Daily Inspiration Quote by Iris Chang

The first move here is disarming: Iris Chang starts with a scene of civic warmth, a mayoral welcome, “special ceremonies,” the kind of pageantry that signals belonging. Then she snaps the frame into focus with that clipped aside - “again this is when their colony was very small” - which reads less like a neutral detail than a warning label. The hospitality wasn’t a moral breakthrough; it was a demographic calculation.

Chang’s intent is to puncture the comforting myth that racism arrives fully formed. She’s showing how exclusion often begins as conditional acceptance: admiration for the “exotic,” politeness toward a group that poses no perceived threat, even pride in being “cosmopolitan” when the numbers are manageable. The subtext is brutally contemporary: tolerance is easiest when it costs nothing. Ceremony becomes a kind of PR, a way for the city to congratulate itself while keeping power relations intact.

Context matters. Early Chinese migration to California was tied to labor demand and the Gold Rush economy. San Francisco could afford to welcome a tiny community because it was useful, visible in a controllable way, and politically convenient. Chang’s emphasis on smallness foreshadows the pivot point American history keeps rehearsing: once the community grows - once workers organize, once neighborhoods expand, once presence becomes permanence - the welcome curdles into scapegoating and policy, culminating in violence, segregation, and the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The quote works because it makes “welcome” sound like a footnote to a future betrayal. The phrase “only a few” isn’t reassurance; it’s the tell.