The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  16

  For years, the poetry remained unprotected from the elements. Some, written in pencil, could be easily smudged away, or disappear from flaking paint and water erosion. But a few scholars took the time to preserve the literature of Angel Island—to prevent this delicate legacy from crumbling away. In 1926, Yu-shan Han encountered the poems when he arrived in the United States to study at Boston University. Even though his trip was sponsored by a U.S. senator, immigration officials mistreated Han, calling him a “chink” and locking him away on Angel Island. While incarcerated, he read the poetry on the walls and, deeply moved, began to copy and translate them. Other efforts were made to record these verses. Detained in 1931, Smiley Jann copied ninety-two poems; the following year, Tet Yee, another inmate, recorded ninety-six poems. Some of these, and others, were later compiled by historians Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung in their book Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940.

  17

  The original purpose of the Alien Land Act act had been to discourage Japanese immigration into California. Like the Chinese, Japanese arrivals had endured anti-Asian racism and could not become naturalized citizens, but unlike the Chinese, they were not systematically excluded from the United States. To avoid the humiliation of having their people turned away from American shores, the Japanese government in 1907 signed the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” in which Japan would voluntarily restrict and police contract-labor immigration to the United States. However, some of the Japanese émigrés began to buy and lease farmland in California, which so alarmed the state’s politicians that they lobbied the federal government for legislation to stop Japanese immigration. When these efforts came to nothing, they decided to focus on state legislation. Believing that the Japanese would be reluctant to migrate to California if they could not acquire land, the California legislature passed the Alien Land Act, which, until its repeal in 1948, barred all Asians from owning real estate in California.

  18

  As early as 1858, a San Francisco herbalist, Hu Yunxiao, used English-language business signs to bring in white customers, and, beginning in the 1870s, Chinese herbalists ran advertisements in English-language newspapers in California, some as large as half a page, with pictures of Chinese men taking the pulse of white patients.

  19

  By obscuring the truth, they promoted the myth of easy American success, and inspired others to emigrate. The myth persisted for decades. When researching To Save China, to Save Ourselves, his book on Chinese hand laundries in New York, author Renqiu Yu learned from his field interviews that as late as 1979 many descendants of laundrymen still had no inkling what these “clothing stores” had really meant.

  20

  The School Law of 1870 specified that the education of black and Indian children would be provided in separate schools.

  21

  During the early twentieth century, many ABCs used the terms “white” and “American” interchangeably, even though they were, like whites, American citizens. Such language only served to reinforce their sense of themselves as foreigners in the United States.

  22

  As more immigrant families possessed the financial means to let their children participate in leisure activities, softball, tennis, and golf became popular among the Chinese middle class.

  23

  This racism cooled Pardee Lowe’s teenage ambition to be elected president of the United States, a fever he later called “Presidentitis,” contracted when his teacher, Miss McIntyre, told the class: “every single one of you can be president of the United States someday!” As Lowe later recalled, “I broke down and wept. For the first time I admitted to myself the cruel truth. I didn’t have a ‘Chinaman’s chance’ of becoming president of the United States. In this crash of the lofty hopes which Miss McIntyre had raised, it did not occur to me to reflect that the chances of Francisco Trujillo, Yuri Matsuyama, or Penelope Lincoln [Pardee’s classmates] were actually no better than mine.”

  24

  Another date cited for the crash is October 29, the day on which the market took its worst beating.

  25

  Many whites believed the manufactured myths. “Last summer, on a day early in the afternoon, a big, husky, middle-aged American gentleman opened the [YMCA] door and asked in broken English for the location of the underground tunnels and opium dens,” one observer in San Francisco noted. “On being told that no such places existed, he was quite disappointed and ‘Chinatown’ lost its glamour [for] him.” White teenage girls, fed images of Chinese men as white slavers, seemed titillated by Chinatown’s reputation. According to the Chicago Tribune, they searched for Chinese men in alleys on their way to mission schools and toured Chinatown in groups in New York.

  26

  Both winning essayists ended up doing precisely the opposite of their written intentions. After graduating with a degree in international law from Harvard, Robert Dunn worked in Nationalist China as secretary to a delegate to the United Nations. Kaye Hong stayed in America, where he became a successful businessman.

  27

  Chinese American women took to the skies as well. One of the first female aviators of Chinese descent was Ouyang Ying, who resolved in the 1910s to help China build its military defense. Tragically, she died in a plane accident in 1920, at the age of twenty-five, before she could move to China. Another pioneer was Katherine Cheung; in 1931 she became the first Chinese woman in America to earn a pilot’s license. Cheung became something of a celebrity, awing spectators with her aerial performances and earning headlines in San Francisco newspapers. A woman ahead of her time, she criticized the Chinese Nationalists for barring female students from their aviation schools. Cheung intended to start her own pilot training program in China but changed her mind after she survived a plane crash and her ailing father begged her never to fly again.

