The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  The Japanese imperial government expanded operations by dispatching troops to northern and central China, as well as to the coastal city of Shanghai, China’s largest metropolis. Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist government, invested his best forces in the defense of Shanghai, but they were no match for Japan’s better trained and better equipped military. The Nationalist army suffered some 250,000 casualties in a vain attempt to save the city. Before the end of the year, Japanese forces had also conquered Nanjing (Nanking), the capital of the Republic of China. In one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, a bloodbath that came to be known as the Rape of Nanking, the Japanese imperial army raped and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians, presaging a war that would last eight years and claim the lives of as many as 35 million Chinese.

  Especially hard hit was the Toishan region, the point of origin for most of the Chinese immigrants in America. When the Japanese seized the region’s crops to feed their own troops, many locals simply starved to death. Further, the Japanese capture of the port city of Hong Kong in 1941 closed off a major hub of communication between China and the United States. For generations, Hong Kong had served as the headquarters for major emigration firms, which safely and reliably delivered money from Chinese American men to their Toishanese families. The fall of Hong Kong ended this inflow of overseas money, turning the lives of many Gold Mountain families upside down almost overnight. Having settled in as members of the local leisure class, they were particularly vulnerable because they no longer had the skills required to provide for themselves and their families. To buy food, some pawned first their jewelry and furniture, then their homes, and finally themselves. In the most desperate cases, Gold Mountain wives entered into prostitution and sold their own children into slavery. Before the war’s end in 1945, at least 150,000 Tolshanese—about one in four—had either died or disappeared.

  Galvanized by the plight of their families, and horrified by reports of Japanese atrocities, Chinese Americans rallied to promote public awareness of the Sino-Japanese War. Most Chinese immigrants had not been formally educated in the United States and were not fluent in English, but they did their best, however imperfectly, to make Americans aware of the situation in the Far East. The publicity campaign was waged both within and beyond the Chinese community. In general, the recent émigrés used Chinese newspapers, radio programs, and street demonstrations to disseminate within the Chinese communities news of the dire plight of China, while the American-educated Chinese used the English-language press and the lecture circuit to reach a broader segment of Americans. In New York City, the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance distributed thousands of English-language flyers through their laundry shops, asking Americans to boycott Japanese goods.

  The Chinese Americans not only talked, they acted. One practical contribution they could offer China was skilled manpower in aviation. During the early stages of the Pacific war, China’s air force was so primitive that it posed virtually no threat to Japan’s. At one point Nationalist China possessed fewer than ninety planes in safe working condition, compared to more than two thousand in the Japanese military. But in the United States, as early as the 1920s, Chinese Americans had founded a number of private aviation schools or clubs to train young pilots to defend their ancestral homeland should the need ever arise, which flourished in cities with large ethnic Chinese populations such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, Portland, and Pittsburgh.27 Some of the graduates became war heroes in the United States military, like P-39 pilot Stanley Lau, who flew more than fifty missions over Europe, shot down seven Messerschmitts, and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. Others enlisted in the Chinese military, like Clifford Louie, who rose to the position of general in the Kuomintang air force.

  Chinese Americans also organized to try to prevent the sale to Japan of American scrap metal, which was being turned into munitions used to kill Chinese. In January 1938, thirty-nine Chinese sailors in San Francisco refused to ship a cargo of scrap steel to Japan and were promptly dismissed from their jobs. Within months, Chinese American demonstrations broke out in New York and along the West Coast, effectively halting the shipment of raw war materials to Japan. One of the largest protests began in San Francisco in December 1938. When Japan’s Mitsui Company leased the SS Spyros, a Greek freighter docked in the city, to transport steel to Japan, Chinese American groups and their allies threw up a picket line on the docks. A crowd of two hundred Chinese volunteers and three hundred Greeks, Jews, and other Caucasians demonstrated in front of the Spyros. Soon they were joined by more Chinese Americans, who had flocked in from nearby cities, until the picket line comprised eight thousand people. Drenched by rain, they made a pitiful spectacle: the red ink trickled from their posters, and their faces, in the words of one reporter, looked as if they were “spattered with blood and tears.”

  But pitiful sight or not, their demonstration won over the dock workers. Members of both the International Longshoremen (ILU) and the Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) passed resolutions of support, stating that they were “100 percent opposed to passing the picket line.” Loading stopped for five days, and through negotiations between the union and the Chinese American leaders it was decided that the picketing would end if the ILWU hosted a conference to promote an embargo on all war matériel to Japan. In a rare moment of solidarity, organized labor actually joined forces with the Chinese War Relief Association, the American Friends of China, and the Church Federation to initiate a national embargo. Their efforts and those of others paid off when in early 1941 Congress authorized President Franklin D. Roosevelt to halt the sale of arms and certain raw materials outside the western hemisphere (except to Britain), angering the Japanese.

