CHAPTER TWELVE
The Great Depression struck most Americans without warning, ending one of the nation’s most glittering decades. The 1920s, otherwise known as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties, now evoke images of shocking new fashions and pleasures—of bootleggers in speakeasies, of flappers in short skirts dancing provocative new dances at wild parties flowing with gin. Everyone seemed to have money. The pervasive feeling of prosperity arose from off-the-chart economic growth in the twenties, a period when American business was given free rein by the government. New technological wonders that promised to liberate millions of Americans from drudgery—automobiles and radios, washing machines and vacuum cleaners—rolled off factory assembly lines and were snapped up by a boundlessly optimistic public, often on credit. The United States was now by far the wealthiest nation in the world, with a national income surpassing that of much of Europe and a dozen other countries combined. American corporations built skyscrapers as towering monuments to their ability to do so. Large numbers of people—not just moguls, but maids and shoeshine boys—eagerly played the stock market, hoping to amass a fortune, and most were doing well at it. It seemed that in this age of perpetual prosperity, with some companies starting to include workers in their stock plans, labor unions would soon become obsolete.
But after a decade of frenzied stock market speculation, the bubble burst. On October 24, 1929, “Black Thursday,” came the first great crash on Wall Street, followed by a series of secondary shocks, and then a long, sickening slide toward a national depression.24 The effect rippled away from New York deep into the hinterlands of the country, shutting down banks and putting companies out of business, until twenty million Americans found themselves unemployed, about 16 percent of the entire U.S. population.
The wheels of capitalism ground to a halt. Bankrupt executives flung themselves out of high-rises, hoping that their families could collect on their life insurance policies. Thousands of laid-off workers went hungry, as farmers, facing foreclosures, burned their crops because the new, lower prices for many farm products did not cover shipping costs. Young men and women lived as hobos, jumping freight trains and riding in boxcars, crisscrossing the country in their futile search for jobs. Growing numbers of homeless Americans slept in shanties made of newspapers and cardboard—“Hoovervilles,” they were sarcastically named, referring to President Herbert Hoover’s inability to revive the economy. Eventually, the depression spread across the globe. As pessimism deepened about the ability of capitalism to heal itself, youths began to read Communist literature and talk revolution.
California was spared the worst effects of the depression, largely because, unlike the industrialized East, its economy centered on agriculture. But the 1930s saw horrendous working conditions in the fields of California. The depression coincided with a severe drought in the Great Plains states, which baked the overworked soil into a giant “dust bowl.” White farmers from those regions, especially Oklahoma, loaded their possessions into jalopies and fled to California, hoping to serve as migrant farm workers, crowding into squalid shacks in private labor camps where they were treated almost like slaves. Their plight was immortalized in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, as impoverished whites, known as “Okies,” the new serfs of California, took their place in the fields where the Chinese had worked decades earlier.
Most Chinese were able to avoid these upheavals in rural California. By the 1930s, they were largely concentrated in major cities, usually in their own racially segregated neighborhoods. The Great Depression did not affect the Chinatowns of 1930s as badly as the crisis of the 1870s, largely because of the self-sufficiency of these ethnic communities. The knowledge that they could not get easy access to white venture capital had long ago instilled in them certain protective habits, such as frugality, reliance on family connections, and avoidance of frivolous debt. Isolated from white mainstream America, deeply distrustful of white banks, most Chinese businesses had established their own informal credit systems. Aspiring entrepreneurs would borrow money from their own relatives, or partner with other Chinese immigrants to create a bui, a pool of capital into which they would make regular deposits and out of which loans would be made at mutually agreed rates of interest.
This is not to say, however, that they did not feel the impact of the depression. As growing numbers of white Americans were thrown out of work, there was less money to pay for services the Chinese provided, such as restaurant dining or laundry. As money grew tighter, Chinese families, like millions of white families, had to make do with less. “I remember wearing sneakers with holes in them,” Lillian Louie said of her New York Chinatown childhood. She would patch the shoes with cardboard and not tell her parents. “We didn’t want to bother them, you know, they had enough to do. They worked so hard.”
