The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  Knowing that even American borders might not protect them from retaliation caused many Chinese to focus their energies on economic achievement rather than politics. Most grew up in families that had fled mainland China to either Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the United States, and had witnessed firsthand the risks of being caught on the losing side of a political struggle. Many of their parents had urged them since childhood to seek their fortune in a lucrative field that required neither English-language skills nor personal connections in a foreign country. One obvious career path ran through the newly developing high-tech industries.

  The 1980s spawned a revolution in personal computers, and the Chinese in the United States would play their part right from the beginning. In 1980, David Lam, a Hong Kong immigrant with a doctorate from MIT, founded Lam Research, which produced the first completely automated plasma etcher for chip wafer processing. The firm later grew into a global giant in the semiconductor field. In 1987, David Wang, a Taiwanese immigrant with a Berkeley Ph.D. in material sciences, co-invented the Precision 5000 multiple chamber single-wafer system, which combined two of the most complex steps in chip-making into a single process, thereby transforming the manufacture of integrated circuits.

  Taiwanese immigrants John Tu and David Sun became billionaires with memory modules, Pehong Chen with software. In the 1980s, Charles Wang, son of a supreme court justice from Shanghai, kept a small company, Computer Associates International, alive by juggling credit cards and bartering computer services in Manhattan. Within two decades, his company grew into the second largest independent software maker in the world, an empire that spans two dozen countries on five continents.

  The 1980s would bear witness to the growth of a nouveau riche class of Chinese immigrants. As the People’s Republic gained political support from the United States, many better-situated residents of Taiwan and Hong Kong, fearing that the PRC might soon take over Taiwan and Hong Kong, quietly searched for new sanctuaries. Taiwanese and Hong Kong capital began to flow to American cities. While many Chinese businessmen moved their families into exclusive white neighborhoods in the United States, others created their own communities, mostly in California. As they invested in real estate, banks, restaurants, malls, and Chinese-language newspapers, they formed wealthy new ethnic enclaves that some would later call “suburban Chinatowns.” These communities, populated by people of diverse backgrounds, such as émigrés from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, are called “ethnoburbs” by sociologist Wei Li. Within these enclaves, many relied on their Chinese heritage to broker symbiotic business deals, such as matching Taiwanese or Hong Kong money with ethnic Chinese manpower from Southeast Asia. “Say I am Chinese, I come from Vietnam,” a journalist explained. “You are Chinese and you come from Taiwan or maybe Singapore, or maybe Hong Kong. I need money—I need you to support my business ... you have the money, but you don’t know how to run [this] business. So you check my credit and ask the other people ... Maybe you are partner or maybe I give you interest in six months. It works because we [are] all Chinese.”

  One affluent enclave was Monterey Park, near Los Angeles, nicknamed the “Chinese Beverly Hills.” Toward the end of the twentieth century, Chinese constituted more than one-third of Monterey Park’s population and more than one-quarter in the nearby communities of Alhambra and San Marino. Before long this region of southern California, known as the San Gabriel Valley, would contain the largest suburban concentration of ethnic Chinese in the United States, surpassing the populations in the long-established Chinatowns of many major American cities.

  So great were the number of new Chinese arrivals that some whites came to view them as part of a massive foreign invasion. “I feel like I’m in another country,” a white resident of Monterey Park complained to Timothy Fong, author of The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California. “I don’t feel at home anymore.” “I feel like a stranger in my own town,” another said. Cars flashed bumper stickers with messages like “Will the Last American to Leave Monterey Park Please Bring the Flag?” In 1986, a gas station in town posed the same question, along with a picture of two slanted eyes.

