The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  Deng also opened China to the rest of the world. In 1979, the PRC reestablished diplomatic ties with the United States, inaugurating an era of amity between the two countries. The following year, a new American president, Ronald Reagan, seen by many as an aggressive cold warrior, was swept into office with a landslide victory; to the surprise of his critics, his administration worked to thaw relations between America and its two cold war rivals, the Soviet Union and China.

  As the decade progressed, the Reagan and Deng administrations signed historic agreements to promote scientific, technological, and cultural exchanges between the two countries. Mainland Chinese students responded eagerly, knowing that an American education meant greater opportunity in the future not just in the West, but in China itself. A “study-abroad fever” soon convulsed the PRC. Chinese students began taking the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and actively sought contact with foreign scholars visiting their institutions.48

  In the cold war years before 1979, most foreign Chinese students in the United States had come from Taiwan. The 1965 Immigration Act had established a quota of 20,000 for the Chinese, and the vast majority of those slots went to Taiwanese Chinese. After resuming diplomatic relations with the PRC, the American government doubled the immigration slots for the Chinese, giving both mainland China and Taiwan their own quotas of 20,000 each. Meanwhile, a separate quota of 600 was reserved for Hong Kong, which the U.S. government increased to 5,000 in 1987. These revisions meant that every year, more than 40,000 Chinese immigrants could establish permanent residency in the United States.

  In addition, no limit was placed on the number of Chinese traveling to the United States as non-quota immigrants, such as those on student, diplomatic, or tourist visas. After settling in the United States, many of these non-quota émigrés adjusted their status, first becoming permanent residents, and later U.S. citizens. By the end of the 1980s, more than 80,000 PRC intellectuals had arrived in the United States—the largest immigrant wave of Chinese scholars in American history.

  The Deng-Reagan pact ended three decades of isolation under the Mao regime. But as diplomacy lifted the Bamboo Curtain, the initial exchanges were shocking to visitors from both sides of the Pacific.

  Before Deng, few Chinese Americans knew what was really happening in their ancestral homeland. The occasional rare visitor saw only a sanitized picture of China through tours carefully arranged by the government. During the 1970s, when a few prominent Chinese Americans were allowed to visit the mainland, PRC authorities quickly released many scholars from rehabilitation camps and prisons in order to project a more favorable image of China to the West. Often, all it took was a single appearance from a Chinese American to transform overnight the status of an individual or an entire family. In 1971, for instance, PRC officials immediately freed Deng Jiaxian, developer of the Chinese atomic and hydrogen bombs, from a “study camp” when Nobel laureate Yang Chen-ning asked to see his old friend. Furthermore, in 1973, when Yuan Jialiu, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, decided to tour the mainland, Chinese authorities frantically attempted to undo some of the Red Guard offenses against his family.49

  But gradually, as the number of exchanges increased, uncensored stories of life under Mao emerged. Some former “stranded scholars” in the United States—the Chinese intellectuals who chose to remain in America after the 1949 revolution—had an opportunity to learn what had become of former classmates who had chosen to return to China during the civil war. Computer mogul An Wang remembered that roughly half the Chinese foreign students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had decided to move back to mainland China in the late 1940s. Decades later, he found that some had obtained powerful positions in the Communist hierarchy, while others had perished during the Cultural Revolution.

  Linda Yang, another stranded scholar, met a few of her former American-trained classmates at her fortieth college reunion at St. John’s University in Shanghai. Some told her, with downcast eyes, about the persecution their families had endured, and how their children were deprived of the opportunity to attend school. She would never forget the “regret in their eyes,” the searing knowledge that, by returning to China during the Mao years, they had “not only sabotaged their own future, but the future of their children and grandchildren.”

  While many Chinese Americans were reeling from the shock of these revelations, new immigrants from the PRC would be equally astounded by what they found in the United States. Some had incorrectly assumed that America was a vast utopia. During the 1930s, Let Keung Mui’s family in south China had gone hungry during the Japanese invasion: “All we ate was wild plants and grass roots.” Things were not much better under the Communists. People fought each other for food, and his favorite daughter committed suicide by taking poison. He was thrilled when, in 1979, a brother in New York secured permission for him to migrate to America. “The U.S. was a place I had dreamt of for a long time,” he recalled. “People had said, ‘America is a place with gold floors, diamond windows, tall buildings, and seven-foot-tall whites with red moustaches.’ ”

  The reality was very different. When Let Keung Mui and his family flew to New York, what he found was hardly an American nirvana: “I felt that everything that my people said about how good the U.S. was, was not true. I felt like I had gone to the wrong place.” His brother found him housing in Chinatown, a dilapidated apartment with a crumbling ceiling and only three windows. Living there was a cold and alienating experience. Every resident shoveled his own snow, and he felt “like a stranger” when his neighbors locked their doors at night.

