folklorists are still implied nowhere! Here, we must again applaud the AFS project of the Notable Folklorists of Color!
The absence of Asian American folklorists and their works in American folklore studies,12 similar to some other minority groups, is not because they are invisible in our daily life without tellable folklore, but because they are often “implied nowhere” due to the “white dominance” in our field. Very recently, Diana Baird N'Diaye implored folklorists to “abandon the fantasy that your work is objective or somehow free of racism. Mine is. Yours is. That's what systemic racism is about” (2021:256). Gilman further points out the paradox that self-claimed folklorists are proud of working at the margins on the marginalized “everyday people” while simultaneously holding “the fantasy” that “we aren't racist, or at least aren't contributing to racism and other forms of oppression”; she reminds us that the field of American folklore studies is not only “out of and in the service of white dominance,” but also “our organizations and the work we do continues to feed social stratification and power differentials” (2021:250). If we consider this to be a sounding alarm from JAF, we are hopeful that many folklorists in and outside AFS will join together to engage in dialogues crossing existing boundaries and to make folklore studies truly “at the very center of humanistic study” (Wilson 1988:158).
Acknowledgments
I thank Lisa Gilman, editor of JAF, for initiating this project, and Amanda Ellard, a graduate student in George Mason University's Folklore Program, and the editorial assistant of JAF, for gathering the bibliographic records. I am grateful to Fariha Khan, Margaret Magat, and Nancy Yan for their constructive comments on the early drafts of this essay.
Notes
This period was set somewhat arbitrarily assuming that it was in a similar social climate until some changes in immigration laws took place after World War II.
Among the eight publications, five of them were accounts, not studies, of oral narratives in Asia, and the authors only stayed briefly in North America, and three were book reviews. The two individuals I mention in this essay are Stewart Culin and Francis L. K. Hsu. I argue that the former could be included as a folklorist of Asian American folklore, and that the latter, whose book reviews appeared respectively in 1948 (vol. 61, no. 242) and 1949 (vol. 62, no. 243), and who is commonly known as an anthropologist, should also be seen as an Asian American folklorist (see the Notable Folklorists of Color website, https://notablefolkloristsofcolor.org/notable-folklorists-of-color).
For more discussion on the concept of folkloric identity, its folkloric, ideological, and scientific evidences, see my Archer Taylor Memorial Lecture at the annual meeting of the Western States Folklore Society in 2019, later published as “Folkloric Identity Is the Thing” (Zhang 2020).
See the document known to be written by Frederick Douglass, “Reply of the Colored Delegation to the President,” Washington, DC, February 7, 1866. https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/4391.
The Social Life of the Chinese, by Rev. Justus Doolittle (New York, 1867), is a valuable source of information, but it is based upon observations made at Fuhchau, where the customs vary from those of Kwantung, from whence all [Chinese] immigrants come to the United States.
These consist of Chinese and English vocabularies and phrase books. Those in common use were printed from blocks with the English text cut in script [and the phonetic symbols beneath the Chinese characters]. The valuable dictionary of Kwong Ki Chiu, which is highly esteemed, has not come into general use here on account of its high price.
These dialects are being made the subject of a series of studies by J. Dyer Ball, Esq., of H. M. Civil Service, Hong Kong, who has just published an excellent monograph on the San Wúí dialect in the China Review.
It is worth noting that most of the customs Culin described still exist today, as seen in Chinatowns in the United States, because they have been practiced for centuries by the Chinese. A difference is that the Chinese community of that time was essentially a nontypical group of bachelors due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Clearly, Culin's ethnographic recording, though brief, was pioneering. One particular custom regarding hairstyle was related to the 1911 Revolution in China, which changed the previous style to the current practice.
Ting mentioned this fact to a close friend of his in a letter dated April 15, 1985. The letter is in a private collection and was read by this author on September 15, 2022.
The ongoing AFS project of Notable Folklorists of Color has highlighted some Asian American folklorists and continues to rediscover more of them. See https://notablefolkloristsofcolor.org/notable-folklorists-of-color.
For example, in the recent discourse of folkloristic development the JAF special issue “Critical Folkloristics Today” (vol. 133, no. 530, 2020), the Francis Lee Utley Memorial Panel “Race and Racism in the Practice and Study of Folklore” in JAF (vol. 134, no. 533, 2021), and in four collections of essays, all published by Indiana University Press, Advancing Folkloristics edited by Jesse A. Fivecoate, Kristina Downs, and Meredith A. E. McGriff (2021), Theorizing Folklore from the Margins: Critical and Ethical Approaches edited by Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera and Solimar Otero (2021), What Folklorists Do: Professional Possibilities in Folklore Studies edited by Timothy Lloyd (2021), and Culture Work: Folklore for the Public Good edited by Tim Frandy and B. Marcus Cederström (2022), not one of the more than 100 contributions addresses the issue/topic of Asian American folklore/groups, and there are no contributors who (self-)identify as Asian American folklorists. Furthermore, in the studies of a specific folklore genre, not a single one of the 40 articles/chapters by 27 authors in the volume Teaching Fairy Tales edited by Nancy L. Canepa (Wayne State University Press, 2019) is about Asian or Asian American fairy tales, as if to teach the students/teachers who would use this book that Asians or Asian Americans did not have fairy tales to tell or to study.
For example, the Transnational Asia/Pacific Section, founded through petition in 2005, has remained a marginalized group whose work is rarely recognized, collaborated with, or quoted, but, meanwhile, AFS has grown in many ways.
