Soldiering through Empire. Simeon Man

on June 4, after which he received orders to fly to San Francisco. From there, he would report to the staff headquarters of the Twelfth Naval District and await transportation to Taiwan. On June 8, he proceeded as directed, and was cleared for departure three days later. When his plane departed, however, Hsuan was nowhere on board. An immediate investigation revealed that he had checked out of his hotel with all of his belongings. No foul play was suspected. Instead, naval authorities seemed to know without a question of doubt that Wei had gone AWOL. The investigation and endless confusions that followed were beyond anything that officials could have imagined at that moment.¹⁰¹

      A national manhunt ensued over the next few weeks, coordinated among Chinese authorities and U.S. Navy and immigration officials. Wei, meanwhile, had sought temporary refuge in Evanston, Illinois, where he enlisted the legal aid of K.C. Wu, the ousted governor of Taiwan Province known for his staunch criticisms of the Chinese Nationalist government. Two months prior, Wei had made contact with Wu, expressing his growing disillusionment with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime.¹⁰² On Wu’s advice, two weeks after his disappearance, Wei wrote a letter to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) office in Washington, D.C. that revealed his whereabouts. This move was a shrewd political strategy. In the letter, Wei invoked section 243(h) of the Immigration and Nationality (McCarran-Walter) Act of 1952 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. He requested political asylum and expressed his wish to stay in the United States for fear of persecution back home. The letter announced his defiance against Chiang’s government, at once removing his taint as a deserter by proclaiming himself an asylum seeker.¹⁰³

      On July 3 in Skokie, Illinois, U.S. naval authorities apprehended Wei and escorted him back to San Francisco, determined to return him to Taiwan immediately. But his request for asylum posed complications that the navy could not ignore. On July 7, while Wei remained in custody at the Twelfth Naval District, the State Department’s Director for Chinese Affairs, Walter P. McConaughy, convened a meeting with other state and navy officials to discuss possible actions toward his deportation. The meeting generated a sea of confusion about whether Wei should be deported through immigration or military channels, and concluded with no agreement. According to the state legal advisers, the navy was not “legally empowered” to remove him from the country, “no matter how politically desirable such action might be.” Joseph Chappell, the assistant director of the Visa Office, expressed the willingness of the INS to “look the other way” while the navy deported Wei. He admitted this had been done in past cases involving other attempted desertions by foreign trainees, but the state legal advisers could not verify this claim. They cited their own recollections that such cases “had been handled under regular deportation procedure.”¹⁰⁴

      This discussion revealed the fundamental newness of the problem Wei’s case presented. The uncertainty of whether Wei should be deported by the INS or the navy drove officials in endless circles. Hsuan Wei defied simple dichotomies—he was both a political problem and a military problem, yet there was no remedial means for handling both. The meeting ended with an agreement to consult more MDAP and INS officials.¹⁰⁵ That same day, the Chinese naval attaché drew a more definitive conclusion about Wei’s case: “Hsuan’s motivation was believed to be selfish rather than political,” he stated, and “if he succeeded in his effort to abandon his post of duty and start an easier life in this country, other defections of Chinese military officers in similar circumstances could be anticipated, with serious prejudice to Chinese military discipline and to the Mutual Defense Assistance Program.”¹⁰⁶

      Concerns about the possible ripple effects of Wei’s “selfish” act were not misguided. In the following years, as Wei battled his way through lengthy court hearings and appeals to remain in the United States—in the process capturing the media spotlight and winning legions of supporters around Chicago where he continued to reside—the State Department confronted a handful more cases involving Chinese military deserters who filed for asylum and whose cases shared many other similarities.¹⁰⁷

      Wei’s subversion defied easy categorization; he was neither a “Communist agent” like Yi Sa Min nor a subject who espoused “leftist inclinations” like Misao Kuwaye or Calvin Kim. Quite the contrary, Wei was an avowed “anti-Communist” who wanted nothing more than to see the communists driven out of his homeland. Nonetheless, he threatened the government because his decision to go AWOL and remain in the United States occurred at the precise junction of two overlapping forces: the U.S. militarization of Asia that depended on his labor as a military and cultural asset, and the anticommunist purge that deemed his “foreign” presence in the United States a threat to national security. That he was caught between these imperatives was not a coincidence. Instead, it revealed the contradiction at the heart of the U.S. empire in an age of decolonization: that the impulse to militarize and liberate Asia from communism reproduced and magnified the very problem of subversion it sought to contain.

      This contradiction is further embodied in the McCarran-Walter Act, the law at the center of Wei’s case that simultaneously empowered his claim to remain in the United States and served as the state’s mechanism for his removal. Passed at the height of the U.S. anticommunist crusade, the McCarran-Walter Act rearticulated immigration reform as a cold war imperative, admitting “desirable” immigrant subjects through numerical quotas while administering new restrictions to exclude and expel “undesirable” aliens from U.S. borders. Although the act did not specify any provisions for admitting refugees, section 243(h) of the act stipulated that deportation might be withheld for any alien who faced physical persecution in his country of origin.¹⁰⁸ Reiterated in the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, the U.S. resolve to protect deportable aliens from persecution underscored the liberal anticommunist consensus that reaffirmed the United States’s belief in itself as a beacon of democracy. Asian military assets like Hsuan Wei exploited this legal-cultural loophole, reconstituting themselves as “political refugees.” In so doing, they not only deprived the Chinese government of “valuable human material … likely to contribute to the development and the welfare of Formosa,” as Francis E. Walter, the coauthor of the 1952 immigration law, put it, but they also subverted the boundary between “foreign” and “domestic” that was becoming increasingly important and difficult to pinpoint during this time.¹⁰⁹

      Wei had become an “illegal alien” at the end of his journey as a militarized subject, and this was not an anomaly. It was entirely logical within the broader U.S. project of policing the boundaries of “free Asia.” His transformation from a military asset into an immigration problem revealed the severe restrictions undergirding the terms of Asian inclusion into the U.S. transnational security state. He could be one or the other and nothing else; any deviation demanded swift reprisal and containment. Against these legal subjections, Wei nonetheless and remarkably carved a life for himself beyond what U.S. and Taiwanese officials had envisioned for him. In 1967, after a six-year hiatus from the media spotlight, the Chicago Tribune resurrected Hsuan Wei to public attention in response to one reader’s curiosity about his fate. A Tribune columnist discovered that Wei finally was granted permanent U.S. residence in the early 1960s, and at the time lived in Ithaca, New York, with his wife and son, and taught math at Ithaca College.¹¹⁰ His long elusion of authorities and ultimate legal victory had once again transformed his status. Now, Wei was a “good immigrant,” the kind who reaffirmed the domestic civil rights narrative of national inclusion and redemption.¹¹¹

      In the end, the failure of individuals like Hsuan Wei to live up to their promise did little to dislodge the racial logics that made Asians indispensable to the U.S. military in an age of decolonization. Against the anticolonial currents sweeping the decolonizing world, U.S. officials redoubled their claims of supporting postliberation freedom struggles in the name of supporting an Asia for Asians. Throughout Asia and the Pacific ordinary people had an immense role to play in bringing about this new reality, and the military was vital to the process. In 1954, the victory of Vietnamese nationalist forces over the French demanded renewed U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. The project of securing Asia for Asians in the 1950s, the next chapter shows, unfolded along the expanding circuits of U.S. militarism that connected the Philippines and South Vietnam. Within this space of the decolonizing Pacific, the U.S. state mobilized its former colonial subjects in an endeavor to bring lasting changes to South Vietnamese society and to secure South Vietnam for the