The Chinese in America
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After several ABCs were rejected, Chinese American families in 1994 sued the school district, the state of California, and the NAACP, alleging that unfair racial quotas were unconstitutional. Six years later, the school board resolved the suit by abandoning its plans for affirmative action and upholding a racially neutral admissions policy. Immediately, the number of black and Latino acceptances plummeted while that of Chinese Americans and whites soared; severe racial imbalances emerged within a year.
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Research has shown that adolescence is already one of the most traumatic stages of human life, and moving from one culture to another during this period only makes the experience worse. For those who arrived without the protective support of their parents, the experience could be devastating.
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A symbiotic relationship evolved between the Bay Area and Asia. For instance, while new companies in Silicon Valley produced cutting-edge hardware and software, the island of Taiwan served as a manufacturing center, supplying the industry with computer components and peripherals.
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During those heady years of the Internet boom, there were other success stories, though less well known. Tony Hsieh founded a startup called LinkExchange with a fellow Harvard classmate and immediately sold it to Microsoft for a reported $250 million. (The terms of the agreement prevented him from disclosing the actual figure.) Initially, his parents—both scientific professionals with doctorates—had been distressed by Tony’s decision to become an entrepreneur. “At first my parents were a bit surprised and not happy that I was leaving a steady job at Oracle to start this company,” Hsieh said. “Actually, they weren’t even happy that I went to Oracle in the first place, because they wanted me to get my Ph.D.” It didn’t matter whether the Ph.D. was in computer science or not: “They just wanted the letters after my name.” few corporate players. By the end of the twentieth century, even colossal semiconductor companies began cutting costs by farming out their fabrication work to Taiwan.
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Most of the Chinese H1-B visa holders came from the People’s Republic of China, not Taiwan. During the late 1980s and 1990s, Taiwan experienced a reverse brain drain in relation to the United States. Unlike the Taiwanese who chose to stay in the United States after graduating from American universities during the 1960s and 1970s, more Taiwanese students are now returning to the island after obtaining their degrees, to take advantage of better employment opportunities there. High-tech workers from the PRC, however, are more eager to stay in the United States.
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Some of these books asserted, on the basis of scant evidence, that President Bill Clinton had sold out American security for PRC bribes, that mainland China had stolen military secrets from the United States, and that the Communist Chinese leadership was targeting the United States with nuclear weapons.
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“Do you think the press prints everything that’s true?” one FBI agent told Lee. “Do you think that everything in this article is true? ... The press doesn’t care ... Do you know what bothers me? You’re going to have this kind of reputation! ... You know what’s going to happen, Wen Ho? People are going to read this stuff, and they’re gonna think you’re not a loyal American.”
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“Bill Press, a prominent Democrat and co-host of CNN’s Crossfire program, was the guest host of the Ron Owens show this morning,” wrote one listener, Eddie Liu. “Within just five minutes of my listening, Press twice referred to Lee as a ‘spy,’ with no qualifying adjectives such as ‘alleged.’ ”
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Mainland China received so many adoption applications from the United States that in 2002 the government decided to impose a yearly quota.
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Many believed that America was synonymous with wealth, and viewed their relatives in the United States as “Gold Mountain uncles” and tycoons. When visiting ancestral villages during the 1980s, Chinese Americans reported excessive demands for money and gifts, a culture consumed by greed. “Those friends and relatives would all want money from you,” one Chinese American remembered. He was appalled to find that his PRC relatives scorned certain gifts, such as a black-and-white television set, because they had expected something more expensive. “They were all dissatisfied, they’d wanted a color model. We don’t even have one ourselves.”
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Of course, the Chinese are not the only people who used desperate means to enter the country. Immigration officials can recite accounts of many nationalities employing extreme measures to get into the United States, such as strapping themselves to the landing gear of airplanes, where they might fall or freeze to death, or even cramming themselves into suitcases, in hopes of making it into American airports undetected.
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A 1986 study conducted by the Real Estate Board of New York exposed shockingly high prices: in a community where rents were once lower than in Harlem, the cost of retail space on Chinatown’s Canal Street surpassed even that on Wall Street.
