Asian American Disability: A History and Its Archives

Ability has been central to Asian American history, as the notion has importantly shaped the "model minority" trope. A success story of Asian immigrants gaining upward mobility and socio-economic power in the United States by sheer perseverance and practiced efficiency, the trope has been used as a wedge against other racialized minorities—Black Americans in particular—cast as failing to succeed.1 Because of this divide and conquer ideology, perpetuated by white supremacy and anti-Blackness, disability has been strikingly invisible in both Asian American history and historiography. Asian American literature is rife with stories of mental and physical disability, not surprisingly so given war, mass death, family separation, and diaspora fundamental to Asian American history throughout the twentieth century.2 Early statistics from medical facilities and social service agencies in the 1970s and 1980s, too, indicate high risks and rates of disability among Asian Americans, particularly more severe forms of mental illness.3 And yet, the history of Asian American disability, arguably a mirror image of the model minority trope, has been poorly substantiated by historical records and inquiries alike.4In this article, I articulate reasons for this paucity, a methodology of finding sources, and why it is necessary to tell a range of disability histories of the immigrant community that has been long mischaracterized as excessively able.5 In so doing, I aim to reveal more than what has been hidden from history: Asian American disability. Drawing on the scholarship on disability, archives, Black studies, and Asian American Pacific Islander studies, I delineate historically specific ways in which Asian American experiences of disability have been made invisible. Building on a few examples of Asian American disability histories that I have found in unexpected places, I show how ableism, as much as racism, has shaped the history of Asian immigrants in America and their archives. Making these histories more tangible is to begin to dismantle the ableism—a belief in non-disabled individuals as a social norm, against which disabled individuals always measure as inferior—that has underpinned US perpetuation of violence, war, and diaspora vis-à-vis Asians who have been deemed less able than Americans in colonial and postcolonial contexts.Writing about colonial archives, Ann Laura Stoler argues the need for "the analytic shift from the high-gloss print of history writ-large to the space of its production, the darkroom negative" of history. Embedded in historical records produced by colonial authorities, Stoler contends, experiences of those subjugated by the authorities—voices that rarely make unfiltered entry into archives—might help us "trace disturbances in the colonial order of things . . . [and its] potential dissent and current distress."6 I wish to make a similar turn toward Asian American disability, provoked by the difficulty of locating it in virtually all kinds of archives—national, university, and community. What if the reward of finding Asian American disability in moments of archive-making is to illuminate a kind of "dissent" and "distress" produced by US state violence? Given that many Asians are in America as the result of US colonialism and the nation's involvement in the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, it is plausible that this "analytic shift" facilitates an attempt to conceptualize an Asian American archive of disability. This archive might barely seem to exist. By thinking of it as a collection of historical "negatives," which produced and structured more readily tangible "positives" in archives, however, we might discover meaningful disturbances that erupted in the US imperial order.7My exploration of the Asian American disability archive does not reproduce or reiterate stories of major "multicultural loss" and "loss of [historical] continuity" frequently associated with Asian American immigrants.8 Derived from the loss of kinship, language, and homeland common among Asian Americans, these stories make frequent appearances in Asian American archives, making Asians in America seem psychosocially deficient. Not only has this dynamism nurtured the essentialist notion that their homeland is too disabled to become independent of US influence, as Dorothy Fujita-Rony argues, the dynamism has also obscured the "ongoing . . . US empire and militarism" that has rendered "Asian American archives themselves . . . militarized constructs" from the moments of their formation.9 As a result, archival records appear to present Asian American experiences of loss as challenges that individuals are expected, and able, to overcome, presumably thanks to the abundant opportunities for self-improvement in the United States. Seldom, if ever, are histories of Asian American disability seen as indicators of US structural failure, which requires more than reactive remedies such as medical treatment and social services. Consequently, Asians as model immigrants of America, not Asian American experiences of disability, have come to the fore.Keeping eyes toward ruptures in the ableist structure of US dominance in the Asia-Pacific, instead of individual deficiencies among Asian American immigrants waiting to be remedied in the land of opportunity, my articulation of the Asian American disability archive also relies on scholarship that points to the intersection of race and ability. Writing about Black women with disability, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah and Anna Mollow argue how difficult it is "for black women to be seen as . . . emotionally complex" beings fully capable of suffering from psychological illnesses.10 This difficulty arises because "emotional hardship is supposed to be built into the structure of [Black women's] lives," rendering them as naturally equipped with a "birthright to strength."11 There is much in Danquah and Mollow's articulation