The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

Some Chinese Americans saw a silver lining in this shift of racial antipathy and used the newly favorable Chinese image to bring about the repeal of the exclusion laws. After Pearl Harbor, several influential Americans, both ethnic Chinese and Caucasian, lobbied to overturn the ban on Chinese immigration that had been enacted back in 1882. In May 1942, more than 180 Caucasians founded the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, arguing that the United States should end exclusion for both moral and practical, war-related reasons.29 The movement’s leading activists included Ng Poon Chew, editor of Chung Sai Yat Po, Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Good Earth and daughter of Christian missionaries in China, and Buck’s second husband, Richard Walsh, a New York publisher. But the woman who dealt exclusion the strongest blow was Meiling Soong, the wife of the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek.

  Madame Chiang Kai-shek grew up in one of China’s most powerful families. Her father, Charlie Soong, was a Shanghai mogul who earned his first fortune printing Bibles for Western missionaries. A former preacher who spent part of his youth in Boston and North Carolina, Soong used his Christian contacts to send his own children to the United States for their education. Meiling Soong first studied in Macon, Georgia, where she learned to speak fluent English with a slight southern drawl, then in 1913 enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in English literature. Upon her return to China, she and her American-educated siblings forged a dynasty within the new Nationalist regime. One sister, Chingling, married Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Chinese republic; another sister, Ailing, wed the wealthy industrialist H. H. Kung; her Harvard-educated brother, T. V. Soong, helped Chiang Kai-shek finance his Northern Expedition to defeat the Chinese warlords, and was awarded the position of minister of finance in Chiang’s government.

  After America’s entry into the war, President Roosevelt invited Meiling Soong to visit the United States. In November 1942, she arrived to rally support against Japan’s campaign of aggression. The following spring, she embarked on a one-month cross-country tour, visiting New York, Wellesley, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The tour was a triumph. The articulate Soong attracted tens of thousands of supporters, captivating American audiences with her beauty, charisma, and elegance. The darling of the American media, her image graced every major magazine and newspaper. One of her most ardent fans was Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life. The son of missionaries, Luce was delighted that the first family of China was Christian. He put Chiang Kai-shek and his wife on the cover of Time and called Chiang “the greatest man in the Far East.”

  Madame Chiang Kai-shek became the first Chinese woman and second woman ever invited to address a joint session of Congress, and she earned a standing ovation. One congressman was later heard to mutter, “Goddamnit, I never saw anything like it; Madame Chiang had me on the verge of tears.” After her tour, Senator Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.) introduced a bill repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act. Enjoying wide support and passed on December 17, 1943, the bill abolished exclusion, provided for an annual quota of 105 Chinese immigrants, and gave Chinese who had entered the country lawfully the right to naturalization. While the quota was extremely low, especially compared to admission rates for many European countries, the Magnuson Act was a landmark in Chinese American history: for the first time in six decades, foreign-born Chinese could become American citizens.

  “To men of our generation, World War II was the most important historical event of our times,” journalist Charlie Leong noted. “For the first time, we felt we could make it in American society.” The war, he wrote, took them out of Chinatown ghettos, put them into American uniforms, and sent them overseas, where they became “part of the great patriotic United States war machine out to do battle with the enemy.”

  This was a theme heard frequently among Chinese Americans. The war, in which China and the United States had a common enemy, allowed them to contribute simultaneously to the survival of China and to victory for the United States. Some worked for the government as interpreters, code-breakers, and intelligence analysts. One notable example was Colonel Won-Loy Chan, a 1936 Stanford graduate who attended the Military Intelligence Service Language School after Pearl Harbor. As part of the U.S. Army’s G2 intelligence and a member of General Joseph Stillwell’s staff, Chan served in the China-Burma-India theater and later headed the Pacific Military Intelligence Research Section (PACMIRS) in Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Under his direction, a team of translators, some of them Chinese American, gathered and disseminated captured documents from the Pacific battlefront.

