by Lisa See
In their grief, the family ignored the visit of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek’s wife, Soong Mei-ling, to the United States, where she campaigned for both war funds and the repeal of the exclusion laws. In Washington, D.C., she addressed Congress and met with President Roosevelt. On her way back to China, she stopped in Los Angeles. This visit highlighted years of work against the Japanese aggressor—the fund-raising of the New Life Movement, the Rice Bowl Campaign, the Seven-Seven Campaign (named for the 7/7/37 bombing of the Marco Polo Bridge in Peking), the outstanding sales in war bonds, and the $250,000 raised by the 1941 Moon Festival. All in all, the Chinese in Los Angeles had raised more money than had the larger Chinatowns of either New York or San Francisco. Madame Chiang Kai-shek did her best to honor those efforts.
On March 31, 1943, she appeared at the Hollywood Bowl, where, author Garding Liu noted, humanity hung to the hillsides like bees swarming in a tree. Madame Chiang was a Wellesley graduate and the most sophisticated woman the four thousand Chinese who attended could ever remember seeing. She appeared hatless before the throng, and her black hair glistened in the sun. Her ears were pierced with silver buttons. She wore a long black satin cheongsam lined in pale blue. (Though hardly as important as fund-raising or the campaign for repeal, Madame Chiang’s visit started a fad among the young Chinese women of the community; for the first time, on special occasions they proudly donned Chinese dresses modernized to show the arm and accentuate the figure.)
Like the Chinese in the audience, Madame Chiang also wore pins on her lapel: one was the silver wings of the Chinese air force; the other was a ribbon showing the national colors of red, white, and blue. After the speech, Mayor Fletcher Bowron escorted her to a parade in her honor that passed along Macy Street in Chinatown. Later the Chinese Benevolent Association received her. These activities—along with her beauty, her elegance, her grace, her education—were dutifully followed in the press and, perhaps, swayed the readership of the country into believing that, indeed, the Chinese race was not so bad after all.
In a message to Congress, President Roosevelt called exclusion a “historic mistake.” On December 17, 1943, Roosevelt signed the Magnuson Act, repealing the old exclusion laws and allowing Chinese to be naturalized. Actor Keye Luke, who had earned a reputation as Charlie Chan’s Number One Son, announced that he wanted to be the first Chinese to be naturalized. However, on the day Luke had to appear in court, he was doing a picture with Wallace Beery, and a Chinese doctor became the first to be naturalized. Amused by this, newspaper columnist Walter Winchell carried the following item: “Keye Luke, Charlie Chan’s Number One Son, just missed being Number One Naturalized U.S. Citizen.”
In the heady days following repeal, no one paid much attention to the fine print, which continued the annual quota established in 1924. As a result, even while China and the United States fought side by side, Immigration and Naturalization officials still found it difficult to find “acceptable” and “qualified” Chinese to fill the annual quota of 105. In actuality, during the first ten years of repeal, the U.S. government found an annual average of only fifty-nine Chinese acceptable for admittance to the country. In addition, between 1944 and 1952, only 1,428 Chinese Americans—after presenting documentation stating that they were here legally, and passing tests on English competency, American history, and the Constitution—were naturalized.
The anti-miscegenation laws carried on, as did the laws barring Chinese from buying property. More immediately troubling were the cases of Caucasians mistaking Chinese for Japanese. Bennie, whose home in Beverly Hills had been bought in his wife’s name, worried about what would happen to families of Chinese ancestry. He cautioned his daughters, “Don’t tell the neighbors about your ancestry. Don’t tell the people at school you have Oriental blood in you. Don’t tell anyone anything.” His daughter Marcia remembers those days: “I grew up thinking, It’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone. It’s a no-no. Not because I was ashamed of being a quarter Chinese, because I’m not. We just didn’t know what would happen.”
