The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  During their early years on Taiwan, some mainlanders refused to accept the island as a permanent home and set their sights over the horizon. My own mother’s family, like many other mainland refugees, believed an invasion of Taiwan was imminent. In late 1949 and early 1950, my maternal grandfather, who had been a poet, scholar, and journalist in mainland China, anxiously pored over stacks of books, researching the culture and geography of other countries in which the family might settle. America was out of the question, because my grandfather believed only rich, well-connected Nationalists could go there, but the Philippines or perhaps Brazil might lie within their reach. A year after arriving in Taiwan, the family moved to Hong Kong, intending to proceed to another country, either in Asia or Latin America. Courageously—or perhaps naively—my grandfather attempted to support himself, his wife, and their five children in Hong Kong as a freelance writer. As Chinese American Anna Chennault would later write in her memoirs, Hong Kong in the 1950s was a “desolate place both in literary and in cultural terms. Writers could seldom practice their craft and make ends meet, and even well-known columnists could rarely hope to make more than ten dollars an article.” My mother’s entire family squeezed into a single room without a kitchen, and prepared meals over a charcoal burner in the hallway. They later moved to another boarding house where water for cooking or cleaning had to be fetched from a faucet in the street. While my grandfather diligently wrote editorials and political commentary for a local newspaper, my grandmother looked into the possibility of earn-ing extra money by frying beans for vendors or mending clothes. Decades later, my mother says her family was just one step away from being homeless.

  Many, even some of those who stayed through the 1960s, saw Taiwan as only a temporary resting ground, a refugee way station en route to their next destination. By the time the first generation of Taiwanese Chinese children came of age, it was clear that starting a career on this island, just a few miles across a narrow strait from Communist-controlled China, could not promise a glowing future. With the encouragement of their parents, the best and brightest of them actively worked to leave Taiwan and start new lives abroad. The most popular destination turned out to be the United States, the former patron of the Nationalist government. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, about two thousand students were leaving Taiwan each year to pursue graduate degrees in America.

  Those like my grandfather who were certain that mainland China was about to invade and annex the island were not simply pessimistic prophets of doom. The PRC had fully intended to deliver the coup de grace with a military assault on Taiwan, when the Korean War unexpectedly intervened, turning the PRC and the U.S. into deadly enemies. The American government, an ally of South Korea, threw its protection to Taiwan and used the island as a forward Pacific base. Most important, the United States continued to recognize the Nationalists as the sole legitimate government not only of Taiwan but of all of China. Only when it was clear that Taiwan had the unwavering support of the United States did my maternal grandfather have the confidence to leave Hong Kong in 1950 and move back to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, where he soon became a regular newspaper columnist and a professor.

  Since United States backing was key to Taiwan’s survival, the KMT devoted tremendous resources to maintaining good relations with Washington. At the vanguard of what would become known as Taiwan’s “China Lobby” in the United States were two of Chiang Kai-shek’s brothers-in-law: T. V. Soong, the finance minister of the Republic of China, and H. H. Kung.43 In 1954, in part because of the influence of the China Lobby and its supporters, the United States pledged to safeguard Taiwan by signing a mutual defense treaty. For the next three decades the United States recognized the Nationalist regime as the official government of China. Indeed, until 1971, more than twenty years after the Nationalists were driven from the mainland, U.S. power in the United Nations enabled a government that exerted effective control over only one small island of less than 20 million people to hold one of the five permanent seats on the Security Council, while the People’s Republic of China, the de facto government of a billion people, was not even a UN member. So powerful was the China Lobby in American politics that U.S. News and World Report later ranked its influence as an international lobby in Washington second only to that of the state of Israel.

  But while the Nationalists gained powerful friends in Washington, they were much less concerned about winning the hearts of those at home. Within a few years, Chiang’s island regime rivaled its former mainland regime in cronyism and corruption. The new administration threw thousands of native bureaucrats out of work and suspended all national-level elections on the island on the pretext that Communist occupation of the mainland prevented a fair vote on Taiwan. In their view, the civil war was far from over, entitling all elected Nationalist politicians to keep their positions until the Communists were driven from the mainland and new elections could be held. On March 1, 1950, Chiang Kai-shek became, once again, the president of the Republic of China. In 1960, the government revised the constitution to eliminate the two-term limit on the presidency during “the period of Communist rebellion,” so that Chiang could parlay his position into a lifelong dictatorship.

  The period of the 1950s was known as the reign of “White Terror,” during which Chiang’s National Security Bureau harassed thousands of people suspected of being pro-Communist, often solely on hearsay and circumstantial evidence. The government silenced, jailed, and in some cases executed or assassinated members of the intellectual landowning elite, and laws were applied retroactively to punish innocuous activities committed long before the Nationalists had even arrived on the Island.44 The Nationalist crackdown bred a deep hatred of the KMT on the island and fostered the growth of secret organizations of natives for Taiwanese independence.