that is applicable to Asians in America. Historically, Asian Americans have been seen as emotionless or emotionally inscrutable. As Yoonmee Chang notes, disabled bodies of Asian Americans are often overshadowed by the social salience of their racial differences, as if a racial minority cannot have non-racial identity, such as an identity as a person with disability.12 These critiques of the invisibility of disability among the racially minoritized, I argue, help us respond to disability scholar Douglas C. Baynton's concern that historians of immigration, "with their attention confined to ethnic stereotypes," have largely left unchallenged the notion that physical or mental disabilities "might legitimately disqualify one for [immigration]."13 Although I do not argue that this critique applies to immigration historians generally, I nonetheless see the merit of reclaiming disability as part of Asian American history in light of Baynton's critique. Given the ableist immigration policies stipulated by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965—which offered preference to immigrants equipped with professional or financial assets14—Asian American archives seem structured with an assumption that disabilities do not exist, are already cured, or are about to be. This structure has not only perpetuated US ableism but also obscured experiences of the racially minoritized living with disabilities.Although the Asian American disability archive that I explore here might still be under construction, it is important to affirm that immigrants with disabilities did enter the United States and continued to live with disabilities both before and after 1965. It is useful, perhaps necessary, then, to consider what "critical fabulation" of absent experiences might look like in the context of existing Asian American archives. While Saidiya Hartman proposes this concept out of dire necessity—the archives of Atlantic slavery severely lack voices of enslaved people—I seek the possibility of making a productive use of fabulation by positioning Asian American literature in a continuum with Asian American archives.15 Using an oral history that is likely, though not certainly, related to Asian American disability, I aim "to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling" in order to rethink archives and their relationship to other historical and cultural constructs.16 After mapping a logic of the continuum between archives and literature in the first section, I offer in the second section a composite analysis of literary narratives and historical records that substantiates the logic. Here, I use records clearly related to disability, which makes them appear a reliable source of historical analysis. Then, I propose a new interpretation of a peculiar gap in historical statistics—a relatively small number of Asian Americans who suffered from milder forms of mental illness—using the oral history that seems less reliable as a historical record because of its ambiguous relationship to disability. Nonetheless, as I will show, finding meanings in this gap, using critical fabulation, is a step toward demystifying the model minority trope, as well as rethinking archives and archival practices. This, in turn, urges us to see the apparent lack of disability among Asian immigrants as a result, rather than a cause, of US ableism and its deep connections to US imperialism.First, I would like to state the obvious: disability does exist among Asian Americans. Disability has been deeply entwined with lives of Asian Americans, both those who came before and after the 1965 immigration reform. In the earlier era, for which historical records are especially scarce, Asian American literature fills the void. Going beyond a small number of (often fragmentary) historical records of injuries or illnesses explored by scholars,17 which suggest that these conditions likely caused a person what we would call "disability" today, literary work about Asian Americans often presents richly autobiographical or semi-autobiographical narratives of disability in their daily lives. The foundational work America Is in the Heart (1946) by Carlos Bulosan (1913–1956) is a case in point. Perhaps the best known Filipino American author, Bulosan suffered from multiple disabilities. One of his legs was two inches shorter than the other, forcing him to walk with difficulty. A few years after he migrated to the United States, Bulosan was hospitalized in 1934 with tuberculosis, which led to his premature death.18 John Okada, in another seminal Asian American novel, No-No Boy (1957), told poignant stories of disability through one of the protagonists, Kenji Kanno. Although the novel is not autobiographical and does not clearly define Kenji's condition as a disability—understandably so given the relative scarcity of the word's usage in the United States before the rise of the disability rights movement in the 1960s19—Kenji's amputated, slowly rotting leg clearly serves as "narrative prosthetics."20 In the postwar United States, where disabled veterans became socially salient, Okada made Kenji's disability a literary device to tell stories of national disloyalty, betrayal, and racism.21The abundance of disability in Asian American literature continued into the post–1965 era. Ved Mehta's memoir Sound Shadows of the New World (1986) revealed the experience of the author himself as a boy, born and raised in India and sent alone to the Arkansas School for the Blind at the age of fifteen. His blindness is so closely intertwined with his encounter with a new culture that any of its elements—be it racism, codes of behavior, or Boy's Club—also become experiences of a person with disability.22 Turning our eyes toward more contemporary times, we find in Krys Lee's Drifting House (2012) stories of refugees from Korea self-inflicting injuries at key moments of the narrative. Searching for her estranged daughter in California, a Korean mother reveals her desire to be violently hit, sometimes