The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

Many students from Taiwan arrived just as the United States was undergoing one of the most radical cultural transformations in its history. The 1960s were a time of rebellious challenge by young Americans; in the 1970s American institutions were forced to reinvent themselves in response to these challenges. The social upheaval bewildered even America’s native-born citizens, but for those who had spent their formative years in a repressive island culture, seeing America in such open and often successful rebellion against authority must have been astounding. It was a strident age, a time of growing militancy among all sectors of the population. Women demanded their rights and pushed for an Equal Rights Amendment. One-third of the college-age population in America viewed marriage as obsolete. The assassination of Martin Luther King destroyed the idealism of the civil rights movement, hastening the rise of new black leaders, many of whom clamored for revolution and the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

  It was a time of mass disillusionment, of eroding trust in government. American students felt betrayed when President Richard Nixon, who had pledged to end the Vietnam War, sent troops into Cambodia to interrupt the flow of arms from North Vietnam to the Vietcong guerrillas in the south. This decision ignited riots at American universities, and led to the deaths of four students at Kent State in Ohio. Gasoline prices soared when Arab nations, angered by American support of Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, drastically increased the price of oil exported to the United States, which the major oil companies exploited to raise prices even further. In this decade Germany and Japan, America’s former wartime adversaries, emerged as serious economic competitors, and for the first time in the twentieth century the United States began to import more than it exported. The value of the dollar plummeted, while inflation skyrocketed into double digits. Money dropped in value faster than pay raises, shaking the American middle-class dream of prosperity.

  Disgusted by the Vietnam War, government corruption, and the country’s economic problems, many American youths simply refused to participate in the system. Tens of thousands decided to challenge the establishment by rejecting consumerism, spurning corporate America, and seeking spiritual enlightenment. They flocked to communes and lived off the land. They embraced, spontaneously and voluntarily, a national uniform that erased distinctions of class: denim blue jeans. Discarding traditional bourgeois values, they experimented with alternative lifestyles: cohabitation without marriage, homosexual and lesbian relationships, discos and drugs. While many found these changes liberating, others despaired at what they considered mindless hedonism and the collapse of American civilization.

  The newcomers from Taiwan had no frame of reference with which to assess these upheavals. Upon arrival, many were simply trying to distinguish one Caucasian face from another. “White people all looked alike to me in the beginning,” my mother recalled of her first year at Harvard. “Pale skin, big noses—that was all I could notice in the beginning.” Despite the profusion of different shades of eye and hair color, all she could take in about the Caucasian population were those racial features that would not be seen on a Chinese person.

  American food repulsed them. Many Taiwanese Americans remember being half starved through their first term in graduate school because they could not stomach the meals. They described the horrors of barbecues, college cafeterias, and inauthentic Chinese restaurants in the United States. Wrote Cai Nengying, the wife of a graduate student, “The sight of a hot dog dripping with red tomato sauce and yellow mustard is enough to take your appetite away ... hamburgers are even worse: semi-raw beef with a slice of raw onion and a slice of raw tomato.” And to add insult to injury, good manners required that the “terrible tasting food must be praised to the skies.” Once she almost threw up when served a dessert of cored apples stuffed with plum jam and coated in sugar, yet knew she was obligated to say, “Delicious! Delicious!”

  And inevitably, the newcomers struggled with the language. At first most could not grasp the freewheeling American vernacular. Their studies back in Taiwan had not prepared them for the slang terms and many idiomatic expressions in which words had meanings they had never learned. There were also hand and facial gestures that seemed like coded signals. Jokes had incomprehensible punch lines. It was often difficult to follow the lectures of professors, to decipher certain passages in textbooks and academic papers, and to make oneself intelligible during classroom discussions.

