MOCA TALKS with Beth Lew-Williams
John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law
November 6, 2025, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
$10 General Admission | $5 Student & Senior | Free for MOCA Members
The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) cordially invites you to a special conversation with Beth Lew-Williams, Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University, on her new book John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law.
In this revelatory work, Prof. Lew-Williams uncovers how everyday life for Chinese residents across the American West was shaped by thousands of state and local regulations enacted between the 1850s and the early twentieth century, decades before federal exclusion sealed the border. Often recorded in official documents under generic names like “John Doe Chinaman” or “Mary Chinaman,” Chinese immigrants and their American-born families navigated a dense web of laws governing labor, education, health care, property, business, and family life.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Prof. Lew-Williams reveals how these rules were enforced not only by police and tax collectors but also by teachers, missionaries, and neighbors, and how Chinese communities met these constraints with remarkable resourcefulness from challenging discriminatory taxes in court, asserting their political rights, and adapting to a hostile legal landscape. In this program, Prof. Lew-Williams will explore what this legal architecture reveals about race, belonging, and citizenship, and how these histories continue to resonate in America today.
MOCA thanks Barclay Damon LLP, Distinguished Sponsor for this presentation of MOCA TALKS.
About Beth Lew-Williams
Beth Lew-Williams is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018) and John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press, 2025). Lew-Williams earned her A.B. from Brown University and Ph.D. in History from Stanford University. She is a 2025 recipient of the Dan David Prize and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. At Princeton, her teaching was recognized by the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award.
About John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law
A revelatory history of the laws that conditioned the everyday lives of Chinese people in the American West—and of those who negotiated, circumvented, and resisted discrimination.
Legal discrimination against Chinese people in the United States began in 1852, when California passed a tax on foreign gold miners that was explicitly designed to exploit Chinese labor. Over the next seventy years, officials in California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states instituted more than five thousand laws that marginalized and controlled their Chinese residents. Long before the Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese immigration, these laws constrained the activities and opportunities of Chinese people already living in the United States.
In this eye-opening account, Beth Lew-Williams describes a legal architecture redolent of Jim Crow but tailored specifically to people often referred to only as “John Doe Chinaman” or “Mary Chinaman” in official records. Enforced by police and tax collectors, but also by schoolteachers, missionaries, and neighbors, these laws granted the Chinese only limited access to American society, falling far short of equality or belonging. Cementing stereotypes of Chinese residents as criminals, invaders, and predators, they regulated everything from healthcare to education, property ownership, business formation, and kinship customs. Yet in the face of these limitations, Chinese communities reacted resourcefully. Many fought, evaded, and manipulated these laws, finding ways to maintain their prohibited traditions, resist unfair treatment in court, and insist on their political rights.
Drawing on dozens of archives across the US West, John Doe Chinaman reveals the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion and tells the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life.
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