And the war pressed on. Angelenos grew accustomed to blackouts. Radio spots such as “Viva Victory” reminded citizens to behave, be careful with their rations, and buy bonds. Jeeps zipped in and out of traffic. GIs streamed through Union Station, rode the Red Car out to the beach, and went to the Hollywood Canteen, hoping for a dance with Betty Grable. Sometimes they simply crossed Alameda and ventured into Chinatown.
Since many of the GIs were “seeing the world” fof the first time, they got up their courage to sample Chinese food. Some restaurant owners did something they never would have thought possible back during the Depression: they closed and locked their doors to keep the crowds out. The restaurants were simply stretched beyond their capabilities; supplies were impossible to get, and most of the help had either gone to war or into defense work. The Leong family, which had opened a second Soochow in New Chinatown, closed it for lack of dishwashers, busboys, and waiters; Gilbert and Elmer were in the service and Ed was working at See Manufacturing for his deferment. The Leong family gave the New Chinatown space to the USO for the duration, and focused their energies on the original Soochow.
On April, 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide. The very next day, Sissee gave birth to a baby girl, Leslee Ann Leong, in Memphis. One week later, German resistance ceased. On August 6, 1945, America dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, followed three days later by a second bomb on Nagasaki. On August 14, Japan unconditionally surrendered. The war was finally over, and the boys started coming home. Soon Sissee, Gilbert, and Leslee would be reunited with their families back in Los Angeles.
PART V
CHAPTER 17
HOLLOW BAMBOO
1946–47
BETWEEN 1940 and 1950, the population of Los Angeles doubled, with nearly eighty percent of the people migrating from the Midwest. Los Angeles was now home to more Iowans than lived in Des Moines, more Indianans than in Terre Haute, and more Nebraskans than in Lincoln. Where once fields of lima beans or asparagus had grown, now hospitals, parking lots, and row after row of tract houses appeared to spring up overnight. The numbers of automobiles also mushroomed. Angelenos owned more cars than the number registered in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, and Colorado combined, with the result that Los Angeles now ranked as the country’s number-one smog city.
During the war, Los Angeles had established itself as “the arsenal of democracy.” Its aircraft industry, the largest in the nation, was the city’s number-one moneymaker and employer. But the city also ranked first in other industries. Los Angeles produced more movies than any other city in the world. As Time magazine reported, Los Angeles “lands more fish than Boston or Gloucester, makes more furniture than Grand Rapids, assembles more automobiles than any other city but Detroit, makes more tires than any other city but Akron. It is a garment center (bathing suits, slacks, sports togs) second only to New York. It makes steel in its backyard. Its port handles more tonnage than San Francisco.” What most people didn’t know was that the county was still the richest and most profitable agricultural and dairy area in the nation.
Not since the railroad pricing wars of the 1880s had Los Angeles experienced such prosperity and change. That first Christmas after the war, downtown was gaudy with lights and decorations and families together again. Department stores filled their windows with fantasy displays of everything from electric trains to washing machines. Santas, puffy with padding and fake beards, handed out strings of rock candy and lollipops to rosy-faced children. GIs still in uniform prowled the sidewalks in groups or honked their way down congested streets in their jeeps. Women, basking in the radiance of early pregnancy, window-shopped past the Broadway, Silverwoods, and Barker Brothers. At night, the women linked arms with men they’d thought they’d never see again, and stood in line to take in a movie at the Orpheum, Lowe’s State, Pantages, Paramount or the Million Dollar.
During these postwar years, Chinatown mirrored the growth of the rest of the city when, from 1940 to 1950, the population
increased from 5,300 to 8,000. For the Chinese this boom was fueled by the War Brides Act of 1945, the Act of August 9, 1946 that put Chinese wives of U.S. citizens on a nonquota basis, and the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. So, while the official quota for Chinese immigrants still stood at a mere 105 a year (by contrast, Poland had an annual quota of 6,524), over 7,000 Chinese women entered the U.S. between 1946 and 1953 as war brides and another 3,465 Chinese students, visitors, and seamen were granted permanent resident status as “displaced persons.”