  The first semester was a frightening time for many. They saw themselves competing with American-born graduate students who had spent their entire lives immersed in English. If writing a clear and cogent paper was daunting for native-born Americans, it was far more difficult for students still groping for fluency in a new language. If their grades slipped, they could lose their scholarships and stipends. Most did not come from wealthy families and could not afford to continue their studies without some sort of financial help. A few, in fact, were in debt, having borrowed money from relatives in America. To quit would mean returning to Taiwan a disappointment to family and relatives, a failure.

  Even with help, many had to be ruthlessly focused and frugal. My uncle, Dr. Cheng-Cheng Chang, remembered that when he first arrived for graduate studies in electrical engineering at the University of Oklahoma in the 1960s, his first priority was to earn the top grades that would allow him to transfer to the doctoral program at the University of California at Berkeley. He also resolved to slash his expenses and save a nest egg to support his education in the United States. His budget was so tight that he dared not spend even a few cents for any nonessentials, however trivial. One of his most poignant memories was pacing around a Coke machine one hot, dusty afternoon, trying to decide whether to part with a single coin to quench his thirst.

  As a result of disciplined saving, many Chinese students were not only able to maintain themselves on their American stipends, but to help their families back in Taiwan as well. Like the Chinese immigrants who had preceded them, the Taiwanese students placed great emphasis on family, and their loyalty to kin created a pattern of chain migration. Because exchange rates inflated the value of American currency on the island—often by a factor of ten—their small remittances home seemed a small fortune to the recipients in Taiwan. The most frugal students were able to sponsor the migration of spouses, siblings, and parents to the United States. The funds also gave younger students in Taiwan a glimpse of American opportunity, inspiring them to excel at their studies so they themselves could apply to U.S. doctoral programs.

  After an initial period of adjustment, many students found life in the United States both exhilarating and liberating. “As I grew up in Taiwan under a fairly controlled society, I was blown away by the freedom and [the fact that] everyone can do what they want,” remembered Albert Yu, head of Intel’s microprocessor division. “I felt that I was set free.”

  This freedom, however, was overshadowed by one sobering fact. Even though they were thousands of miles from home, the Nationalist government kept careful tabs on its students in the United States. During the 1960s, when thousands of young Chinese began to leave the island to pursue advanced degrees, the Nationalists, ever sensitive to their image in the United States, cultivated an extensive network of spies to watch over them at American universities.

  As some would learn the hard way, potential troublemakers were arrested and imprisoned during their visits back to the home island. In 1966 authorities apprehended Huang Qiming, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, during a visit to Taipei, slapping him with a five-year prison term for allegedly attending Taiwanese independence meetings in the United States. In 1967, the Nationalists accused Chen Yuxi of reading Communist literature in the library of the East-West Center in Hawaii and participating in Vietnam War protests. Within weeks of Chen’s acceptance by Hosei University in Tokyo, Japanese immigration officials handed him over to KMT agents, who transported him back to Taiwan. The KMT sentenced him to death on charges of sedition, then reduced the sentence to seven years after activists in the United Sta
tes and Japan lobbied furiously to save his life. Eventually, in 1971, the uproar from the human rights activists resulted in Chen’s release from Taiwan.

  Because of the risks associated with activism, many Taiwanese Americans decided to focus on their careers instead of politics. As the years flew by and their lives were established, they had to make the difficult decision that all of America’s immigrants eventually face: should they apply for U.S. citizenship and commit to living in the United States?

  After earning their degrees, only one in four students returned to Taiwan to settle down permanently. The majority remained in the United States, accepting positions at universities, government laboratories, and corporations, swiftly moving into upper-middle-class American society. Whereas previous generations of Chinese were forced by law or social custom to live in segregated Chinatowns, only to watch their descendants leave for the suburbs, most Taiwanese Americans never had any contact with Chinatown other than to eat meals there. Instead, their lives followed the pattern of a more privileged class of Chinese Americans. In 1970, Chia-ling Kuo provided a glimpse of this world in his study of Chinese émigrés living in Long Island, New York. Many of these people had grown up in upper-class families in coastal cities like Shanghai, attended Christian schools in China, and gained early exposure to Western culture. Now they were highly paid professionals, such as executives and bankers, with lives almost indistinguishable from their white neighbors. Owning expensive homes, they hosted dances and parties and led active lives in the community. Most attended church regularly and belonged to white country clubs, where they played tennis and golf. Their children often felt more comfortable among whites than among other American-born Chinese, because most of their friends and schoolmates were white.