  Simultaneous with the embargo drive were efforts to raise money and supplies for the Nationalists. Starting in 1938, San Francisco Chinatown organized “Rice Bowl” parties—massive street spectacles that drew hundreds of thousands of people. Cities with large Chinese populations, such as New York and Los Angeles, also hosted their versions of these parties. Like Mardi Gras celebrations, they were boisterous, noisy affairs, lavish in scale and lasting for days. Through confetti-filled streets, the Chinese orchestrated dragon dances, floats, fireworks, re-creations of “Old Chinatown,” mock air raids, and sales of “humanity” buttons. Bystanders would pour money into rice bowls to support the Chinese war effort, or toss coins and dollar bills into a giant flag of the Chinese republic that was proudly paraded through the streets by Chinese women.

  Fund-raising for the Pacific war united all levels of Chinese American society. Immigrants and American-born Chinese alike solicited money door to door and sold war bonds. Chinese physicians helped organize a blood bank in New York as well as the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, to assist sick and wounded victims of the Japanese invasion. Chinese volunteers served the Red Cross, preparing shipments to China of bandages, drugs, and vaccines. Middle-class women hosted bazaars, dances, and fashion shows for the cause, combining their social lives with social activism. Laundrymen placed relief-fund boxes on their counters and used the money collected to donate ambulances, cotton-padded clothing, and medicine to the Chinese military. In their scarce free time, garment workers sewed thousands of winter garments for wounded Nationalist soldiers. Even teenagers and young children pitched in, collecting tin cans, foil, and other scrap metal for the Nationalists.

  In the end, some twenty cities collected about $20 million for the Chinese War Relief Association, and during the eight years of Japanese occupation, the Chinese American community donated a total of $25 million. These sums were not remarkable for their absolute dollar amount, but certainly so for the amount per individual. The ethnic Chinese community in the continental United States was minuscule during the Pacific war: about 75,000 at the start of the 1930s, a number that increased by only a few thousand as the decade progressed. The fund-raising efforts drew about $300 for every Chinese in the country, a substantial figure, particularly given the value of the dol
lar in the 1930s and the constricted budgets of most Chinatown residents, many of whom earned only five or six dollars a week; some gave almost every cent of their life savings to the cause.

  However noble the intent, the effect of these fund-raising efforts on the outcome of the Sino-Japanese War is uncertain. Although some of the money bought clothes, gas masks, mosquito nets, and airplanes for the Nationalists, no one can determine if the funds collected, or provisions purchased with them, actually reached the Chinese soldiers. It is now clear that the Nationalist army was hardly a model of virtue or efficiency; during the war Chinese peasants were routinely kidnapped and conscripted into the army, given starvation-level food rations, and brutalized by their superiors. Montgomery Horn, the filmmaker of We Served with Pride, a documentary about Chinese American contributions to World War II, has expressed the belief that most of the money intended for the soldiers ended up in the pockets of corrupt Nationalist officials.

  The heartfelt efforts did, however, give rise to a sense of political unity among the Chinese in the United States. Ironically, these fund-raisers drew on and in turn reinforced dormant feelings of loyalty to China during an era when ever-diminishing numbers of Chinese Americans had personal connections to their ancestral homeland. In 1940, for the first time, the percentage of U.S.-born Chinese Americans surpassed that of foreign-born immigrant Chinese. Thus, a majority of the Chinese in America had grown up in America, and most had never been to China. This left them with very little sense of personal identification with China, except through their parents. The war brought the entire community back together at just the time when a drift toward assimilation was gaining momentum.

  By 1940, Japan had occupied nearly all of China’s major cities, and the retreating Chiang Kai-shek was forced to establish a wartime capital in Chongqing, in Sichuan province deep in the interior of China, but still subject to relentless Japanese air raids. With the coast firmly under Japanese control, the only route Chiang had available to obtain military supplies from the outside world was the Burma Road, a single treacherous ribbon of dirt highway twisting through the mountains between west China and Burma. Despite China’s precarious condition, the country itself and its vast territories seemed unconquerable. Japan found itself mired in Chinese guerrilla warfare, overwhelmed by the nation’s size and enormous population.

  Although foreign correspondents sent back grisly reports for U.S. newspapers, and short newsreels about the Japanese invasion were shown in theaters, the war in China meant little to most Americans. The United States, with its predominately European-descended population, focused much more attention on the war in Europe, where one country after another was falling to the Nazi blitzkrieg. But so strong were the isolationist sentiments among Americans that even the rise of Hitler—and reports of atrocities by refugees who had seen firsthand the horrors committed by Third Reich—could not induce the country to enter another world war. Far-sighted American leaders made the case that if the United States did not enter the fray quickly it might well be too late to save itself. Even this dire warning could not engender support for action. Noninterventionist feelings remained so high that President Franklin Roosevelt made neutrality an important part of his 1940 reelection campaign. Addressing the mothers and fathers of America, he promised, “I have said this before and I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

  On December 7, 1941, Japan solved the quandary for America’s leaders, by launching a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Earlier that year, Roosevelt had already ordered an embargo on war supplies to Japan—an embargo made politically feasible in part by the Chinese American rallies on the shipping docks. The Japanese high command, fearful that their plan for Asian conquest would be thwarted, recommended to Emperor Hirohito a short-sighted and, in retrospect, suicidal response—an aerial attack on the American Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. At dawn on December 7, carrier-based Japanese planes bombed the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, sinking or badly damaging twenty-one naval vessels, destroying almost two hundred American aircraft on the ground, and killing or wounding approximately three thousand naval and military personnel.

