Haley’s political career embodies the narrative of the Asian American model minority. This stereotype claims that Asian Americans have been able to overcome racism through cultural values like hard work and perseverance, and that their success proves that America is a colorblind meritocracy. This is a myth that ignores Asian Americans’ socioeconomic diversity, defends existing structures of inequality and has been used as a wedge between Asians and other people of color. Nonetheless, many Asian Americans and others continue to embrace it.
The first Asian American nominated for president — in fact, the first person of color to be nominated by a major party in the 20th century — also embraced the model minority image. Hiram Fong was a Republican Senator from Hawai’i who was nominated in 1964. Yet a closer look at his story shows just how much the GOP — and the political implications of the model minority myth — have changed in the last 50 years.
Fong’s life bridged two distinct periods in the history of American attitudes toward Asia and Asian Americans. He was born in Honolulu in 1906 to Sau Howe Fong and Lum Shee Fong, illiterate immigrants from southern China. The country’s first significant immigration restriction law, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, had just been extended indefinitely and expanded to U.S. territories like Hawai’i. It would culminate with the complete exclusion of all immigrants from Asia in the Immigration Act of 1924.
Fong grew up under the shadow of exclusion, racism and crushing poverty, deeply conscious of the significance that his individual success would have for the Chinese American community as a whole. He began working at age 4, picking algarroba beans to sell for cattle feed. He worked his way through school — with additional funds from Chinese American friends in Honolulu who “picked him to succeed” for their community — and eventually graduated from Harvard Law School in 1935. In 1938, he was elected to the territorial House of Representatives as a Republican, running on the theme of “local boy makes good.” His Horatio Alger story endeared him to voters, helping him net the second-highest number of votes in the district.
The Republican Party, which had a stranglehold on territory of Hawai’i, was controlled by the White men who dominated the islands’ plantation-based economy. Yet Fong immediately became known for his willingness to challenge the GOP leadership. Perhaps his most dramatic rejection of the party line was his cultivation of close ties with the powerful International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union, which gave him a significant crossover vote.