As the decade progressed, the United States passed emergency legislation to combat the effects of the Great Depression. When Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, he inaugurated, under an agenda known as the New Deal, a flurry of federal programs to regulate banks, initiate public projects, and put the unemployed back to work. Some programs benefited ethnic Chinese by giving them government jobs and financial assistance. By 1935, 2,300, or 18 percent, of the Chinese in San Francisco were receiving government aid, thanks to the Federal Emergency Relief Act. The number was lower than that for the general American population (22 percent), because many Chinese refused to participate in these programs, scorning them as charity. “During the Depression, I’d see these people taking canned goods [home] from school,” recalled Mark Wong, an American-born Chinese in San Francisco. “And my dad refused. He told me simply, ‘You’re not going to bring back any canned goods back here, period.’ I think the pride of the Chinese is very strong. We’re not going to accept food from anybody even to feed ourselves, even when we’re eating less.”
Though loath to accept government handouts, many Chinese did not hesitate to fight when the interests of their community were threatened. During the Great Depression, Chinese laundry owners in New York City successfully battled white competitors trying to drive them out of business with restrictive municipal codes. In 1933, city aldermen proposed that U.S. citizenship be a requirement for operating a laundry, and set high license fees and security bonds that were far beyond the means of the majority of Chinese laundries, which for the most part were small operations. If it had passed, the ordinance would have damaged if not destroyed the entire Chinese laundry industry in New York.
The response was immediate. The Chinese washermen organized the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, which issued a public statement declaring that if they did not fight this ordinance immediately, “tens of thousands of Chinese laundry men would be stranded in this country, and our wives and children back home would be starved to death.” Pooling their resources to hire a prominent white attorney, the CHLA succeeded in pressuring the city to reduce the license and bond fees substantially and exempt all “Orientals” from the U.S. citizenship requirement. CHLA continued to thrive for years, reaching its peak in 1934 with 3,200 members.
Smaller battles, less epic in scale but equally important, were also waged as individual Chinese tried to save their businesses during the depression. In some cases, they revealed remarkable reserves of strength within families. In her poignant autobiographical essay, “An Early Baltimore Chinese Family: Lee Yick You and Louie Yu Oy,” Lillian Lee Kim described how she and her siblings survived double disasters before the onset of the depression: first the death of her father in 1928 from illness, then the physical collapse of her mother after battling her husband’s first son from a previous marriage for control of the household savings. One evening, after vomiting a stream of blood, the mother was confined to bed, leaving her grade-school children completely responsible for the day-to-day operation of the laundry. Amazingly, they kept the business alive without adult supervision. Arranging for a wholesaler to wash the soiled laundry during the day, they rushed home from school each afternoon to sort, starch, and press clothes until bedtime, with the younger ones standing on stools to reach the ironing board. As they grew older, they found part-time jobs on weekends—doing housework, carrying groceries for shoppers, and helping vendors sell fruits and vegetables. Their valiant teamwork helped them rescue the laundry from bankruptcy and weather the Great Depression.
As Chinese family businesses worked harder during the depression, Chinese civic leaders joined together to discuss strategies for increasing their earnings. Tourism appeared to be a reliable source of cash. In San Francisco, immigrant Chinese merchants had sensed early the potential profits of this industry: after the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the old Chinatown, Chinese businessmen erected new structures that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, were “thoroughly modern” yet projected an “Oriental charm and attractiveness.” With a steady stream of articles, brochures, and advertisements, the local media, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and the Chinese community itself all worked together to promote Chinatown as one of the city’s visitor attractions. In 1915, San Francisco Chinatown staged its first beauty pageant to encourage white male tourism. Businessman H. K. Wong, founder of the contest, wanted to reward “the looks that made China’s beauties so fascinating.” Crown contenders sheathed their figures in skintight satin chipao gowns, the traditional costume for women in the Qing dynasty. These promotional efforts paid off. By the 1930s, Chinatown had captured almost one-fifth of the city’s tourist trade.
During the Great Depression, the San Francisco Chinese, concerned about the business slowdown, redoubled their efforts to draw tourist revenue, no matter the means: “Make tourists WANT to come; and when they come, let us have something to SHOW them!” The result was a live fantasy version of the “wicked Orient,” exploiting the most debased stereotypes of the Chinese. Tour guides spun tales of a secret, labyrinthine world under Chinatown, filled with narcotics, gambling halls, and brothels, where beautiful slave girls, both Chinese and white, were kept in bondage. They ushered gaping tourists into fake opium dens and fake leper colonies.
Other Chinatowns across the United States also played the tourist game. In Los Angeles, teenagers earned money after school by pulling rickshaws for white sightseers. In New York City, where tourism in Chinatown had already thrived for decades, guides warned visitors to hold hands for safety as they walked through the neighborhood’s streets. They paid Chinese residents to stage elaborate street dramas, including knife fights between “opium-crazed” men over possession of a prostitute.
