CHAPTER ELEVEN
It is ironic that so many Chinese émigrés, all part of a culture that cherished large families, would never enjoy the special satisfaction of raising their own children. True, many sent regular remittances back to their home villages in China to support wives, children, and other relatives, but this was hardly the same experience as watching one’s own beloved sons and daughters mature into adult-hood. Yet this was the price so many Chinese men paid for the extreme shortage of Chinese women in the United States; thousands of them were forced to live out their days either as bachelors, or in family arrangements split between two continents.
The numbers alone tell a discouraging tale. Back in 1880, on the eve of the Exclusion Act, the male-female ratio in the ethnic Chinese community was more than twenty to one—100,686 men and 4,779 women. By 1920, deaths and departures had reduced the male Chinese population, while a small number of births had increased the female population, but there were still seven Chinese men for every Chinese woman. One significant cause of this disproportion was that U.S. immigration policies prevented Chinese workingmen from bringing their wives into the country. The law automatically assigned to women the status of their husbands, so if their husbands were categorized as “laborers,” their wives would be, too, making them ineligible for admission to the country. Only the wives of bona fide Chinese merchants were welcome.
So the arrival of any Chinese female in the United States was a rare event. From 1906 to 1924, only about one hundred fifty Chinese women secured legal permission to enter the United States. Then the Immigration Act of 1924 was enacted, prohibiting the entrance of any foreign-born Asian woman. Aimed primarily at ending the practice of Japanese mail-order brides, it hurt the Chinese American community as well: from 1924 to the end of the decade, not a single Chinese woman was admitted to the United States.
Despite the daunting numbers and the discriminatory laws, small communities of families gradually emerged. Because the typical Chinese immigrant could not afford to marry in the United States and was not permitted to bring his Chinese wife to his newly adopted country, those men with families by their side were almost always of the merchant or entrepreneur class, the petty bourgeois of Chinese American society. Consequently, the American-born Chinese children of these families (abbreviated as “ABCs”) tended also to be part of an elevated socioeconomic stratum. Still, many of these families were hardly rich by American standards. And though their children had avoided the horrors of steerage and the struggle to adjust to a strange country, they faced their own unique challenges in the United States.
The first great challenge was the right to an education. Even more than many other immigrant groups, the Chinese, with their Confucius-infused culture, preached the importance of education to their American-born progeny. As they scrambled and grubbed for a living—washing other people’s clothes, slaving away in sweatshops, stir-frying food in hot restaurant kitchens—they were driven by the all-consuming dream of all immigrants: that their children, particularly their sons, would lead a better life than they had. Education represented status, and some traditional Chinese parents, acutely sensitive to the stigma attached to merchants in China and the respect accorded scholars in Confucian society, venerated book learning as a worthy goal in itself, not simply as the path to skills that bring financial security or success. But the special place reserved for education was also based on its direct, practical outcomes. Immigrant parents especially favored careers such as medicine and engineering, not only because they were relatively lucrative, prestigious, and stable, but also because they did not require political connections, enormous outlays of capital, or advanced English-language skills. “My parents wanted us to become professionals,” one American-born Chinese recalled of his childhood days. “If either of my brothers [had become] a doctor, my mother would have been thrilled.”
Many parents also believed that if, for whatever reason, their American-educated children failed to establish themselves in the United States as doctors, engineers, or scientists, they could always go back to China and practice there the profession for which they had been trained in the West. Education was the one thing that could not be stripped from their children, and the parents frequently reminded them of this with adages like “You can make a million dollars, but a good education is better than a million dollars. You can lose everything but nobody can take away your good education.”
But immigrant Chinese parents learned from painful experience that an American education—even public education—was not a right for their children, but a privilege that had to be fought for. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, state authorities tried to exclude Chinese American children from attending white public schools, over the protests and petitions of their parents.
In 1859, San Francisco school board members, making no secret of their contempt for the Chinese (referring to them even as “baboons” and “monkeys”), shut down a public school for Chinese children, even though their parents were required to pay school taxes along with other residents of the city. Under public pressure, authorities reopened the Chinese school but passed state laws in the 1860s to segregate Asians, American Indians, and blacks from the white public school system. Little more than a decade later, during Reconstruction, a new California state law granted separate public education for blacks and Indians, but not Asians, giving local school officials the legal right to close down even the segregated school they had established for Chinese American children.20
For fourteen years, from 1871 to 1885, Chinese children were the only racial group to be denied a state-funded education. Some Chinese parents home-schooled their children, sent them to private schools, or arranged for missionaries to tutor them individually, while others were too poor to exercise these options. The Chinese community made desperate appeals to the school board to admit their children into the public schools, but these were repeatedly ignored.
Finally, the Chinese turned to the courts. In 1884, Joseph Tape, an interpreter for the Chinese consulate, and his wife, Mary, a photographer and artist, sued the San Francisco Board of Education when their daughter Mamie was denied admission to a public white primary school. The school officials argued that “the association of Chinese and white children would be demoralizing mentally and morally to the latter” and tried to label Mamie as a child of “filthy or vicious habits suffering from contagious or infectious diseases.” The Tape family submitted medical records that gave Mamie a clean bill of health, but the school board refused to budge from its position. Joseph Tape v. Jennie Hurley (the principal of the Spring Valley School) was argued at the height of violent anti-Chinese hostility in California, when the state superintendent of schools felt comfortable asserting that barring Chinese children from public schools was unconstitutional but necessary because they were “dangerous to the well-being of the state.” One Board of Education member insisted that he would rather go to jail than permit a Chinese child to enroll in school.
