by Iris Chang
Some activists depicted the fight over racial quota systems as a struggle for limited slots between Asian Americans and other minority groups, such as blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. But in reality, asserted Henry Der, head of Chinese for Affirmative Action, “Asian applicants are competing with white applicants.” The “legacy” programs for children of Ivy League alumni, the “old-boy networks” that maintained places in elite universities for the children of the East Coast establishment, Der said, were a form of affirmative action for Caucasians. Noting that two-thirds of all Asian Americans opposed the system of affirmative action, Der told A magazine, “Most Asian immigrant families would ask for meritocratic standards. These families don’t understand that selection has never been based on meritocratic standards.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Decade of Fear: The 1990s
As the 1980s drew to a close, the leadership of the People’s Republic of China faced the greatest threat to its power since its defeat of Chiang’s Nationalists. Their public embrace of a new openness during the Reagan-Deng years had encouraged long-suppressed but deep-seated dissatisfaction with the Communist Party to bubble to the surface. Now they would have to deal with it.
The trouble began small. In 1986, Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and vice president at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei and a Party member, emboldened others by openly criticizing the government. Soon afterward, a student movement protested PRC corruption, charging that elections to the people’s congresses had been fixed. When demonstrations spread to other cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, Fang Lizhi was fired from his position and dismissed from the Communist Party. But serious damage had already been done. The secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, an outspoken advocate of both democracy and immediate government reform, was made a scapegoat for the protests and forced to resign.
In April 1989, Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack, provoking another mass gathering in Beijing. His death coincided with a year of anniversaries within China—the tenth anniversary of U.S. recognition of the People’s Republic of China, the fortieth anniversary of the birth of the PRC, and the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth movement, an early intellectual and literary revolution based on Western concepts of freedom. To bolster their demands for political change, Beijing students held street parades in homage to May Fourth and staged a broad-based hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. The state visit of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that month added fuel to the fire, for under his leadership the Soviet Union was instituting serious reforms, such as perestroika (restructuring), which edged his people in the direction of capitalism, and glasnost (openness), a policy offering greater access to information on government policies and a new freedom to comment on them.
By late May 1989, the Beijing students had erected in Tiananmen Square a Chinese “Goddess of Democracy” statue, inspired by the American Statue of Liberty. More than a million people came out to support the students, and outside the capital similar rallies erupted. It was the largest pro-democracy movement in the history of China, and possibly, considering the number of participants, the largest anywhere in the world. It seemed to many in both China and the United States that China might be on the threshold of its first democratic society. According to high-level documents leaked out of China, later published anonymously as The Tiananmen Papers, such optimism was not entirely unrealistic. Many top officials initially wanted to negotiate with the student activists and reach some sort of compromise with them. But eventually they deferred to an elite group of party elders, including Deng Xiaoping, who decided that the best course was to declare martial law and crush the movement.
In the pre-dawn hours of June 3 and 4, 1989, fully armed Chinese troops, accompanied by tanks, stormed into Tiananmen Square and opened fire, killing hundreds of people and wounding many more. While some of the most visible pro-democracy leaders were rounded up and arrested, others fled the country and sought asylum in the United States. Fang Lizhi and his wife fled for their lives to the U.S. embassy, which, to the great indignation of the PRC leadership, secured their safe passage out of China.
The massacre, widely reported by the international media, left a lasting scar on Sino-American relations. Footage of the bloody corpses was smuggled out of the country and shown on Western television, creating enormous sympathy for the Chinese students. Over the next few days, Chinese television ran pictures of some of the better-known protestors who had been captured, all appearing much the worse for their few days in custody. Overnight, the warm Western stereotype of China—a country of lotus flowers, pavilions, and pandas—was replaced by violent images of a brutal Soviet-like totalitarian regime.
On June 5, 1989, President George H. W. Bush signed an executive order allowing all Chinese nationals to remain in the United States. On April 11, 1990, he issued another order giving Chinese immigrants who could prove they were in the country before that date the right to stay. Bush also combined domestic with international politics when he made clear that “individuals from any country who express fear of persecution ... related to their country’s policy of forced abortion or coerced sterilization” would be welcome to stay in the United States.
Many students felt little interest in returning to China. One law student from Beijing told an interviewer that it would be “political suicide” to go back: “It is a waste of life.” A Berkeley engineering student said the PRC would “make Chinese intellectuals as scapegoats, just like what they have always been doing in every political movement in the last forty years.” A few expressed interest in returning only after the ruling-class elite had passed away. Observed a Stanford doctoral candidate, “China will definitely change because it just cannot get worse. Political changes might come faster after the death of some old guys.” In 1992, in response to the plight of these pro-democracy student activists, the U.S. government passed the Chinese Student Protection Act, permitting more than fifty thousand students and scholars to gain permanent residence status in the United States.