The reality of the 1930s was that Chinatown neighborhoods were actually becoming less violent. The tour guides, who entranced their white audiences with stories about hatchetmen and highbinders, were describing a bygone era that reflected poorly on the realities of modern organized crime within the Chinese community. By the early twentieth century, Chinese tongs had become more professional in their operations, less willing to risk scaring off white tourists with real bloodshed. If in previous years merchants and tong leaders had fought over money, they now colluded to increase profits. In fact, merchants themselves often joined tongs to expand their power base, and in some instances the line between respectable Chinese businessman and crime syndicate leader vanished altogether. Historian Adam McKeown has noted that in the 1930s, the minutes of the Hip Sing tong, historically a powerful criminal and extortionist association, resembled the meetings of “a joint stock company.” Each branch voted for a “congressman” to represent local interests at the national meeting, the topics discussed including protection and extortion rates, deadlines for payment, and the distribution of revenue.
Although prostitution in Chinatowns also declined through this period, thanks largely to the efforts of missionaries and middle-class Chinese activists, the purveyors of the tourist trade continued to exploit flesh for profit. During the 1930s, Charlie Low opened the Forbidden City nightclub in San Francisco Chinatown, hiring hundreds of Chinese women (most of them middle-class and college-educated) to dance in his floor show. Like the famous Cotton Club in Harlem, Low’s establishment featured ethnic minority talent performing before a largely Caucasian audience. When Low put nude acts on the stage, he scandalized all of Chinatown, which condemned the dancers as whores. Outraged mothers forbade their daughters to work there or even to go near the place. But many young Chinese women continued to take the work. Sex appeal was lucrative, and the Forbidden City thrived, attracting more than one hundred thousand customers a year, among them senators, governors, and at least one future president (Ronald Reagan, then a young actor, is reported to have been an eager patron). Toward the end of the decade, the World’s Fair in San Francisco exposed the crass ambitions of certain Chinatown merchants eager to distort the image of Chinese women to entice white sensibilities. When the organizers of the fair committed $1.2 million to build an authentic Chinese village on Treasure Island, a few Chinese businessmen suggested having naked girls jump out of a cake to draw huge audiences. The proposal was dropped when critics strenuously objected, pointing out that the idea was not only trashy but hardly authentically Chinese.
Many inhabitants of the nation’s Chinatowns chafed whenever the tourists came around. For one thing, they hated being gawked at like zoo animals, and they had expressed their anger long before Chinese capitalists embraced tourism during the depression. “Every day and all year round there are special sightseeing motor cars decorated with Japanese paper lanterns bearing a huge signboard in front standing right in the midst of the business center of New York City and with a couple of people walking around shouting desperately, ‘Chinatown, O, Chinatown, one dollar down to see Chinatown,’ ” S. J. Benjamin Cheng, a Columbia University student, wrote in a letter to the New York Times. “What do you think that a Chinese or any red-blooded human will feel when he passes by such a car and hears such shouting?”
They were also exasperated by myths that a subterranean community thrived under the city streets. “I never saw an underground tunnel,” one Chinese man insisted. “Just mah-jongg rooms in the basements.” In Los Angeles, residents denied the existence of tunnels, though they recalled that the Chinese district used to have alleys with ceilings so that chickens could be raised there. Some resentful Chinese threatened to beat up white tourists, and did occasionally resort to violence. “We hated them!” declared Lung Chin in New York Chinatown. “Because the sightseers, they would come around, they would always be talking bad stories about China.” He seethed when he heard falsehoods about opium dens and slave girls; the Chinese, he said, were in the United States to “make a living, not to capture white girls for slavery.” And he admitted, “We would have fights with them. How many times I go up there, I say, ‘That’s a lie!’ and then I hit them.”25
Projecting a false image of their community to mainstream whites may have earned the Chinese a certain amount of money, but the prostitution of their heritage was an extravagant price to pay. The guides cultivated fear and suspicion among white tourists, whose brief glimpses of Chinatown may have been their only contact with Chinese Americans during the exclusion era. We will never know how many people walked away certain that the Chinese could never assimilate. Nor will we know how many Chinese Americans endured racial discrimination and a hostile job market in the United States as a direct consequence of the myths fostered by Chinatown tourism and spread through white communities by tourists who “saw it all firsthand.” Worst of all, some of these negative images were perpetuated on the silver screen, where they reached a mass audience far beyond the numbers of tourists who actually came and spent money in Chinatown.