  Chinese Americans also went to the front lines. Today, anyone envisioning men parading in World War II American military uniforms would see no Chinese faces, yet during the war, ethnic Chinese men gave their lives in numbers disproportionate to their presence in the country. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese served in the military, representing about 20 percent of the Chinese population in the continental United States; the comparable figure for the general population was 8.6 percent. Almost 40 percent of the Chinese population in New York City was drafted, the highest rate among any of the city’s ethnic groups. One reason for this high percentage, of course, was that most Chinese in the United States were male, single, and without dependents, the legacy of the Chinese exclusion laws, and the majority of the Chinese in New York were Chinese men living a bachelor existence in Chinatown. Nonetheless, it seems clear that if 40 percent were inducted, few tried to evade the draft when called. “New York’s Chinatown cheered itself hoarse when the first draft numbers drawn were for Chinese Americans,” the sociologist Rose Hum Lee wrote. “Some below-age boys tried to pass on their ‘Chinese age,’ which is often a year or two older than the American count. Since their birth certificates told a different tale, they had to be patient and wait.”

  Many joined the military voluntarily, even eagerly. “I remember Sunday, December 7th, vividly,” wrote Dr. Richard Lee, the son of Clarence Lee, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.30 “We were raking leaves at our home in West Islip and my father upon hearing the news became very upset. I was terrified! He tried to enlist the next day but was told he was too old. He kept pestering the military selection process and was finally accepted into Army officer training despite his flat feet, poor vision and age.” Clarence Lee would become the assistant chief of staff of the Army Air Force Bomber Training Command and retire in 1947 as a full colonel.

  Some Chinese were enticed by government promises of U.S. citizenship in exchange for their service; others who were already citi-zensby being born on American soil signed up to eliminate doubts about their loyalty to the land of their birth. But many, perhaps most, enlisted for no other reason than patriotism. Sociologist Lee reported that all single Chinese American males of draft age in Butte, Montana, volunteered for service before they were called up. Chinese American David Gan spoke for countless others when he recalled, “I had never felt so happy and proud that I was an American, ready to fight for my country even if it meant that I must give up my life.”

  The Chinese in the U.S. military occupied a unique position, a “gray” area, as some would describe it, in which they were neither fully accepted, nor persecuted as outcasts. Unlike African Americans and Japanese Americans, whom all branches of the military segregated from whites, the Chinese were partially integrated into the U.S. armed services. Their experience reflected their ambiguous status in American society, and their treatment varied from region to region as they were sent throughout the country for training. In the Midwest, new Chinese American soldiers met people who had never seen an Asian before, and who asked if they were part of the Chinese army. Some recalled that in the South local whites eyed them suspiciously but accorded them more freedom than blacks, such as permission to sit wherever they wanted on buses.

  For most young men in the military, World War II would be the first time in their lives they would be thrown together in close quarters with strangers from other parts of the country. Some had never before bef
riended men of a different race, much less slept and showered next to them. Although the new Chinese American troops wore their uniforms with pride, these uniforms did not always shield them from outright hostility. One Chinese American was labeled a “goddamn Chink” and assigned the dirty work in his unit; another had all his possessions thrown out the window by a GI who refused to sleep in the same room. “I was told that ‘no Chinaman will ever fly in my outfit,’ ” William Der Bing recalled of his experience with the U.S. Navy. “I was told that by a doctor—a navy doctor. He gave me a physical. He said, ‘I want you to know that I would do anything I can to fail you in your physical.’ I looked at him and said, ‘If you do, it would be the most dishonest thing that an officer in this United States Navy could ever do to another member of the United States Navy.’ ” True to his word, the navy doctor flunked him, but Bing managed to schedule another physical with another doctor, and passed.

  Despite overt racism, for many the benefits of military service far outweighed the disadvantages. It empowered Chinese Americans, giving them a sophistication and worldly knowledge they never could have achieved in the insular world of America’s Chinatowns. Their daily contact with white men made whites less threatening and mysterious. When Paul S. Wong taught an English-language class to illiterate white recruits, the myth of white superiority was forever demolished for him. “I was so damn surprised when they could not write their name [or] even add,” he said.

