The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  In time, some of these marriages transcended the barriers of prejudice. When Tye Leung, a Chinese American interpreter at Angel Island, married Charles Schulze, a Caucasian immigration inspector, both were fired from their civil service jobs in San Francisco. Many Chinese snubbed them as well. At first, the residents of Chinatown referred to their mixed-race children as fan gwai jai (“foreign devil child”). But the Schulze family gradually gained acceptance, if only because Tye Leung devoted countless hours to volunteer service in the community. Later, she reminisced that her husband’s mother and her own parents “disapprove very much” of their marriage, but as she observed, “when two people are in love, they don’t think of the future.”

  While some parents fretted over the behavior of their children, others may have been even more concerned about the well-being of their families back in China. The 1920s were an era of prosperity for the United States, but in China the decade was a time of lawlessness, when the country was ruled by rapacious warlords. By the late 1920s, there were hopeful signs that the Republic of China would survive. A young Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, emerged to unify a fractured nation. The son of a merchant in the coastal province of Zhejiang, Chiang had gained his military training first in Japan and later, as a protégé of Sun Yat-sen, in the Soviet Union. Between 1926 and 1928 he led a campaign, known as the Northern Expedition, to defeat the warlords and consolidate control of China under the Nationalists. The following year, Chiang, now the supreme leader of the Nationalists, established the capital of the Republic of China in the city of Nanjing.

  But it was still a troubled republic. The Northern Expedition had been supported by the Chinese Communist Party, but in 1927, shortly after the expedition began, Chiang purged his former allies from power. Enlisting his extensive contacts with organized crime syndicates, such as the notorious “Green Gang” in Shanghai, Chiang orchestrated the massacre of hundreds of left-wing labor activists. As the slaughter spread to other regions, the shattered remains of the Communist Party fled to the mountains. For the next few years, Chiang waged war against the Communist guerrillas, hoping to exterminate them altogether.

  Chiang also faced relentless attacks from Japan, which viewed the chaos in China as a prime opportunity for military expansion. The first sign of trouble surfaced at the end of World War I. In the 1919 Versailles Treaty, Western powers decided not to return German concessions in Shandong province to China, but gave them to Japan instead. In a furor of national outrage known as the May Fourth movement, Chinese intellectuals held mass demonstrations in Beijing and across the country, but the Nationalist government was too weak to ward off Japanese encroachments. Less than a decade later, in 1928, Japan bombarded the city of Jinan in Shandong, killing or wounding more than seven thousand people. In 1931, Japan seized Manchuria, renamed it Manchukuo, and installed Henry Puyi, the last emperor of China, as puppet ruler. The following year, Japanese marines attacked Shanghai, but Chinese resistance forced them to retreat.

  With heavy hearts, the Chinese American community followed these developments through ethnic newspapers and letters from relatives. Many immigrants wanted to help the new republic defend itself against Japanese assaults, but were uncertain how to do so beyond sending money home to their own families. But soon, even those remittances would be put in jeopardy, as their newly adopted country found itself mired in the deepest economic depression in its history.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Chinese America During the Great Depression

  The Great Depression struck most Americans without warning, ending one of the nation’s most glittering decades. The 1920s, otherwise known as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties, now evoke images of shocking new fashions and pleasures—of bootleggers in speakeasies, of flappers in short skirts dancing provocative new dances at wild parties flowing with gin. Everyone seemed to have money. The pervasive feeling of prosperity arose from off-the-chart economic growth in the twenties, a period when American business was given free rein by the government. New technological wonders that promised to liberate millions of Americans from drudgery—automobiles and radios, washing machines and vacuum cleaners—rolled off factory assembly lines and were snapped up by a boundlessly optimistic public, often on credit. The United States was now by far the wealthiest nation in the world, with a national income surpassing that of much of Europe and a dozen other countries combined. American corporations built skyscrapers as towering monuments to their ability to do so. Large numbers of people—not just moguls, but maids and shoeshine boys—eagerly played the stock market, hoping to amass a fortune, and most were doing well at it. It seemed that in this age of perpetual prosperity, with some companies starting to include workers in their stock plans, labor unions would soon become obsolete.

