by Judy Yung
Popularly referred to as the "Chinatown Canteen," the weekly event held at the Chinese YWCA on Thursday evenings was orchestrated by Chinese women but drew the support of all Chinatown. It was paid for by contributions from local residents and involved scores of business and college women as well as members of the six key women's organizations. All volunteered to take turns shopping and cooking Chinese food as well as dancing and socializing with Chinese American soldiers, sailors, and coast guardsmen on leave. Although some of the upper-class ladies would normally not have bothered to cook at home, said Jane Kwong Lee, "wartime was different. The response to serve was spontaneous." 16' Special occasions, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, entailed more elaborate menus and gifts. During the month of December 1943, attendance averaged sixty-five servicemen each week, and beginning in March 1944 Sunday afternoons were added to the schedule.166
As in the rest of America, when it came to civil defense preparedness, the Chinese Press proclaimed, "It's a Woman's World!"167 Most active in this area was the newly formed Chinese chapter of the American Women's Volunteer Services (AWVS), under the leadership of Emily Lee Fong and May Chan. The AWVS sponsored air raid precaution classes in which Chinese women of all ages and backgrounds learned to make blackout curtains, convert old newspapers into flashlights, and apply first aid in the event of enemy attack. "The women of Chinatown are definitely responding to the need for gearing the home to possible wartime emergencies which the next blackout may bring," said Daisy K. Wong, one of the instructors quoted in the Chinese Press article.16H Aside from skills associated with the domestic realm, courses were also offered to Chinese women in motor transportation, motor mechanics, map reading, and photography; girls at the Chinese YWCA were instructed to build model airplanes for use by the army and navy. Those trained in communications and codes volunteered for the Aircraft Warning Service and the Chinese Code Corps, which aided in directing motor convoys, shore to land signaling, and other communication duties. "Every Sunday morning from 6 A.M. to noon, we would help with charting the course of all aircraft in the area," recalled Alice Fong Yu, one of the vol- unteers.169 Many AWVS members also volunteered to entertain soldiers at the Chinatown Canteen, chauffeur them around town, or work as telephone operators, interpreters, and nurses' aides at the local Red Cross and twenty-four-hour first aid station. 110
The AWVS led Chinese women in the area of fund-raising for the Allied war effort. Having already contributed over $3 million for war relief in China since 1937, San Francisco Chinatown joined with the rest of the country to fill the American war chest. Asked to raise $io,ooo for the Red Cross in 194z, the Chinese raised $i8,ooo-on top of $30,000 for defense bonds and $50,000 for the Chinese war relief fund that same year.171 In each of the eight national war bond cam paigns, too, the Chinese community consistently raised large amounts of money-$750,000 worth in the seventh campaign alone, for exam- ple.172 Separate women's divisions brought in the largest sums in all these various drives. Money also poured in from the AWVS war bond booth in Chinatown, which, though set up at the suggestion of the Chinese Six Companies, was staffed by women volunteers. Martha Taam, one of the volunteers, recalled: "We all dressed up in our gray uniforms and took a four-hour shift selling war bonds at this booth on Washington and Grant Avenue. It was quite successful. Stores would buy bonds, and many Chinese too. "173 Each day an average of $ i,ooo was collected from war bond sales alone. In addition, the AWVS chapter sponsored benefits that featured Chinese American radio and nightclub stars as well as auctions and raffles; at one such benefit, $6o,ooo was raised.174
Martha Taam (front row; far left) and the Chinese chapter of the American Women's Volunteer Services selling war bonds in Chinatown. (Courtesy of Martha Taam)
Reflecting a united front in the merging of two war efforts, Chinatown was invited to participate in the city's Pearl Harbor anniversary parade in 1942 and the "I Am an American Day" program held at the Civic Auditorium in 1943. Then in 1944, the Chinese community changed the annual Double Seven parade (in commemoration of 7-7, the day Japan invaded China) to the Triple Seven parade, to mark the seventh year of the War of Resistance. A special open house party was held in Chinatown and at the Civic Center to express appreciation of American support for the war in China. Chinese American women were in the forefront in all of these events. It was in large part because of their efforts that close to $13,000 was raised at the Triple Seven open house in 1944, with another $ 5 z,ooo being collected for Chinatown's victory celebration in 1945. 175