  28

  Despite the discrimination against their families by the United States government, Japanese Americans from Hawaii gave their lives in patriotic service to the United States. The Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team from Hawaii became the most decorated U.S. military unit during World War II.

  29

  By fighting exclusion, the Citizens Committee unleashed some of the deepest fears of white Americans. One xenophobic letter called the Chinese the “enemies of the American people”: “If you want a polyglot, mongrel race, then repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act, and amalgamate with the negroes and the Chinese.”

  30

  Clarence Lee was the Eurasian son of Yan Phou Lee, a member of the Chinese Educational Mission, a summa cum laude graduate of Yale in 1887, and author of the book When I Was a Boy in China, one of the first English-language autobiographies written by a Chinese American.

  31

  During the early 1940s, the Chinese Communists had to contend not only with a Nationalist economic blockade but also the lack of foreign military aid. The Russians signed a Soviet-Japan neutrality pact in 1941 and later devoted their resources to fight against a German invasion.

  32

  The 1924 Immigration Act required foreign Chinese graduate students wishing to study in the U.S. first to complete a college education, gain acceptance by an American university, possess English-language skills, and prove they had the financial means to support themselves and pay for their journey back to China. Of course, these criteria entirely favored students from wealthy elite families. In Chinese Intellectuals and the West, Yichu Wang found that the fathers of most Chinese nationals who studied abroad before 1949 had four major occupations: landowner, professional, businessman, or government official. Most of the students had spent their formative years in large coastal cities, one-third from only two metropolitan areas, Shanghai and Canton, and many had graduated from universities established by missionaries, with Western-style curricula, such as the University of Nanjing, Yanjing University in Beijing, and St. John’s University in Shanghai. A few academic superstars—the intellectual cream of
the crop—received Boxer Rebellion scholarships, under a program funded by Chinese indemnities to the United States after the failed uprising of 1900, but most students paid their own way, with the backing of their families.

  33

  During the cold war, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, also believed the Chinese American community was riddled with spies. Testifying before the Senate, Hoover warned that “Red China has been flooding the country with its propaganda and there are over 300,000 Chinese in the United States, some of whom could be susceptible to recruitment either through ethnic ties or hostage situations because of relatives in Communist China.” He added, “Chinese communists carry out their intelligence activities through representatives in third countries and contacts with sympathetic Chinese Americans. The large number of Chinese entering this country as immigrants provides Red China with a channel to dispatch to the United States undercover agents on intelligence assignments.” Hoover’s words suggest that he saw little if any distinction between Chinese foreign nationals and American citizens of Chinese heritage, and that he viewed the latter as untrustworthy merely because of their race and ethnicity.

  34

  Delbert Wong’s life was transformed by military service and federally subsized education. A third-generation Chinese American born in California, Wong served in the Army Air Force during World War II, flying thirty bombing missions over Europe and winning the Distinguished Flying Cross. The government supported his education at Harvard Business School, and after the war he also studied law at Stanford, which launched his forty-year judicial career.

  35

  The United States reserved 70 percent of its admission slots for only three countries—the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany—slots that largely went unused. Countries in southern and eastern Europe or Asia had tiny quotas and long wait lists: Italy had an annual quota of only 5,666, Greece 308, and Yugoslavia 942. For the Chinese, the number was even smaller—105. Furthermore, according to the U.S. government, a Chinese alien was not simply someone who originated from China, but any foreigner with at least 50 percent Chinese ancestry, no matter where he or she lived in the world. Thus, immigrants of Chinese heritage born in Europe, or even people of half Chinese, half white ancestry in Europe, were categorized not as European but as Chinese, and were barred from using European quotas.

  36

  Supporters of the bill assured their opponents that the purpose was to fight racial discrimination, not swamp the country with newcomers from Third World countries. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) predicted that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset” and that the bill would not “inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.” Hiram Fong (R-Hawaii) echoed these sentiments, pointing out that “Asians represent six-tenths of one percent of the population of the United States” and that “the people from that part of the world will never reach one percent of the population ... Our cultural pattern will never be changed as far as America is concerned.” President Johnson added, “This bill we signed today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives.” These claims, however, were wrong—the act profoundly changed the history of modern immigration and affected millions of lives.

  37

  According to the documentary Sewing Woman, seamstress Dong Zem spent almost every waking moment hunched over a sewing machine after she migrated to the United States: “I can still recall the times when I had one foot on the pedal and another one on an improvised rocker, rocking one son to sleep while the other was tied to my back. Many times I would accidentally sew my finger instead of the fabric because one child screamed or because I was falling asleep on the job.” †In her memoir Paper Daughter, M. Elaine Mar describes how her family emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver in 1972, when she was five. Her father, employed by a Chinese restaurant managed by one of his relatives, was too poor to buy a ten-dollar T-shirt with her grade school logo printed on it. “Your father has to work a long time, many hours, to make ten dollars,” her mother explained. “How much money do you think we have? We’re not like the Americans, with their English and their four-dollar-an-hour McDonald’s jobs! Don’t you think your father would work at McDonald’s if he could speak English?”