In Tape v. Hurley at least, the courts served justice and not public passion. The Superior Court ruled in favor of the Tape family, and was upheld on appeal by the California Supreme Court. When the board adopted a resolution to fire teachers and principals who admitted “Mongolian” children to public schools, one judge warned that he would punish the board members with contempt citations if they attempted to enforce it.
After their defeat in court, the San Francisco school board lobbied for a separate educational system for Chinese children. A bill giving the board the authority to establish an Oriental Public School sailed through the California state legislature under a special “urgency provision.” An outraged Mary Tape vented her feelings in an ungrammatical but passionate letter to the school board: “May you Mr. Moulder, never be persecuted like the way you have persecuted little Mamie Tape. is it a disgrace to be Born a Chinese? Didn’t God make us all!!! What right! Have you to bar my children out of the school because she is a chinese Descend. Mamie Tape will never attend any of the Chinese schools of your making! Never!!! I will let the world see sir What justice there is When it is govern by the Race prejudice men!!!”
By the turn of the century, racially segregated schools were legal not just in California but nationwide. In the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court ratified racial segregation as constitutional by accepting the doctrine of “separate but equal,” saying that states had the right to exclude nonwhites from public schools and other publicly supported services as long as equal facilities were created for them. Separate but equal remained the law of the land until the Supreme Court overturned Plessy in 1954 in another landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education.
Despite Plessy, the Chinese continued to challenge segregation in several court cases, but with little success. One of the most notable was a suit filed in 1924 by Lum Gong, a grocer whose daughter Martha was rejected by the local white school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the state of Mississippi had the prerogative to reserve white schools for white children alone.
A few Chinese American children managed to find ways to attend Caucasian schools. An unwritten rule was that they could enroll if the local community did not object—a situation that doubtless encouraged the ethnic Chinese students to be docile, respectful, and studious. This strategy could backfire, however, when high academic achievement inflamed white envy. In 1905, a group of white parents at Washington Grammar School in San Francisco insisted that four Chinese students, all academic superstars, were cheating by secretly exchanging answers in Chinese during tests. The students were separated during the next exam, but they still achieved the four top scores in the class. Undeterred, the white parents then complained to the Board of Education, which removed the four boys from the school altogether. In 1928, a white community in Mississippi decided to bar all Asians from attending the local white school after a Chinese boy graduated at the top of his class. The specter of segregation always lurked in the background, with the constitutionally protected right of school boards to expel Chinese students on any whim or pretext.
By the mid-1920s, it was becoming difficult to segregate Chinese students in California, largely because of the Chinese community’s willingness to organize politically. An effort to create a segregated junior high school failed in the San Francisco Bay Area when Chinese activists and organizations made vociferous protests. It appears that these barriers gradually, informally dropped away, several decades before actual laws were codified to ban racial segregation. So as the years went by, more Chinese American children attended integrated schools, and their initial exposure to whites often threw them into a welter of confusion about their identity.
In most children, feelings oscillated between a fierce pride in their heritage and a near-total rejection of being Chinese. Some saw themselves as informal ambassadors of China, interpreting its culture for their white classmates while also serving as models of deportment for their white teachers, as if upon their words and actions hinged the reputation of an entire country. Others had so deeply absorbed the toxin of racism that they grew to loathe everything Chinese, even their own looks. To make themselves appear less Asian, some Chinese American teenage girls taped or glued their eyelids in order to create an extra fold, and while Chinese American boys were less likely to resort to such tactics, some must have been equally insecure about their self-image during the 1920s. Even late into the twentieth century, one man would recall, “I remember rushing home from school one afternoon—I was eleven or twelve years old—and desperately staring at the bathroom mirror and praying to God my face would miraculously turn Caucasian. Only fear of pain and death kept me from committing suicide.”
A few American-born Chinese simply viewed themselves as white. Such individuals tended to live in rural areas, where the absence of an established ethnic Chinese community made them less threatening to whites and encouraged their participation in the mainstream. Bernice Leung, born in 1917 in the farming community of Fresno, California, remembered a period in her childhood in which she and her siblings did not believe they were Chinese at all. Asians, not Caucasians, looked strange to them, and they wondered why they themselves had not been born with blue eyes and blond hair. Noel Toy, who grew up in the only Chinese American family in a small northern California town, was astonished to meet another Asian woman in college. “I was brought up purely Caucasian, Western,” she recalled. “When I went to junior college, I saw an Oriental woman. I said, ‘an Oriental! My gosh, an Oriental woman!’ I never thought myself one.”
Somewhere in the middle were those torn between the demands and expectations of both cultures, Chinese and American. “There was endless discussion about what to do about the dilemma of being caught in between,” remembered Victor Wong, an American-born Chinese who grew up in San Francisco.
