Unfortunately, in this show, we then lose track of China until the 20th century. After being caricatured as the “yellow peril,” China became a welcome ally during the World War II and then regained yellow peril status after the Communists took over in 1949. The exhibition paints with overly broad strokes here (and gives no credence at all to concerns about Chinese espionage), but these political shifts affected the fortunes and opportunities of Chinese-Americans. The modern era of “normalization” is signified by two 1972 Ping-Pong paddles bearing the portraits of Richard M. Nixon and Mao Zedong, commemorating their diplomacy after the ice was broken by their countries’ table tennis matches. But what happened during this history to Chinese immigrants? From the 1850s to the 1870s, tens of thousands of Chinese mined for gold and silver and worked in the American West. According to an 1880 census, the residents of Deadwood (in what is now South Dakota) included 238 Chinese men and 15 Chinese women; among their number were cooks and miners but also a doctor, a land speculator and a barber. One in four miners during the 1860s was Chinese. And they were so successful that, in 1870, shipments of gold and silver to China were valued at $6 million.

But this success (there were 105,000 Chinese in the United States by 1880) was accompanied by hatred and anti-Chinese riots. An 1875 law required that any Chinese woman seeking to enter the country had to prove she was not a prostitute. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act: a law that limited Chinese immigration and was renewed in various forms until 1943, prohibiting entry to Chinese laborers while allowing students, teachers, merchants and diplomats.

We see an 1883 issue of a newspaper here, The Chinese American, whose name may have been the first time that term was ever used — in this case, as a provocation; its editor, Wong Chin Foo, defiantly opposed the new legislation. At the same time, lawsuits by Chinese-Americans began to attack discrimination and affirm citizenship rights.