The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 had other consequences as well. It provoked fears of political instability across Asia, encouraging ethnic Chinese capitalists to establish second homes in North America. Perhaps no group was more concerned about its future than the people of Hong Kong, which by treaty the British were obligated to return to the People’s Republic of China on July 1, 1997. Could the freewheeling capitalist culture of Hong Kong survive under the Communist old guard? No one knew. To allay fears, the mainland Chinese government promised not to change the city’s social conditions for the next fifty years, but many Hong Kong residents did not fully trust them. “No sane person should have faith in the promises,” announced one Hong Kong skeptic. “Mao made the same pledge to Shanghai in 1949, but it lasted for just three months. My parents escaped to Hong Kong, giving up everything.” He pointed to the tragedy of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. “Shouldn’t we leave before it is too late?”
Many felt they could not afford to wait to find out. Not surprisingly, those who most wanted to leave were the ones with the most to lose under Communist rule—the capitalist and professional elite of Hong Kong. Late-1980s surveys found that 70 percent of Hong Kong’s government doctors, 60 percent of its lawyers, and 40 percent of its civil engineers intended to move out before 1997. According to a review of visa applications, between 1987 and 1991 some 15 to 19 percent of Hong Kong émigrés held college degrees, compared to only 4 percent of the general population. A 1989 telephone poll of 605 Hong Kong residents found that the wealthier the household, the stronger the desire to leave. Many emigres were, in fact, millionaires. In the 1990s, the typical household of a Hong Kong émigré investor in Canada was worth an estimated 1.5 million Canadian dollars, equivalent to about $1.2 million U.S.
Like the 1949 refugees from Hong Kong, most of those trying to leave in the 1990s found the logical destination—England—closed to them. Although Great Britain traditionally issued British passports to all those born
on its territory, it refused to do so with the Chinese born on Hong Kong while it had been British. These passports would have ensured entry to England for those who chose that path. Many Hong Kong residents felt profoundly betrayed, convinced that Great Britain had shirked its responsibilities to avoid ruffling the feathers of the PRC. Even though the British had enjoyed a century of colonial rule in Hong Kong, benefiting from the wealth created by the colony, it appeared they were unconcerned about the fate of their former subjects.
Fortunately, other countries had friendlier policies. Canada, for instance, had lenient immigration laws, especially for political refugees. Thus Canada became the most popular destination for the Hong Kong émigrés, followed by Australia and the United States. No doubt many former residents of Hong Kong were attracted to these countries not only because of their liberal admissions policies, but also because English was their primary language. As people left in droves for those regions, the annual rate of migration from the city of Hong Kong soared from twenty thousand in the early 1980s to over sixty thousand after 1990.
But the road out of Hong Kong was anything but smooth, even for those who had money. First, their desperation made them easy victims for con artists, as some Hong Kong families handed over outrageous fees—often in excess of $30,000—to immigration “consultants” who promised to handle the paperwork for them. Second, after settling into their new homes, some found it impossible to replicate their earlier business success. Unlike Hong Kong, a city of unbridled capitalism, the United States had far greater government regulation, higher taxes, and more stringent labor laws, all multitiered, with complex local, state, and federal mandates to be met. Some entrepreneurs lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of their life savings when they launched enterprises doomed to early failure. Yet many were surprisingly free of bitterness. They simply wrote off the losses as the price of establishing themselves in America, obtaining U.S. citizenship, and assuring themselves of American political protection.
Over time, many found it easier to conduct business in Hong Kong than in America and hedged their bets by maintaining ties in both regions. They moved their families and transferred wealth to the United States, while continuing to operate their businesses out of Asia. Soon, they came to be known as “astronauts”: international commuters who spent many hours flying back and forth between Hong Kong and North America.
Coincidentally, the Chinese term for “astronaut”—tai kong ren—sounds like the Chinese words for “empty wife” or “home without a husband,” an appropriate description for women who, like the nineteenth-century “Gold Mountain widows,” rarely saw their husbands on a regular basis. And to a certain degree, the lives of these Hong Kong astronauts mirrored the lives of the early Chinese immigrants in America, but with a high-tech twist. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chinese in America lived an odd paradox: their American income was too low to sustain families in the United States, yet high enough to elevate their families to the status of gentry in China. A split-family arrangement emerged, in which wives reared children in Guangdong villages while the breadwinner worked on the other side of the ocean and mailed money back. During the 1990s, the split-family tradition reappeared as the astronaut phenomenon, but the direction of cash flow had reversed: wives and children resided in North America, while the husbands earned money in Asia to support their families in fine style in America.
The number of these Hong Kong astronauts ran in the thousands, and they ranged from moderately successful executives to celebrity moguls. The most prominent ones included Jimmy Lai, a newspaper and magazine publisher and founder of the Giordano clothing empire; Ronnie Chan, a billionaire real estate developer and chairman of the Hang Lung Group, a property development corporation; Frank Tsao, a real estate and shipping magnate; and Tung Chee-hwa, another shipping tycoon. All of them regularly commuted between Hong Kong and their homes in California.