Finding a comfort zone in a racially stratified society took time. For some ABCs it took decades. Confusion about identity was only one problem; another was overt and covert racism. Those who grew up in white areas often did not feel the full effect of racism until reaching puberty. “We have never lived in Chinatown but have always lived in an American neighborhood,” Lillie Leung recalled in 1924.21 “I mingled with all the children quite freely, but when I was about twelve years old they began to turn away from me. I felt this keenly. Up to that time, I never realized that I was any different, but then I began to think about it.”
It was in the white or integrated public schools that many Chinese American children felt the sting of racism most sharply. Esther Wong of San Francisco remembers a French-language teacher who made no effort to hide her hatred of the Chinese. After asking Wong to read aloud in class, she remarked, “Well, you read all right, but I don’t like you. You belong to a dirty race that spits at missionaries.”
Racism also pervaded the curricula and textbooks, driving a wedge between Chinese Americans and their white classmates. “In grade school I was fairly successful in being admitted to the ‘inner circles,’ as it were,” one ABC recalled of her childhood in the 1910s. “Children are not prone to think a great deal of their ‘social selves’ and since I spoke English as well as they, and played and dressed as they did, I was not regarded as an outsider.” That is, until China was taught in geography and history class:
When we came to the study of China, the other children would turn and stare at me as though I were Exhibit A of the lesson. I remember one particularly terrible ancient history lesson; it told in awful detail about “queer little Chinamen, with pigtails and slanting eyes” ... and went on to describe the people as though they were inhuman, and at best, uncivilized. Even I, young as I was, resented these gross exaggerationswhich were considered the gospel truth by other pupils. I meditated on ways and means of absenting myself from class that day; I would have welcomed a sudden and violent attack of illness, or even sudden death, but since my health remained disgustingly good, I was forced to sit through a very embarrassing hour.
Another kind of struggle was being waged after school, at home. Many Chinese American children not only faced daily prejudice from whites, but at home had to deal with rigid attitudes their parents had imported from the old country. Fear and insecurity compelled many Chinese parents to shield their children from the influence of the outside, alien world, especially their daughters. “Mother watched us like a hawk,” Alice Sue Fun recalled of her formative years in San Francisco during the 1910s. “We couldn’t move without telling her. We were never allowed to go out unless accompanied by an older brother, sister, or someone else.”
In certain households, the girls were burdened with household work while still very young. Many second-generation Chinese women endured an unusually restrictive upbringing, with heavy domestic responsibilities and orders to stay home, while their brothers were permitted to venture out into the streets to play. After coming home from Oriental Public School each day, Alice Sue Fun had to do “a lot of housework for my mother—washed dishes, scrubbed the children’s clothes by hand, helped her sew.” By the time she was eight or nine years old, “I was cooking rice. If I burnt the rice, I would get a ling gok [a knuckle-rap on the head].”
Boys also learned early to work hard, although, unlike their sisters, they were usually given more freedom to work outside the home. The poverty of one ABC’s family in California forced him to take jobs after school—and sometimes before:
When we grew up, we just lived on a bare minimum. If there was nothing to eat, we just ate plain rice and water. Whatever. Just wash it down. I used to get up at 7:00 in the morning and go to work at a wholesale florist. And I worked there for an hour before I went to school. I’d take my bicycle and I’d ride from Fifth and Mission Street, all the way to Galileo High. After school, I’d go to an apartment to wash the kitchen or do housework for an hour. Then I’d go home and eat dinner. And we started Chinese school at 5:00. From 5:00 to 8:00, we had three hours Chinese school. After that, I’d go home and do the laundry, or clean up the house or whatever, and do some homework and then go to bed.
Some families forbade their children to speak English at home and insisted that they attend special Chinese-language schools after their public school classes, six days a week. Chinese-language schools represented the hopes and efforts of first-wave immigrant parents eager to maintain in their American-born children some vestige of their Chinese heritage. The earliest of these schools appear to have been informal arrangements between scholars and Chinese immigrant families. Known as kuan, and held in the private homes of their tutors, they consisted of classes of twenty to thirty children who learned the rudiments of Chinese language, calligraphy, philosophy, and classical literature. By the end of the 1920s, some fifty Chinese-language elementary schools and a half dozen Chinese-language high schools existed in the United States, mostly in the West.
The children’s reaction to this additional education was mixed. Chinese lessons were “an ordeal that I grew to hate,” Louise Leung Larson recalled of her childhood in the 1910s. “I didn’t see why I had to learn Chinese when I was always going to live in America. The only way I could remember the characters was to write the American phonetic sound beside them.” Rodney Chow had a Chinese-language teacher in Los Angeles with a “totalitarian attitude” toward the children: “It was just memorizing, writing, and reading, and it was very, very strict because he actually took the stick and hit us.”
Even if the teacher was not abusive, it was difficult for some children to concentrate on their studies. There was the problem of different dialects: one Chinese school made the mistake of employing a Mandarin-speaking instructor for children of Cantonese-speaking parents, which frustrated the students and led most of them to drop out. And often the interest simply was not there. Pardee Lowe, an ABC who grew up in San Francisco in the 1920s and graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law School, described his personal struggle with Chinese school: “It was not that I was entirely unwilling to learn, but simply that my brain was not ambidextrous. Whenever I stood with my back to the teacher, my lips attempted to recite correctly in poetical prose Chinese history, geography or ethics, while my inner spirit was wrestling victoriously with the details of the Battle of Bunker Hill, Custer’s Last Stand, or the tussle between the Monitor and Merrimac.”
