Gatekeeping in the Promised Land : STRANGERS FROM A DIFFERENT SHORE: A History of Asian Americans <i> by Ronald Takaki (Little, Brown: $22.95; 512 pp.; 0-316-83109-3) </i>

On a February morning in 1988, in a large, dingy chamber of the federal District Court House in Manhattan, a clerk handed me my Certificate of Naturalization listing my height, weight, color of eyes (“brown”), hair (“black”) and complexion (“medium”), then a judge led me and more than 150 other petitioners (most of whom seemed to be of “medium” or “dark” complexion) through the pledge of allegiance and pronounced us legitimate Americans. For us, the new citizens, this was a moment of intense emotions. Strangers hugged and kissed. For America, too, this was proof that the principles of democracy and equal rights had triumphed. There had been a time not that long ago in America’s immigration history when I, educated, law-abiding, eager to be American, would have been denied citizenship simply because of my “medium” complexion.

For Americans and Canadians of Asian extraction, however, the battle for acceptance doesn’t stop with winning the right to become citizens. I became painfully aware of how the New World marginalizes its Asian-looking citizens when I was co-authoring a book on the 1985 terrorist-bombing of an Air India jet en route from Canada to India. Three hundred and twenty-nine people died when AI Flight 182 exploded in mid-air; in terms of body count, that terrorist incident remains the world’s bloodiest. Ninety percent of the victims were Canadian citizens. But because those citizens were Canadians “of Indian origin,” a senior External Affairs official explained to me, the Canadian government perceived them as being Indian rather than Canadian, and Canada’s prime minister, in a rush of mis-channeled sympathy, sent a cable of condolence to India’s prime minister.

It is this Asian-American, 150-year-long, two-phase fight for legal and psychological acceptance that Ronald Takaki, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, skillfully uncovers and forcefully records in “Strangers From a Different Shore,” his fifth book on American minorities.

Takaki’s aim is to correct the Euro-centric tilt favored by the majority of American social historians, to render visible Asians’ contributions to the making of America, and to firmly establish the pluralism of American culture. His scope is vast: He chronicles the very distinctive immigration odysseys of the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Filipinos, the Asian Indians, the Vietnamese, the Hmong. And his method is extraordinary, seaming together meticulous scholarship, impassioned analysis, popular culture and personal memoir. The result is a compelling and timely document about America’s changing responses to the threat of de-Europeanization.

It was to California of the 1850s, staggeringly underpopulated and glittery with gold dust, that the first Asian immigrants--Chinese prospectors--rushed. These were gutsy, hard-working pioneers who experienced the push/pull syndrome familiar to most immigrants: as with their European counterparts, the Chinese were “pushed” out of their homeland by poverty, and “pulled” in to America by promises of self-improvement. And, at least at first, the Chinese were accepted. In Jan., 1852, Gov. John McDougal of California described the newcomers as “one of the most worthy classes of our newly adopted citizens--to whom the climate and the character of these lands are peculiarly suited.” Theirs should have been a happy story.

What the Chinese soon stumbled against however, Takaki argues, was the violent panic of white labor unions. Racism was a tool that labor leaders and savvy politicians exploited to break the power of white capitalists who employed the cheap and diligent Asian work force as “scabs.” Labor unions successfully fed the public’s fears about miscegenation and de-Europeanization, and created a backlash against the Asian immigrants.

Takaki is particularly dogged in tracking the changes in public perception and official rhetoric. The “worthy” adoptees suddenly became the “servile” hordes crowding America’s shores, men too “dissimilar from ourselves in customs, language and education” to be assimilated into the Founding Fathers’ ideal of a homogenously white and Christian sovereign state. Even a respectable newspaper such as the New York Times labeled the Chinese “a population befouled with all the social vices . . . with heathenish souls and heathenish propensities . . .”, the enemy of the American Constitution.

America needed Asian labor, but white Americans didn’t want Asian compatriots. The All-American solution? Pass new race-related laws that reduce the Asian entrant to a low-waged transient, permanently ineligible for citizenship; reinforce the vicious myth that Asians are “sojourners,” only Europeans are immigrants.

To be deprived of citizenship is to be rendered invisible, mute, marginal. The Asians were both too “invisible” and too “visible” a minority. This is the paradox against which Takaki rightly rages.

“Strangers” provides fuller information on the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino groups than on South Asians and recent political refugees. But it does include a succinct and astute chapter on America’s strategies for keeping out Indians, Asia’s “Caucasian” immigrants.

Takaki is at his best when he quickens scholarship with tableaux of immigrant life. With Chinese railroad workers, we shiver through the rough winter of 1866. “The snow drifts, over sixty feet in height, covered construction operations. The Chinese workers lived and worked in tunnels under the snow, with shafts to give them air and lanterns to light the way. Snow slides occasionally buried camps and crews; in the spring, workers found the thawing corpses, still upright, their cold hands gripping shovels and picks and their mouths twisted in frozen terror.”

And Takaki is very affecting when he empowers the long-silenced or the inarticulate with voice. A Japanese-American woman interned during World War II recalls, “I felt wonderful the day I left camp. We took a bus to the railroad siding and then stopped somewhere to transfer, and I went in and bought a Coke, a nickel Coke. It wasn’t the Coke, but what it represented--that I was free to buy it, that feeling was so intense.” A Hmong hog farmer in California explains: “When you pull a plant out of the ground without any soil around its roots--soil from where it was grown--and transplant it, the plant will have trouble surviving.”

Takaki startles when he reminds us repeatedly that it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an American icon, who “issued Executive Order 9066, which targeted Japanese Americans for special persecution and deprived them of their rights of due process and equal protection of the law.” F.D.R. did not incarcerate German and Italian immigrants.

The heroic white American in this narrative is the late Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy who, heady with Civil Rights victories, told the Congress in 1964: “ ‘Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on national origins. Yet, this system is still the foundation of our immigration law,’ ” and who, in spite of protests from exclusionist groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, negotiated new legislation that fractured forever America’s Euro-centric self-image.

The attack on “the Model Minority” myth is magnificent. But one wishes that Takaki had allowed himself a longer discussion of the post-1965 wave of Asian immigrants, especially of the new class structures and the new gender and generational relations evolving within the immigrant communities. Perhaps that will be the subject of this prolific author’s next work.

“Strangers” is an important book. Given the documented flight of Anglos from Southern California in the ‘80s and the increasinly reactionary stance of the urban white middle class, this book should be required reading on campuses.