  The military also gave Chinese Americans the opportunity to be heroes. One such was Gordon P. Chung-Hoon, a Honolulu-born ABC and 1934 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. In the spring of 1945, Chung-Hoon served as commanding officer of the USS Sigsbee, which helped destroy twenty Japanese planes near the island of Kyushu. When a kamikaze pilot smashed into the Sigsbee, throwing the port engine and steering control out of commission, Chung-Hoon skillfully handled two crises simultaneously: he directed anti-aircraft battery fire against the enemy while overseeing damage control to allow the Sigsbee to reach port safely. He won the Navy Cross and Silver Star for conspicuous gallantry and extraordinary heroism, and in 2001 the Navy honored Rear Admiral Chung-Hoon posthumously by naming a guided missile destroyer after him.

  Maybe most important, service in the U.S. military forced Chinese Americans to question their identity and every value taught them by their parents since childhood. For many ABCs, the war was the defining moment of their lives, the pivotal years that changed them, psychologically, from “Chinese” to “Americans of Chinese descent.”

  One military unit in China—the all-Chinese American 14th Air Service Group (part of the “Flying Tigers”), which had approximately 1,300 members—vividly illustrates this transformation. When Lawrence Chen was a boy, his parents told him, “China is your home.” But after Chen joined the U.S. Army Air Force and entered the Pacific theater, China became more than a glorified abstract concept to be discussed over the dinner table; it was a daily reality. It soon became clear to Chen and other ABCs in the U.S. military that China was not, and never could be, “home.” Their experience destroyed all their romantic illusions about China. They were shocked by the levels of KMT corruption—by the sight of Nationalist soldiers marching in straw sandals (or sometimes barefoot), of peasants being dragged out of their homes and forcibly impressed into the military. Their lives had been threatened not only by the Japanese but by hostile Nationalist troops. (One ABC, John Chuck, was accosted at gunpoint by a Nationalist guard demanding money, until others convinced him that Chuck was American.) They were disturbed by the level of poverty in some regions of China—the lack of flushable toilets, showers, or indoor running water, the construction of pebble roads by brute manpower, the throngs of starving refugees fleeing the Japanese invasion and ignored by Nationalist officials. China, in the words of these young ABCs, was “behind time—like cavemen,” “primitive,” and “scary.” Wing Lai of the 555th Air Service Squadron described the people in China as “so poor. These beggars there—boy you feel sorry for them. You just had to give them something to eat, but how much can you feed so many people?”

  These cultural barriers precluded true friendship between the ABCs and the native Chinese they met during their service overseas. Members of the 14th Air Service Group felt that the local villagers profoundly distrusted them, even though many ABCs could speak the local dialect fluently. Some natives called the Chinese American soldiers yang guizi (“foreign devils”). Others feigned friendship in an effort to use Chinese American soldiers as potential sponsors for emigration to the United States.

  What the war did for the 14th Air Service Group was to forge a new Chinese American identity among its members. Not that there was a cookie-cutter similarity among them. They represented a cross-section of the ethnic Chinese population in the United States in terms of age, geography, and cultural background: the members ranged from teenagers to middle-aged men, from a guitar-playing Montana cowboy to college graduates from New York and San Francisco. Some spoke mainly Chinese; some did not understand Chinese; some were fluent in both languages. But their shared wartime experiences helped dissolve regional differences and create a new national Chinese American consciousness.

  After the rollback of Japanese control of the eastern coastal area of China, Harry Lim and a few other Chinese American soldiers had an unsettling experience while walking along the Bund in Shanghai, one that reminded them of their own precarious status in the United States, and the fact that some white Americans would never accept them as equals. Coming upon a group of Japanese prisoners of war sweeping the road, the first time they had seen enemy soldiers up close, they suddenly realized that these prisoners looked just like them. “Except for the uniforms, those boys could have been us,” Lim observed. “They were even about the same age. I was shocked. Incidents like these really made you think about the double standards in America and had you wondering how you would be treated when you went home.”