On August 14, 1945, when Japan's surrender was publicly announced, overjoyed revelers filled the streets of downtown San Francisco and the adjacent financial district. Crowds carried on all night long, making bonfires of Victory Bond booths, breaking windows, and overturning cars in uncurbed jubilation.176 Margaret Woo, who was working downtown that afternoon, noticed all the people running outside: "There were mobs of people, and the soldiers were kissing all the girls on the street," she said. "All the stores closed for the day. Everybody was so happy, screaming, `The war's over! 111177 Lorena How recalled the joyous occasion in this way:
It came around 4 P.M. in the afternoon. The siren went off at the Ferry Building. Normally the siren would go off at 12 noon and again at 4:30, so we were all very surprised when it went off at 4. Then the siren was joined by the St. Mary's bells. Then all the other church bells began ringing and chiming. My mother, who always kept up with the news, knew the war was over when she heard the siren. We all ran out into the street, got into my brother's car, and started driving around.... We didn't know that the gas cap was off. People were throwing confetti and firecrackers, and there was paper all over the streets. It was a wonder we didn't get blown up.178
A few days later, Chinatown held its own celebration and began preparations for its role in the citywide victory parade. On September 9, the day of the parade, all Chinatown businesses were closed. Twenty-eight Chinese units, including veterans, dignitaries, men and women's organizations, Chinese schools, and lion dancers, took part in the four-hourlong parade that marched from the Ferry Building to City Hall.179
For most Americans, World War II lasted four years. For Chinese Americans, it was a protracted war of fourteen long years. Throughout that period, despite their own socioeconomic problems, they stood steadfast in their commitment to help China and then the United States defeat their common enemy. Because of the united efforts of all Americans, victory was finally achieved in 1945. In the wake of that victory, Chinese American women, who had given generously of their time, money, and energies, found themselves in step not only with the rest of their community but also with the larger society.
In 1941, the same year that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, forcing the United States to enter World War II, my mother, Jew Law Ying, set sail for America on the S.S. President Coolidge with her fouryear-old daughter, Bak Heong (meaning "forced to leave the home vil- lage").1 The Chinese Exclusion Act was still in force, so my father, Tom Yip Jing (a.k.a. Yung Hin Sen), changed his status from laborer to merchant by declaring partnership in a Chinese art goods business. This way, my mother could come as a merchant's wife. Mother was glad to be leaving war-torn China for what she believed would be "heaven," despite her maternal grandmother's warnings. She took with her the parting words of her mother: "Be sure to send for your two younger brothers as soon as you can." Nothing was said about her three younger sisters. Although the practice of footbinding had stopped with Great-Grandmother's generation, feudal ideology concerning male preference was still very much alive in many parts of China.
Mother and Bak Heong, upon arrival in San Francisco, were detained at the immigration station temporarily located on Silver Avenue (the Angel Island station was destroyed by fire in 1940). Their experience there was not very different from the ordeal suffered by women on Angel Island. My mother recalled:
All of the women lived in the same large room. I think there were maybe twenty of us at the time. It was quite spacious. We would chitchat and talk a lot. So
me of us would sew and read. That's about it. Other times we would become depressed because our future was so uncertain. Many of us did not know how long we would be detained and if we would set foot in San Francisco or not. Some of the women burned incense to ward off the evil spirits. Some were deported back to China. Two of the women I met there became my friends for life.