  But after a decade of frenzied stock market speculation, the bubble burst. On October 24, 1929, “Black Thursday,” came the first great crash on Wall Street, followed by a series of secondary shocks, and then a long, sickening slide toward a national depression.24 The effect rippled away from New York deep into the hinterlands of the country, shutting down banks and putting companies out of business, until twenty million Americans found themselves unemployed, about 16 percent of the entire U.S. population.

  The wheels of capitalism ground to a halt. Bankrupt executives flung themselves out of high-rises, hoping that their families could collect on their life insurance policies. Thousands of laid-off workers went hungry, as farmers, facing foreclosures, burned their crops because the new, lower prices for many farm products did not cover shipping costs. Young men and women lived as hobos, jumping freight trains and riding in boxcars, crisscrossing the country in their futile search for jobs. Growing numbers of homeless Americans slept in shanties made of newspapers and cardboard—“Hoovervilles,” they were sarcastically named, referring to President Herbert Hoover’s inability to revive the economy. Eventually, the depression spread across the globe. As pessimism deepened about the ability of capitalism to heal itself, youths began to read Communist literature and talk revolution.

  California was spared the worst effects of the depression, largely because, unlike the industrialized East, its economy centered on agriculture. But the 1930s saw horrendous working conditions in the fields of California. The depression coincided with a severe drought in the Great Plains states, which baked the overworked soil into a giant “dust bowl.” White farmers from those regions, especially Oklahoma, loaded their possessions into jalopies and fled to California, hoping to serve as migrant farm workers, crowding into squalid shacks in private labor camps where they were treated almost like slaves. Their plight was immortalized in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, as impoverished whites, known as “Okies,” the new serfs of California, took their place in the fields where the Chinese had worked decades earlier.

  Most Chinese were able to avoid these upheavals in rural California. By the 1930s, they were largely concentrated in major cities, usually in their own racially segregated neighborhoods. The Great Depression did not affect the Chinatowns of 1930s as badly as the crisis of the 1870s, largely because of the self-sufficiency of these ethnic communities. The knowledge that they could not get easy access to white venture capital had long ago instilled in them certain protective habits, such as frugality, reliance on family connections, and avoidance of frivolous debt. Isolated from white mainstream America, deeply distrustful of white banks, most Chinese businesses had established their own informal credit systems. Aspiring entrepreneurs would borrow money from their own relatives, or partner with other Chinese immigrants to create a bui, a pool of capital into which they would make regular deposits and out of which loans would be made at mutually agreed rates of interest.

  This is not to say, however, that they did not feel the impact of the depression. As growing numbers of white Americans were thrown out of work, there was less money to pay for services the Chinese provided, such as restaurant dining or laundry. As money grew tighter, Chinese families, like millions of white fa
milies, had to make do with less. “I remember wearing sneakers with holes in them,” Lillian Louie said of her New York Chinatown childhood. She would patch the shoes with cardboard and not tell her parents. “We didn’t want to bother them, you know, they had enough to do. They worked so hard.”

  As the decade progressed, the United States passed emergency legislation to combat the effects of the Great Depression. When Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, he inaugurated, under an agenda known as the New Deal, a flurry of federal programs to regulate banks, initiate public projects, and put the unemployed back to work. Some programs benefited ethnic Chinese by giving them government jobs and financial assistance. By 1935, 2,300, or 18 percent, of the Chinese in San Francisco were receiving government aid, thanks to the Federal Emergency Relief Act. The number was lower than that for the general American population (22 percent), because many Chinese refused to participate in these programs, scorning them as charity. “During the Depression, I’d see these people taking canned goods [home] from school,” recalled Mark Wong, an American-born Chinese in San Francisco. “And my dad refused. He told me simply, ‘You’re not going to bring back any canned goods back here, period.’ I think the pride of the Chinese is very strong. We’re not going to accept food from anybody even to feed ourselves, even when we’re eating less.”