  38

  Maxine Hong Kingston, winner of the National Book Award and National Critics Circle Award, is the most widely taught living author in the United States.

  39

  Lee and Yang first met as students at National Southwest United University, when the Japanese invasion forced them to flee to the city of Kunming in Yunnan. After World War II, they won doctoral scholarships to study physics under Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, beginning a scientific collaboration that continued even after Yang moved to Princeton University and Lee to Columbia. When they received the Nobel, Yang was only thirty-four years old, and Lee barely thirty-one, the second youngest scholar ever to win this honor.

  40

  Chien-Shiung Wu (also known as Jian Xiong Wu), a Chinese woman physicist at Columbia, confirmed their theory experimentally. Though many felt that Wu, then the world’s leading female physicist, also deserved to be honored by the Nobel committee, she ended up winning honorary doctorates from twelve universities, including Harvard and Yale, and earned the title of the “Queen of Nuclear Physics.” †T. Y. Lin International later built some of the most daring structures in history, such as the giant arches of the Moscone Center in San Francisco, which support, without columns, the biggest underground room in the world.

  41

  The natives later claimed that Taiwan was the “number three” choice for mainland refugees: the most powerful went to the “number one” destination, the United States, and those with money went to the “number two” location of Hong Kong. Everyone else, they said, headed for Taiwan.

  42

  The natives viewed them as the latest arrivals in a long parade of conquerors. During the seventeenth century, the island fell under the domination of the Dutch, the Spanish, and then the Manchus. In 1895, after its humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan. Half a century later, when Japan lost World War II, they returned Taiwan to Nationalist China. Originally, many Chinese natives on the island, ecstatic at Japan’s surrender, looked forward to reunification, but their excitement soon turned to rage and disappointment. In 1947, KMT malfeasance and corruption ignited a local revolt, which the Nationalists swiftly and brutally crushed.

  43

  Soong had exploited his position to exchange worthless Chinese currency into U.S. dollars, which he used to profit through black market speculation, and before the entire Nationalist monetary system collapsed, Soong had converted his wealth into gold and moved to New York City.

  44

  For instance, one journalist who had read Marxist literature before migrating to Taiwan found himself sentenced to several years of hard penal labor after authorities discovered evidence of his literary tastes by reading his friend’s diary.

  45

  One Chinese American, who asked to remain anonymous, remembered that his childhood home in Taiwan became a miniature factory. Between 1948 and 1979, his father purchased tons of milk powder stored in metal buckets, as well as hundreds of food cans with rusted surfaces. “We children had to use sandpaper to scrub away the rust to make the can like new for resale,” he recalled. †The KMT needed scientific expertise to fill the ranks of a new government technocracy, and in 1979 the government created the Hsin-chu Science-Based Industrial Park to recruit talent from the United States.

  46

  Born in Ann Arbor in 1936, the son of a Chinese engineering student at the University of Michigan, Ting moved to mainland China at the age of two months. The Communist revolution forced the family to migrate to Taiwan, where his father taught at National Taiwan University, and Ting later returned to the United States to study at the Univ
ersity of Michigan in the 1950s.

  47

  In 1960, almost half of all Chinese people in the continental United States—43 percent—lived in either the New York or San Francisco Bay areas, two of the most expensive regions in the country.

  48

  TOEFL is an English-language proficiency exam for international students aspiring to study in North America or other regions with English-language curricula.

  49

  Yuan was the grandson of Yuan Shikai, a military commander who had served briefly as emperor after the 1911 Republic revolution, and his family had suffered heavy persecution during the Cultural Revolution. But Yuan Jialiu’s sudden appearance from America changed everything. Acting under orders from Premier Zhou Enlai, local officials hastily returned confiscated houses to Yuan’s relatives and even gave them job promotions. (They were not, however, able to repair in time Emperor Yuan Shikai’s tomb, which the Red Guards had tried to demolish with explosives.)

  50

  At the forefront of the battle against AIDS is Taiwanese American scientist David Ho. Born in Taiwan in 1952, Ho migrated with his parents to Los Angeles at the age of twelve, and after graduating from the California Institute of Technology with a degree in physics and earning an M.D. from Harvard, he decided to devote his career to finding a cure for the HIV virus. As the world-famous director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, Ho has created a potent blend of three antiviral drugs to suppress HIV in his patients, giving them fresh hope after the failure of traditional AZT treatments. To reward Ho’s revolutionary findings, Time magazine placed him on the cover and named him its 1996 Man of the Year.

  51

  In 1995, the University of California regents decided to remove race and gender from consideration during admissions, hiring, and promotion; the following year, Californians voted to pass Proposition 209, which outlawed racial quotas in the state.