Many Chinese—both young and old—became citizens: Chuen Fong, Fong See’s eldest son from his second family, who had been inducted into the army one month before the end of the war, was naturalized after he was released in 1947. Fong Yun was naturalized a year later. Like other American GIs, the Chinese veterans took advantage of new opportunities for education and housing. By the spring of 1949, 3,610 Chinese Americans across the country had enrolled in American colleges and universities, more than ever before. With these successes, education became recognized and accepted as a way out of Chinatown.
Although the Supreme Court had declared restrictive covenants unconstitutional as far back as 1917, California had continued to enforce them. In May 1948, a ruling passed the state legislature that effectively banned restrictive covenants barring Chinese and other minorities from buying property; such covenants would no longer be enforceable in state court. This—combined with the influx of immigrant women—changed the structure of Chinese communities. American-style nuclear families developed and settled in traditionally white suburbs to find superior housing and schools.
The miscegenation laws had also hung on with tenacity. As a quarter-Chinese, Pollyanne, Ray’s daughter, still fell under the state’s racial code. Like her parents before her, she and her Caucasian fiance made the trip to Tijuana. Two weeks later, on October 1, 1948, the California Supreme Court finally declared the miscegenation laws unconstitutional. The following year, the L.A. County Marriage License Bureau issued eighty licenses for interracial marriages, of which eleven were for marriages between whites and Chinese. Bennie’s daughter, Shirley, who, along with her sister, had been sworn to secrecy about her Chinese background during the war, was the first in the See family to be married to a Caucasian in the United States.
But attitudes were stubborn. “After World War II, we were considered either dumb or stupid, because whatever we earned we gave back to our parents,” recalled David Lee. “Once we got out of our territory, we were shell-shocked. They didn’t want us. I remember Sammy Lee, the Olympic diving champion. He came back a captain or a major and he couldn’t buy a house in Orange County. If you died, you couldn’t be buried, because the cemeteries were segregated.” Those who moved into new neighborhoods scouted things out ahead of time. Tyrus and Ruth Wong, for example, asked the existing owners to inquire if anyone would object to having a Chinese family in the neighborhood.
Wilbur Woo, who had lived as a child behind the Leong residence in the City Market Chinatown, was one of fifteen Chinese students at UCLA: “After the war, some of us became professionals—doctors, lawyers, maybe a few owned supermarkets in black areas. But things hadn’t really improved. I remember driving to Sacramento in the late forties and being stopped by a policeman. The first thing he asked was ‘What restaurant do you work at?’” Choey Lau, Fong Yun’s eldest daughter, married an Army Air Force pilot who couldn’t get a civilian job because he was Chinese. In 1951 they would move to Hawaii, where he would be hired by Aloha Airlines, which had been founded by a Chinese.
It didn’t matter if you were important, either. In New York, when the chief Chinese delegate to the United Nations knocked on the door of the wrong hotel room, the woman who answered wordlessly handed him her laundry. Closer to home, James Wong Howe, the cinematog-rapher, took a portion of his Hollywood money to open a Chinese restaurant. When a photographer came to take publicity shots of the exterior, Howe walked over and asked, “Can you move over just a little bit so it will make a better composition?” The photographer sneered. “What the hell do you know about photography? Why don’t you go back in the kitchen and do some cooking?”
The residents of the last block of Old Chinatown remained resolute in the face of any change. The old businesses—the F. See On Company, the F. Suie One Company, Soochow Restaurant, the Chew family’s curio shop, and the herbal emporium—still held sway. Along the small alleyways bisecting the block, wives still bought their pork at the Sam Sing Butcher Shop, city pols stopped in for drinks at the three-thousand-year-old carved bar in Jerry’s Joynt, the religious sought advice and good luck at the Kong Chow Temple, and bachelors bought entire meals at See Yuen for a quarter. The Lugo House continued as a refuge for single men. But the once-grand Pico House had become a flophouse, and in the Plaza on Sundays, evangelists hurled hellfire and brimstone at a sorry collection of derelicts, drunks, and hobos.
