The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  His father wanted David to have the formal education that had eluded him during the war years, specifically, to study toward an engineering degree at an American university. In 1956, David enrolled at Montana State University in Bozeman, where he worked two hundred hours a month to pay his way through college. “I worked every job in the dorm,” he later told a reporter, “cleaning rooms, making beds, counselor, dietitian, washing dishes—you name it, I did it.” It was hard, but overall his experience at Montana State was positive. In 1960, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, then earned a master’s in the same field from North Dakota State University.

  At first, David took the conventional path of working as an engineer at established companies. In 1962, he started at NCR in Dayton, Ohio, then moved to Frieden in San Leandro, California, then the largest mechanical calculator company in the United States. There he designed the keyboard for the first electronic calculator, as well as the first electronic calculator printer. But in 1969, several employees at Frieden left to form their own company, Diablo, and Lee decided to join them.

  It was a radical move at the time, for the majority of Taiwanese arrivals in the early 1960s aspired to become professors, a career deemed both prestigious and secure. Those who did not plunge into academia tended to work as scientists or engineers at large commercial companies, like IBM or Bell Laboratories. In David’s memory, there were perhaps no more than a thousand Chinese American engineers in Silicon Valley—and most of them were wage-earning professionals, not capitalists. Very few dared to create their own companies.

  At the Diablo start-up, Lee developed the first daisywheel printer for mass production. In 1972, the Xerox Corporation, avidly seeking a product to compete with IBM ball-type printers, bought Diablo for $28 million, turning David into a multimillionaire. Xerox retained him as head of its printer department, but appointed someone else as his boss—a white man whom Lee asserts knew nothing about daisywheel printers. “During that time, Chinese Americans were not viewed as capable managers,” he remembered. “Many companies didn’t want to promote the Chinese—they just wanted to use them.” Knowing that he had hit the glass ceiling at Xerox, Lee trained his new boss and resigned in 1973.

  The same year Lee left Xerox, he co-founded Qume Corporation, a manufacturer of computer peripheral equipment, with the primary goal of creating a new daisywheel printer to compete with the one purchased by Xerox. In 1978, ITT bought Qume for $164 million and asked David to stay at the company to manage its growth. He rose to become the president of Qume, then a vice president of ITT and chairman of its business information systems group.

  Under his leadership, Qume grew into the largest printer company in the world as well as the largest manufacturer of floppy drives in the United States. By contracting with Chinese manufacturers, Lee also helped foster the growth of the personal computer industry in Taiwan. Three Taiwanese companies that built products for Qume—Acer and Mitac for personal computers, and Jing Bao (also known as Cal-Comp Electronics) for terminals—became giants in the industry, transforming the island into a major export leader in PCs and computer peripherals.

  Looking back on his life, Lee observed that many of his fellow émigrés followed safe trajectories and shunned entrepreneurialism, while he was inclined—eager, even—to take risks. “To this day I believe that if you have a Ph.D., you can always get a regular job if your company fails,” he said. “My father—who could not speak Spanish and who had no advanced degrees—faced far worse odds when he launched his own business in Argentina.”

  Not everyone, however, shared Lee’s optimism. During the 1970s, Chinese American professionals began voicing complaints of racial discrimination, and of exploitation by white employers. Some felt they were treated like honorary whites rather than as fully equal fellow Americans, and believed their advancement in academia, government, and corporate America had been arrested by an artificial barrier, what some called a “bamboo ceiling.”

  Many claimed they had to work harder just to win second-level status in their companies. “Orientals are inordinately industrious, reliable, and smart in school but like Avis Rent-A-Car, ‘being only number two,’ Chinese must try harder to prove their middle class Americanization,” James W. Chin wrote in the East/West newspaper in 1970.

  On the surface, the statistics seem to refute charges of racism. In the 1970s, studies found that on average, the Chinese in America possessed more education than whites and earned more money per household. But these studies neglected three important factors: the regional concentration of the Chinese American population, the number of wage earners per family, and the professional and financial returns on their academic degrees. Most Chinese resided in urban centers with higher costs of living, so any somewhat higher earnings were spent on significantly higher rent and taxes.47 Also, while the average household income of Chinese Americans exceeded that of whites, more Chinese women worked full-time than white American women, and more children held part-time jobs.

  The one dimension in which many new Chinese immigrants managed to compete successfully was education. In 1970, one in four Chinese American men sixteen years or older had college degrees, compared to 13 percent of the white male population. In advanced degrees, they were even further ahead of the mainstream. But the true measure of a minority’s success is not just the number of advanced degrees attained, but the career gains achieved as a result of those degrees, and here comparisons do not favor the group. In the Bay Area at that time, for instance, the median income of Chinese men was only 55 percent that of white men.