My parents, Toni Yip Jing and Jew Law Ying, and my eldest sister Bak Heong reunited in San Francisco, 1941. (Judy Yung collection)
The Tom/Yung family in 1954. Front row, left to right: Patricia, Jew Law Ying, Warren, Tom Yip Jing/Yung Hin Sen, Judy (author); back row, left to right: Sandra, Sharon, and Virginia. (Judy Yung collection)
There were at least two positive changes relative to Angel Island. According to my mother, the Chinese food at the Silver Avenue station was actually pretty good. For lunch and dinner, they always had soup and at least three different dishes to go with the rice. My father also sent her roast duck a number of times, and at the snack bar she was able to buy other Chinese food such as preserved bean cakes. The women, except for those who had failed the interrogation, were also free to come and go within the building-unlike at Angel Island, where they were locked inside their sleeping quarters.
Mother had memorized all the information concerning Dad's "paper son" side of the family with great trepidation, but for her the interrogation proved easier than expected. "They were more interested in the fact that my mother was an American citizen," she recalled. "They asked me more questions about my maternal side of the family. The entire interrogation took only half an hour. It was very simple. Everything was said through an interpreter."2 Mom considered herself one of the lucky ones. "When I left, many of the women there were sad because they had been there so much longer than I, spending many days crying and feeling miserable."
Little did my mother know that her miserable days were just about to begin. She spent the first few years in Menlo Park, California, in a run-down house on the private estate of the Cowell family, for whom Dad worked as a gardener. "We had only a wood-burning stove and we slept in an old broken bed," she said. "Times were very hard then. I could hardly adjust. I remember crying so much because I was used to a more comfortable life [living with my grandparents] in Macao. We had servants to do everything [in Macao]. I never had to cook or chop wood before. Here there was no hot water and I had to wash all the clothes by hand." From sunrise to sunset, my mother picked suckers off flowers at one of our kinsmen's nurseries close by, making 25 cents an hour. "I would be paid at the end of the season, if the season was good," she said. "If it was a bad year, they would just owe me the money until the next year." When she was about to give birth to their second child, my father could not get her to the hospital in time because of the war curfew. An old midwife with trembling hands was called in, and Father assisted in the difficult birth. My second sister, Sandra-named See Heong ("thinking of the home village")-was thus born in circumstances far removed from the sterile hospital in Macao where Bak Heong (later named Sharon) came into the world.
By the time my mother was pregnant with their third child, the United States was deeply immersed in World War H. The family moved to San Francisco Chinatown to be closer to a modern hospital and so that my father could take advantage of the well-paying jobs in the shipyards. Mother began working in a Chinatown sweatshop, often bringing sewing home to do at night. My parents rented two rooms in a tenement. Although there was no kitchen, private bathroom, or running hot water, it was still an improvement over Menlo Park. Mother now had the comforts of an ethnic community and a network of relatives and friends close by. Virginia was born at the beginning of 1943, and Patricia at the end of that same year. I followed in 1946 and proved to be the lucky fifth daughter because I preceded the son my parents had so longed for. When my brother, Warren Tom Yung (note the middle name that honors my father's real surname), was a month old, my parents splurged and threw a Red Egg and Ginger banquet to announce his birth. And they stopped having children. (I have always been painfully aware of my possible nonexistence had my brother been born first.)
Ironically and tragically, Warren suffered an accident when he was nine years old and has since been institutionalized, confined to a wheelchair. When it became clear that he would never be able to sire children and continue the Tom family line, my mother sought solace in the Chinese Independent Baptist church. My father, however, could find no outlet for his despair. He never returned to China to pay homage to his ancestors as a filial son should. Instead it was we daughters who carried on the duties of the sons. We all worked through high school and afterward to help support the family. We took care of our parents in their old age. We represented the family at clan functions. We returned to China to worship the ancestors and sent money home to build a schoolhouse and to have our grandparents properly reburied. As the fifth daughter, I brought honor to the family name by being the first from our ancestral village to earn a doctorate. Since my father's death in 1987, we daughters have gone regularly to tend his grave at the local cemetery. We keep the lineage and stories alive, passing them on to the next generation. And those of us with children have broken tradition by celebrating every birth, regardless of gender. When my mother reflects on her bittersweet past, she recalls how our relatives used to ridicule her for bearing only girls. Now she proudly points out that her daughters have been as valuable as sons. "Just look at how good my daughters have been to me," she says. "My heart is totally satisfied."