Yet immigrant parents believed these classes were necessary to sustain continuity with the ancestral homeland and their identity. In 1924, a Los Angeles-born woman of Chinese parents recalled, “I had to learn the Chinese language because father told me time and again that I could never be an American because my skin was yellow and only white people could be Americans.”
But neither Chinese schools nor Chinese parents could shelter children from the onslaught of American culture. Outside the narrow confines of Chinatown and family, a larger world beckoned. Popular culture permeated even the most isolated ethnic ghettos, shaping the desires of ethnic Chinese youths, exposing them to new values, new ideas, beyond the reach of parental control. The children listened to the radio for entertainment, read English-language newspapers, pored over comic books and pulp novels bought from neighborhood drugstores, spent Saturday afternoons at the local nickelodeons watching movies. Child-related activities of civic and religious groups also encouraged the assimilation of the American-born Chinese. Missionaries established Chinatown churches, and by 1920, almost all of the Chinese American children in San Francisco—close to a thousand of them—were attending Sunday school. The YMCA in San Francisco Chinatown organized athletic competitions in sports like soccer and basketball.22 At the same time, Chinese American children took the initiative of starting their own clubs. In 1914, eight young Chinese American boys thumbed through a Boy Scout handbook in the playground of a Methodist church in San Francisco and decided to create their own Scout chapter. It became the very first Boy Scout troop in San Francisco, and probably the first ethnic Chinese Boy Scout troop in the world.
The urge to partake in American customs grew more intense as children got older. Chinese American adolescents craved what they saw on the silver screen, in glossy advertisements, and in the (mostly white) public schools. By the 1920s, one of the most prosperous decades in U.S. history, ABCs were increasingly torn between parental restraints and the seductive pull of American consumer culture. The urban enclaves of Chinese America of that decade were so profoundly transformed that their earliest settlers would have found them unrecognizable. “Take it all in all, the Chinatown of today is not the Chinatown of the bygone days,” Dr. Ng Poon Chew, the founder of San Francisco’s Chung Sai Yat Po, wrote in 1922. Chew and others noticed how American traditions supplanted Chinese ones—how Chinese costume and skullcap gave way to closely cropped hair and Western clothes, how Chinese women wore the latest fashions and styled their hair in pageboy bobs or marcelled waves, and how while older women tottered about in bound feet, younger women wore high heels.
But the most dramatic changes were the ones least visible to the casual observer: the shifts in thought, attitudes, and values. Chew noted that Chinese children spoke English and enjoyed American slang. Chinese American women, independent and assertive, dated whomever they pleased and selected their own husbands instead of leaving these decisions to their parents. And Chinese students—ambitious and patriotic United States residents, Chew observed—aspired to earn first-rate college degrees.
By the first few decades of the twentieth century, a substantial number of Chinese Americans, mostly children of small business owners, had fulfilled their parents’ dreams of becoming well educated and were now enrolled at universities along the West Coast, especially in California. But parents and children alike would soon learn that in America, a university degree did not guarantee them respectability, career success, or even employment.
Mainstream society thought of Chinese males as workers in service industries such as laundries, restaurants, and produce markets. Those who aspired to break into the professions—that is, college graduates with degrees in fields such as engineering, architecture, or the sciences—faced difficulty in trying to secure positions at large, Caucasian-controlled firms. In California, consonant with the state’s legacy of racial discrimination, many firms had specific regulations against hiring Asians. “It is almost impossible to place a Chinese or Japanese of either the first or second generation in any kind of position, engineering, manufacturing or business,” the Stanford University Placement Service reported in 1928.
In a family memoir, Father and Glorious Descendant, Pardee Lowe wrote about the discrimination he faced when seeking work, when certain whites could not see beyond the stereotype of the Chinese as houseboy or coolie. While a student at Stanford University, Lowe had applied for a job as chauffeur for a banker’s wife, who insisted upon speaking to him in pidgin English. “You Chinee boy or Jap boy?” she asked.
“Chinese, of course, but born in this country,” an astonished Lowe replied.
“Me no likee, me no wantee Chinee boy,” she said.
Suppressing a “huge desire to laugh,” Lowe responded, “Mrs. Bittern, I understand perfectly.”
Lowe saw with distressing clarity that it was his skin color and not some fault in his credentials that barred him from employment. Even his flawless, educated English could not overcome a prospective employer’s prejudice about the Chinese. “Everywhere I was greeted with perturbation, amusement, pity or irritation—and always with identically the same answer,” he wrote.