to satisfy her sexual urges, other times to "ease all grief" and bring the world "to predictable pinpoints of pain." This story of her "wounded body"23 echoes uncontrollable rages of the father of the nameless protagonist, a girl-refugee from Vietnam, told in lê thi diem thúy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003). Upon learning of a family death, he throws a "fish tank out the front door" of his apartment and "clenche[s] his hands into tight fists and punche[s] the walls" while his daughter watches him bleed. The girl herself suffers from what one critic identifies as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and experiences delusions and social withdrawals.24 Regardless of whether the protagonist actually suffered from the medically diagnosed condition, her day-to-day experiences are evidently shaped by ongoing realities of loss, dislocation, and family disintegration in the United States.In my reading, none of these stories are about "multicultural loss" or "loss of [historical] continuity" that mark Asian Americans as psychosocially deficient, people fundamentally in need of repair to become socially functional. To be sure, familial and communal losses are deeply felt by the protagonists, disruptions and discontinuities strongly coloring their cross-national journeys. And yet, the protagonists face these obstacles fully and with care. I see their reactions to losses, which often take the form of physical and mental disturbances, as expected and firmly situated in meanings of disability. What is more ordinary than a person responding to the deaths of their loved ones, followed by a disintegration of the family across national borders, with disturbed acts or emotions? Would it be healthy or healthier to show no disturbances? Before we place a medical or social diagnosis on diasporic immigrants, it is important to imagine how probable, even necessary, their expressed reactions are.25 Certainly, these immigrants must have resources if and when they need them for healing. They should also be empowered to define healing. Equally important, we must also ask what structural deficiencies have caused them disturbances and what meanings have been generated by immigrant lives with disabilities, including those that never healed. Regardless of whether authors specifically refer to any immigrants as people living with disability, Asian American literature is an abounding source of relevant life experiences. Many, if not all, narratives flow without an end point of being repaired or healed mentally, physically, or socially.These stories of disability are much more muted in historical records. So far, I have been using the term "disability" broadly, to include any sustained disturbances in acts or emotions that make a person appear not fully functional or healthy in an ableist society. I continue to use the same definition in my search for historical records on Asian American disability.26 Prior to 1965, Asian immigrants were allowed to enter the United States based on restrictive national quotas. Until the McCarran-Walter Act opened the US gate to Asia in 1952, Asians had been variously banned or severely restricted from entering America. Although the quotas between 1952 and 1965 permitted only about one to two hundred immigrants per Asian country annually, they were deemed a liberal policy that promoted America's image as a democratic, racism-free nation.27 The resultant small number of Asian Americans justified state authorities' neglect. One striking example of this neglect is found in the Kenneth Hahn papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Although California was (and still is) home to the largest Asian American population in the United States, the official statistics of mental illness and rehabilitation did not include "Orientals" as a subcategory until the late 1960s.28 They were combined with "Others," making the number of disabilities among Asian Americans literally invisible. As then–Los Angeles County Supervisor Hahn noted, "black and brown community" members were overrepresented among the mentally sick, while Asian Americans were deemed not willing to pursue medical treatment. Their "cultural orientation" made them "fear" government facilities; they are more likely than others to "self-blame."29 These blatant stereotypes, as well as the statistical lacunae, have made it nearly impossible for historians to find records of Asian American disability before 1965. Surely, there were Asian American individuals living with disability. But they failed to show up in archives except on the peripheries—by which I mean that Hahn papers do refer to Asian American patients anecdotally30—and not disaggregated.After 1965, when Asians began to arrive in great numbers, the silence around disability in Asian American archives persisted. In the early 1970s, state and local authorities finally began to recognize that Asians are here, and the number of people with disability may be large. The influx of war refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia exacerbated the problem. Governmental documents reveal officials' awareness of how these refugees were likely to need considerable mental health care,31 although these same documents are nearly silent about refugee experiences. US-born offspring of pre-1965 Asian immigrants took notice of this situation, making it one of their priorities in the Asian American Movement throughout the 1970s to create agencies and facilities more attuned to community needs. These younger Asian Americans' activism helped establish community healthcare centers staffed with multi-lingual physicians, as well as social agencies that specifically catered to immigrant users.32 These facilities' records could have made it possible to finally chip away the silence around disability. I have looked at the papers of these healthcare centers at both the Huntington Library and the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. Following in the steps of scholars