  Anti-Chinese jokes began to surface: about senior citizens wearing pajamas in the streets, about reckless driving habits. “I Survived the Drive through Monterey Park,” one bumper sticker boasted. Monterey Park was dubbed the “Traffic Collision Capital of the World” and Atlantic Boulevard was “Suicide Boulevard,” causing residents to remark it should be illegal to be “DWC”—Driving While Chinese. But simmering below the taunts and snickers was hatred that often reflected envy of the openly displayed success of the new arrivals. When the local newspaper, the Monterey Park Progress, announced it would print a section in the Chinese language, vandals attacked Chinese-owned movie theaters, smashing windows and throwing paint on the marquees.

  Hostility toward the newcomers in Monterey Park came not only from Caucasian residents but from many local Chinese Americans as well. Previously, up to the early 1970s, the Chinese in Monterey Park were mainly young professionals, usually salaried engineers, respectable, upper-middle-class Chinese Americans with quiet, conservative lifestyles. Like their white neighbors, they were scarcely prepared for the arrival of fast-talking, aggressive businessmen from Hong Kong and Taiwan, who turned the streets of the city into a crass showcase for their expensive jewelry, designer suits, and custom-made mansions. The newcomers grated on the nerves of those who could not afford such ostentation, or who believed that flaunting wealth was unspeakably vulgar. “First it was the real estate people, and then trading companies, heavy investors, people who came with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash,” Wesley Ru recalled. “Their first stop would be the Mercedes dealer, and the second stop would be the real estate broker.”

  Another way the nouveau riche Chinese disturbed their neighbors was their children’s success in school classrooms. In an increasingly class-conscious America, Chinese academic ability would create another source of anxiety.

  By the 1980s, ethnic Chinese children no longer had to struggle for educational opportunities. Generations of civil rights activists had ended the system of segregated schools, and federally funded public schools and public libraries made education more accessible to even the most impoverished Chinese immigrant families. At the same time, America saw the rise of a Chinese professional class, who comprised not only the descendants of earlier Chinese Americans but also new émigrés with education and status. The children of these groups grew up in privileged settings such as white suburbs or university towns. Their parents were professors, scientists, engineers, or doctors, not laundry or restaurant workers who needed their children to help out with the family business. These parents spared no expense in sending them to the best schools, where they could devote their full energy to academic achievement.

  Large numbers of Chinese American students were now attending elite private preparatory schools, such as Phillips Exeter, Groton, and Deerfield, or top academic programs in competitive public programs, like the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School in New York, or Lowell High School in San Francisco—all of which served as fast-track conduits to the best universities in America. Many spent their summers in gifted children’s programs run by universities like Stanford and Johns Hopkins. By the 1980s, they were routinely entering prestigious Ivy League schools and winning national competitions, like the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (now called the Intel Science Talent Search), in disproportionate numbers.

  The Chinese immigrant community soon considered excellence in school not as a lofty standard, but as a minimum expectation. Franklin Ng, a professor of anthropology at California State University, revealed the intensity of parental ambition for their children when he published an inside joke circulating in the Taiwanese American immigrant community:

  HOW TO BE A PERFECT TAIWANESE KID (from the first generational perspective)

  Score 1600 on the SAT.

  Play the violin or piano o
n the level of a concert performer.

  Apply to and be accepted by 27 colleges.

  Have three hobbies: studying, studying, and studying.

  Go to a prestigious Ivy League university and win enough scholarships to pay for it.

  Love classical music and detest talking on the phone.

  Become a Westinghouse, Presidential, and eventually Rhodes scholar.

  Aspire to be a brain surgeon.

  Marry a Taiwanese-American doctor and have perfect, successful children (grandkids for ahma and ahba!)

  Love to hear stories about your parents’ childhood ... especially the one about walking seven miles to school without shoes.

  HOW TO BE A PERFECT TAIWANESE PARENT (from the second generational perspective)

  Don’t “ai-yoh” loudly at your kid’s dress habits.

  Don’t blatantly hint about the merits of Hah-phoo (Harvard), Yale-uh (Yale), Stan-phoo (Stanford), and Emeh-I-tee (MIT).

  Don’t reveal all the intimate details of your kid’s life to the entire Taiwanese community ...