“Sorry,” they invariably said, “the position has just been filled.” My jaunty self-confidence soon wilted. I sensed that something was radically, fundamentally wrong. It just didn’t seem possible that overnight all of the positions could have been occupied, particularly not when everybody spoke of a labor shortage. Suspicion began to dawn. What had Father said? “American firms did not customarily employ Chinese.” To verify his statement, I looked again in the newspaper that next morning and for the week after, and sure enough, just as I expected, the same ten ads were still in the newspapers.23
Chinese American college graduates were sometimes barred not only from professional positions but even from the lowliest jobs at white firms. During the exclusion era, even companies outside of California had strict policies against hiring Asians. “Recently two friends of mine wrote to no less than fifty firms throughout the country to apply for a position where they could get some experience along their own line and all they have got were negative answers,” University of Washington graduate Fred Wong told an interviewer in the 1920s. “They went to the Oriental Admiral Line to apply for a job as common labor on the boat. The superintendent at first told them that it was not the policy of the firm to hire people other than Americans. The boys told him that they were American born and did not come into the excluding list. They talked with the supervisor for a while and finally he said, ”I am sorry boys, I cannot employ you people.”
Perceived as foreign, ethnic Chinese job seekers even endured linguistic standards that were not imposed on Caucasians. Some employers expected Chinese Americans to be fluent in both English and Chinese, hiring them to serve as the company’s link between the white and Chinese communities. For instance, a Los Angeles bank hired a young second-generation Chinese man to serve its Chinese American customers. Although he spoke perfect English, his lack of proficiency in Chinese caused him to be fired, prompting his father to send him to China to study the language. Other employers expected ABCs to be verbally deficient in English and naturally gifted in Chinese. When a candidate for a teaching post answered questions using correct English diction, he was asked, “Don’t you have an accent? You’re Chinese.”
Some Chinese Americans learned to ignore such racism, and forged ahead with little more than the energy of their own ambition. Frank Chuck, son of a Chinese schoolteacher in Hawaii, arrived at Stanford University with only twenty-five cents in his pocket. In desperate need of cash and housing, and knowing that Chinese students were not welcome in Stanford’s dormitories (one Chinese boy, he recalled, was bodily “thrown out of Encina Hall”), Chuck worked his way through college by cooking for a Stanford professor in exchange for room and board, and earned a bachelor’s degree in organic chemistry in 1922 and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1925.
Chuck’s education changed not only his life but America’s eating habits as well. In 1927, after a stint teaching in China on a Rockefeller Fellowship, he became a research chemist for Western Condensing Company, the parent company of Carnation Milk. There he discovered the chemical actions responsible for milk dehydration and whey stabilization and in the process, invented powdered milk and instant cocoa. Later, Chuck would identify a way to prevent the parasitic disease coccidiosis from ravaging the poultry industry. He also developed livestock vitamins that profoundly benefited the American food industry.
Another American-born Chinese who pursued his career with relentless, single-minded determination was Chan Chung Wing. Born in Napa, California, he spent his early childhood in China, in the care of his grandfather, a merchant. When he returned to Napa at age nine, shortly before the turn of the century, he showed an early aptitude for learning, skipping from first to fourth grade within a single year. He continued his education in the San Francisco Bay Area, graduating from Lowell High School and Berkeley, where he studied engineering. His grandfather wanted Chan to be an engineer, but Chan opted instead for law. Upon graduation from the Saint Ignatius School of Law, he passed the bar exam with a score of 96 percent—one of the highest on record—and became the first Chinese lawyer to practice in California.
Friends warned Chan that as a lawyer he would starve to death. Indeed, he “found it very difficult to defend my clients, because there was a lot of discrimination against Chinese and many judges tried to throw me out of the courtroom,” he recalled. “But I was very persistent and soon found out that playing golf with the judges and district attorneys afforded me the opportunity to discuss the problems of the Chinese community with them.” Soon the Chinese community found Chan Chung Wing to be one of its greatest champions, a formidable defender of their civil rights. For instance, when Chan learned that the San Francisco police would habitually attack unemployed Chinese workers, striking them with their billy clubs and ordering them to leave town, he filed more than thirty lawsuits against the police, effectively ending the violence.
Second-generation Chinese American women also served as pioneers in their fields, but their struggle for acceptance was far more difficult than the men’s. Before the turn of the century, the majority of working-class Chinese families could not afford to educate their daughters beyond primary school, but after World War I, the introduction of compulsory education in the United States permitted Chinese girls to attend and graduate from high school in numbers equal to Chinese boys. College, however, remained out of reach for most. These women were only a generation or two removed from an era when it was unthinkable for a respectable woman—white or Chinese—to appear alone in public. As was true of other immigrant groups, and the majority of native-born white Americans as well, many Chinese American families employed a double standard, urging their sons to go to college while expecting their daughters either to stay at home or to marry, preferably an educated man. Jade Snow Wong, author of Fifth Chinese Daughter, wrote poignantly of her San Francisco youth in the 1920s, and of how her father refused to finance her college education so he could send her brother to medical school instead.
Even if an ABC woman had financial support to pursue her degree and the encouragement of enlightened parents, she had few role models to inspire her. During the nineteenth century, the number of ethnic Chinese women—either American- or foreign-born-who had graduated from college could be counted on the fingers of one hand: between 1881 and 1892, a total of four Chinese female students, sponsored by missionaries, obtained medical degrees from American universities. They are believed to have been the very first Chinese women to study in the United States. Even at the secondary school level, it was difficult to find female mentors for Chinese girls. It was not until the 1920s that the San Francisco public school system began hiring female Chinese schoolteachers. Any Chinese American woman who wanted higher education needed extraordinary persistence and dedication to achieve her goal.
