The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  The government kept Tsien in a state of limbo while trying to decide what to do with him. One faction—mainly defense officials—fought to keep him in the United States, arguing that his technical knowledge was too valuable to let fall into the hands of Communist China, while another—primarily immigration authorities—believed he should be packed off. Meanwhile, the government would not let Tsien leave the boundaries of Los Angeles until his case was resolved. For five years, from 1950 to 1955, he lived under constant FBI surveillance, with his phone bugged, his mail opened and read, his family followed in the streets. Finally, on September 17, 1955, the U.S. government deported Tsien and his family to mainland China.

  Whether Tsien was a Communist in the United States cannot be determined, but the evidence suggests that he was not. His wife was the daughter of a top military strategist for Chiang Kai-shek, and survivors of the Cal Tech Communist cell to which Tsien had allegedly belonged insist he was not a member. After a five-year investigation, the INS failed to turn up any documentary proof of Tsien’s Communist involvement. As it later turned out, however, his political leanings had no bearing whatsoever on the final decision to deport him. Decades later, declassified State Department documents revealed that the United States and the PRC had negotiated a secret prisoner swap: Tsien Hsue-shen for a group of American POWs captured during the Korean War.

  In the end, the case against Tsien hurt rather than helped U.S. national defense. By deporting him, the nation lost a first-class scientist who almost certainly would have been a valued adviser to the American lunar and missile programs. As early as 1949, Tsien had predicted that a trip to the moon would be possible within thirty years and that the journey could be accomplished in a week. Meanwhile, with Tsien’s return the PRC gained a man who helped launch a technological revolution in his homeland. As the director of the Fifth Academy of National Defense, China’s first missile institute, Tsien oversaw the development of China’s first generation of nuclear missiles, the Dongfeng “East Wind” series. He also proposed and guided the development of the first artificial Chinese satellite, a tracking and control telemetry network for ICBMs.

  Perhaps Tsien’s attorney, Grant B. Cooper, best summed up the repercussions to the United States of its irrational persecution of Tsien: “That this government permitted this genius, this scientific genius, to be sent to Communist China to pick his brains is one of the tragedies of this century.”

  As the cold war escalated, American society turned inward, as if cocooning itself against the risk of nuclear destruction. It was an age of burgeoning suburbs, when American men embraced the security of a safe income in a large corporation, while women were encouraged to forgo careers and devote themselves to motherhood. Glossy advertisements projected images of the ideal American marriage: the company man cruising in his long-finned car to his job in the city, the blissful housewife surrounded by gleaming new gadgets in her suburban kitchen. TV dinners—packaged food with disposable utensils and trays—enabled families to eat at home, often right in front of the television, under the hypnotic power of mass media. It was a time of affluence, consumerism, and anesthetizing conformity. Yet underneath it all was a persistent anxiety, arising out of fear that some national leader would miscalculate and the Bomb would annihilate them all.

  Despite this anxiety, or because of it, the postwar baby boom produced a culture centered almost exclusively on the needs of children. Couples married earlier and had more children, until birth rates exceeded even those of India. People who had survived the Great Depression and World War II were determined that their own children would want for nothing, and soon the rhythm of American society was governed by the scheduling of Brownie and Boy Scout meetings, birthday parties, and PTA meetings.

  Chinese American culture, with its own explosion of births, became even more family-oriented as well. In San Francisco Chinatown, Cameron House, formerly a rescue mission for prostitutes, became a community center that hosted recreational activities for Chinese American children. Youths enjoyed slumber parties there, sleeping in a room painted like a log cabin so they could pretend to be campers in the wilderness. Historian Judy Yung, who spent her youth in 1950s San Francisco, recalled that “many of my peers strove to be all-American, participating in integrated high school club activities and competing to be cheerleaders, student body officers, and prom queens. Others of us chose to become socially active in the Chinese YMCA, Cameron House, Protestant churches, or Chinese language school.”

  The 1950s were also a period of decline for Chinatowns. Quietly, the “old-timers” of Chinatown—the elderly Chinese men who had led a bachelor existence as they supported families overseas—were aging, losing affluence, and dying. The passing of these men coincided with both the government surveillance of Chinatowns, which decreased business revenue, and the conservative political climate of the 1950s, which devastated Chinese casinos and nightclubs. In 1954, the federal government passed an anti-gambling law that crushed Chinese lotteries across the country, thereby destroying a significant source of business revenue for Chinatown neighborhoods and causing residents to move out and seek new business opportunities elsewhere.

  Simultaneously, upwardly mobile young families were reluctant to rear their children in old Chinatown tenements, most of which required significant retrofitting. In 1950, a New York State Housing Survey of New York City Chinatown dwellings found that almost a third did not have flush toilets, almost half lacked showers and bathtubs, and almost three-fourths had no central heating. To escape these privations, many of the children or grandchildren of the nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants or exclusion-era “paper sons” left their ethnic neighborhoods and headed for the suburbs, to join their fellow Americans.

