Mari Uyehara is a culture and politics writer. She was previously an editor at GQ, and her work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, and more.
Long before Trump, politicians on the country’s West Coast mobilized a white working-class base through violent hate of Chinese and Japanese immigrants.
The Page Act of 1875, outlawing “lewd and immoral” Chinese women, codified the bigotry directed at Asian women from their earliest migration to the US to today.