And education was only the first hurdle. The labor situation, dismal as it was for American-born Chinese men, could be even worse for their sisters, who occupied the lowest tier of a labor market stratified by race and sex. In the early twentieth century, most employed Chinese women, both native- and foreign-born, worked in low-wage, piece-rate industries. Home-based jobs, like sewing and shrimp peeling, gradually evolved into factory jobs that exploited cheap female labor. After World War I, Chinese immigrant women dominated the rank and file of the garment industry. Local Chinese businessmen, obtained contracts from white manufacturers and opened sweatshops with poor ventilation, dim lighting, and inadequate child care, where mothers worked with infants strapped to their backs or with children crawling across the factory floor. Some of the first memories of ABCs who grew up in the San Francisco or New York Chinatowns were of their mothers, mute and exhausted, hunched over sewing machines.
The American-born Chinese women, however, enjoyed better—slightly better—opportunities than their immigrant mothers. With education, fluency in English, and familiarity with American culture, they could move out of labor-intensive industries and into jobs that required specialized skills. By the 1920s, there was a detectable pattern of gradual upward mobility for talented female ABCs. Bilingual and high-school-educated women, overqualified for factory jobs, began working in gift shops and local businesses in Chinatown. Some became operators for the Chinatown Telephone Exchange in San Francisco, where they were required to speak fluent English, several Chinese dialects and subdialects, memorize 2,200 phone numbers, because the exchange handled an average of 13,000 calls a day.
Landing work outside Chinatown, however, remained a challenge. A few found employment in so-called pink-collar positions: as secretaries, clerks, or stock girls for large white corporations, largely because of the popular view that the Chinese were a hardworking and docile people. Sexism magnified the problems of race. White firms hired young Chinese women simply to capitalize on their physical appearance, outfitting Chinese department store salesladies, elevator girls, theater ushers, and restaurant hostesses in Asian costumes to provide an exotic atmosphere for white customers. But for every Chinese American woman hired, countless others met a wall of resistance—they could not obtain even the lowest-paid, most dead-end jobs; they were told flatly that the company didn’t “hire Orientals.”
Nevertheless, in the first few decades of the twentieth century a female Chinese American professional class began to emerge. Second-generation Chinese women entered arenas traditionally dominated by white middle-class women, such as teaching, nursing, and library science. When hired by the San Francisco public school system in 1926, Alice Fong Yu became one of the first Chinese American teachers in the country. Three sisters from a prosperous San Francisco family became pioneers in their chosen occupations: Martha Fong was the first Chinese American nursery school teacher, Mickey Fong the first Chinese American public health nurse, and Marian Fong the first Chinese American dental hygienist. College-educated ABC women also stepped into careers normally occupied by men. Faith So Leung is believed to have become the first Chinese American female dentist in 1905, and Dolly Gee the first Chinese American female bank manager in 1929.
Given the obstacles, it took women with exceptional willpower to rise to the top. Bessie Jeong, one of the nation’s earliest Chinese American women physicians, was one such. Jeong saw what could happen to women who surrendered complete control of their lives to their husbands. In the 1910s, her sister Rose was told to choose between two marriage proposals from men she had never met—a man in his twenties and a fifty-year-old cook—with only their photographs and her family’s advice to guide her. She decided to marry the older man: “Better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave,” her parents advised. But her husband turned out to be jealous, suspicious, and tyrannical—a “hard taskmaster,” as Jeong described him. Sixteen-year-old Rose was far too Americanized and educated for his taste, even though she had had only two years of public schooling, and she found herself caught in a disastrous marriage, a life of poverty, a world of shrinking possibilities. In a poorly insulated log cabin in the lumber camp of Weed, California, Rose watched her husband fail in one business enterprise after another; he sold her wedding jewelry to recoup his losses. Finally, an exhausted Rose died at the age of twenty-six during a flu epidemic.
Bessie Jeong resolved not to share her sister’s fate. When her father began to invite men to the house, and then asked her to return to China, she inferred it was her turn to be married off. “He was going to realize money out of it, or he was fulfilling his duty as a father,” she speculated. “But I still would be on the auction block. Prized Jersey—the name ‘Bessie’ always made me think of some nice fat cow!” In 1915, at the age of fourteen, she fled her parents’ home to live with Donaldina Cameron, the head of the Presbyterian Mission Home in San Francisco, which sheltered runaway Chinese prostitutes and battered Chinese wives. With Cameron’s protection and financial support, Bessie enrolled first at the Lux Normal School for girls, then at Stanford (where in 1927 she became the first Chinese American woman graduate), and finally at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. To help pay her way toward becoming a doctor, she performed a series of domestic tasks—cleaning and laundry, baby-sitting children, and serving dinners.