  Most interesting, many Chinese Long Islanders exuded confidence in the face of prejudice. Contempt, rather than fear or hurt, was the most frequent response to racist white Americans: “I would not let those ignorant people bother me,” one immigrant told Kuo. “After all, we have had four thousand years of civilization. You just can’t reason with fools and little people, as Confucius once said.”

  Such attitudes caused some Americans to conclude that anti-Asian prejudice had all but disappeared. In 1970, the New York Times announced that bias against Chinese Americans had dropped significantly: “The great majority of Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, whose humble parents had to iron the laundry and garden the lawns of white Americans, no longer find any artificial barriers to becoming doctors, lawyers, architects and professors.” The article went on to report that many Asian Americans under the age of thirty could not remember a single personal instance of racial discrimination. “If you have ability and can adapt to the American way of speaking, dressing, and doing things, then it doesn’t matter anymore if you are Chinese,” the article quoted Mr. J. Chuan Chu, vice president of Honeywell Information Systems, as saying.

  Individual success stories seemed to validate this position. Indeed, a number of Taiwanese Americans would soon reach the pinnacle of their professions within a single generation. In 1976, Sam Ting, a physics professor at MIT and head of a research team at Brookhaven National Laboratory, won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the J/psi particle, which contained a new kind of quark and its anti-particle. 46 The following decade, another prominent Taiwanese American scientist, Yuan Tseh Lee, a professor at Berkeley, would win a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research in the collision of molecular beams.

  One Taiwanese American professor, Chang-Lin Tien, became the first Chinese American, as well as the first Asian American, to head a major research university in the United States. His career was propelled by personal determination and a fierce reverence for education—a reverence to which his family had introduced him by example.

  Tien was born in Wuhan, the son of a wealthy banker. His father had earned a degree in physics from Beijing University, the most prestigious university in China. (“A degree in anything and you were automatically Mandarin; it was a ticket anywhere,” Tien explained years later.) The pedigree enabled his father to become a financial commissioner in the Nationalist government, but no one foresaw that events would crumble the very foundations of their society. The Japanese invasion of China stripped the Tiens of everything—their home, their servants, their luxurious lifestyle. Fleeing the Japanese forces, the family uprooted themselves from Wuhan and moved into the French concession of Shanghai.

  With extraordinary resolve, Tien’s father rebuilt his life as well as his fortune, eventually becoming the CEO of a major bank and Shanghai commissioner of commerce. Their world became lavish once again, complete with servants and chauffeured cars: “We lived like the Rockefellers!” But then, once again, it all disappeared: the 1949 revolution wiped out their charmed existence, and the family, once again refugees, escaped from Shanghai to Taiwan with little more than the clothes on their backs.

  “My father couldn’t cope with the loss,” Tien later told a San Francisco Focus reporter. “It was the second time he had lost everything.” When Tien first arrived in Taiwan at age fourteen, his entire family—twelve people—had to squeeze into one tiny room. “There wasn’t even room for all of us to sleep at the same time,” he recalled. “We had to take turns.”

  One evening, Tien awoke to find his father sitting in the room, staring into the darkness. “Go to sleep,” Chang-Lin told him. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll find jobs.” Bitterly, his father retorted, “I don’t care whether my children even have nothing to eat. What I worry about is I cannot send my children to get an education.” Young Tien never forgot those words.

