CATALOGING LIMINALITY

Battle of Mactan by Manuel Pañares

Chinese Humiliation Parade, May 10, 1938. New York City. Photographer: Peter Stackpole for LIFE Magazine.

Twelve thousand Chinese Americans from all parts of New York City, Newark, Jersey City, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Washington D.C. closed their laundries and other businesses to take part in one of the largest demonstrations staged in the USA, observation China’s ‘National Humiliation Day,’ on which to pause and recall Japan’s humiliating Twenty-One Demands on China of May 9, 1915. They marched from Mott Street in Chinatown through lower Manhattan. 

A group of a hundred smiling young Chinese women in cheongsam carried a 45 x 75-feet Nationalist Chinese flag. It was reported that although no appeal was made for funds, spectators threw coins and even dollar bills onto the flag, and this appears to have been the prototype for future fundraising parades in Chinese American communities.

More info:  Kevin Scott Wong's Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War (2009)

615. John Lautner /// Stevens House /// Malibu, California, USA /// 1968

Female red guard soldiers in the finnish civil war 1918