Beyond the Family Album in Exclusion-Era Asian America
Photograph album of Frank Jue, untitled, 1915 – 1919, silver gelatin print, Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection, University of British Columbia, Rare Books and Special Collections, CC-PH-00748. Six sharply-dressed young Chinese American men in waistcoats and ties pose in a suburban Portland neighbourhood with wind instruments.
Even though it’s been several years since I last worked closely with the album of photographs amassed by Chinese American teenager Frank Jue between 1915 and 1919, I still find it astonishing to contemplate. (It can be viewed in its entirety here.) It challenges so many of the stories we’ve inherited and continue to tell about Chinese American life during the Exclusion era, and is (I think) just lots of (queer) fun to boot. I write about Jue — a teenage saxophonist who went on to a career as a vaudeville singer in the 1920s and ‘30s — in “Intimacy Out of Doors,” an essay in Tanya Sheehan’s edited volume Photography and Migration. Originally published June 2018.