  Don’t give your child a bowl haircut or your daughter two acres of bangs ...

  By the 1980s, the media began to report the educational triumphs of ABCs, profiling those who won National Merit Scholarships and the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. In 1982, Newsweek ran a favorable article under the headline “Model Minority.” Sociologist William Peterson had invented the term in 1966 to describe Japanese Americans, but the media soon borrowed the phrase to describe other Asian Americans, including the Chinese. Other stories soon appeared in the popular press to celebrate Chinese achievement. In 1986, both the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and the NBC Nightly News praised the academic prominence of the Chinese and Asian American community. “Why are Asian Americans doing so exceptionally well?” Mike Wallace of CBS’s 60 Minutes asked in 1987. “They must be doing something right. Let’s bottle it.”

  Chinese American enrollment at top universities soared. MIT soon gained the nickname of “Made in Taiwan,” UCLA of “University of Caucasians Lost in Asians,” UCI (the University of California at Irvine) of “University of Chinese Immigrants.” In certain academic departments where ethnic Chinese students were concentrated (such as math, science, and engineering), the elevators were called the “Orient Express.” Engineering became synonymous with Chinese. At Stanford, when a professor scolded a Caucasian engineering student for not scoring higher on his tests, the student responded, “What do you think I am, Chinese?” Rumor had it that certain white engineering majors at Berkeley would drop a class if they counted too many heads of glossy black hair in the auditorium. Some ABCs even started wearing buttons on campus announcing, “I am NOT a Chinese American electrical engineer.”

  Even the ABCs themselves were intimidated, and often overwhelmed, by the large numbers of Chinese American students on college campuses. Phoebe Eng, the daughter of a Taiwanese American and an American-born Chinese of Cantonese heritage, grew up in Westbury, a suburb near New York. When she attended college in California, she was shocked: “I had never been around so many Asian faces, so much black hair,” she wrote in her book Warrior Lessons. “Berkeley seemed like China to me. It took me a full year to learn how to distinguish one Asian face from another.”

  If Chinese achievement provoked awe in some quarters, it incited fear in others. Anti-Chinese hate graffiti suddenly appeared on college campuses: “Stop the Yellow Hordes”; “Stop the Chinese before they flunk you out”; “Chink, Chink, Cheating Chink!” And by the 1980s, some ABCs began to feel victimized by their own success. Some complained of institutional racism, insisting that the harder they studied, the higher the bar was raised to block their admission to top universities. Many alleged that university officials at elite schools, concerned by the growing presence of Asian Americans on campus, intentionally sought to reduce their numbers through racial discrimination.

  In 1983, the East Coast Asian Student Union, a coalition of Asian American student organizations at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, analyzed the admissions data at twenty-five universities and concluded that an “alarming barrier” had been erected to prevent ethnic Asian students from “seeking higher education and better lives.” This inspired other studies, and from 1983 through the rest of the decade, students and administrators alike would search for evidence of racial bias. At Princeton, it was found, the admission rate for Asian Americans was only 14 percent, compared to 17 percent for white applicants and 48 percent for children of alumni. At Brown, research revealed that the admit rate for Asians had plummeted from 44 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 1987. At Stanford, Asians had filled out as many as one-third of the applications, but secured less than one-tenth of the enrollment. At Harvard, critics asserted that Asian Americans had the lowest rate of admissions for any racial group, even though the number of Asian applicants kept rising, and the applicants were “actually more qualified than anybody else.” After scrutinizing Harvard’s 1982 statistics, an outside team even concluded that, “in order to be offered admission, Asian Americans had to score an average of 112 points higher on the SAT than the Caucasians who were admitted.”