Stereotyping minorities was nothing new to Hollywood. Since the dawn of film, the movie industry had made them the butt of cruel jokes, and Chinese Americans had played their part. In an 1894 silent film, Chinese Laundry Scene, a Chinese character entertains white audiences by eluding an Irish cop. In The Terrible Kids, a 1906 film, a group of mischievous boys attack a Chinese man and yank his queue. But soon a different, more sinister image appeared. In 1908, D. W. Griffith released The Fatal Hour, in which the Chinese villain Pong Lee, aided by cleaver-wielding Chinese thugs, kidnaps and enslaves innocent white girls.
By the 1920s, as Chinatown tourism grew more popular, Fu Manchu made his debut in Saturday afternoon matinees. Writing under the pen name Sax Rohmer, Arthur Sarsfield Ward had introduced the diabolical Fu Manchu in a series of pulp fiction thrillers, describing the character as “the great and evil man who dreamed of Europe and America under Chinese rule... whose existence was a menace to the entire white race.” The Fu Manchu created by Rohmer/Ward was not only a genius, but a beast: “The green eyes gleamed upon me vividly like those of a giant cat ... a man whose brown body glistened unctuously, whose shaven head was apish low, whose bloodshot eyes were the eyes of a mad dog! His teeth, upper and lower, were bared; they glistened, they gnashed, and a froth was on his lips.”
The Fu Manchu character had its female counterparts. Films depicted Chinese women either as victims, fragile China dolls, compliant and sexually available to white men, or villainesses, dragon ladies, cunning and dangerous seductresses. Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American—indeed, the first Asian American—movie star, built her entire career on such roles, playing a series of stock, one-dimensional characters, such as the evil daughter of Fu Manchu.
By the 1930s, during the heyday of Chinatown tourism, cinema had matured into America’s most popular form of entertainment. The introduction of sound led to Hollywood’s golden age, when people entered cavernous theaters to forget, if only temporarily, their depression-era woes, to lose themselves in the glamour of the screen. The images of the Chinese they saw on the screen did not reflect reality, but instead the taboo sexual desires or hidden anxieties of white audiences about a people they did not fully understand. The demonization, or oversexualization, of Chinese characters in films was akin to the presentation by lazy novelists and filmmakers of Italian Americans as preponderantly Mafia henchmen, personae created to resonate with the criminal stereotypes widely accepted by the general public even though the overwhelming majority of Italian Americans were and are law-abiding citizens.
During the depression, white audiences embraced Charlie Chan, a character who combined the contradictory stereotypes of Chinese mystic and Chinese buffoon. Between 1925 and 1932, six Charlie Chan detective novels, written by Earl Derr Biggers, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in serial form and spawned forty-eight films. Chan was a brilliant, rotund Chinese detective who, while not evil, exuded, like Fu Manchu, an aura of Oriental inscrutability. As played by Caucasian actors, most famously Swedish-born Warner Oland, he had a face resembling an ancient Chinese mask, with half-closed eyes and a cryptic smile. He personified the wise old Confucian sage, dropping proverbs faster than his antagonists could drop clues. Yet his demeanor lent itself, inevitably, to ridicule. His words of wisdom sounded like fortune cookie messages, and his personality could be reduced to Chinese menu offerings: a white police sergeant in Charlie Chan at the Opera (1937) refers to Chan as “egg foo yung” and tells him, “You’re all right. Just like chop suey. A mystery, but a swell dish.”
Because the best dramatic roles went to whites, it was difficult for Chinese American actors to depict their people as genuine human beings. The whites’ practice of adopting yellowface in Hollywood not only robbed ethnic performers of starring roles but also promoted Chinese caricatures. Smothered in heavy makeup and wearing prosthetic masks, many white actors—including top stars such as John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn—had no qualms about slanting their eyes and speaking with a fake accent. While some were delighted to assume exotic personae to expand their artistic range, it was often forgotten that Chinese American actors were being deprived of similar opportunities, and not just because no one would have seriously entertained the notion of a Chinese actor’s donning whiteface to play a Caucasian.
