Despite arriving in smaller numbers than other ethnic groups in the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants to the United States were the central target of immigration restriction laws. Chinese laborers comprised the first and only demographic group to be denied entry to the United States based on ethnicity. In this chapter, I address the history of the Chinese in America, focusing on key economic issues and laws related to immigration. I then track the widely known literary trope of the “Heathen Chinee” through works of the 1870s and 1880s, highlighting how it directly mediated political and economic issues of the period, while also illustrating its shaping role in English-language writings by early Chinese immigrants Wong Chin Foo and Yan Phou Lee. The tension between these authors’ perspectives, I conclude, anticipates the later emergence of Asian American politics and the contemporary racialization of Asians as America’s “model minority.” Nevertheless, the anomalous circumstances of these two writers meant that they were not representative of most Chinese immigrants of the time.

Reconstruction legislators faced the uncomfortable yet broadly acknowledged fact that the U.S. Constitution had countenanced slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment set out to guarantee and secure civil freedom through the reassertion of the U.S. Constitution, yet its expansive possibilities proved short-lived. Anti-Chinese ideologues and nativists challenged birthright citizenship and advanced new legislation restricting legal entry into the United States. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the nation’s first raced immigration and naturalization ban, helped stabilize the meaning and value of citizenship as the federal judiciary began narrowing the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. By the end of the century, the Chinese Exclusion Acts and federal rulings on Chinese immigration cases completed the redefinition of the Asiatic as the categorically excluded. Among the earliest Asian American writers to publish in English, Wong Chin Foo and Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) produced a wide-ranging body of journalism and short fiction that addressed public anxieties over “contraband Chinese.” The criminalized “illegal immigrant” remains a ready foil for the citizen, shoring up fantasies of national belonging as our civil liberties face increasing erosion. The writers discussed in this chapter offer us a unique vantage on this conflicted and evolving history of U.S. citizenship.