  His nephew gave him a job in his garment factory, and there Let Keung Mui labored long hours, past 9 P.M. most nights and often as late as midnight, six days a week. The work was difficult, the pay low, and he received no preferential treatment from his nephew or brother merely because he was family. “I was so mad that I started not to rely on them and started looking for jobs on my own,” he said later. Soon he landed a position as a restaurant chef at a much higher salary, then served as a machine operator in a noodle factory. After toiling in the factory for five years, six days a week, twelve hours a day, he saved enough money to purchase a house in Queens, New York. But his disappointment persisted. He later told an interviewer that he hoped his children would not lead lives like his, or endure what he had suffered in his life.

  Other Chinese saw a much different side to America. In 1980, when Liu Zongren traveled to Illinois to study at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University—one of a handful of visiting scholars sponsored by the PRC Ministry of Education to study abroad for two years, at government expense—he was spared the need to work for a living. Still, he was perturbed by the excessive waste and extravagant materialism in the United States. Upset to find six lights in his guest room in Evanston (“Why would one person need so many lights?” he wondered), he asked his host to be more vigilant about conserving electricity. Also, the sight of an American using a metal detector along the shores of Lake Michigan astounded him. Upon learning that the detector cost $100, he exclaimed, “A hundred dollars to buy a machine to look for pennies! How strange these Americans are.”

  Despite or because of the abundance in his host country, Liu did not feel he could ever become an American. In 1982, shortly before returning to the PRC, Liu saw E. T., Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film about an extraterrestrial who befriends a little boy while trapped on earth. “I liked E. T. for a reason that most American kids might not think of: E.T. wanted to go home,” he later wrote. Many of his friends in the United States were like E.T.’s friends: “They had helped me in every way they could to understand American life. But few of them really understood me or knew why I couldn’t feel comfortable among Americans, why I preferred to live a poorer or simpler life in China.”

  The great disparity in experiences among newcomers from the People’s Republic of China owed much to a growing American social inequality. During the 1980s, steep cuts in the income tax rates paid by the
highest earners increased the gap between the haves and have-nots. It was a decade of intense class envy in America, with extremes in wealth and poverty not seen since the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. It was also a time when a culture of greed ruled Wall Street. Moguls such as Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky made billions of dollars by acquiring some companies and merging others, often relying on illegal tactics and insider trading, with little regard for the general public or the consequences to workers who would lose their jobs as a result of their activities. During the Reagan years, the wealthiest one percent of Americans almost doubled their share of the national income, and the four hundred richest Americans almost tripled their financial worth. The decade also saw the rise of a new class of young urban professionals, known as “yuppies,” their lifestyles marked by the conspicuous and competitive consumption of luxuries, usually purchased on credit.

  Simultaneously, a host of new problems began to plague the inner cities and small towns of America, exacerbated by deep cuts in federal spending on social programs. As financiers reaped huge profits by manipulating paper rather than building industries, thousands of middle-class Americans were thrown out of work. Decaying urban neighborhoods became fertile ground for a highly addictive narcotic—crack cocaine. Cutbacks in spending for public health may have seriously delayed the recognition of a deadly new epidemic, AIDS.50 This decade of economic expansion, now remembered as an era of high living, saw increases in the size of the homeless population, and new despair within the minority underclass.

  The 1980s were also a time when the national debt soared, turning America from the world’s greatest creditor into the world’s greatest borrower. Much of the country’s wealth flowed to foreign investors in Germany and Japan. During the previous decade, the oil crisis had boosted the Japanese automobile industry, which, unlike American manufacturers, offered small, fuel-efficient, reliable cars. The American automobile industry had used its monopoly and its influence with the government to resist changes in the safety, performance, and durability of its products. As American consumers recognized that Japanese-made cars were safer, more serviceable, and more fuel-efficient, the American auto industry went into recession, widening the country’s trade deficit with Japan.

  Even as Sino-American relations thawed, anti-Asian hostility smoldered in certain regions of the United States, for reasons that had nothing to do with China. The Japanese—or Asians in general—were widely perceived to be the source of America’s troubles, foreign competitors who stole American jobs by working cheaply. “Many of Detroit’s corporate heads, politicians, and leaders are blaming the Japanese for America’s economic woes,” said Helen Zia, a Princeton-educated Chinese American writer who had been working in auto factories to build Asian American political consciousness on a grassroots level. ”In Detroit, the bumper stickers say it all,” she observed. ”Honda, Toyota, Pearl Harbor“ was one. ”Unemployment—Made in Japan” was another. The reality, of course, was that the rejection of American-made cars was related to management failures in planning and design, not to cheap Asian labor. It was not that Japanese workers worked for less, but that Japanese cars worked better.

  In June 1982 in Detroit, Vincent Chin, the adopted son of a Chinese laundry owner, was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two disgruntled auto workers who mistook him for Japanese. Chin, a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese American engineering student about to be married, had gone to a topless bar with three friends to enjoy that quintessential American prenuptial activity, the bachelor party. At the bar, two Caucasian auto workers—Ronald Ebens and his step-son Michael Nitz, who had been laid off from his job—began to taunt them. They called Chin a “Jap” and yelled, “It’s because of you motherfuckers that we’re out of work!” Insults soon led to blows, and when the manager threw them out, Ebens and Nitz grabbed a baseball bat from the trunk of their car and chased Chin through the streets. Twenty minutes later, they seized him in front of a McDonald’s restaurant. Nitz held back Chin’s arms while Ebens shattered his skull. Expecting to attend his wedding, Chin’s friends and relatives came to his funeral instead.