At the pinnacle of her career, Anna May Wong failed to land the starring role of O’Lan in The Good Earth, a movie based on the novel by Pearl Buck, and one of few films that depicted China favorably to American audiences. The role went to Luise Rainer, who won an Oscar for her performance. When the studio offered Wong the part of Lotus, the wicked concubine, she protested: “You’re asking me—with my Chinese blood—to do the only unsympathetic role in the picture, featuring an all-American cast portraying Chinese characters.” Heartbroken by the snub, the Los Angeles-born Wong left Hollywood in 1936 to visit China, only to be criticized in her ancestral homeland. “Because I had been the villainess so often in pictures, it was thought that I had not been true to my people,” she later told a reporter. “It took four hours one afternoon to convince the Chinese government this was not so. I couldn’t give up my career, because I feel it is really drawing China nearer and making it better understood and liked.”
If even Wong could not gain a major role in a film about China, then other Chinese actors faced even slimmer prospects. Only a few worked in the film industry, most of them as extras who rarely had speaking roles. The majority of them did little more than provide exotic background for films set in Asia. The work was sporadic; months, even years, could elapse between calls for jobs. Whenever a major film with a Chinese story line went before the cameras, some Chinese extras dared not venture far from the phone for fear of losing a rare chance at work.
A few enterprising individuals realized that they could make far more money in Hollywood as agents than as actors. As in other industries, entrepreneurial Chinese Americans assumed middleman roles in Hollywood, matching white capital with Chinese labor. Actress Bessie Loo started her own talent agency in Los Angeles. Tom Gubbins, the Eurasian owner of the Asiatic Costume Company, earned money both from the Chinese actors and the studios. As an agent, he placed extras in movies like The Good Earth (1937) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), charging the standard 10 percent commission on the actors’ pay. He also made a fortune from the studios by renting out rickshaws, costumes, and props. And because he spoke both Cantonese and English fluently (he was born in Shanghai and reared in Hong Kong), Gubbins earned a third income as an interpreter, translating the director’s instructions for the extras.
As these middlemen helped Hollywood package images of the Chinese for mass consumption, fiction replaced reality even for some Chinese Americans. A movie set was “the closest we would ever get to China,” journalist Louise Leung observed in an article for the Los Angeles TimesSunday magazine in 1936. She described a typical day for a Chinese American extra, when “youngsters, Hollywood-stylish in gaucho shirts and berets, stood alongside Chinatown grandfathers who had never become reconciled to American shores.” The extras walked through a replica of a south Chinese village: “The mingled odor of dried ducks, incense, preserved ginger, scented rolls of silk gave the marketplace a most authentic Chinese aura, the smell of Chinatown, the smell of China. The native Chinese looked at it all with a yearning nostalgia; even the young one with the movie eyelashes murmured, ‘Gosh, this must be just like China.’ ”
To many American-born Chinese, the nation of China represented an ideal, a utopian world in which they would be fully accepted. According to Victor Wong, who spent his childhood in San Francisco Chinatown during the 1930s, “the older people, they were always talking about going back home. All the time. ‘When we go back to China we’ll have this and we’ll have that; there won’t be any more discrimination.’ ”
Even before the depression, some Chinese immigrant parents had encouraged their American-born children to straddle both countries: to obtain their education in the United States but build their careers in China. This was the message that Sam Chang, a southern California farm pioneer, passed down to his son in 1925. In the course of urging his brother—who held a medical degree from Georgetown University and a position at Beijing Union Hospital and was contemplating a return to the States—to stay in China, Chang wrote to his son, “If your uncle comes back to America, he might make a little money, but his reputation and social rank will be low; and his knowledge will be wasted. He will never become a respected man as America is the most racist society and very prejudiced against the Yellow race of people.”
The Great Depression seemed to ratify those words. In the 1930s, the Oriental Division of the United States Employment Service in San Francisco reported that more than 90 percent of their placements were in the service sector, mainly the food industry. Some Chinese engineers and scientists were demoralized at finding themselves back in Chinatown working at menial jobs in laundries and restaurants. “Father used to tell me, ‘Look at your boss,’ ” said James Low, an American-born Chinese, whose boss had been educated as a mining engineer, but ended up in a garment factory. “‘He was going to be an engineer, look what happened to him!’ ” One Chinese graduate of MIT became a waiter. Residents of Little Canton, a Chinese enclave in Cherrywood, California, remembered that several Chinese Americans with engineering degrees had no choice but to work in restaurants. “Oh, you couldn’t get a job outside of the Chinese community because, you know, look [at] your face,” one elderly bachelor said. “You’re Chinese, you’re not American. So what if you’ve got ten degrees?”