As she had promised her mother, Mother worked hard as a seamstress to save enough to send for her two younger brothers. Although the Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943, the new law allowed only 105 immigrants a year from China. Many more Chinese, especially women, were able to come as non-quota immigrants under the War Brides Act of 1945, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, and the Refugee Act of 19 5 3. The easiest way for my mother, who was not yet a U.S. citizen, to get my Uncle Lurt to America was to buy papers for him to come as a son of a U.S. citizen. When that failed, she studied hard for six months and succeeded in becoming a naturalized citizen in 1964. The next year, Congress passed a new Immigration and Naturalization Act, which ended the restrictive quota system and placed China on an equal footing with other countries. Now that zo,ooo persons per year were allowed to immigrate from China, my mother could begin the process of chain migration by bringing Uncle Lurt and his wife over from Hong Kong. Uncle Lurt, in turn, sent for his wife's parents, brother, and sister after he became a U.S. citizen. Then when China and the United States resumed full diplomatic relations in 1979, Uncle Lurt was able to help his brother, Haw, and his family immigrate directly from China. Thus, my mother fulfilled her promise. She wanted her three sisters to come too, but by the time they could emigrate after -1979, they declined to do so, saying they were too old to start over in America. So Mother has continued to send remittances home to help them. And in the last decade she has made repeated trips back to visit them in the village. Her only regret is that she was unable to provide for her parents in China. Upon her arrival in San Francisco in 1941, she immediately sent them the large sum of $-1oo. Because of the war with Japan, however, she was unable to get any more money through to them. Both died of starvation before the war was over.
My mother's immigration to and life in America follow a pattern similar to that of Chinese women who preceded her, but with some different contours owing to the socioeconomic and historical circumstances of her time. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, she could only come as one of the exempt classes, and she had to endure detention and interrogation to prove her right to immigrate as a merchant's wife. It was not until the early 195os, after political pressure was applied by the American Civil Liberties Union and Chinese American organizations because of reports of suicide by a number of despondent immigrant women, that the U.S. Immigration Service ceased the practice of detainment and began settling an immigrant's right to enter the country at the point of departure instead of the point of entry.
Although t
he World War II economy meant a good job for my father as a shipfitter, it was only a temporary situation. After the war he returned to being a laborer, or what he called "a mule's life." With no education or fluency in English, and handicapped by racism, the best he could do was land a job at the Mark Hopkins Hotel as a janitor; this enabled him to join the Service Employees Union and enjoy the benefits of union protection until he retired in 1968. It proved to be the best job he ever had-decent wages, regular hours, two-week vacations annually, health insurance, and a good pension plan.
My mother, however, with six children to support and a husband who was addicted to gambling for a period, had little choice but to work in a Chinatown sweatshop. The job allowed her flexible work hours, but it also exploited her by paying low piecework wages. Finding employment at a union shop in later years made no difference in terms of her wages, although it did mean set hours, medical coverage, and vacation and retirement benefits.3 Like many other immigrant women, Mother sewed day and night while raising us children, trapped in Chinatown in a dead-end job because she never had a chance to learn English or acculturate into American society. One difference that set her life apart from the lives of her Chinese immigrant predecessors was that there was less of a gendered separation between the private and public spheres in the postwar years. Mother and her peers felt no qualms about appearing in public. They freely walked the streets of Chinatown and even went shopping downtown whenever they felt like it-usually with one of us in tow to serve as translator. On the whole, though, Mother was so busy working and taking care of us that she had little leisure time to socialize or engage in community activities. Her few pleasures were to attend the Chinese opera or movies and, later, to go to church on Sundays.