The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
I strutted into the newly opened Old Tucson Movie Studio Theme Park, a 7-year-old cap-gun slinger with my Ma and Pa. After seeing the “High Noon” mock gunfight this buckaroo got lost and ended in an alley that was a replica of a Chinese street complete with laundry lines and chicken coops.
I knew all about Asian Americans in the Old West thanks to the Magnavox. White as the cast of the “Donna Reed Show,” my family loved “Bonanza.”
Dave Tang Jr., an old friend I often tap for iconoclastic insights, was on my back porch, masked as I was and seated at a distance, when I said with a straight face, “Everything I know about Asians I learned from the character Hop Sing on ‘Bonanza.’ Did you watch ‘Bonanza’ when you were a kid, Dave?”
Dave rolled his eyes, winced. “We didn’t have time. We were working in the store! Everybody worked nine to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at my dad’s store.”
Dave looked at the Catalinas. “Hop Sing normalized racism.”
Dave’s dad came here in the 1920s. He was 12! Here long before my family.
Every white kid I knew mimicked Hop Sing just as we laughed at Bill Dana’s cruel “Jose Jimenez” character on “The Steve Allen Show.” Imagine a Mexican astronaut! We all did imitations of “Jose Jiminez” on the playground. We were clueless bullies witlessly ruling the racial hierarchy, parroting Hollywood’s racism, convinced it was OK, normal.
Many Chinese laborers in Tucson stayed, becoming cooks, launderers and merchants. Urban renewal bulldozed all the Chinese restaurants, laundries and storefronts that had thrived downtown since the 1880s. Tucson’s understandably insular Asian community persisted and thrived at a time when the word “coolie” was as common as “wetback”and deeds prohibited the sale of real estate to Asians.
Hank Oyama was a Japanese American icon in Tucson. In the 1940s he and his family were sent to an internment camp. In the ’50s Oyama fought a legal battle to overturn Arizona’s interracial marriage ban so he could marry Mary Ann Jordan. (The late Tucson restaurateur Magdalene Gerrish made her way to New Mexico in 1958 so she could legally marry the white man she loved.)
In the ’60s, Oyama, a master educator, ended up the nationally acclaimed Father of Bilingual Education. The man sent to internment camps by his country served that country as a translator, retiring an Air Force lieutenant colonel.
Dave Tang Jr., was born in 1947. “I grew up in the aftermath of the Korean War. Tucsonans were not kind to Asian faces. I was called a chink more than once. My dad came here when he was 12 and he did everything humanly possible to fit into white culture. It was an English-only home. ‘Don’t speak English with an accent.’ Don’t stand out.”
Dave’s voice revealed regret. “I was embarrassed by my dad’s accent. I was a kid. He was quiet, reserved and he supported my mother. I admired my dad.”
“What do you make of the brutal attacks on Asian Americans? Kung flu and China virus?” I asked.
Dave sighed again. Normalized racism. Dave asks us to examine our own common racism.
“Dave, I love Margaret Cho. What do you think of Asian female comics who mimic their immigrant mothers?”
Dave was pained. “It is what is is. They promote stereotypes.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to watch a YouTube clip of Hop Sing with me?”
I enjoy Dave’s familiar exasperated laugh.
For the first 12 years of Dave’s academic life in Tucson, the only other Asians he ever saw at school were his two sisters. And the Asian caricatures he saw in broader culture who were either slavishly servile or wickedly sinister.
Dr. Seuss’ drawing of yellow Asians normalize and reinforce racism. I like to think that today, Theodore Geisel, a smart sensitive man, would be as embarrassed and ashamed of those drawings as I am of my childhood imitations of immigrants struggling to succeed.
I told the story of my half-Asian friend Chris. We were 6, playing outside his Tucson home with our toy soldiers. Chris’ Japanese mom came outside to the driveway where we were waging war, bearing Oreo cookies and tall tumblers of ice-cold milk. I had a big plastic Japanese toy soldier in my hand. With his grimace, his overbite and his sinister slits for eyes behind thick eyeglasses he looked like he stepped out of a World War II era “Popeye” cartoon.
I hid it from Mrs. White in the dirt behind me; where such things remain buried yet ever present.
Dave, the only son of the late, great Esther Tang, is now the patriarch of his family. He asked, “Are we really that old?”
We Tucsonans laughed, nodded and toasted each other with glorious shots of Bacanora mezcal.