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American police have been known to commit anti-Chinese hate crimes. In January 1987, New York City police officers appeared at the doorstep of a Chinatown apartment to investigate charges that the occupants had illegal access to cable TV. When the Wongs, a Chinese couple, asked to see a warrant, the police apparently broke down the door, yelling, “Why don’t you Chinese go back to China?” and struck both of them. (Mrs. Wong, hit in the face with handcuffs, later required twelve stitches.) They later sued the police department and settled for $90,000. In January 1991, a New York City policeman pulled over Zhong Guoqing for running a red light. But Zhong, a Chinese émigré, failed to understand the officer’s demand to see his registration, which so enraged the cop (“Are you a wise guy?” he asked) that he handcuffed Zhong and pounded his head. Zhong was wounded so severely that he spent the night in the hospital and suffered the partial loss of vision in one eye.
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Lin later noted her loyalty and patriotism to the United States. “If you ask, I would identify myself as Chinese American,” she wrote in Art in America in 1991. “If I had to choose one thing over the other, I would choose American. I was not born in China, I was not raised there, and the China my parents knew no longer exists ... I don’t have an allegiance to any country but this one, it is my home.”
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The Joy Luck Club interwove Tan’s family history with the fictional stories of four American women and their immigrant Chinese mothers. No other novel by an Asian American writer had achieved such success in the history of publishing—it topped the New York Times best-seller list and sold 4.5 million copies by 1997. The film appeared in 1993, directed by Wayne Wang and based on a screenplay co-written by Tan and Ron Bass.
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Foreign correspondents and academics have also observed the coming of age of a new generation of Chinese “superkids” or “little emperors”—the fruit of China’s one-child policy—for whom no sacrifice or expense was too great for their parents to provide with the best education possible. The American press noted the presence of musical and mathematical prodigies in Chinese kindergartens, of Chinese high school students scoring triple 800s on the Graduate Record Examination. China watchers predicted that the twenty-first century would soon witness a Chinese renaissance of genius in science, literature, and the arts, matching or perhaps even surpassing the United States.
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For example, in October 2000, the Republicans ran a television commercial suggesting that electing Al Gore for president might result in nuclear annihilation by the People’s Republic of China. The commercial claimed that China had “the ability to threaten our homes with long-range nuclear warheads” because the Clinton-Gore administration “sold” out the nation’s security “to Communist Red China in exchange for campaign contributions.” The advertisement featured a little white girl plucking daisy petals as she counted backward. Her counting was abruptly followed by the countdown for a missile, and then a nuclear explosio
n. “Don’t take a chance,” the commercial warned. “Please vote Republican.” This TV ad was a remake of the well-criticized 1964 “Daisy” commercial, made for President Lyndon Johnson and implying that the views of his opponent, Barry Goldwater, would lead to an atomic war. The “Daisy” remake provoked a furor in the Chinese American community, which accused the Republican Party of playing the “yellow peril” card.
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Even newspaper editors openly indulged in anti-Chinese stereotypes. In April 2001, Amy Leang, a Chinese American college senior, began an internship at the ASNE Reporter, a publication of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, during its convention in Washington, D.C. Assigned to photograph the performance of a comedy troupe during the convention’s opening reception, Leang watched, to her surprise, a crudely racist skit about U.S.-Chinese relations. What was particularly disturbing was that the audience for the skit comprised those who represented themselves as leaders among American editors. As she later wrote, “White males impersonated a Chinese official and his translator. The official sported a black wig and thick glasses and spoke fake Chinese. ‘Ching ching chong chong,’ the man shouted as he gestured wildly. What was disturbing was not just the fact that this was happening, but that hundreds of editors, my future bosses, were laughing. I felt myself swallowed by all the loud laughter. Each time the ‘Chinese’ voice became more jarring, the editors would laugh even harder. Despite feeling humiliated, I finished the job and turned in my pictures. The next morning, I woke up crying.”
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The Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA) is a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights lobbying group founded by Kung Lee Wang in 1973. The Committee of One Hundred (C100) is a nonpartisan organization of prominent Chinese Americans, designed to promote Sino-American relations and address crucial issues within the Chinese American community. The intent of the 80/20 initiative, organized by S. B. Woo, a Chinese American physicist and former lieutenant governor of Delaware, is to persuade 80 percent of the registered Asian American voters to support a single endorsed presidential candidate, the person most likely to provide policy benefits for the ethnic Asian community.
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Interracial marriages soared after 1967, when the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declared all anti-miscegnation laws unconstitutional. Before the ruling, it was still illegal for white people to marry out of their race in sixteen states, but the landmark Supreme Court decision helped spawn an interracial baby boom.
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In the past, only a few Eurasian actors achieved stardom, and they were typically cast as Asian, not white. The two most famous Hapa stars were Bruce Lee, who popularized Chinese martial arts in films like Enter the Dragon, and Nancy Kwan, immortalized for her roles in The World of Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song.