A telling incident occurred in April 2001, when a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea, apparently flying too close to an American navy spy plane on a routine U.S. surveillance mission, caused the American pilot to take sudden evasive action, resulting in a midair collision. The Chinese pilot was killed and the Chinese government detained the twenty-four American crew members of the spy plane after they made an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. After eleven days of tense negotiations and a carefully worded apology from the United States, the PRC released the crew, but by that time the Chinese American community had suffered a fierce backlash from their fellow Americans. Patrick Oliphant, a Pulitzer Prize—winning cartoonist, published a shocking caricature of a Chinese man, complete with buck teeth and thick glasses, serving cat gizzards. The National Review complained that the Chinese “put MSG in everything” and claimed, “if my dog were a member of the American crew Jiang Zemin would have eaten him by now.”

During the spy plane crisis, recalls Theresa Ma, a Chinese American chemist in Lincoln, Nebraska, a neighbor approached her and asked, “Why don’t you go to China to bring our men home?” This neighbor could not figure out the difference between Chinese Americans and Chinese foreign nationals—despite the fact that many Chinese Americans were U.S. citizens whose families had lived here for generations.

(Chang 395)