  Though loath to accept government handouts, many Chinese did not hesitate to fight when the interests of their community were threatened. During the Great Depression, Chinese laundry owners in New York City successfully battled white competitors trying to drive them out of business with restrictive municipal codes. In 1933, city aldermen proposed that U.S. citizenship be a requirement for operating a laundry, and set high license fees and security bonds that were far beyond the means of the majority of Chinese laundries, which for the most part were small operations. If it had passed, the ordinance would have damaged if not destroyed the entire Chinese laundry industry in New York.

  The response was immediate. The Chinese washermen organized the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, which issued a public statement declaring that if they did not fight this ordinance immediately, “tens of thousands of Chinese laundry men would be stranded in this country, and our wives and children back home would be starved to death.” Pooling their resources to hire a prominent white attorney, the CHLA succeeded in pressuring the city to reduce the license and bond fees substantially and exempt all “Orientals” from the U.S. citizenship requirement. CHLA continued to thrive for years, reaching its peak in 1934 with 3,200 members.

  Smaller battles, less epic in scale but equally important, were also waged as individual Chinese tried to save their businesses during the depression. In some cases, they revealed remarkable reserves of strength within families. In her poignant autobiographical essay, “An Early Baltimore Chinese Family: Lee Yick You and Louie Yu Oy,” Lillian Lee Kim described how she and her siblings survived double disasters before the onset of the depression: first the death of her father in 1928 from illness, then the physical collapse of her mother after battling her husband’s first son from a previous marriage for control of the household savings. One evening, after vomiting a stream of blood, the mother was confined to bed, leaving her grade-school children completely responsible for the day-to-day operation of the laundry. Amazingly, they kept the business alive without adult supervision. Arranging for a wholesaler to wash the soiled laundry during the day, they rushed home from school each afternoon to sort, starch, and press clothes until bedtime, with the younger ones standing on stools to reach the ironing board. As they grew older, they found part-time jobs on weekends—doing housework, carrying groceries for shoppers, and helping vendors sell fruits and vegetables. Their valiant teamwork helped them rescue the laundry from bankruptcy and weather the Great Depression.

  As Chinese family businesses worked harder during the depression, Chinese civic leaders joined together to discuss strategies for increasing their earnings. Tourism appeared to be a reliable source of cash. In San Francisco, immigrant Chinese merchants had sensed early the potential profits of this industry: after the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the old Chinatown, Chinese businessmen erected new structures that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, were “thoroughly modern” yet projected an “Oriental charm and attractiveness.” With a steady stream of articles, brochures, and advertisements, the local media, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and the Chinese community itself all worked together to promote Chinatown as one of the city’s visitor attractions. In 1915, San Francisco Chinatown staged its first beauty pageant to encourage white male tourism. Businessman H. K. Wong, founder of the contest, wanted to reward “the looks that made China’s beauties so fascinating.” Crown contenders sheathed their figures in skintight satin chipao gowns, the traditional costume for women in the Qing dynasty. These promotional efforts paid off. By the 1930s, Chinatown had captured almost one-fifth of the city’s tourist trade.

  During the Great Depression, the San Francisco Chinese, concerned about the business slowdown, redoubled their efforts to draw tourist revenue, no matter the means: “Make tourists WANT to come; and when they come, let us have something to SHOW them!” The result was a live fantasy version of the “wicked Orient,” exploiting the most debased stereotypes of the Chinese. Tour guides spun tales of a secret, labyrinthine world under Chinatown, filled with narcotics, gambling halls, and brothels, where beautiful slave girls, both Chinese and white, were kept in bondage. They ushered gaping tourists into fake opium dens and fake leper colonies.

