Book Review: Orientals

One of the most bizarre and interesting aspects of Robert G. Lee’s Orientals is his demonstration that race, such as it is, is very clearly a social construction (though no less significant for that). In chapter 5, he cites an article from Life magazine: “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” a two page article I was able to find on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign website:



Lee observes that:

Although the pictures are the same size and the proportions of facial features virtually identical, the notes tell a vastly different story. The Chinese, Life told its readers, has “parchment yellow complexion, more frequent epicanthic fold, higher bridge, never has rosy cheeks, lighter facial bones, longer narrower face and scant beard.” Tojo, “representative of the Japanese people as whole…betrays aboriginal antecedents, has an earthy yellow complexion, less frequent epicanthic fold, flatter nose, sometimes rosy cheeks, heavy beard, broader shorter face and massive cheek and jawbone.” (page 147)

The point Lee makes in the first sentence-that the facial features are virtually identical-is particularly interesting, and is bore-out by earlier chapters, in which he mentions that the United States essentially declared that race is a matter of neither ancestry nor actual color. This particular magazine feature comes a scant two decades after a man who could plausibly prove his Aryan ancestry had his citizenship revoked because “racial standards,” as Lee says, “were contingent not on ethnology or linguistics, but on contemporary popular standards.” (143) That is to say, as Justice Sutherland intoned in judgment of the case: “the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today.” (143).

It seems perfectly clear, both from Lee’s analysis and the evidence he provides, that the immovable and insurmountable barrier of race-the “intrinsic” differences so very often referenced in films such as Broken Blossoms or The Cheat-were fluid, subjective and ultimately arbitrary. The law stated a “free white person” was eligible by law to immigrate to the United States. When applied, it meant those who, like Bhagat Thind, could present reasonable arguments for their descent from Aryan stock, were eligible. The irony of the inexact and ever-changing location of that boundary, and the court’s acknowledgement of it as something that they could not actually define-science, ethnology, color and behaviour all failed as methods of legally defining race and reserving privilege for the “free white person,” are readily apparent in the text. For a boundary so rabidly upheld, it remained (and remains) so ill-defined that the best delineation is ‘the ideology of “common” sense.’ (143)

Altogether, of the deluge of information and analysis, the presentation of the elastic boundary of race and its implementation over the period of history covered seems to be one of the strengths of Orientals; not only does it present the (grim) realities of race-related law, but also the bizarre ironies that shape the role of that law in practice.