The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  They did not know even how to write down numbers. When a bundle of laundry was done, he had to put down the amount charged for the work. Being so illiterate, he could not write the numbers. He had a way though, and what a way! See, he would draw a circle as big as a half dollar coin to represent a half dollar, and a circle as big as a dime for a dime, and so on. When the customers came in to call for their laundry, they would catch on to the meaning of the circles and pay accordingly. It is indeed laughable.

  The reality of the laundry business was harsh. Most Chinese washermen survived only because they lived frugally and charged at least 15 percent less for services than white laundries, leaving them with razor-thin profit margins. The work consumed almost every waking moment. Breathing steam and lint, the laundryman labored on a wet, slippery floor, washing and pressing, using an eight-pound iron heated over a coal stove, and then folding his customers’ clothes by hand. The finishing work—the starching of detachable items, like collars, cuffs, and shirtfronts—required attention to detail and time. Collars had to be handled delicately lest wrinkles form. They were first pressed through a special mangle, then moistened with a tiny brush, and finally each was rolled by hand. Decades later, elder laundrymen would remember the ordeal of having to get up each morning to finish a thousand shirt collars.

  In time, the laundry became a humid prison. The typical washer-man not only worked in his laundry but slept there at night. He rarely left the premises because suppliers, sensing quick profits, came to him: salesmen called to peddle laundry supplies, wagon drivers delivered cooked meals. On some days, a laundryman might labor twenty hours continuously, without even stopping to eat. “My father used to joke [about] how flexible his stomach was—like rubber bands—he could skip meals for a couple of days,” recalled a New York laundryman’s son. “And once he ate, he had enough to last for quite a while! There was no time for meals.” Another remembered, “I heard that some of them used a string to hang a piece of bread from the ceiling, in front of them, and had a bite when they had time to do so.”

  Most laundrymen did not have wives in America, but some managed to pass themselves off as “merchants” to secure permission for their wives to migrate. Arriving at their husbands’ laundries was often a terrible shock. “In China in the old days women thought that people came over to pick gold,” a veteran laundry wife recalled. “Ai! Really! They thought they were coming to Gold Mountain to pick gold. You think they knew that they were coming to work in the laundry?”

  Those wives who did manage to get to America had to work alongside their husbands as well as care for the children and cook meals in the back of the laundry. With babies strapped to their backs, they bent over heaps of laundry until they developed swollen legs, strained neck muscles, and varicose veins. One recalled that her veins grew so monstrously big that they “became like balls and I wrapped them with cloth around my legs.” Exhausted and overwhelmed by the volume of dirty linen, they, like their husbands, rarely stepped outdoors. One wife told an interviewer that in the thirty-eight years she worked in a laundry, she left it only three times—and then only to attend family celebrations in another city.

  One reason for this slavish work ethic was the knowledge that they were giving their relatives in China a better life. “Some of these old-timers, they work almost sixteen hours a day,” said Andy Eng, manager of the Wing Gong laundry in New York City. “They save a few dollars because they have no time to do anything else. The money they picked in their hands, they didn’t spend it nowhere, except for their family back in China or in Hong Kong.” And this money transformed entire regions in Guangdong. It paid for new technology, electric lights, paved roads, and new schools. Thanks to these remittances, by 1910, Toishan county, from which more than half of all the first-wave Chinese émigrés in the United States originated, enjoyed an astounding 90 percent literacy rate among its adult men.

  But many people in Toishan had little appreciation of the hard life their relatives were living in the United States. The amount of money sent home was often huge by Chinese standards, which led them to picture their relatives as wealthy merchants in the American clothing industry, an image the émigrés encouraged. In their letters and during their rare visits home, proud laundrymen would refer ambiguously to their yishanguan, which in Chinese means either “clothing store” or a business related to clothing. That they did this was perfectly understandable. Why would they jeopardize their celebrity status in their home villages, the only bit of glory in their lives? Why would they want to jump off their pedestals to announce that they were not supermen or heroes, but only menial workers? For most laundrymen, the awe and admiration in the eyes of their children gave them the only bright moments in their lives.19