  Even those who had grown up with a certain degree of prosperity were anxious to move on. One such individual was William Chew, whose family had achieved upper-middle-class status in two generations. His grandfather labored on the transcontinental railroad, worked in mines, and sold vegetables for a living. His father served with distinction during World War I, became one of the first Chinese American Masonic Lodge masters in the United States, and rose to the position of superintendent at the Bayside Cannery in Isleton, California. William, who earned a master’s degree in engineering, would later design an experiment for the space shuttle and watch his two sons become a dentist and a professional sports photographer. But when his boys were young, Chew faced a difficult decision: “whether to [remain in] the Chinese community where I grew up, or to move away to rear my family in a medium-income community with more opportunities and a better lifestyle.” He chose the latter. Although he knew moving into a white neighborhood would “eventually dilute my family’s cultural identity,” the enticements were too strong to resist: “I longed to mow a green lawn and wax my car on weekends; to take my children to Sunday school and have backyard bar-b-ques with our neighbors and friends.”

  Many Chinese now had the means to buy into this life. During the 1950s, increasing numbers of ethnic Chinese—among them college-educated children of the immigrant Chinese merchant class, and the World War II veterans who earned university degrees on the GI Bill—rapidly assumed white-collar or professional positions as engineers, doctors, accountants, lawyers, and businessmen. Some were achieving national prominence, and by the end of the decade the new Chinese American luminaries included mogul Chinn Ho, whom Time magazine dubbed the “Chinese Rockefeller of Hawaii,” his high school classmate Hiram Leong Fong, the first American of Chinese as well as Asian ancestry to win a seat on the U.S. Senate, Delbert Wong,34 the first Chinese American (and Asian American) judge in the United States, and James Wong Howe, one of the best cinematographers in the world, whose mastery of the camera would win him two Oscars.

  Through this period, the Chinese American community achieved material wealth far above national averages. In 1959, for instance, they had a median family income of $6,207, while the comparable figure for all Americans was $5,660. Flush with disposable income, the Chin
ese American middle class could now afford mortgages in upscale white suburbs, if the legal obstacles to their purchasing such homes could be eliminated.

  For generations, racist laws, mostly in California, had barred the Chinese from living in white neighborhoods or attending white schools, though some Chinese were informally integrated into white society. After World War II, these laws, both state and federal, were rapidly disappearing from the books. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the real estate covenants that barred homeowners in certain areas from selling to Chinese or other minorities, giving the Chinese the legal right to purchase housing or land anywhere in the country. Legislators in California also struck down laws in the education code mandating racial segregation.

  The absence of these laws did not mean, however, that new Chinese suburbanites were welcomed with open arms. Many white homeowners feared that minority families in their neighborhoods would lower property values, and many local realtors catered to those fears, refusing to show homes to Chinese buyers. To circumvent these exclusionary tactics, some Chinese purchased homes directly from progressive-minded whites, or worked out secret arrangements with white friends, who bought the property first and then immediately resold it to them. To avoid possible confrontation with angry white neighbors, many of these new Chinese homeowners moved in furtively, in the middle of the night.

  In extreme cases, a few whites resorted to harassment, vandalism, and even violence in hopes of driving out the Chinese newcomers. It was not uncommon for Chinese American families in prestigious suburbs to find unpleasant notes tacked on their doors, or garbage thrown into their yards. “The first night, they broke my windows, but I ignored them,” recalled Lancing F. Lee, who bought a house in a white neighborhood in Los Angeles. “Then they brought dogs over to cause trouble. If you crossed the street, they would bully you.”

  Underneath the placid surface of suburbia, some Chinese American families would soon learn, lay a dormant xenophobia. In an era when homeowners erected fallout shelters in anticipation of nuclear war, when children practiced “duck and cover” exercises in schools in the event of a nuclear missile attack, fear was often an instinctive if irrational reaction to anyone who did not look true-blue American.

  Alice Young, a Harvard-educated attorney, remembers growing up in “the only Asian family in what was then essentially Pentagon-CIA land”: the lily-white, conservative Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia. One day, her third-grade teacher showed a social studies film on the Communist threat, in which all the Communists depicted happened to be Chinese. “At the end of the film they said if you notice anyone suspicious, please call your local CIA or FBI,” she recalled. “There I sat in the third-grade class and when the lights came on all of my classmates had moved their chairs further back.”

  Yet the exodus out of the Chinatowns into America’s suburbia continued. Not only did the Chinatowns shrink in size, but some vanished altogether. In 1940, a nationwide study recorded twenty-eight American cities with Chinatowns; by 1955, that number had fallen to sixteen. Some predicted that the Chinatowns of America would soon become ghost towns.

  They were wrong. By the next decade, the People’s Republic of China would undergo cataclysmic political changes so severe that American Chinatown neighborhoods were soon filled with new immigrants.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  New Arrivals, New Lives: The Chaotic 196Os

  In the 1960s, the Chinese in America may have looked to outsiders like one people with a shared culture, shared traditions, and a shared immigration experience. But this was not the case, nor was it for most other immigrant groups. As discrimination against each immigrant group abates over generations, and the enticement of assimilation increases, ethnic ties are rarely strong enough to bind people of different aspirations and talents to a monolithic group identity. This is especially true when immigration is a continuing process, and later arrivals tend to push earlier arrivals out of the ghettos.