of disability such as Anita Ghai and Therí A. Pickens, who critique the medicalization of disability,33 I expanded my search beyond medical facilities by examining papers of social agencies such as the Japanese American Social Services, Japanese American Help for the Aging, and Asian & Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS between the 1970s and 2010s. Although these papers were useful for understanding institutional or organizational histories, they were unable to help me fully understand Asian American experiences of disability. Chronically underfunded, these community-based facilities did not have the capacity to keep detailed records of their clients, let alone maintain them long-term. Moreover, many of these records were off-limits due to privacy concerns and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance. Given how the majority of Asian American patients or recipients of social services were post–1965 immigrants, it was possible as of 2021 to access their records only within a narrow window between 1965 and 1971.The archival silence stands in sharp contrast to eloquent literary story-telling. It seems not only that Asian American literature speaks for what is missing from the archives, but also that fictional narratives flourish because official records are critically lacking. The absence of historical documents sparks alternative ways of remembering—"loss gives rise to longing"34—placing history and story in a continuum. Stories may even be "a form of compensation"35 for archival "positives" that do not exist. This is not necessarily unique to the history of Asian American disability, but it is different from histories of other minoritized groups of whom archival records and literary narratives might be more evenly balanced—white women or white LGBTQIA2S+ people in the latter half of the twentieth century, for instance. Multiple suppressions that come from being persons of color and immigrants, as well as living with disability, certainly take a toll.36 Moreover, as the Hahn papers suggest, Asian American disability has been less likely to be documented than disability among other people of color such as Black, Latinx, and Indigenous Americans because Asian Americans historically have had less contact with medical and social agencies. To be sure, the immigration restrictions have been a hallmark of US history affecting all immigrants. And yet, the small number of Asian Americans with disability who left their traces in historical documents has made their experiences particularly difficult to locate in governmental and organizational documents, including records of the groups specifically serving Asian American communities. This means that not only state archives, but also university and community archives might offer only limited sources about Asian American disability. Despite archivists' best intentions, the gap between their institutions and Asian Americans whose voices they seek to capture has not been easily closed. Writing about the Vietnam War Center and Archive in Lubbock, Texas, Long T. Bui notes how "the full inclusion of America's Vietnamese allies is challenged by the dearth of personal materials" from Vietnamese Americans who originated from South Vietnam.37 This is the same group of people that some Asian American community healthcare clinics sought to serve but did not leave many traces of. In this light, it becomes a necessity for historians to look for personal and family papers, in which experiences of disability might not be demarcated as such but nonetheless are present.Can literary production assist this particular mode of archival quest? Should it? Historians have tip-toed around the relationship between history and fiction at the same time as being fascinated by it. Although it has become increasingly acceptable to use fictional writing in history classrooms, literature is still distinguished in historical research from supposedly more fact-infused historical documents. Both history and story create "a vast tapestry" from "disparate threads" to narrate a time and place previously unseen. And yet, historians are also quick to say that fiction tells the "truth using nothing but lies."38 Unlike fiction, history remains faithful to archives, a source of certainty. Still, we recognize a kind of fictional history or historical fiction that "blur[s] the line" between the genres.39 Are Asian American stories of disability in this gray area? Certainly, many of them are semi-autobiographical, if not outright autobiographical. While individual specifics may be imagined, they may reveal family and community memories, sometimes even histories.Instead of rejecting them altogether, then, I pursue a possibility of finding in Asian American fictional stories moments of "longing" for remembering, which nonetheless did not materialize in archives. Literature is a map for archival "negatives," which in turn may illuminate disruptions in the ableist structure of ongoing US imperialism. If Asian American literature frequently illustrates lives with disability in dialogues between parents and children, I would seek family letters exchanged intergenerationally in my archival quest. If fictional stories are particularly revealing of disability in woman-to-women relations, I would look for oral history records of Asian American women conducted by women community members. Then, I would discuss how these sources were made invisible in archives-making and -organizing.Here, I am merely stating my methodology more explicitly than usual; in all my previous historical writing, I must have chosen a thread of history I tell based on my particular sets of interests, spurred by things I know from Asian American archives. Nonetheless, it is important to clearly mark my way into archives. This is not only for others to assess how "fabulations" might be put in conversation with "facts" and how "lies" can productively upset assumed authenticity and authority of archives.40 This is also for us to expand