The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  By the mid-1920s, it was becoming difficult to segregate Chinese students in California, largely because of the Chinese community’s willingness to organize politically. An effort to create a segregated junior high school failed in the San Francisco Bay Area when Chinese activists and organizations made vociferous protests. It appears that these barriers gradually, informally dropped away, several decades before actual laws were codified to ban racial segregation. So as the years went by, more Chinese American children attended integrated schools, and their initial exposure to whites often threw them into a welter of confusion about their identity.

  In most children, feelings oscillated between a fierce pride in their heritage and a near-total rejection of being Chinese. Some saw themselves as informal ambassadors of China, interpreting its culture for their white classmates while also serving as models of deportment for their white teachers, as if upon their words and actions hinged the reputation of an entire country. Others had so deeply absorbed the toxin of racism that they grew to loathe everything Chinese, even their own looks. To make themselves appear less Asian, some Chinese American teenage girls taped or glued their eyelids in order to create an extra fold, and while Chinese American boys were less likely to resort to such tactics, some must have been equally insecure about their self-image during the 1920s. Even late into the twentieth century, one man would recall, “I remember rushing home from school one afternoon—I was eleven or twelve years old—and desperately staring at the bathroom mirror and praying to God my face would miraculously turn Caucasian. Only fear of pain and death kept me from committing suicide.”

  A few American-born Chinese simply viewed themselves as white. Such individuals tended to live in rural areas, where the absence of an established ethnic Chinese community made them less threatening to whites and encouraged their participation in the mainstream. Bernice Leung, born in 1917 in the farming community of Fresno, California, remembered a period in her childhood in which she and her siblings did not believe they were Chinese at all. Asians, not Caucasians, looked strange to them, and they wondered why they themselves had not been born with blue eyes and blond hair. Noel Toy, who grew up in the only Chinese American family in a small northern California town, was astonished to meet another Asian woman in college. “I was brought up purely Caucasian, Western,” she recalled. “When I went to junior college, I saw an Oriental woman. I said, ‘an Oriental! My gosh, an Oriental woman!’ I never thought myself one.”

  Somewhere in the middle were those torn between the demands and expectations of both cultures, Chinese and American. “There was endless discussion about what to do about the dilemma of being caught in between,” remembered Victor Wong, an American-born Chinese who grew up in San Francisco.

  Finding a comfort zone in a racially stratified society took time. For some ABCs it took decades. Confusion about identity was only one problem; another was overt and covert racism. Those who grew up in white areas often did not feel the full effect of racism until reaching puberty. “We have never lived in Chinatown but have always lived in an American neighborhood,” Lillie Leung recalled in 1924.21 “I mingled with all the children quite freely, but when I was about twelve years old they began to turn away from me. I felt this keenly. Up to that time, I never realized that I was any different, but then I began to think about it.”

  It was in the white or integrated public schools that many Chinese American children felt the sting of racism most sharply. Esther Wong of San Francisco remembers a French-language teacher who made no effort to hide her hatred of the Chinese. After asking Wong to read aloud in class, she remarked, “Well, you read all right, but I don’t like you. You belong to a dirty race that spits at missionaries.”

  Racism also pervaded the curricula and textbooks, driving a wedge between Chinese Americans and their white classmates. “In grade school I was fairly successful in being admitted to the ‘inner circles,’ as it were,” one ABC recalled of her childhood in the 1910s. “Children are not prone to think a great deal of their ‘social selves’ and since I spoke English as well as they, and played and dressed as they did, I was not regarded as an outsider.” That is, until China was taught in geography and history class:

  When we came to the study of China, the other children would turn and stare at me as though I were Exhibit A of the lesson. I remember one particularly terrible ancient history lesson; it told in awful detail about “queer little Chinamen, with pigtails and slanting eyes” ... and went on to describe the people as though they were inhuman, and at best, uncivilized. Even I, young as I was, resented these gross exaggerationswhich were considered the gospel truth by other pupils. I meditated on ways and means of absenting myself from class that day; I would have welcomed a sudden and violent attack of illness, or even sudden death, but since my health remained disgustingly good, I was forced to sit through a very embarrassing hour.

  Another kind of struggle was being waged after school, at home. Many Chinese American children not only faced daily prejudice from whites, but at home had to deal with rigid attitudes their parents had imported from the old country. Fear and insecurity compelled many Chinese parents to shield their children from the influence of the outside, alien world, especially their daughters. “Mother watched us like a hawk,” Alice Sue Fun recalled of her formative years in San Francisco during the 1910s. “We couldn’t move without telling her. We were never allowed to go out unless accompanied by an older brother, sister, or someone else.”

  In certain households, the girls were burdened with household work while still very young. Many second-generation Chinese women endured an unusually restrictive upbringing, with heavy domestic responsibilities and orders to stay home, while their brothers were permitted to venture out into the streets to play. After coming home from Oriental Public School each day, Alice Sue Fun had to do “a lot of housework for my mother—washed dishes, scrubbed the children’s clothes by hand, helped her sew.” By the time she was eight or nine years old, “I was cooking rice. If I burnt the rice, I would get a ling gok [a knuckle-rap on the head].”