  The Chinese had suffered severe racism and a tight job market during the depression, but the war now gave them a better public image, as well as a booming American wartime economy that needed all the help it could get. As fighter planes rolled off assembly lines, as factories sought to fill the insatiable demand for new technology and new weapons, the Chinese easily found work in arenas previously closed to them. With so much work to be done, and with hundreds of thousands of young white men away in the armed services, the United States found itself facing what may well have been its greatest labor shortage in history. In 1944, California, home to an exploding defense industry, repealed a nineteenth-century law that forbade the state or public corporations from employing any Chinese.

  The result was an era almost boundless in opportunity. Many educated Chinese landed positions as engineers, scientists, and technicians in the burgeoning high-tech industry. In the lower-echelon labor market, Chinese broke away from menial jobs to enter the industrial sector. Thousands of waiters and laundrymen found employment in shipyards and aircraft factories offering union wages and benefits. During this exodus from Chinatowns, as workers found more lucrative positions, small, family-run businesses suffered desperately from lack of manpower. During the war, Chinese restaurants operated with fewer waiters, while cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia borrowed help from larger Chinatowns in Chicago and New York.

  Job opportunities multiplied for women as well. Many left Chinatown to secure new positions as secretaries, clerks, and assistants for government contractors. The U.S. government also recruited second-generation ethnic Chinese women to work for the Army Air Force as Air WACs (Women’s Army Corps), whose duties included air traffic control and photograph interpretation. (In deference to the high esteem in which the first lady of China was held, these women in the Army Air Force were often referred to as the “Madame Chiang Kai-shek Air WACs. ”) Another valuable source of employment came from the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, which trained Chinese American women to become powerful leaders in the military. Helen Pon Onyett, who nursed wounded soldiers in t
he North African campaign, earned the Legion of Merit and other major citations during her thirty-five-year army career. She would later retire as a full colonel, one of the few American women ever to do so.

  In August 1945, the war finally came to a close when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender. After four years of combat in the Pacific, thousands of battle-scarred veterans returned home, anxious to put the war behind them, eager to start new lives and new families. The resulting baby boom comprised not only white births, but Chinese American ones as well.

  Before the war, many Chinese men could not find wives because of the terrible shortage of Chinese women. In 1924, an immigration act prevented American citizens of Chinese heritage from importing alien Chinese brides, and as a result, no Chinese immigrant woman—not one—gained admission for the next six years. Then in 1930, the U.S. government decided Chinese wives could enter as long as the marriage had occurred before May 26,1924, a specific time requirement that limited the number of women arrivals. During the next decade, only about sixty Chinese women a year joined their husbands in the United States, but more recent Chinese brides faced difficulty gaining admission.

  After World War II, the U.S. government decided to overhaul this immigration policy to reward Chinese American veterans for their service. The 1945 War Brides Act permitted them to marry in China and bring their wives to the United States. Given the low number of ethnic Chinese women at home (the male-female ratio was three to one), many servicemen decided to wed foreign-born Chinese women. Before the act expired on December 30, 1949, almost six thousand Chinese American soldiers went to China and returned with brides. For many, there was no time for elaborate rituals or lengthy, romantic courtship. They faced not only the deadline of the act’s expiration date but also the time constraints of their own furloughs. One soldier on leave flew to China, picked a bride, married, and then landed at San Francisco airport the night before his month’s furlough expired. As a result of such hasty marriages, after the war about 80 percent of all new Chinese arrivals were female. In March 1948, the maternity ward of the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco recorded an average of two births a day. According to historian Him Mark Lai, so many pregnant women came into this hospital that many had to sleep in the hallways. In part because of these new arrivals and new births, during the 1940s the ethnic Chinese population in the United States soared from 77,000 to 117,000.