  To ensure their control into the future, the KMT went about indoctrinating a mindset of unquestioning loyalty in the youth on the island. “By grade school, they had already started to brainwash you,” recalled Dick Ling, a Taiwanese American engineer now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He remembered the school assemblies and the Chinese Boy Scout meetings designed to instill in him a sense of Sun Yat-sen as an almost mythic hero and of the Three People’s Principles of the Nationalist Party as beyond challenge. In junior high, he endured interminable flag-raising ceremonies, in which the school principal and his assistant addressed motivational speeches to their captive audience: how they all must “work hard, study hard, be loyal to the country, and help Chiang Kai-shek, the savior of China, recover the mainland to rescue the people from Mao Zedong.” As in many cult-based dictatorships, pictures of Chiang appeared everywhere—in classrooms, hallways, the streets. On October 10, National Day, Ling said, students would wave flags in front of the presidential palace and sing, “Long live Chiang Kai-shek! May he live more than ten thousand years!”

  Censorship was strictly enforced, as intelligence officials freely steamed open and read the public’s letters. Not only did the citizens lose their right to privacy, but also their right to free speech and unfettered access to information. Foreign publications were sanitized as they came through the mail: bureaucrats, rifling through American magazines like Time and Life, stamped on each photograph of Mao Zedong the Chinese character Fei—“bandit”—for the benefit of unenlightened readers. Creative works, no matter how small, were scrutinized for hidden political messages. For example, when Dick Ling was moonlighting as a freelance cartoonist during his college years, he was warned by a Taiwanese newspaper editor never to draw “bald old men with little moustaches,” because they might be perceived as caricatures of Chiang Kai-shek.

  People were punished simply for careless, offhand remarks. Carl Hsu remembered that during his military service in Taiwan, the authorities ordered the entire boot camp to join in a group denunciation of Communist and Marxist philosophy. One boy asked how he could do this since he was not legally allowed to read books on the subject. “That student got into deep, deep trouble,” Hsu recalled.
“Even though we were very young, we were trained to be very careful about what we said.”

  The government even discouraged its citizens from building their own shortwave radios, for fear of their listening to broadcasts from the People’s Republic of China, an activity outlawed by the Nationalist government. Shortwave radios were also associated with espionage, because they could enable secret communication with the mainland. “You couldn’t even buy vacuum tubes then,” remembered Ching Peng, a Chinese American engineer from Taiwan. “The KMT was paranoid about people using the tubes to build shortwave radios.” Caught with such a radio, one of his relatives ended up with a three-year jail term, even though there was no evidence whatsoever that he had tuned in to any Communist propaganda.

  As the years went by, a schism opened. between parents and children in many Nationalist families. Some parents could not free themselves from the past, and for the rest of their lives they would obsess, bitterly, on lost fortunes and ruined careers. Some could talk of nothing but their glory days in China—their mansions, their servants, their titles—and how it had all vanished overnight in the 1949 Communist revolution. Some clung to a dream—which grew more remote with each passing year—that one day the Nationalists would somehow expel the Communists, reclaim their rightful role as leaders of China, and restore the émigrés to their former, proper status in Chinese life.

  Their children took a more realistic view. While many would fondly recall the beautiful island where they had come of age, most came to detest the pinched xenophobia of the Nationalist government, which reduced the culture to a near-monolithic society controlled by an oligarchy of aging politicians. This generation had little interest in returning to mainland China, now a Communist society even more constraining than Taiwan. Once these young people accepted that their future did not lie here, two questions arose: where would they go to build their futures, and how would they get there?

  Science and technology provided the means to get them out of Taiwan. Within a few years, the island would undergo an industrial revolution so breathtakingly rapid it would be heralded worldwide as an economic miracle.

  One of the most formidable tasks the KMT faced in the 1950s was building a modern economy almost from scratch. Like many tropical economies based on the ready availability of at least a subsistence diet, Taiwan had little concern about foreign-trade balances, and consequently no interest in developing foreign export. Aid from the United States paid much of the cost of sustaining the huge government bureaucracy, but the Nationalist leadership understood that Taiwan could not long survive in the changing global arena without the ability to generate its own income.

  Before the arrival of the KMT, Taiwan had been largely an agrarian society, with many families drawing little more than a subsistence income directly from the land. Those who remember that era describe a poor world, yet one infused with a slow-paced, simple beauty. Sayling Wen, co-author of Taiwan Experience, wrote that few people owned chairs or tables in his childhood village: families ate sweet-potato porridge as they stood or squatted around a wooden bench; when meals were cleared away, the bench might be moved under a tree and used as a place to nap. Children walked to school barefoot, and did not receive their first pair of shoes until their middle school years. At night, with no electricity, adults lit oil lamps while children captured fireflies and kept them in jars.