  From that moment forward, America no longer considered the Pacific war a remote Asian event. The next day, in his address before Congress, Roosevelt, referring to December 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy,” asked the legislature to declare that “since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December seventh, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.” Japan’s allies—Nazi Germany and Italy—quickly declared war on the United States, thrusting the formerly isolationist country into a titanic global struggle on both sides of the world.

  Almost overnight, the attack on Pearl Harbor transformed the American image of China and Japan—and redistributed stereotypes for both Chinese and Japanese Americans. Suddenly the media began depicting the Chinese as loyal, decent allies, and the Japanese as a race of evil spies and saboteurs. After the attack, a Gallup poll found that Americans saw the Chinese as “hardworking, honest, brave, religious, intelligent, and practical” and the Japanese as “treacherous, sly, cruel, and warlike”—each almost a perfect fit with one or the other of two popular stereotypes formerly promoted by Hollywood, in characters like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu. The unspoken question for many Americans was how to tell the good guys from the bad guys. On December 22, 1941, Time, the premier newsweekly in the United States at the time, published an article entitled “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs.” According to Time:

  Virtually all Japanese are short ... Japanese are likely to be stockier and broader-hipped than short Chinese. Japanese—except for wrestlers—are seldom fat; they often dry up and grow lean as they age. The Chinese often put on weight, particularly if they are prosperous (in China, with its frequent famines, being fat is esteemed as a sign of being a solid citizen). Chinese, not as hairy as Japanese, seldom grow an impressive mustache. Most Chinese avoid horn-rimmed spectacles. Although both have the typical epicanthic fold of the upper eyelid (which makes them look almond-eyed), Japanese eyes are usually set closer together. Those who know them best often rely on facial expression to tell them apart: the Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant.... Japanese are hesitant, nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time. Japanese walk stiffly erect, hard heeled. Chinese, more relaxed, have an easy gait, sometimes shuffle.

  Time conceded, however, that there is “no infallible way of telling them apart, because the same racial strains are mixed in both. Even an anthropologist, with calipers and plenty of time to measure heads, noses, shoulders, hips, is sometimes stumped.” The magazine noted that its Washington correspondent, Joseph Chiang, “made things much easier by pinning on his lapel a large badge reading ‘Chinese Reporter—NOT Japanese—Please.’ ”

  Pearl Harbor brought devastating consequences for the Japanese American community, even though as a group they had played no role in the attack. The U.S. Department of Justice rounded up a hundred thousand Japanese Americans along the Pacific coast and in Hawaii and interned them at remote concentration camps (in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and elsewhere), even though many were loyal American citizens who had lived in the United States for generations. Rodney Chow, who spent his boyhood in Los Angeles, remembers how Pearl Harbor changed the dynamics of playground politics in his neighborhood. A few Japanese American children, he recalled, used jujitsu to torment Chinese kids on the block. After December 7, these bullies were suddenly trying to convince their schoolmates that they were Chinese American, not Japanese. Then the Chinese in the neighborhood started to wear badges to distinguish themselves from the Japanese. Before long, the Japanese children disappeared altogether, and Chow did not see them again until the war was over, when they returned from the relocation camps.

  A few progressive Chinese Americans, like the activist Hung Wai Ching in Ha
waii, spoke out on behalf of Japanese American rights. But Hawaii had a fairly long tradition of Asian American activism, as well as better integrated Chinese and Japanese communities.28 In the continental United States, however, the majority of Chinese Americans kept silent about the civil rights abuses against other Asian Americans while accepting the temporary, short-term gains they might enjoy as a preferred minority. Terrified of being mistaken for Japanese, some Chinese Americans even carried identification cards signed by a Chinese consul general, wore buttons announcing “I am Chinese,” and placed similar signs in their shop windows to warn off potential vigilantes.

  But ethnic profiling would hurt the entire Asian American community. Inevitably, some whites refused to distinguish between foreign Japanese nationals serving Japan’s imperialist designs and Americans of Japanese and Chinese ancestry; it was easier to lump all Asians into a single despised group, “the Japs.” Yu-shan Han became the target of anti-Japanese xenophobia when he was renting a house in Beverly Hills, California, during the war. Believing that Han was Japanese, the neighbors repeatedly reported him to the police, insisting that he was using a secret radio transmitter to communicate with enemy agents. Even Chinese Americans in the military were not immune to racist attacks. One Chinese American woman enlistee recalled how a white man spun her around in the middle of a street in Baltimore screaming, “You damn Jap, get out of that uniform!”