In 1885, San Francisco built the “Oriental School,” an educational institution for Chinese, Japanese and Korean students. A 1906 policy mandating the segregation was passed by the city.
Today, San Francisco school board will formally repeal the century-old policy in a symbolic vote (indeed — Ed Lee, San Francisco’s mayor, is Chinese American. Myong Leigh, the interim superintendent of the city’s public schools, is Korean American), according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The late 1800s saw the height of anti-Chinese sentiment; the Chinese Exclusion Act had emerged just three years prior. The Chinatown school represented the “otherness” of the young student body, many of them American-born sons and daughters of immigrants.
Though Japanese students were excluded from the mandate via an agreement made between President Theodore Roosevelt and the Japanese government in 1907, Chinese and Korean students remained.
“There’s no hiding from the past,” Ken Maley, a historian and documentarian, told the Chronicle. “You have to know where you’ve been to know where you are.”
UCLA Professor Russell C. Leong, writing for Amerasia Journal in 2005, wrote about his own experience attending the school in an exploration of Orientalism:
As an Asian child growing up in the segregated America of the 1950s, I did not know or speak the words “Oriental,” or “Orientalism,” “Third World,” or “Afro-American” or “Asian American” or “Arab American.” I merely knew and called myself tong yan, or “Tang person” in the Cantonese dialect; everyone else was simply “American.”