  Charged with second-degree murder, Ebens and Nitz entered into a plea bargain and pled guilty to manslaughter. Charles Kaufman, a Wayne County circuit judge, apparently unwilling to confront the xenophobia in that part of the country, placed the pair on probation for three years and fined them $3,750 each. Neither spent a single night in jail. “What kind of law is this? What kind of justice?” cried Lily Chin, mother of the victim. “This happened because my son is Chinese. If two Chinese killed a white person, they must go to jail, maybe for their whole lives ... something is wrong with this country.” Others echoed her outrage: “Three thousand dollars can’t even buy a good used car these days,” one Chinese American protested, “and this was the price of a life.”

  Infuriated Chinese American activists organized the Justice for Vincent Chin Committee, which prompted an investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The federal government indicted Ebens on charges of committing a racially motivated crime. In a new trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but an appellate court overturned the conviction. Lily Chin, Vincent’s mother, felt betrayed by the justice system. “I don’t understand how this could happen in America,” she cried. “My husband fought for this country. We always paid our taxes and worked hard ... Before I really loved America, but now this has made me very angry.” Disillusioned, she moved back to China to live there permanently.

  The only positive outcome was that this tragedy reminded the Chinese American community—immigrant and ABC alike—of the need to organize politically. Suddenly people realized that as long as they looked Asian, they could all be vulnerable to assault. The murder of Vincent Chin galvanized the ethnic Chinese community. “My blood boiled when I first learned that Vincent Chin was deliberately attacked and murdered as an act of racial hatred,” said Harold Fong of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance at a rally in San Francisco. George Wong pointed out, “The killing of Vincent Chin happened in 1982, not 1882, the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act!” The Chin murder spawned demonstrations, films, and a new generation of Chinese American political activists. It launched the careers of several prominent human rights leaders in the Chinese American community, among them Helen Zia, author of Asian American Dreams, and Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles.

  The tremendous publicity generated by the Vincent Chin murder did not mean that the United States had actually become more dangerous for Chinese Americans. A century earlier, when the Exclusion Act precipitated anti-Chinese riots, dozens were murdered with virtually no media scrutiny whatsoever, the victims presented more as clumps of statistics than as individuals whose lives were snuffed out. But by the 1980s, the Chinese American community had come to expect more from the United States, and had learned to broadly disseminate information about injustices suffered by their people. Seven years after the death of Vincent Chin, activists drew on the political lessons learned from his tragedy when another Chinese person became a fatal victim of a hate crime.

  Jim Loo (also known as Ming-Hai Loo) was a twenty-four-year-old immigrant from China, working in a restaurant to save enough money for college. In 1989, Loo and several Vietnamese friends were playing pool in a Raleigh, North Carolina, billiards hall when two whites started to push them around. Robert Piche and his brother Lloyd Piche called them “chinks” and “gooks,” and even blamed them for American deaths in Vietnam. “I don’t like you because you’re Vietnamese,” Lloyd Piche told them. “Our brothers went over to Vietnam, and they never came back.” He also threatened, “I’m gonna finish you tonight.” The manager ordered the two brothers to leave the premises, but they waited outside, ambushing Loo and the others as they walked out. Robert Piche struck Loo in the back of the head with a gun, causing him to collapse onto a broken beer bottle. The glass forced a bone fragment through his brain, killing him.

  Ini
tially, Lloyd Piche was found guilty of only two misdemeanors—simple assault and disorderly conduct—and his brother Robert was sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison by a state court for second-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon. But the Chinese American community, observing the parallels between the Jim Loo and Vincent Chin cases, lobbied for federal intervention. After the U.S. government stepped in with a federal trial, Lloyd Piche was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $28,000 in reparations to Loo’s family.

  Not all the murders of Chinese Americans during the 1980s were committed by whites. As diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the PRC steadily improved, the KMT appeared obsessed with the idea of controlling Taiwanese intellectuals in the United States. There was, for instance, the mysterious death of a Carnegie Mellon professor, Chen Wencheng, when he returned to his native Taiwan in 1981. Shortly after being interrogated by authorities about attending certain political meetings during his student days in the United States, Chen fell to his death from the window of his Taiwan hotel room. Though exactly what occurred will probably never be determined, many Chinese Americans believe the KMT gave Chen some help through the window.

  Three years later, another death shook the Taiwanese community in America. In 1984, Wang Xiling, head of KMT military intelligence, dispatched members of the island’s criminal “Bamboo” gang to Daly City, California, where they assassinated Henry Liu in his home. Liu had written an unauthorized biography of Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek and at that time president of the Chinese Nationalist government on Taiwan. Though the story of Liu’s activities before his murder was far more complicated than it appeared on the surface (he was apparently a triple agent between the United States, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China), the fact that the KMT could operate with such impunity in the United States sent a chill through both the Chinese American community and the intelligentsia in Taiwan.