  Other Chinatowns across the United States also played the tourist game. In Los Angeles, teenagers earned money after school by pulling rickshaws for white sightseers. In New York City, where tourism in Chinatown had already thrived for decades, guides warned visitors to hold hands for safety as they walked through the neighborhood’s streets. They paid Chinese residents to stage elaborate street dramas, including knife fights between “opium-crazed” men over possession of a prostitute.

  The reality of the 1930s was that Chinatown neighborhoods were actually becoming less violent. The tour guides, who entranced their white audiences with stories about hatchetmen and highbinders, were describing a bygone era that reflected poorly on the realities of modern organized crime within the Chinese community. By the early twentieth century, Chinese tongs had become more professional in their operations, less willing to risk scaring off white tourists with real bloodshed. If in previous years merchants and tong leaders had fought over money, they now colluded to increase profits. In fact, merchants themselves often joined tongs to expand their power base, and in some instances the line between respectable Chinese businessman and crime syndicate leader vanished altogether. Historian Adam McKeown has noted that in the 1930s, the minutes of the Hip Sing tong, historically a powerful criminal and extortionist association, resembled the meetings of “a joint stock company.” Each branch voted for a “congressman” to represent local interests at the national meeting, the topics discussed including protection and extortion rates, deadlines for payment, and the distribution of revenue.

  Although prostitution in Chinatowns also declined through this period, thanks largely to the efforts of missionaries and middle-class Chinese activists, the purveyors of the tourist trade continued to exploit flesh for profit. During the 1930s, Charlie Low opened the Forbidden City nightclub in San Francisco Chinatown, hiring hundreds of Chinese women (most of them middle-class and college-educated) to dance in his floor show. Like the famous Cotton Club in Harlem, Low’s establishment featured ethnic minority talent performing before a largely Caucasian audience. When Low put nude acts on the stage, he scandalized all of Chinatown, which condemned the dancers as whores. Outraged mothers forbade their daughters to work there or even to go near the place. But many young Chinese women continued to take the work. Sex appeal was lucrative, and the Forbidden City thrived, attracting more than one hundred thousand customers a year, among them senators, governors, and at least one future preside
nt (Ronald Reagan, then a young actor, is reported to have been an eager patron). Toward the end of the decade, the World’s Fair in San Francisco exposed the crass ambitions of certain Chinatown merchants eager to distort the image of Chinese women to entice white sensibilities. When the organizers of the fair committed $1.2 million to build an authentic Chinese village on Treasure Island, a few Chinese businessmen suggested having naked girls jump out of a cake to draw huge audiences. The proposal was dropped when critics strenuously objected, pointing out that the idea was not only trashy but hardly authentically Chinese.

  Many inhabitants of the nation’s Chinatowns chafed whenever the tourists came around. For one thing, they hated being gawked at like zoo animals, and they had expressed their anger long before Chinese capitalists embraced tourism during the depression. “Every day and all year round there are special sightseeing motor cars decorated with Japanese paper lanterns bearing a huge signboard in front standing right in the midst of the business center of New York City and with a couple of people walking around shouting desperately, ‘Chinatown, O, Chinatown, one dollar down to see Chinatown,’ ” S. J. Benjamin Cheng, a Columbia University student, wrote in a letter to the New York Times. “What do you think that a Chinese or any red-blooded human will feel when he passes by such a car and hears such shouting?”

  They were also exasperated by myths that a subterranean community thrived under the city streets. “I never saw an underground tunnel,” one Chinese man insisted. “Just mah-jongg rooms in the basements.” In Los Angeles, residents denied the existence of tunnels, though they recalled that the Chinese district used to have alleys with ceilings so that chickens could be raised there. Some resentful Chinese threatened to beat up white tourists, and did occasionally resort to violence. “We hated them!” declared Lung Chin in New York Chinatown. “Because the sightseers, they would come around, they would always be talking bad stories about China.” He seethed when he heard falsehoods about opium dens and slave girls; the Chinese, he said, were in the United States to “make a living, not to capture white girls for slavery.” And he admitted, “We would have fights with them. How many times I go up there, I say, ‘That’s a lie!’ and then I hit them.”25