  Sustaining this false image, however, carried a price. Believing that these laundrymen were moguls in the United States, relatives had no qualms about making financial demands upon them. The 1920s correspondence between Hsiao Teh Seng, a Chicago laundryman, and his family in China, revealed the endless pressures placed on the overseas Chinese by their kin. Letters he received from home all harped on one single theme: money. Bandits had kidnapped Hsiao’s elder brother’s concubine, and the family needed $20,000 to pay her ransom. A cousin asked for $200 to adopt a son. Younger clan members pleaded for money to purchase a house in Canton, because they had no suitable place to stay during their vacations (“We are indeed losing face ... Please do not regard this as an unimportant thing”). After gangsters ransacked Hsiao’s village, his family begged for funds to construct a wall (“The village’s life and death is depending on you. Take note of this”). A nephew wanted financial assistance to cleanse himself from the “humiliation of an embezzling uncle.” Even the embezzling uncle turned to Hsiao, seeking monetary relief from his own humiliation. Hsiao’s daughter asked for a gold watch (“Big Uncle’s daughters have gold watches, but we do not. My venerable one can use his own judgment whether jade should be inlaid or not”). His wife chastised him for his selfishness (“Month after month, I was longing for your money, but all you sent were plain letters”). His misplaced generosity, she wrote, had bankrupted her household (“I am so poor now, I have to pawn things in order to have money to buy food, while you go donating money, trying to wear your ‘high hat’ ”). She resorted to threats (“I do not want to take care of your home anymore. Even though you are a slave to them, none of your brothers love you. Why should you have pity on your brothers?”). And finally she wrote, “There is a Lou-fal monastery near Canton; let me go there and become a nun, and let your brothers take care of the children. I am not your lifelong partner. Please think it over; when you are old in the future, are you going to depend on your children or depend on your brothers? I pray you send me $200 so that I can have money to spend in the monastery. Now, I do not care how hard you work in America; I have no pity on you.” Hsiao never did learn on whom he could rely in his old age, because he died the following year.

  Nonetheless, the Chinese laundrymen in America viewed their families back home with pride; for many, it was all that kept them going in their hard lives. Perhaps nothing better illustrates their enduring love and self-sacrifice than L. C. Tsung’s novel The Marginal Man, in which the character Charles Lin walks into a laundry and sees a withered old Chinese man ironing under a bare light bulb, even though it is past ten o’clock at night. After a brief conversation, the laundryman tells Lin he has lived in the United States for forty years, working and sending money back to his family. He proudly shows Lin a photograph. “In the center sat a white-haired old woman, surrounded by some fifteen or twenty men, women and children, of various ages ... The whole clan, with contented expressions on their faces, were the offspring of this emaciated old man, who supported not only himself but all of them by his two shaking, bony hands ... Charles Lin realized that this picture was the old man’s only comfort and relaxation. He had toiled like a beast of burden for forty years to support a large family which was his aim of existence, the sole meaning of his life. Th
e picture to him was like a diploma, a summa cum laude to an honor student.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A New Generation Is Born

  It is ironic that so many Chinese émigrés, all part of a culture that cherished large families, would never enjoy the special satisfaction of raising their own children. True, many sent regular remittances back to their home villages in China to support wives, children, and other relatives, but this was hardly the same experience as watching one’s own beloved sons and daughters mature into adult-hood. Yet this was the price so many Chinese men paid for the extreme shortage of Chinese women in the United States; thousands of them were forced to live out their days either as bachelors, or in family arrangements split between two continents.

  The numbers alone tell a discouraging tale. Back in 1880, on the eve of the Exclusion Act, the male-female ratio in the ethnic Chinese community was more than twenty to one—100,686 men and 4,779 women. By 1920, deaths and departures had reduced the male Chinese population, while a small number of births had increased the female population, but there were still seven Chinese men for every Chinese woman. One significant cause of this disproportion was that U.S. immigration policies prevented Chinese workingmen from bringing their wives into the country. The law automatically assigned to women the status of their husbands, so if their husbands were categorized as “laborers,” their wives would be, too, making them ineligible for admission to the country. Only the wives of bona fide Chinese merchants were welcome.

  So the arrival of any Chinese female in the United States was a rare event. From 1906 to 1924, only about one hundred fifty Chinese women secured legal permission to enter the United States. Then the Immigration Act of 1924 was enacted, prohibiting the entrance of any foreign-born Asian woman. Aimed primarily at ending the practice of Japanese mail-order brides, it hurt the Chinese American community as well: from 1924 to the end of the decade, not a single Chinese woman was admitted to the United States.

  Despite the daunting numbers and the discriminatory laws, small communities of families gradually emerged. Because the typical Chinese immigrant could not afford to marry in the United States and was not permitted to bring his Chinese wife to his newly adopted country, those men with families by their side were almost always of the merchant or entrepreneur class, the petty bourgeois of Chinese American society. Consequently, the American-born Chinese children of these families (abbreviated as “ABCs”) tended also to be part of an elevated socioeconomic stratum. Still, many of these families were hardly rich by American standards. And though their children had avoided the horrors of steerage and the struggle to adjust to a strange country, they faced their own unique challenges in the United States.

  The first great challenge was the right to an education. Even more than many other immigrant groups, the Chinese, with their Confucius-infused culture, preached the importance of education to their American-born progeny. As they scrambled and grubbed for a living—washing other people’s clothes, slaving away in sweatshops, stir-frying food in hot restaurant kitchens—they were driven by the all-consuming dream of all immigrants: that their children, particularly their sons, would lead a better life than they had. Education represented status, and some traditional Chinese parents, acutely sensitive to the stigma attached to merchants in China and the respect accorded scholars in Confucian society, venerated book learning as a worthy goal in itself, not simply as the path to skills that bring financial security or success. But the special place reserved for education was also based on its direct, practical outcomes. Immigrant parents especially favored careers such as medicine and engineering, not only because they were relatively lucrative, prestigious, and stable, but also because they did not require political connections, enormous outlays of capital, or advanced English-language skills. “My parents wanted us to become professionals,” one American-born Chinese recalled of his childhood days. “If either of my brothers [had become] a doctor, my mother would have been thrilled.”