  Boys also learned early to work hard, although, unlike their sisters, they were usually given more freedom to work outside the home. The poverty of one ABC’s family in California forced him to take jobs after school—and sometimes before:

  When we grew up, we just lived on a bare minimum. If there was nothing to eat, we just ate plain rice and water. Whatever. Just wash it down. I used to get up at 7:00 in the morning and go to work at a wholesale florist. And I worked there for an hour before I went to school. I’d take my bicycle and I’d ride from Fifth and Mission Street, all the way to Galileo High. After school, I’d go to an apartment to wash the kitchen or do housework for an hour. Then I’d go home and eat dinner. And we started Chinese school at 5:00. From 5:00 to 8:00, we had three hours Chinese school. After that, I’d go home and do the laundry, or clean up the house or whatever, and do some homework and then go to bed.

  Some families forbade their children to speak English at home and insisted that they attend special Chinese-language schools after their public school classes, six days a week. Chinese-language schools represented the hopes and efforts of first-wave immigrant parents eager to maintain in their American-born children some vestige of their Chinese heritage. The earliest of these schools appear to have been informal arrangements between scholars and Chinese immigrant families. Known as kuan, and held in the private homes of their tutors, they consisted of classes of twenty to thirty children who learned the rudiments of Chinese language, calligraphy, philosophy, and classical literature. By the end of the 1920s, some fifty Chinese-language elementary schools and a half dozen Chinese-language high schools existed in the United States, mostly in the West.

  The children’s reaction to this additional education was mixed. Chinese lessons were “an ordeal that I grew to hate,” Louise Leung Larson recalled of her childhood in the 1910s. “I didn’t see why I had to learn Chinese when I was always going to live in America. The only way I c
ould remember the characters was to write the American phonetic sound beside them.” Rodney Chow had a Chinese-language teacher in Los Angeles with a “totalitarian attitude” toward the children: “It was just memorizing, writing, and reading, and it was very, very strict because he actually took the stick and hit us.”

  Even if the teacher was not abusive, it was difficult for some children to concentrate on their studies. There was the problem of different dialects: one Chinese school made the mistake of employing a Mandarin-speaking instructor for children of Cantonese-speaking parents, which frustrated the students and led most of them to drop out. And often the interest simply was not there. Pardee Lowe, an ABC who grew up in San Francisco in the 1920s and graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law School, described his personal struggle with Chinese school: “It was not that I was entirely unwilling to learn, but simply that my brain was not ambidextrous. Whenever I stood with my back to the teacher, my lips attempted to recite correctly in poetical prose Chinese history, geography or ethics, while my inner spirit was wrestling victoriously with the details of the Battle of Bunker Hill, Custer’s Last Stand, or the tussle between the Monitor and Merrimac.”

  Yet immigrant parents believed these classes were necessary to sustain continuity with the ancestral homeland and their identity. In 1924, a Los Angeles-born woman of Chinese parents recalled, “I had to learn the Chinese language because father told me time and again that I could never be an American because my skin was yellow and only white people could be Americans.”

  But neither Chinese schools nor Chinese parents could shelter children from the onslaught of American culture. Outside the narrow confines of Chinatown and family, a larger world beckoned. Popular culture permeated even the most isolated ethnic ghettos, shaping the desires of ethnic Chinese youths, exposing them to new values, new ideas, beyond the reach of parental control. The children listened to the radio for entertainment, read English-language newspapers, pored over comic books and pulp novels bought from neighborhood drugstores, spent Saturday afternoons at the local nickelodeons watching movies. Child-related activities of civic and religious groups also encouraged the assimilation of the American-born Chinese. Missionaries established Chinatown churches, and by 1920, almost all of the Chinese American children in San Francisco—close to a thousand of them—were attending Sunday school. The YMCA in San Francisco Chinatown organized athletic competitions in sports like soccer and basketball.22 At the same time, Chinese American children took the initiative of starting their own clubs. In 1914, eight young Chinese American boys thumbed through a Boy Scout handbook in the playground of a Methodist church in San Francisco and decided to create their own Scout chapter. It became the very first Boy Scout troop in San Francisco, and probably the first ethnic Chinese Boy Scout troop in the world.

  The urge to partake in American customs grew more intense as children got older. Chinese American adolescents craved what they saw on the silver screen, in glossy advertisements, and in the (mostly white) public schools. By the 1920s, one of the most prosperous decades in U.S. history, ABCs were increasingly torn between parental restraints and the seductive pull of American consumer culture. The urban enclaves of Chinese America of that decade were so profoundly transformed that their earliest settlers would have found them unrecognizable. “Take it all in all, the Chinatown of today is not the Chinatown of the bygone days,” Dr. Ng Poon Chew, the founder of San Francisco’s Chung Sai Yat Po, wrote in 1922. Chew and others noticed how American traditions supplanted Chinese ones—how Chinese costume and skullcap gave way to closely cropped hair and Western clothes, how Chinese women wore the latest fashions and styled their hair in pageboy bobs or marcelled waves, and how while older women tottered about in bound feet, younger women wore high heels.