Perhaps China, then, was the better option for them. In 1933, the respected San Francisco Chinese-language newspaper Chung Sai Yat Po openly urged young Chinese Americans to seek employment in their ancestral homeland, where they would be less likely to encounter racism. The bleak job prospects during the Great Depression made it easier for some youths to vow allegiance to a motherland they had never seen. Rodney Chow remembered his Chinese American friends dreaming about going “back” to China, even though some had difficulty speaking the language and had never visited the country. In 1935, 75 percent of the attendees at the Chinese Young People’s Summer Conference in Lake Tahoe announced that they wanted to serve China, many professing that it was their duty.
In 1936, the conflict over identity and loyalty was intensified in a national essay contest with the theme “Does My Future Lie in China or America?” The competition, sponsored by the Ging Hawk Club in New York, an organization founded by the International Institute of the YMCA, provoked a lively debate among second-generation Chinese Americans, and the Chinese Digest published the finalists’ essays.
The winner was Robert Dunn, a student at Harvard. Dunn viewed himself as a human bridge between two cultures. He could achieve more in the United States, he wrote, by fostering understanding, goodwill, and business partnerships between the two countries. But he also noted that “ever since I can remember, I have been taught by my parents, by my Chinese friends, and by my teacher in Chinese school, that I must be patriotic to China.” China had enjoyed a glorious four-thousand-year history and Robert owed his very existence to his Chinese ancestors, they told him, and he should recognize the humiliation endured by the Chinese in the United States. “Don’t you realize that the Chinese are mocked at, trodden upon, disrespected, and even spit upon?” he quoted his parents as telling him. “Haven’t you yourself been called degrading names? Have you no face, no sense of shame, no honor? How can you possibly think of staying in America to serve it?”
Yet Robert also felt that the United States was worth defending. “I owe much pride and gratitude to America for the principles of liberty and equality which it upholds, for the protection its government has given me, and for its schools and institutions in which I have participated. Without them, I certainly would not be what I am now. I am certainly as much indebted to America as I am to China.” Employment opportunities were scarce in China, he wrote, and as an American he would have a hard time adjusting to life there. His future, he concluded, belonged to America.
The second-place winner, Kaye Hong of the University of Washington, had no feelings of ambivalence. His duty, “built on the mound of shame,” lay in China. “The ridicule heaped upon the Chinese race has long fermented within my soul,” he wrote. He believed that jobs for ABCs were more plentiful in China, where they were needed to build a greater, stronger nation. His advice to himself and others, ironically paraphrasing Horace Greeley, was, “‘Go Further West, Young Man.’ Yes, across the Pacific and to China.”26
A number of them did. In the 1930s, an estimated one in five ABCs migrated to work in China. Most were sojourners, living in their ancestral homeland for a few years and then returning to the United States. Those with professional training found employment as engineers,scientists, doctors, professors, businessmen, social workers, and government bureaucrats. Foreign branches of American corporations, U.S. government agencies, educational institutions, and religious organizations like the YMCA needed the skills of college-educated Chinese Americans—preferably bilingual Chinese Americans, though individuals lacking fluency in Mandarin could still teach English. The Chinese Ministry of Industry sought engineers with experience in iron and steel, the Shanghai Aviation Association recruited pilots, and the Chinese government even invited ethnic Chinese farmers from the United States to migrate, promising them money, machinery, and property. Like the relatives of the first-wave immigrants, second-generation Chinese American expatriates (or true patriots, as some might define them) enjoyed a better standard of living than the typical Chinese native: many lived in prestigious residential areas populated almost entirely by other Chinese Americans, and hired teams of servants.
Interestingly enough, some fought fiercely to retain American customs in China, just as their parents had stubbornly retained Chinese customs in the United States. For instance, in 1932 Flora Belle Jan, the wife of a University of Chicago graduate, moved to Beijing when her husband accepted a position as a college professor there. Even though Jan, an ABC writer from Fresno, California, had always dreamt of living in her ancestral homeland, she could not establish an emotional bond with the natives because of her inability to read and write the language. She took a job at the U.S. Office of War Information in Beijing and befriended mainly English-speaking businessmen, diplomats, and students. She insisted that her Chinese-born children watch American films, wear Western clothes, and eat American food.
No matter what their personal feelings toward China, many American-born Chinese were forced to return to the United States for their own protection. For just when America was pulling itself out of the Great Depression, Nationalist China was facing a crisis so monumental it threatened to eclipse everything that had preceded it.