Instead of cramped quarters in Hong Kong, some astronaut families moved into larger homes in North America, such as gigantic mansions in the Los Angeles area (which locals dubbed “monster houses”), or in Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver (which natives there nicknamed “Hongcouver”). But not every family was happy with the new arrangement. In Hong Kong, where labor was cheap, many wives had servants at their disposal. Now they had to adapt to a society in which even upper-middle-class American housewives were expected to cook, clean, and chauffeur their children around. Also, in Hong Kong, most had enjoyed an adrenaline-charged social schedule, a whirlwind ritual of dim sum luncheons, karaoke parties, banquets, and nightly receptions. In the United States, some found it difficult to adjust to the slower pace of social activities, to the physical isolation and cool privacy of suburban living.
Inevitably, the loneliness caused by the prolonged absence of a spouse would lead many to adultery. According to psychologist Alex Leung, some astronauts experienced “a second bachelorhood” when they returned to Asia. “Hong Kong is a place which is famous for its materialistic glamour and night life,” he wrote. “It is very easy for these ‘single’ men to indulge themselves in these ’niceties‘—while writing off the excesses as ‘Business Entertainment.’” Meanwhile, there were reports of bored, frustrated Chinese housewives developing friendships with local men in their lives, platonic business relationships that may at times have evolved into something else. Extramarital sex—real or imagined—destroyed many astronaut marriages. The wife of a Hong Kong bank executive and mother of three children aroused her husband’s jealousy when she became close friends with an unmarried male neighbor in San Francisco. Her husband accused her of having an affair, while she confronted him with rumors of cavorting with strange women in Hong Kong nightclubs. Upon these words, he immediately left for Hong Kong and asked for a divorce a week later.
Of course, many if not most astronaut marriages withstood these tensions and survived, but the special pressures of split-home arrangements caused other fissures in family relationships. To allay their guilt over their extended absences, some Chinese fathers tried to express their love through expensive gifts—trendy toys, luxury cars, enormous allowances. But no matter how much money they spent, they learned that a father’s obligation to his children could not be satisfied solely in terms of dollars. Some sons and daughters came to view their fathers more as money machines than as loving advisers and reliable role models, and over time many fathers found themselves psychologically and emotionally estranged from their families. Alex Leung described a Mr. Lee whose children preferred to converse in English, not Chinese; when he insisted they speak to him in his native tongue, they often found it easier not to talk to him at all. In another home, a Mr. Wong, when staying with his wife and children, obsessively checked his stock quotes on the other side of the planet through fax and cell phone, often in the middle of the night, North American time. When they grew annoyed and asked him to stop, he warned he would never visit them again if they continued to complain about his behavior.
Without a strong father presence, troubled behavior among young people increased. One daughter of a Hong Kong astronaut confided to an interviewer that she was deeply worried about her brother: “He starts gambling and smoking, being involved with the gangs in Chinatown, having sex with a lot of bad girls. He has been caught once for breaking and entering. I try to cover for him as much as possible. My parents do not know yet and I am sure they will be devastated.”
But surely the ones who paid the greatest price for the astronaut lifestyle were the astronauts themselves, suffering the cumulative health risk of long flights, daily restaurant meals, and sleep deprivation caused by jet lag. A typical day for them might consist of meetings in a city far from home, sending e-mails from the airport, eating and sleeping onboard a red-eye flight to the next destination. Some astronauts trained themselves to work continuously for several days in a row before collapsing in deep slumber during the flight across the Pacific. In the long run, as Alex Leung noted, the astronaut risked losing all th
at was important to him: “his marriage, his children, and even his legal immigration status in the host country as a result of his long and frequent absence.”
Hong Kong was not the only place in Asia troubled by the renewed hard-line posture of the People’s Republic. During the 1990s, the Taiwanese felt new pressure to move themselves and their capital to the safety of the United States. The brutal crackdown at Tiananmen Square raised concerns that the gains achieved during the Deng years might be suddenly reversed. Then, in 1996, the island’s first direct presidential elections challenged the four-decade reign of the Kuomintang. Fearing that pro-Taiwan independence groups would declare the island a separate nation, not an integral part of China, the PRC resorted to a show of saber-rattling. Conducting a series of military exercises near the coast of Taiwan that included the firing of several missiles, it sent a message that it was prepared to act militarily if Taiwan tried to present it with a fait accompli on the issue of independence. The Taiwan stock market plunged, and many residents fled to the United States. But no formal steps to establish independence were taken, and eventually the crisis passed. Economic investment returned to Taiwan, and diplomatic relations between the island and mainland China reverted to their previous status. Nonetheless, many Taiwanese families were shaken, and some found it prudent to keep bank accounts, homes, and even relatives in the United States, in case a quick move became necessary.