Like many successful people, Bessie Jeong approached life with a mixture of natural optimism and resilience. She harbored no bitterness toward her tradition-bound family and even reconciled with her father, who eventually came to terms with her refusal to return to China. (He visited her several times, but died before her graduation from Stanford and never saw her become a doctor.) She had a wide circle of friends, both Chinese and Caucasian, and claimed never to have experienced any racial prejudice in her entire lifetime. Jeong also proved adept at managing a career along with a family, balancing a happy marriage to an educated man of her choice—Wing Chan, the Chinese consul in San Francisco—with a private medical practice that flourished for almost forty years.
Women like Bessie Jeong, however, were rare. The majority of Chinese American women were still under enormous pressure to place family above their careers. But with the old traditions falling away, even aspiring young homemakers were uncertain about their roles in the arena of courtship and marriage.
Different expectations of courtship and marriage inevitably created misunderstandings between Chinese immigrant parents and their children. In the early twentieth century, the rituals of courtship fluctuated between old-country mores and American-style dating. Some ABCs submitted to arranged marriages brokered by their parents; others rebelled. “My parents wanted to hold onto the old idea of selecting a husband for me, but I would not accept their choices,” Lillie Leung told an interviewer for the 1924 Los Angeles Survey of Race Relations:
We younger Chinese make fun of the old Chinese idea according to which the parents made all the arrangements for the marriage of their children. Whenever a young Chinese goes back to China we tell him that he is going there to marry—that has come to be a standing joke, and even the older people join in with us.
As they entered the Western world of romance, many Chinese American youths invented their own rules as they went along. In the 1910s, teenagers in San Francisco Chinatown defied their parents by “spooning” along Dupont Street. Because single Chinese American women and men were not supposed to be seen together, the spectacle of youths openly kissing scandalized Chinatown.
A more acceptable form of social behavior was group dating: for instance, outings sponsored by respectable Western organizations like the YMCA. Such chaperoned activities—picnics, museum tours, church suppers—radiated a wholesome image and provided a setting where members of the opposite sex could meet. Many American-born Chinese youths got to know their future spouses at these events. One San Francisco ABC couple told historian Judy Yung that during the 1920s the two of them did not venture out alone on a date until they had known each other for four years.
A developing Chinese American subculture afforded young ABCs opportunities to select their own marriage partners. Excluded by white fraternities and sororities, Chinese American college students in California built their own Greek system. In 1928, six Chinese engineering students founded Pi Alpha Phi (nicknamed “Pineapple”) at the University of California at Berkeley. Two years later, Chinese American women at San Francisco State Teachers’ College created the first ethnic Chinese sorority in the country, Sigma Omicron Pi.
Cities with well-established Chinatowns, like Los Angeles and San Francisco, organized Chinese American social clubs at local high schools and colleges, where students could hold their own dances and parties. In 1929, a reporter in San Francisco observed large posters of a Chinese flapper dancing with a young Chinese man in formal wear; the caption read “Chinese Collegiate Shuffle!” “What would old John Chinaman think,” the reporter wrote, “could he see one of these lively dancing parties of the Chinese students of the San Francisco district, jazz music, bright costumes, beautiful young women, gaiety on every hand. ‘Everything but hip flasks,’ someone said of the dance.” In regions with smaller (or nonexistent) Chinese communities, such as the South, some ABCs were willing to travel long distances to socialize with other ABCs. Edward Wong recalled that “our parents always preached that you need to marry a Chinese. We used to have dances together. We used to drive from San Antonio all the way to New Orleans or Houston for a dance on Saturday night and go back home on the same night.”
Some Chinese parents were apprehensive about this new freedom. Many immigrants who cherished the Confucian ideals of wifely obedience and filial piety believed that their sons would find the embodiment of these qualities only in native Chinese brides. They worried that American-born Chinese women were “spoiled,” “too Americanized,” and liable to be difficult daughters-in-law. One man recalled that the parents in his community would have been especially proud to have a daughter-in-law from China, because she represented “the real thing.”
In addition, some immigrant parents wanted their daughters to marry native-born Chinese nationals, but often the legal and cultural barriers proved overwhelming. American-born Chinese women who married native Chinese men would lose their citizenship. The Expatriation Act of 1907, which forced all women to adopt their husband’s nationality upon marriage, gave way to the 1922 Cable Act, which stipulated that any woman who married an alien ineligible for naturalization would relinquish her own U.S. citizenship.
While some foreign-born Chinese immigrants had Western educations and considered themselves modern men, they were not always prepared for the degree of female liberation in American society. In the 1920s, second-generation Chinese women enjoyed a level of freedom inconceivable to most families in China: they worked outside the home, volunteered for various social causes, married men of their own choice, and practiced birth control. Some native Chinese men were horrified by the casual displays of intimacy between Americans of the opposite sex. When Yu-shan Han arrived in the United States in 1926, he was greeted by a friend’s girlfriend with a kiss. Appalled, he described the episode in an essay for a Chicago literary contest on the subject of “My Most Embarrassing Moment.” He didn’t win the contest, he later explained, because a kiss from a girl meant nothing in the United States.
