Performance anxiety: the tragedy of Asian success.

• Author: Lott, Jeremy
• Position: 'Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White' - Book Review

Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, by Frank H. Wu, New York: Basic Books, 399 pages, $26

IN 1999, CONGRESSIONAL Republicans and the Clinton administration revived the old diplomatic game known as "Who Lost China?" This round--"Who Lost Nuclear Weapon Secrets to China?"--was particularly nasty. Republicans whispered (when not saying openly) that the administration was guilty of treason for its lax treatment of official government secrets. They were not charging Clinton merely with gross incompetence. They alleged and insinuated that illegal campaign donations by Chinese nationals amounted to a quid pro quo, with the president taking money indirectly from the Chinese government and then looking the other way as secrets were passed along.

In response, Clinton and company played the race card, suggesting that Republicans were bigots for pointing out that the Democrats had been unusually chummy with various Asian-American communities and Asian business interests in the 1996 election cycle. But even as they insisted that they had done nothing wrong and that the Republicans were ogres for bringing it up, the Democrats launched a massive effort to staunch the scandal's flow. The Democratic National Committee called every donor it believed to be of Asian descent and demanded, in terms many found insulting, such details as their Social Security numbers, their places of employment, and copies of their credit reports. More than $3 million in donations were returned.

In the third chapter of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, Frank Wu explains that this episode marked "a turning point in [the] political empowerment" of Asian Americans. "We were transformed from invisible to infamous," he writes. He isn't kidding. The head of a later chapter quotes some stunning remarks from Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), then chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. On a Sunday morning talk show, Shelby stopped just short of invoking Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless: "We've got to remember the Chinese are everywhere, as far as our weapon systems, not only in our labs that make our nuclear weapons and development but also in the technology to deliver them. They're real. They're here. And probably in some ways, very crafty people."

Yellow is meant to be a call for a more accurate understanding of Asians and their future roles in American society; it seeks to "elevate" the racial discussion beyond its "formerly static terms." Those are promising goals, and Wu, a Chinese-American law professor at Howard University, sheds new light on many aspects of the Asian experience in the United States. But his actual policy proposals to address lingering aspects of discrimination are neither...