  But the most dramatic changes were the ones least visible to the casual observer: the shifts in thought, attitudes, and values. Chew noted that Chinese children spoke English and enjoyed American slang. Chinese American women, independent and assertive, dated whomever they pleased and selected their own husbands instead of leaving these decisions to their parents. And Chinese students—ambitious and patriotic United States residents, Chew observed—aspired to earn first-rate college degrees.

  By the first few decades of the twentieth century, a substantial number of Chinese Americans, mostly children of small business owners, had fulfilled their parents’ dreams of becoming well educated and were now enrolled at universities along the West Coast, especially in California. But parents and children alike would soon learn that in America, a university degree did not guarantee them respectability, career success, or even employment.

  Mainstream society thought of Chinese males as workers in service industries such as laundries, restaurants, and produce markets. Those who aspired to break into the professions—that is, college graduates with degrees in fields such as engineering, architecture, or the sciences—faced difficulty in trying to secure positions at large, Caucasian-controlled firms. In California, consonant with the state’s legacy of racial discrimination, many firms had specific regulations against hiring Asians. “It is almost impossible to place a Chinese or Japanese of either the first or second generation in any kind of position, engineering, manufacturing or business,” the Stanford University Placement Service reported in 1928.

  In a family memoir, Father and Glorious Descendant, Pardee Lowe wrote about the discrimination he faced when seeking work, when certain whites could not see beyond the stereotype of the Chinese as houseboy or coolie. While a student at Stanford University, Lowe had applied for a job as chauffeur for a banker’s wife, who insisted upon speaking to him in pidgin English. “You Chinee boy or Jap boy?” she asked.

  “Chinese, of course, but born in this country,” an astonished Lowe replied.

  “Me no likee, me no wantee Chinee boy,” she said.

  Suppressing a “huge desire to laugh,” Lowe responded, “Mrs. Bittern, I understand perfectly.”

  Lowe saw with distressing clarity that it was his skin color and not some fault in his credentials that barred him from employment. Even his flawless, educated English could not overcome a prospective employer’s prejudice about the Chinese. “Everywhere I was greeted with perturbation, amusement, pity or irritation—and always with identically the same answer,” he wrote.

  “Sorry,” they invariably said, “the position has just been filled.” My jaunty self-confidence soon wilted. I sensed that something was radically, fundamentally wrong. It just didn’t seem possible that overnight all of the positions could have been occupied, particularly not when everybody spoke of a labor shortage. Suspicion began to dawn. What had Father said? “American firms did not customarily employ Chinese.” To verify his statement, I looked again in the newspaper that next morning and for the week after, and sure enough, just as I expected, the same ten ads were still in the newspapers.23

  Chinese American college graduates were sometimes barred not only from professional positions but even from the lowliest jobs at white firms. During the exclusion era, even companies outside of California had strict policies against hiring Asians. “Recently two friends of mine wrote to no less than fifty firms throughout the country to apply for a position where they could get some experience along their own line and all they have got were negative answers,” University of Washington graduate Fred Wong told an interviewer in the 1920s. “They went to the Oriental Admiral Line to apply for a job as common labor on the boat. The superintendent at first told them that it was not the policy of the firm to hire people other than Americans. The boys told him that they were American born and did not come into the excluding list. They talked with the supervisor for a while and finally he said, ”I am sorry boys, I cannot employ you people.”

  Perceived as foreign, ethnic Chinese job seekers even endured linguistic standards that were not imposed on Caucasians. Some employers expected Chinese Americans to be fluent in both English and Chinese, hiring them to serve as the company’s link between the white a
nd Chinese communities. For instance, a Los Angeles bank hired a young second-generation Chinese man to serve its Chinese American customers. Although he spoke perfect English, his lack of proficiency in Chinese caused him to be fired, prompting his father to send him to China to study the language. Other employers expected ABCs to be verbally deficient in English and naturally gifted in Chinese. When a candidate for a teaching post answered questions using correct English diction, he was asked, “Don’t you have an accent? You’re Chinese.”

  Some Chinese Americans learned to ignore such racism, and forged ahead with little more than the energy of their own ambition. Frank Chuck, son of a Chinese schoolteacher in Hawaii, arrived at Stanford University with only twenty-five cents in his pocket. In desperate need of cash and housing, and knowing that Chinese students were not welcome in Stanford’s dormitories (one Chinese boy, he recalled, was bodily “thrown out of Encina Hall”), Chuck worked his way through college by cooking for a Stanford professor in exchange for room and board, and earned a bachelor’s degree in organic chemistry in 1922 and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1925.