In a city that prided itself on the new, it seemed that everyone had a plan to make Los Angeles bigger, better, cleaner. In the last years of the decade, many of the city’s landmarks would come down. Old China town, an eyesore to some, also came under fire. On November 6, 1946, City Attorney Ray Chesebro filed condemnation proceedings in Superior Court against the twenty-two property owners in the last surviving block of the city’s original Chinatown. His plan was to raze the block and create a park to “beautify” the approach to Union Station. In coming months this idea would change once again, as much of the area was allotted to the widening and opening of roadways in connection with the building of the Hollywood Freeway.
The residents of Old Chinatown greeted the news with a calmness that reporters found disquieting. But many, like Fong See, were old-timers who had lived through the Driving Out and had been shuffled from place to place at the whim of the larger Caucasian populace since they’d first set foot on the Gold Mountain. A reporter from the Daily News spoke with Fong See, who, it was noted, was “patiently philosophical.” (The rival paper, the Los Angeles Times, supported this observation with photographs capturing the “venerable old man” appearing “unexcited” and “unperturbed” about the condemnation proceedings.) “Man requires but little space—less space than this cubicle in which I stand,” Fong See told the Daily News. “And when my time comes, they will crowd me into less space than this. I have lived well, I am ready for what tomorrow holds.” Yet another reporter asked Fong See if he had made much money in his fifty-eight years on Los Angeles Street. “There are three carloads of it piled up in the back,” the old man laughed, “but I don’t know what to do with it.” The reporter commented that this was an example of “subtle Oriental humor.”
Yet another interviewer seemed to speak with a very different man. “Allee time change,” Fong See mused. “Allee time city glow and change. Move many time. Allee time people think change sad. Not sad. Change must come.”
Photographers roamed the streets of Old Chinatown. One caught Fong See in his long, embroidered mandarin robe, posing with a feather duster before a statue of Buddha in meditation. Another captured a child climbing on one of the stone dogs that stood before the entrance to the F. Suie One Company. The camera lens froze the incongruities throughout the enclave—a carved figure representing the transcendence of man from the Lower World to a Higher Civilization next to a sign for “Rum and Coke—40 cents.” Along this last remaining block, people wondered what they would do if they really did have to move.
In 1946, after the Oki family returned from the relocation camp, Stella, Eddy, and Richard moved into the basement of the F. Suie One Company, where Dragon’s Den had once been. (Ted had joined the merchant marine.) Junk, which in the family could mean anything from antiques to piles of used lumber, occupied half the space. The other half was partitioned off for living quarters. Benji and Tyrus’s murals of the Eight Immortals and the dragon still clung to the walls. Beautiful pieces of Chinese art enlivened dark corners. In the kitchen, the family took their baths in the prep sinks; rats still made their nests in the exposed rafter
s and scuttled along water pipes.
Some people might have seen this paradox—living in a rat-infested basement surrounded by expensive things—as inappropriate. But what constituted inappropriateness? Fong See had grown up in the close quarters of village life. His children had been raised in the close quarters of immigrant life. Now Eddy carried on that tradition. His family had always lived in small places—out of habit, thrift, or necessity. Eddy, Stella, and now their son learned to shut themselves off and establish their own space. They learned how to be in the same room and not talk to each other.
The job at See Manufacturing hadn’t worked out for Eddy. His brothers had put him in charge of the assembly line, but he had realized they were never going to let him do anything really important. After working day after day behind a table saw, he was also overcome by the drudgery of the work. So he’d quit and now simply walked upstairs to help Ming in the store. Eddy set up a table for making jewelry just inside the front entrance. It was a much calmer life, one that helped relieve his ulcers, which still hadn’t healed from the Dragon’s Den days.