  In 1970, the California State Fair Employment Practice Commission (FEPC) held hearings to investigate charges of job discrimination against Chinese and other Asian Americans, the first such hearing of its kind. That year, five Asian American health inspectors claimed to be victims of racial discrimination at the San Francisco department of public health. During the hearings, the Chinese American community learned that all five Asian inspectors had graduated from the School of Public Health at Berkeley, but several Caucasians promoted over them had earned nothing more than high school diplomas. One of the five Asian Americans had received the highest score on a written test but was assigned to work at the lowest level because “he presumably lacked the ability to deal with the public.”

  The complaining inspectors asserted that the oral examinations were subjective and racist, and later, tape recordings of the oral exams proved that some questions indeed drew on negative stereotypes of the Chinese. When Chong D. Koo mentioned that he occasionally vacationed in Reno, A. Henry Bliss, the examiner, responded, “I suppose you like to play the lotteries like all good Chinamen.”

  The Fair Employment Practice Commission also uncovered prejudice against Chinese American women. According to the 1970 hearings, many employers believed that “Oriental women had been trained to be subservient to the man at home, and therefore would make good secretaries.” That year, $10,000 was considered a top earnings bracket, but only 2.5 percent of Chinese women made that much. Overall, their median income was only 27 percent of white male income.

  Judy Yung, author of Unbound Feet, wrote that female clerical workers of Chinese descent of that era, seen as docile “office wives,” received low returns on their education compared to whites. A Chinese American woman had to work twice as hard to be judged the equal of a Caucasian. “In fact, the better educated we became, the further our income fell behind relative to white men, white women, and Chinese American men with the same educational background,” she observed.

  Though Chinese Americans soon earned a reputation for being talented, diligent workers, they were viewed as shunning power, uninterested in management. Many considered this perception about Chinese Americans more of an impediment to career advancement than outright anti-Chinese racism, and they resolved first to document it and then to address its inequitable consequences.

  In the 1970s, a group of Chinese Americans and other minorities conducted an in-house study at B
ell Labs that concluded that Asian American employees were grossly underrepresented in management. And the few Asian American managers working at Bell Labs tended to occupy the lower rungs of the corporate ladder. As a consequence, the group organized Asian Americans for Affirmative Action, also known as “4-A,” to try to improve their representation within the company’s highest ranks.

  When the study’s results were released, some white managers expressed genuine surprise that Chinese and Asian American employees wanted executive positions. According to Carl Hsu, one of the founders of 4-A and now a vice president at Lucent, many white managers had simply assumed that Asian Americans were content to perform technical work and harbored no aspirations whatsoever to rise within the organization.

  Many Taiwanese believe this stereotype arose in part from their own deep-seated but well-founded anxieties about challenging authority, which were somehow visible to white colleagues. “Most of us had very deep fears about retribution by management,” Hsu recalled. Even though these particular fears were unjustified, some members of 4-A worried about what management would “do” to them—a Pavlovian response, they believe, to their childhood under the 1950s “White Terror” in Taiwan when critics of the KMT were dealt with summarily. Suspected subversives, Hsu said, would simply disappear in the middle of the night, never to be heard of again, without benefit of a regular trial or even a court-martial. And even though these former Taiwanese were now working in corporate America, thousands of miles from Taiwan and years after the White Terror, many could not shake their early conditioning to the expectation that one wrong word or act, or even a posture of defiance, could lead to severe punishment, even death.

  In the early 1970s, the Nationalists running Taiwan faced dangerous currents in the political wind. The People’s Republic of China had won a certain grudging respect from the international community when it joined the nuclear club in the 1960s. Soon its size and threat as a military power could not be ignored, and, one by one, governments around the world began to recognize the PRC not as usurpers but as the legitimate government of China.

  In 1971, President Richard Nixon suggested in his State of the World address that the United Nations give the People’s Republic a seat, but recognize Taiwan as well. Predictably, supporters of Taiwan in the United States reacted with howls of outrage. Anna Chennault, a vocal leader within the pro-Nationalist lobby, called this move “worse than the betrayal of a loyal ally, it is, simply, wrong-headed.” Shocked by Nixon’s overtures to the PRC, Chennault scolded, “Mr. President, if you decide to abandon Taiwan, it will be tantamount to the United States telling the Free World that it can no longer depend on it for support.”

  But these protests could not hold back the river of history. The UN decided not only to grant membership and China’s seat in the Security Council to the PRC but also to expel the Nationalists altogether. In February 1972, Nixon became the first American president to visit the People’s Republic of China, bestowing additional legitimacy upon the Communist government. During his highly publicized tour, Chinese and American diplomats announced in Shanghai a “joint communiqué,” in which the United States acknowledged “there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China.” Further, the United States promised to withdraw military forces from Taiwan, cultivate trade with the People’s Republic, and normalize U.S. relations with Beijing.

  It is difficult for outsiders today to imagine the terror this declaration of U.S.-PRC friendship provoked in Taiwan. The Nationalists considered American recognition crucial to the island’s independence—indeed, the only force capable of preventing military conquest by the mainland. Withdrawal of staunch, public U.S. support, they believed, would jerk the trip wire to a PRC attack.