  Shattered and depressed by the memories of his ruined career, Tien’s father later died of a heart attack, at the relatively young age of fifty-four. To help support the family, Chang-Lin worked odd jobs in high school and college. After graduating from National Taiwan University, he left nothing to chance and applied to 240 schools in the United States. The University of Louisville in Kentucky granted him a full scholarship, and in 1956 he borrowed money to pay for an inexpensive plane ticket to Seattle, then boarded a Greyhound bus for the seventy-two-hour ride to Louisville.

  In the American South, Tien caught his first whiff of America’s obsession with race. The moment he stepped off the bus, he saw signs marking bathroom doors and water fountains “Whites Only” or “Colored.” He felt uncertain about his category, but local whites told him to use the white facilities, explaining that he was a guest of the United States. Tien was privately repulsed by the system and agonized over its injustice. Observing that all local buses were segregated by race, with whites sitting in front and blacks in back, he chose to walk whenever possible instead of taking public transportation.

  Later he found that racism permeated not just street life, but academia as well. At the University of Louisville, one of his professors repeatedly called him “Chinaman” (at first, Tien recalls, “I was so ignorant, I thought it was a term of endearment”). Eventually he decided to put an end to these insults. “For two nights I could not sleep, staying awake and thinking about what I should do ... As a refugee, I had insecure status; I owed my livelihood to his employment. He could end my position and I might have to go back to Taiwan. I was very afraid.” Finally Tien worked up the nerve to tell the professor never to call him “Chinaman” again. The confrontation was a partial success—while the professor reacted defensively, saying it would be difficult to remember Tien’s “foreign” name, he never again used the derogatory term of “Chinaman.” However, he looked for other ways to humiliate Tien, leaving him uneasy and insecure. On one occasion, this professor ordered him to climb a ladder and shut off a steam valve. He slipped and broke his fall by seizing a 400-degree Fahrenheit pipe, but he dared not complain about his severely burned and bleeding hand for fear of being ridiculed.

  A less resolute man might have abandoned academic life, but Tien forged ahead with laser-like focus. In 1957, only one year after his arrival, he earned his master’s degree at the University of Louisvil
le. Two years later, he got his doctorate at Princeton and immediately joined the mechanical engineering department at the University of California at Berkeley. He would spend the next four decades at Berkeley, rising swiftly through the ranks, becoming a full professor, chairman of the department, vice chancellor of research, and finally chancellor of the university. On top of his administrative duties, he would also work on the design of the Saturn booster rocket, correct a heat-shield problem in the U.S. space shuttle, and conduct breakthrough research on superinsulation that would be used to construct high-speed levitation trains in Japan.

  The energy and ambition that Taiwanese immigrants applied to academia also helped build the American high-tech industry. David Lee, a computer pioneer, became one of the first Chinese success stories in Silicon Valley. His resilience in the fast, ruthless world of technology can be traced to his childhood. Born in Beijing in 1937, David—then called Sen Lin Lee—grew up amidst war and revolution, where abrupt change was part of his daily existence.

  To escape the Japanese invaders, and later the Communists, his family moved thirteen times during the first twelve years of Lee’s life, each time leaving more wealth behind. In 1949, the family fled the civil war for Taiwan. The twelve-year-old Lee left China with nothing more than the clothes he was wearing and two silver dollars hidden in his shoes. Fearful of a Communist invasion of the island, the family moved again in 1952, this time to Argentina. They settled in Belgrano, a suburb of Buenos Aires, where the family had no business contacts, no knowledge of English or Spanish, and no idea about how they would survive.

  Relying on ingenuity fueled by desperation, they opened a Chinese restaurant in the living room of their apartment. Lee’s parents hired a Chinese man bilingual in Mandarin and Spanish to serve as the host in front, while the family labored in the back of their home to cook the meals. The restaurant thrived (soon expanding into the bedrooms), and the following year the Lee family used their restaurant earnings to launch an eventually successful import/export business. David, then a teenager, swiftly became fluent in Spanish and served as his father’s translator. As he negotiated with vendors by translating his father’s exact words, he learned invaluable lessons in business, lessons he later believed equivalent to earning an MBA.