From Coolies to Model Minority: Chinese in Post-World War II Oklahoma

This paper reviews the history of the Chinese in Oklahoma from the 1950s to 1970s, and provides insight into the lives of these immigrants by examining the transition of their ethnic communities, changes of cultural assimilation, and conflicts among the different groups.  It brings a different perspective, a Chinese American perspective, offering a Chinese recipe, on the larger issues such as trans-nationalism, racial relations, and multi-Culturalism in our state history. The growing diversity has become one of the greatest strengths of our state and underlay belief in a shared and integrated community.

This study consists of primary sources including census data, archival collections, and personal interviews.  The individual recollections are an important source of information and opinion for this work, which contains personal accounts as first-hand sources through reminiscences and oral histories.  Each interview paints the proverbial picture into a specific aspect of military experience.  The oral history is a vital source for historians of ethnic studies concerning Chinese immigrants.  The historians likely agree that oral data recently has become more readily used, not just for filling in factual gaps, but providing the main source used in discovering both the theme and framework of some specific topics.

The Chinese community building has some new characteristics in the post-WWII era.  It seems that the conventional “Melting Pot” or cultural assimilation theory does not explain the complexity of the Chinese cultural community in the mid-West as Frederick J. Turner says that the frontier experience should mix all the nationals together to forge an American nation.  The Chinese community maintains its own cultural identity and tradition.  But the second theory, or the cultural pluralism, the multi-cultural theory, seems not yet explaining the cultural changes in the Chinese American community.  They didn’t simply transplant their home culture from China to America.