“Chinese women who are born here are regular flappers,” Mar Sui Haw, an upwardly mobile first-generation Chinese immigrant in Seattle, declared in 1924. He went to San Francisco to work for his uncle’s store and newspaper, mastered English, and graduated from a business school. Though he viewed himself as modern and Americanized, he still yearned for a traditional Chinese wife:
They [Chinese American women] do not have any virtues whatever. Chinese women who come over are so taken with them that they do not try to learn what they should. In China no women are immoral. Here they do not care. It is hard for me to pick up a mate here. I like to marry and have a family. Before the new immigration law, I thought I would like to go back to China and get a wife, but now I cannot do this. It is hard. A class of Chinese girl here in this country who do not care. Shows, dancing all the time. I cannot stand that kind.
Other men shared these sentiments. “It is not right for Chinese man born in China to marry Chinese woman born in America,” Andrew Kan asserted. “They will not be happy. They do not have the same training, the same feeling about the home the girls do in China.” In the 1920s, when Wallace Lee, a Chinese immigrant in Buffalo, New York, was searching for a wife, his cousin warned, “Don’t get married in the United States! Chinese girls talk about freedom, freedom, free, free, free too much! Too new, too fresh, couldn’t make a good wife.”
Still other taboos remained to be broken. Some American-born Chinese braved ridicule, gossip, and ostracism by entering into interracial marriages, which in many states were banned entirely by anti-miscegenation laws. For many immigrant parents, such marriages were unthinkable. Some could not tolerate their sons or daughters wedding outside the Chinese ethnic community, and a few Chinese Americans of that era recall being shunned by friends and relatives simply for marrying Japanese or Korean Americans. Within certain families, even marriage to a person of Chinese heritage was not enough to fulfill strict family requirements; Rodney Chow recalled that his grandparents did not want any of their offspring to marry outside their own dialect.
Yet interracial unions were more common than might be expected. Studies in some parts of the country found that as many as a quarter of all marriages involving Chinese partners were mixed marriages. In Los Angeles, Milton L. Barron surveyed 97 Chinese marriages contracted between 1924 and 1933 and found that 23.7 percent were interracial. For the same period, he examined 650 Chinese marriages in New York State (excluding New York City) and discovered that 150 were to non-Chinese partners. The interracial marriage rate for Chinese in the United States was much higher than that for Japanese, at 6.3 percent, or blacks, at only 1.1 percent.
In time, some of these marriages transcended the barriers of prejudice. When Tye Leung, a Chinese American interpreter at Angel Island, married Charles Schulze, a Caucasian immigration inspector, both were fired from their civil service jobs in San Francisco. Many Chinese snubbed them as well. At first, the residents of Chinatown referred to their mixed-race children as fan gwai jai (“foreign devil child”). But the Schulze family gradually gained acceptance, if only because Tye Leung devoted countless hours to volunteer service in the community. Later, she reminisced that her husband’s mother and her own parents “disapprove very much” of their marriage, but as she observed, “when two people are in love, they don’t think of the future.”
While some parents fretted over the behavior of their children, others may have been even more concerned about the well-being of their families back in China. The 1920s were an era of prosperity for the United States, but in China the decade was a time of lawlessness, when the country was ruled by rapacious warlords. By the late 1920s, there were hopeful signs that the Republic of China would survive. A young Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, emerged to unify a fractured nation. The son of a merchant in the coastal province of Zhejiang, Chiang had gained his military training first in Japan and later, as a protégé of Sun Yat-sen, in the Soviet Union. Between 1926 and 1928 he led a campaign, known as the Northern Expedition, to defeat the warlords and consolidate control of China under the Nationalists. The following year, Chiang, now the supreme leader of the Nationalists, established the capital of the Republic of China in the city of Nanjing.
But it was still a troubled republic. The Northern Expedition had been supported by the Chinese Communist Party, but in 1927, shortly after the expedition began, Chiang purged his former allies from power. Enlisting his extensive contacts with organized crime syndicates, such as the notorious “Green Gang” in Shanghai, Chiang orchestrated the massacre of hundreds of left-wing labor activists. As the slaughter spread to other regions, the shattered remains of the Communist Party fled to the mountains. For the next few years, Chiang waged war against the Communist guerrillas, hoping to exterminate them altogether.
Chiang also faced relentless attacks from Japan, which viewed the chaos in China as a prime opportunity for military expansion. The first sign of trouble surfaced at the end of World War I. In the 1919 Versailles Treaty, Western powers decided not to return German concessions in Shandong province to China, but gave them to Japan instead. In a furor of national outrage known as the May Fourth movement, Chinese intellectuals held mass demonstrations in Beijing and across the country, but the Nationalist government was too weak to ward off Japanese encroachments. Less than a decade later, in 1928, Japan bombarded the city of Jinan in Shandong, killing or wounding more than seven thousand people. In 1931, Japan seized Manchuria, renamed it Manchukuo, and installed Henry Puyi, the last emperor of China, as puppet ruler. The following year, Japanese marines attacked Shanghai, but Chinese resistance forced them to retreat.
With heavy hearts, the Chinese American community followed these developments through ethnic newspapers and letters from relatives. Many immigrants wanted to help the new republic defend itself against Japanese assaults, but were uncertain how to do so beyond sending money home to their own families. But soon, even those remittances would be put in jeopardy, as their newly adopted country found itself mired in the deepest economic depression in its history.