  Many parents also believed that if, for whatever reason, their American-educated children failed to establish themselves in the United States as doctors, engineers, or scientists, they could always go back to China and practice there the profession for which they had been trained in the West. Education was the one thing that could not be stripped from their children, and the parents frequently reminded them of this with adages like “You can make a million dollars, but a good education is better than a million dollars. You can lose everything but nobody can take away your good education.”

  But immigrant Chinese parents learned from painful experience that an American education—even public education—was not a right for their children, but a privilege that had to be fought for. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, state authorities tried to exclude Chinese American children from attending white public schools, over the protests and petitions of their parents.

  In 1859, San Francisco school board members, making no secret of their contempt for the Chinese (referring to them even as “baboons” and “monkeys”), shut down a public school for Chinese children, even though their parents were required to pay school taxes along with other residents of the city. Under public pressure, authorities reopened the Chinese school but passed state laws in the 1860s to segregate Asians, American Indians, and blacks from the white public school system. Little more than a decade later, during Reconstruction, a new California state law granted separate public education for blacks and Indians, but not Asians, giving local school officials the legal right to close down even the segregated school they had established for Chinese American children.20

  For fourteen years, from 1871 to 1885, Chinese children were the only racial group to be denied a state-funded education. Some Chinese parents home-schooled their children, sent them to private schools, or arranged for missionaries to tutor them individually, while others were too poor to exercise these options. The Chinese community made desperate appeals to the school board to admit their children into the public schools, but these were repeatedly ignored.

  Finally, the Chinese turned to the courts. In 1884, Joseph Tape, an interpreter for the Chinese consulate, and his wife, Mary, a photographer and artist, sued the San Francisco Board of Education when their daughter Mamie was denied admission to a public white primary school. The school officials argued that “the association of Chinese and white children would be demoralizing mentally and morally to the latter” and tried to label Mamie as a child of “filthy or vicious habits suffering from contagious or infectious diseases.” The Tape family submitted medical records that gave Mamie a clean bill of health, but the school board refused to budge from its position. Joseph Tape v. Jennie Hurley (the principal of the Spring Valley School) was argued at the height of violent anti-Chinese hostility in California, when the state superintendent of schools felt comfortable asserting that barring Chinese children from public schools was unconstitutional but necessary because they were “dangerous to the well-being of the state.” One Board of Education member insisted that he would rather go to jail than permit a Chinese child to enroll in school.

  In Tape v. Hurley at least, the courts served justice and not public passion. The Superior Court ruled in favor of the Tape family, and was upheld on appeal by the California Supreme Court. When the board adopted a resolution to fire teachers and principals who admitted “Mongolian” children to public schools, one judge warned that he would punish the board members with contempt citations if they attempted to enforce it.

  After their defeat in court, the San Francisco school board lobbied for a separate educational system for Chinese children. A bill giving the board the authority to establish an Oriental Public School sailed through the California state legislature under a special “urgency provision.” An outraged Mary Tape vented her feelings in an ungrammatical but passionate letter to the school board: “May you Mr. Moulder, never be persecuted like the way you have persecuted little Mamie Tape. is it a disgrace to be Born a Chinese? Didn’t God make us all!!! What right! Have yo
u to bar my children out of the school because she is a chinese Descend. Mamie Tape will never attend any of the Chinese schools of your making! Never!!! I will let the world see sir What justice there is When it is govern by the Race prejudice men!!!”

  By the turn of the century, racially segregated schools were legal not just in California but nationwide. In the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court ratified racial segregation as constitutional by accepting the doctrine of “separate but equal,” saying that states had the right to exclude nonwhites from public schools and other publicly supported services as long as equal facilities were created for them. Separate but equal remained the law of the land until the Supreme Court overturned Plessy in 1954 in another landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education.

  Despite Plessy, the Chinese continued to challenge segregation in several court cases, but with little success. One of the most notable was a suit filed in 1924 by Lum Gong, a grocer whose daughter Martha was rejected by the local white school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the state of Mississippi had the prerogative to reserve white schools for white children alone.

  A few Chinese American children managed to find ways to attend Caucasian schools. An unwritten rule was that they could enroll if the local community did not object—a situation that doubtless encouraged the ethnic Chinese students to be docile, respectful, and studious. This strategy could backfire, however, when high academic achievement inflamed white envy. In 1905, a group of white parents at Washington Grammar School in San Francisco insisted that four Chinese students, all academic superstars, were cheating by secretly exchanging answers in Chinese during tests. The students were separated during the next exam, but they still achieved the four top scores in the class. Undeterred, the white parents then complained to the Board of Education, which removed the four boys from the school altogether. In 1928, a white community in Mississippi decided to bar all Asians from attending the local white school after a Chinese boy graduated at the top of his class. The specter of segregation always lurked in the background, with the constitutionally protected right of school boards to expel Chinese students on any whim or pretext.