  In the 1960s, anti-Chinese discrimination remained strong, but the ethnic Chinese were also no longer bottled up in Chinatowns, as they once were, dependent upon community organizations to protect their rights, their livelihood, and at times their lives. Indeed, some newer arrivals—the intellectuals and those members of the educational and social elite of China who had managed to find their way, however circuitously, to the United States—had not even passed through America’s Chinatowns. They had moved directly into university towns and cities, aided by their English-language skills. They also benefited from the fact that America, whose Declaration of Independence held as self-evident that “all men are created equal,” was about to confront the fearful reality of its own racism.

  Of this group of Chinese in America, the intellectuals, mostly graduate students stranded in the United States by the 1949 revolution in China, were likely to socialize and associate with other intellectuals of Chinese descent. But intellectual communities were already becoming the first outposts of multiculturalism, and Chinese scholars were able to participate in university town life without being self-conscious about their non-Caucasian appearance and speech patterns. As I look back on my own youth as the daughter of two academics, growing up in the community organized around the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I remember driving to Chicago Chinatown with my family, but only for the same reason Americans of other ethnicities went there—for a particularly good Chinese meal, not to strengthen any connection to my roots.

  In addition, as previously noted, by the 1960s quite a few Chinese Americans had been born in the United States. If others saw them as Chinese, not American, that was their problem. Many of these Chinese Americans saw themselves first as Americans, albeit of Chinese descent, and their only real knowledge of the “old country” came through stories they heard from their parents and grandparents. This lack of personal connection was particularly true of the children of the earliest immigrant waves, especially those I refer to as the “long dispersed” immigrants, whose ancestors had left the American Chinatowns long ago. Many now lived and worked in suburban areas throughout the country, and their children had relatively few contacts with other people of their own race. The children’s lives were in many ways indistinguishable from those of the children of other immigrant groups.

  But for Chinese who did not feel secure enough to move out of Chinatown, having strong local community groups to turn to in times of trouble was still important. Their comfort was eroded when, in the 1960s, a large wave of new immigrants, mostly refugees from Communist mainland China, came to the United States. Their arrival in America’s Chinatowns resulted in a clash of cultures between those who were getting ready to move on but had not yet left and those who had just arrived.

  In 1957, in what has come to be known as the “anti-Rightist” movement, Mao Zedong encouraged open criticism of the Communist Party by proclaiming, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.” Those who took Mao at his word, however, and actually voiced criticisms of any aspect of the Communist system suffered serious reprisals. Labeled “counterrevolutionaries,” thousands of intellectuals who had foolishly suggested reforms landed in prison or reeducation camps. Many others kept silent and quietly applied for exit visas.

  A year later, in 1958, the Chinese Communist government began an obsessive national effort to increase industrial output under a plan named the “Great Leap Forward.” Seven hundred million people were placed in agricultural communes and ordered to build “backyard steel furnaces.” Forced to abandon the fields to tend cauldrons of molten steel, peasants melted down their metallic possessions—from pots and pans to bedsprings—for gains that had only symbolic value. Livestock and crops perished from neglect, and soon the country found itself in the throes of the worst famine in Chinese history, possibly the worst in human history. Food was tightly rationed, but millions of Chinese died of starvation. Eventually the Great Leap Forward was abandoned, and even Mao admitted it had been a mistake, announcing, “The chaos caused wa
s on a grand scale, and I take responsibility.”

  To ease the pressure of widespread hunger, the Communist leadership suddenly allowed thousands of Chinese to emigrate. Within a twenty-five-day period in 1962, seventy thousand people, mostly residents of Guangdong province, were permitted to leave. At that time, it was easier to emigrate to Hong Kong than to the United States, so most went there, hoping to move on to America at a later date. But those who attempted this two-step migration to the United States faced numerous frustrations.

  Even though they were now residents of a British territory, and U.S. emigration policy still heavily favored northern Europeans while restricting immigration from other parts of the world, most of these Chinese émigrés were still denied entry. According to the McCarran-Walter Act, the statute on immigration, U.S. nation-of-origin requirements separated applicants not by country of residence, but by country of birth.35 Thus, the Chinese trying to get to America from the British territory of Hong Kong were treated not as British applicants, but as Chinese. The established quotas permitted only a token 105 Chinese to be admitted annually. Beyond the quota, some Chinese, thanks to special legislation, could enter either as political refugees or on the strength of their individual talents, but their numbers were small.

  Many did not even make it to Hong Kong. With so many Chinese streaming across the border, conditions in the city became so overcrowded that British authorities threw up barbed wire to prevent more from entering and rounded up as many refugees as they could to ship them back to China. Hong Kong’s problems were exacerbated by the callousness of the British to the plight of these homeless Chinese as well as restrictive U.S. immigration practices. These issues prompted President John F. Kennedy to sign a presidential directive on May 23, 1962, admitting refugees who were in Hong Kong but had been born in mainland China. By 1965, some fifteen thousand Chinese refugees had arrived in the United States.