narratives that frame and flow into archiving and those that arise from it, so as to tell histories that might have been if ableism had not erased them. Asians can be ill or disabled, and they die as much as others. And yet, as James Kyung-Jin Lee observes, it seems "as if Asian Americans have started dying only recently, in large part because they've long been expected to be harbingers of nothing less than the good American life."41 Asian American people are not any more or less able than others if we read literary representations and archival materials dialogically. Instead, their lives with disabilities have been firmly part of US immigration history, refuting the nation's claim for its exceptional ability to enable its citizens.Saidiya Hartman observes how the history of slaves, like rainwater after a storm, "soon dries up and leaves behind no traces." The lack of historical trace is exacerbated by slaveowners' attempt to "eradicate the slaves' memories," driven by a view that slaves are "perpetual outcast[s], the coerced migrant foreigner[s]" who never belong.42 These observations strikingly resemble Eunjung Kim's argument that a culture can "exercise . . . force to erase differences for the putative betterment of the Other," meaning in her context that those with disability may be made invisible to benefit those without.43 Despite a vast distance separating Hartman's and Kim's respective subjects—Black enslaved people and Koreans with disability—both observations point to intentional erasure leading to archival paucity. Looking for archives of "outcasts," one notices that they do not seem to have a history. They only possess a longing for it, something that may be marked only by absence.Asian American literature has thrived in elucidating this absence, producing a rich body of narratives that rely on "articulate silence." Going against the West-centric notion that speech reveals while silence conceals, King-Kok Cheung has argued that silence can enable "soundless but alert and accurate knowing."44 Not surprisingly, then, moments of silence in Asian American literature often signal longing to know the unknown. Many of these moments find a way toward disability. In Hisaye Yamamoto's "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,"45 the central character, an aging Japanese American ballerina who maintains a strikingly physical beauty, is subject to unfriendly gossip by her fellow camp inmates. Although many words are spoken about her, Miss Sasagawara is confined to silence. When she speaks, "no one takes her allegation seriously; it is automatically dismissed as hysterics," leading to her hospitalization in a sanatorium. The narrator Kiku seems to be the only one not overtly hostile to the protagonist, although Kiku does not fully grasp the unfairness of the situation until she reads Miss Sasagawara's poems after the war's end. A delayed realization of the agony of madness is salient, for which Yamamoto nonetheless does not hold the camp community accountable. As Cheung points out, the "scandal-loving and finger-pointing community" is merely analogous to the "white majority, who allowed themselves to be swayed by prejudice and heresy into endorsing the imprisonment of an entire people."46 In this light, the protagonist's silence and, by extension, "madness," may be the "only appropriate response."47 Silence in Asian American literature, then, raises "skepticism about language and received knowledge and calls attention to their own fictionality."48Such generative skepticism is deepened by a critical reading of Joy Kogawa's Obasan,49 which tells many stories of disability with pronounced silence. Both parents of the protagonist Naomi Nakane suffer a fatal disability. For her father, tuberculosis gradually takes away "his rich baritone voice," a blow to the accomplished singer.50 Naomi's mother, whose disfigurement and death were caused by the Nagasaki atomic bombing in 1945, generates the longest-kept silence in the story. Naomi's uncle and aunt—Obasan—faithfully follow Naomi's mother's request to spare her child the truth. Although this concealment risks Naomi to be "cut off" from history and become "an amputee," silence also allows her to experience her mother's love as a shield that protects "what is hidden most deeply in the heart of the child."51 Silence, then, connects the mother and the child in "an intricate network of supportive female relationships."52Although this reading of Obasan certainly adds to Cheung's notion of "articulate silence," it is also noteworthy that the most tightly kept silence in the story is about the atomic bomb. In both Asian American history and historiography, Japanese American concentration camps are one of the most richly studied subjects. The history of Japanese Americans and Korean Americans who suffered the bomb, by contrast, has been severely understudied.53 This contrast is problematically predicated in Obasan, in which a politically minded Aunt Emily outspokenly critiques the injustice of mass incarceration. Obasan, the other aunt, keeps quiet. Her silence "soothes"; it is a form of "charity" and "forgiveness"; it gives "strength to endure."54 The constant need to care for others takes a toll. Obasan takes insufficient care of herself while serving others all the time. Her eyesight, speech, hearing all fail in old age.55 "Articulate silence" may represent a pronounced—perhaps exaggerated—care work in this context.Taking cues from the layered silence expounded by literature, I search for archival silence that turns paucity to wealth. One instance of such silence fell on me while I was producing an archive, that is, while I was taking an oral history from an Asian American survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing. Unlike many Asian American hibakusha whose families originated from Japan, this survivor, Tomiko Shōji, was born in the present-day Republic of China (Taiwan) in 1926 and came to Japan as a thirteen-year-old. She was injured by the US bo