  But this life would soon vanish forever. Within a few decades, the sleepy agricultural society of Taiwan would morph into a global high-tech superpower, one of the wealthiest regions per capita on the planet.

  During the 1950s and 1960s American aid provided about 40 percent of Taiwan’s income. Between 1951 and 1964, Washington gave the Nationalists $100 million in funding every year, as well as free supplies in certain industries. But government officials recognized that if the United States had been unable to keep the Nationalists in power on the mainland, it might one day be unable or unwilling to do so on Taiwan. Taiwan would have to become self-reliant, and, thanks to aggressive economic planning, it succeeded.

  First the Nationalist government introduced land reform and redistribution, coercing the native aristocracy to sell much of their property at low prices to tenant farmers. By monopolizing the rice and fertilizer markets, and through price controls that encouraged farmers to produce ever more crops, the Nationalists created a “developmental squeeze,” producing a surplus of capital which they funneled into nonagricultural industries.

  Next they cultivated light industries for export. Investment and entrepreneurship were encouraged in labor-intensive fields, such as canned foods, household appliances, textiles, rubber, and plastic goods. “Turn your living room into a factory,” proclaimed Shieh Tung-ming, then the provincial governor and later the vice president of Taiwan. “Don’t cry about not having a production factory,” he advised the people. “The living room can be your factory.” This policy transformed typical households in Taiwan into warehouses stuffed with plastic, which the family would assemble for eventual export to other countries in exchange for hard currency. 45

  Soon, the island’s success in exports resulted in huge trade surpluses. By 1965, when the United States cut off aid to Taiwan to husband its resources for the Vietnam War, the island had become financially, though not militarily, self-reliant. In fact, Taiwan had outstripped all other countries in its rate of growth, expanding faster than any other economy in the world. In the 1970s, the Nationalist government began investing in petrochemicals and steel, shifting the island’s attention from light to heavy industries. During that decade, Taiwanese companies also began manufacturing calculators and electronic games, which set the stage for Taiwan’s later entry into, and dominance of, certain sectors of the fast-growing computer industry.

  The island’s economic boom propelled thousands of young Chinese to seek an education in preparation for a career in technology. This was a new trend, for under Japanese occupation the native Taiwanese had not been encouraged to study the physical sciences or engineering, perhaps out of concern that such expertise could be exploited to build weapons that would be used against their colonizers. Most sons of the elite had majored in non-defense-related fields, such as medicine and education. But now the hot fields on the island were physics and engineering—skills desperately sought by burgeoning high-tech industries both in Taiwan and abroad.†

  Before long, Taiwan’s most valuable export would be its own youth. By the 1960s, both the Soviets and the PRC had developed atomic and missile technology, stripping the United States of its old confidence in the protective buffer of its two oceans. Terrified of losing the cold war to the Communist powers, the United States invested billions of dollars in science and technology, expanding research and development not only in defense facilities but at universities as well. As American funding for graduate programs increased, thousands of Taiwanese students began to realize their dream of studying abroad.

  “In schools, teachers taught us about the task of recovering mainland China,” Sayling Wen recalled. “Students, however, only cared about advanced study in the United States.” That was where the future lay, and soon peer attitudes gave study abroad, especially in the United States, an enhanced social cachet. Wen remembered that soon people were pretending that they were going abroad to study, even if no plans had been settled. “Otherwise, no girl would date a guy with no plans to study in America.”

  The reality was that to reach the United States, students had to endure years of ruthless competition. They had to pass a succession of stiff entrance examinations before enrolling in junior high, high school, or college. To prepare for these tests, some children studied under private tutors, or took weekend group preparatory classes, or even pushed themselves through intense, all-night cram sessions. They fought to enter the most prestigious secondary schools that served as pipelines to the best universities on the island, such as National Taiwan University, where success might earn them a fellowship in an American graduate program. They also had to master English, which wa
s not only key to their success in American doctoral programs, but was also required to obtain official permission to leave Taiwan and enter the United States. Before receiving the necessary exit and entry permits, college students had to prove their proficiency in the language in written and oral exams administered by both the Nationalist government and the U.S. embassy in Taiwan.

  All these stipulations created an emigration cohort consisting almost exclusively of the brightest and most ambitious. It seems evident that through this period most alumni of the famous National Taiwan University—and virtually all in certain departments, such as physics and engineering—pursued advanced degrees in the United States, funded by teaching or research assistantships. Even graduates from less prestigious undergraduate programs in Taiwan found ways to migrate to the United States. Some applied to dozens, even hundreds of universities in America, until they found one willing to pay their way. Others, having gained admission but not a fellowship, sought alternative means of support, such as loans from friends and relatives, or the sponsorship of American churches and Christian organizations. This created a special community of immigrants in the United States. While all immigrant groups are to a certain extent self-selected for courage, ambition, and pure adventurousness, members of this subgroup of the Chinese in America were also selected, by the institutions that had the power to advance or frustrate their dreams, for educational achievement.