Takaki Response

While reading Takaki, it surprised me how many people went to the U.S. with the intent of someday returning home. Even though most migrants were escaping poverty or oppressive regimes and hoping to make their fortunes in America, it was in order to take back those riches to their home countries. Many Asians—Chinese “men [who] thought they would be gone only temporarily”, Japanese “migrants [who] promised they would return to Japan,”, and Asian Indians who wanted “to make money and then return to the Punjab,”—moved to America with memories of their homelands fresh in their minds. I wondered why, if they were escaping such harsh conditions at home, they would ever consider leaving America where they were to make their fortunes later on. Reading about the cruel, slave-like conditions under which the Asian migrants worked and about the discrimination they faced upon their arrival only added to my wondering.

Through primary sources such as the poetry depicting their loneliness, however, I was better able to understand Takaki’s classification of Asian-Americans as “strangers,” and hypothesize why laborers were willing to take on such harsh working conditions. Asian migrants were displaced from their homes because of poverty and isolated by their ethnicity in America, and I think it is because of this alienation that they decided to remain in America: work was the only thing over which they had control, and money was the only tangible means of measuring how close they were to fulfilling their hopes.