  Shortly after Nixon’s landmark visit to China, his political star plummeted with the Watergate scandal. Tapes of his White House conversations provided “smoking gun” evidence that he had personally obstructed justice, and in 1974, before the House could impeach him, Nixon resigned from office. Even though Nixon’s visit to the People’s Republic had provoked much hatred and criticism in Taiwan, his decision to abdicate from power baffled many there. “During Watergate, we didn’t understand why Nixon had to resign, why Americans made such a big fuss over a president trying to cover up something: That’s just what they do,” said Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee, who had grown up in Taiwan during the 1970s. “But America’s different, because it’s such a young country, it’s still so innocent.”

  Nixon’s China diplomacy was not the only event of the 1970s that made Taiwan’s future insecure. The United States was now rethinking its cold war policies in Asia. The Vietnam War had become an embarrassment for the United States. For a decade, the world’s most powerful nation had dumped billions of dollars in technology and manpower into its war against a Third World country of peasant guerrilla fighters—and the Third World country had won. In January 1973, shortly after Nixon’s landslide presidential victory in November 1972, the United States signed the Treaty of Paris with North Vietnam, whereby South Vietnam was to remain a separate state and American military forces were to exit all of Vietnam. After Watergate, however, the North Vietnamese sensed that America would no longer enforce the treaty, and in April 1975 they overran the south and captured the capital city of Saigon. Television pictures showed American helicopters evacuating the American embassy with panicked South Vietnamese clinging to their landing skids. Many on Taiwan feared their island would be the next place to be abandoned by the United States.

  In 1979, the worst fears of the Taiwanese were realized. President Jimmy Carter officially broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan and formally recognized the People’s Republic of China with its capital in Beijing. Outraged Taiwanese mobs torched Carter in effigy and stomped on peanuts to dramatize their hatred of the American president, a former peanut farmer from Georgia. While the PRC gleefully established their embassy in Washington, the Nationalists were relegated to a merely informal presence in America with a pseudo-embassy. As reports filtered home of Taiwanese officials being snubbed or barred entirely from diplomatic functions in Washington, a pall of despair fell over the island.

  Fearful middle-aged and elderly KMT bureaucrats began to leave Taiwan to join their children in the United States. But they were not the only Chinese affected by world events. In the following decade, the 1980s, the thaw in Sino-American relations would lead to open exchanges between the United States and mainland China, shattering the Bamboo Curtain and opening the way to a new era of emigration.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Bamboo Curtain Rises: Mainlanders and Model Minorities

  In 1976, Chairman Mao Zedong suffered a massive heart attack and lay paralyzed for months. His death on September 9, 1976, ended a life of almost mythic proportions. Born a humble peasant, he rose to stratospheric heights as the unchallenged leader of the most populous nation on earth. And while the nation he led depicted itself as a classless society, Mao reigned over China like a modern emperor.

  Mao’s state funeral, organized by the Communist Party leadership, was a lavish affair befitting an emperor. Eight full days were devoted to public mourning, and more than a million people paid their respects to Mao’s body, enshrined in a crystal sarcophagus in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where he was laid to rest in a giant mausoleum under the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

  Publicly, the nation expressed profound grief, but privately many Chinese felt a deep sense of relief. In her memoir Wild Swans, Jung Chang wrote that the moment she learned of Mao’s death, “the news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance.”

  Although Mao had been virtually deified as a savior of the Chinese people, the reality was that under his leadership China had experienced one of its worst eras, characterized by starvation and repression. Millions died during
the famine caused by the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s 1958 program for the forced, rapid industrialization of China. Then, during the Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976, Mao promised to free China from the “four olds”: old habits, old customs, old ideas, and old creeds. Instead, the Red Guards, his juvenile shock troops, destroyed much of China’s priceless heritage, ransacking libraries and museums, desecrating Buddhist temples, burning irreplaceable books, archives, and historical relics. The Cultural Revolution was in essence a form of cultural genocide. By the time Mao passed away, Chinese agriculture, industry, and intellectual life were in shambles. Perhaps even more culturally destructive, an entire generation had been cheated of a serious education during a time when technical training was the basis of much society-building throughout the world. China’s first census, conducted in 1982, reported a sobering finding: half its people were either partly or completely illiterate.

  Mao’s death offered his successor, Deng Xiaoping, the opportunity to reverse the damage. During the 1980s, under Deng, China began to develop a nonideological, capitalist economy. Deng abolished the people’s communes in the countryside and permitted farmers to keep their profits after state taxes. A practical man, Deng valued expertise over ideology: “I don’t care whether the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice,” he once said. Entrepreneurial activity began to flourish, providing a much-needed spur to industry; the per capita gross domestic product doubled every decade. Waste and inefficiency in rural China soon gave way to increased productivity, and then to a broader-based prosperity than China had ever known. Many, including farmers, grew wealthy enough to build mansions, complete with satellite dishes. Some even bought their own airplanes. The nation’s readiness for a new economic path was illustrated by its enthusiastic embrace of one of Deng’s most popular slogans: “To get rich is glorious.”