  Even the state schools were turning away qualified Chinese American applicants. Traditionally, the best students in California had viewed Berkeley and other UC schools as safety nets in case they were rejected by more prestigious universities such as Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, and the Ivy League schools. For years, the only requirement for admission to Berkeley or UCLA was graduation within the top 12.5 percent of one’s high school class. Given the high concentration of Chinese and other Asian Americans on the West Coast, their numbers soared within the University of California system. Between 1966 and 1980, for example, the percentage of Asian American undergraduates at Berkeley had quadrupled from about 5 percent to 20 percent of the students. According to the New York Times in 1981, Berkeley officials fully expected 40 percent of the entering freshman class to be Asian American by 1990. But suddenly, in the mid-1980s, the pattern reversed and the numbers abruptly dropped.

  In 1984, Ling-chi Wang, an ethnic studies professor at Berkeley and veteran activist, noticed that the number of Asian American enrollments fell 21 percent within a single year. Something, he believed, was terribly wrong. “As soon as the percentages of Asian students began reaching double digits at some universities, suddenly a red light went on,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t want to say there’s a conspiracy but university officials see the prevalence of Asians as a problem, and they have begun to look for ways to slow down the Asian American admissions. Are they scared of Berkeley’s becoming an Asian university? They’re shaking in their socks.”

  A volunteer task force in the San Francisco Bay Area—including activists, judges, and professors of Chinese descent—quickly formed in 1984 to investigate the situation. They were shocked to discover that Berkeley had turned away students with perfect GPAs while admitting others who had not even submitted their grades or test scores. Reporting on the Berkeley controversy, the media began to draw parallels between the declining admission rates for Asian Americans and the stringent racial quotas that Jewish students had faced at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale between the 1920s and 1940s.

  The media started to interview Chinese Americans who believed they had been unfairly treated by Berkeley. In 1987, Berkeley rejected Yat-Pang Au, the son of Hong Kong émigrés and a star student at Gunderson High School in San Jose, California. A straight-A student, Au had been the valedictorian of his class, won prizes for ten extracurricular activities, earned letters in cross-country and track, served as a justice on the school’s Supreme Court, and even operated a Junior Achievement company. When Au received the rejection letter in the mail, he read it over and over, “because I thought maybe I had misunderstood or that it wasn’t addressed to me,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I had my mind and heart set on Berkeley. I’d thought about Berkeley for years; I’d worked hard in high school to get into Berkeley. I couldn’t believe I’d been turned down
.”

  Stunned to learn that ten other students with lower grades and test scores had been admitted, Au went to the press and publicly complained about the situation. When the Bay Area media reported the story, the Au family’s house was vandalized, and Au’s terrified mother ended up buying a gun and taking shooting lessons. For two years, Au attended De Anza, a local community college, before finally enrolling at Berkeley.

  In 1989, NBC Nightly News interviewed Hong Kim, an A student of Taiwanese heritage. He had been rejected by Berkeley, while two of his black friends with lower grades were accepted. “I don’t hold it against them, they’re my friends,” he told NBC. “I want to tell them I still love them, but ... I think I’m more qualified.”

  The public furor in the Chinese American community triggered federal investigations and policy changes. In the wake of the controversy, the Justice and Education departments began to probe allegations that Chinese and other Asian American applicants were victims of racism. Federal officials eventually exonerated Harvard and Berkeley but found UCLA guilty of bias.51

  The discrimination even extended to the high school level. In 1983, prestigious Lowell High School in San Francisco adopted different admissions standards for different ethnic groups, with the harshest ones reserved for Chinese Americans. To settle a lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the San Francisco school district agreed to increase the number of black and Hispanic students in the city’s top public schools. The settlement mandated that at least four ethnic groups had to be represented at each school and that no more than 40 to 45 percent of the enrollment could be dominated by one single ethnicity. To enforce this racial cap, Lowell required Chinese American applicants to outperform Caucasians and all other ethnic groups in order to be accepted. The minimum test score for admission to Lowell was 62 (originally 66) for ethnic Chinese applicants, 59 for Caucasians, 58 for other Asian Americans, and 56 for Hispanics and African Americans.52