CHAPTER THIRTEEN
While the United States struggled in the 1930s to get through the depression, China faced a crisis the rest of the world would not face for the better part of a decade—the beginnings of war. By 1931, the Japanese had already seized Manchuria. There were further skirmishes in various places, including Shanghai, all marked by the brutality of the Japanese military against soldiers and civilians alike. Because the Chinese central government was weak and had failed to modernize its military, the Japanese were able to act with impunity. In the long term, their expulsion from China would require more than the efforts of the Nationalist government. It would require Japan’s defeat by the West.
Alas, the first, and only, response to these incursions, which were clear violations of international law and were executed with total disregard for the loss of civilian life, came from the League of Nations, which censured Japan as an aggressor nation. Japan rejected the opprobrium and withdrew from the League, undermining that body’s credibility just at a time when it needed it most; within a few years, Italy and Germany would pose bold new challenges to the weakened League’s ability to act as a peacekeeper. So would Japan, which in 1935 moved into a region of China now known as Inner Mongolia.
Two years later, in July 1937, Japan’s previous sporadic, but never haphazard, military thrusts into China reached the level of a full-scale invasion. The escalation began with a trivial incident—the mysterious disappearance of a Japanese soldier after military exercises at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing. A Japanese commander, claiming that the soldier had been abducted by the Chinese, led an assault on a nearby junction town. Hostilities continued even after the soldier reappeared on his own, clearly unmolested and unhurt; within a month the Japanese controlled the entire Beijing region.
The Japanese imperial government expanded operations by dispatching troops to northern and central China, as well as to the coastal city of Shanghai, China’s largest metropolis. Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist government, invested his best forces in the defense of Shanghai, but they were no match for Japan’s better trained and better equipped military. The Nationalist army suffered some 250,000 casualties in a vain attempt to save the city. Before the end of the year, Japanese forces had also conquered Nanjing (Nanking), the capital of the Republic of China. In one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, a bloodbath that came to be known as the Rape of Nanking, the Japanese imperial army raped and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians, presaging a war that would last eight years and claim the lives of as many as 35 million Chinese.
Especially hard hit was the Toishan region, the point of origin for most of the Chinese immigrants in America. When the Japanese seized the region’s crops to feed their own troops, many locals simply starved to death. Further, the Japanese capture of the port city of Hong Kong in 1941 closed off a major hub of communication between China and the United States. For generations, Hong Kong had served as the headquarters for major emigration firms, which safely and reliably delivered money from Chinese American men to their Toishanese families. The fall of Hong Kong ended this inflow of overseas money, turning the lives of many Gold Mountain families upside down almost overnight. Having settled in as members of the local leisure class, they were particularly vulnerable because they no longer had the skills required to provide for themselves and their families. To buy food, some pawned first their jewelry and furniture, then their homes, and finally themselves. In the most desperate cases, Gold Mountain wives entered into prostitution and sold their own children into slavery. Before the war’s end in 1945, at least 150,000 Tolshanese—about one in four—had either died or disappeared.
Galvanized by the plight of their families, and horrified by reports of Japanese atrocities, Chinese Americans rallied to promote public awareness of the Sino-Japanese War. Most Chinese immigrants had not been formally educated in the United States and were not fluent in English, but they did their best, however imperfectly, to make Americans aware of the situation in the Far East. The publicity campaign was waged both within and beyond the Chinese community. In general, the recent émigrés used Chinese newspapers, radio programs, and street demonstrations to disseminate within the Chinese communities news of the dire plight of China, while the American-educated Chinese used the English-language press and the lecture circuit to reach a broader segment of Americans. In New York City, the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance distributed thousands of English-language flyers through their laundry shops, asking Americans to boycott Japanese goods.
The Chinese Americans not only talked, they acted. One practical contribution they could offer China was skilled manpower in aviation. During the early stages of the Pacific war, China’s air force was so primitive that it posed virtually no threat to Japan’s. At one point Nationalist China possessed fewer than ninety planes in safe working condition, compared to more than two thousand in the Japanese military. But in the United States, as early as the 1920s, Chinese Americans had founded a number of private aviation schools or clubs to train young pilots to defend their ancestral homeland should the need ever arise, which flourished in cities with large ethnic Chinese populations such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, Portland, and Pittsburgh.27 Some of the graduates became war heroes in the United States military, like P-39 pilot Stanley Lau, who flew more than fifty missions over Europe, shot down seven Messerschmitts, and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. Others enlisted in the Chinese military, like Clifford Louie, who rose to the position of general in the Kuomintang air force.
Chinese Americans also organized to try to prevent the sale to Japan of American scrap metal, which was being turned into munitions used to kill Chinese. In January 1938, thirty-nine Chinese sailors in San Francisco refused to ship a cargo of scrap steel to Japan and were promptly dismissed from their jobs. Within months, Chinese American demonstrations broke out in New York and along the West Coast, effectively halting the shipment of raw war materials to Japan. One of the largest protests began in San Francisco in December 1938. When Japan’s Mitsui Company leased the SS Spyros, a Greek freighter docked in the city, to transport steel to Japan, Chinese American groups and their allies threw up a picket line on the docks. A crowd of two hundred Chinese volunteers and three hundred Greeks, Jews, and other Caucasians demonstrated in front of the Spyros. Soon they were joined by more Chinese Americans, who had flocked in from nearby cities, until the picket line comprised eight thousand people. Drenched by rain, they made a pitiful spectacle: the red ink trickled from their posters, and their faces, in the words of one reporter, looked as if they were “spattered with blood and tears.”
But pitiful sight or not, their demonstration won over the dock workers. Members of both the International Longshoremen (ILU) and the Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) passed resolutions of support, stating that they were “100 percent opposed to passing the picket line.” Loading stopped for five days, and through negotiations between the union and the Chinese American leaders it was decided that the picketing would end if the ILWU hosted a conference to promote an embargo on all war matériel to Japan. In a rare moment of solidarity, organized labor actually joined forces with the Chinese War Relief Association, the American Friends of China, and the Church Federation to initiate a national embargo. Their efforts and those of others paid off when in early 1941 Congress authorized President Franklin D. Roosevelt to halt the sale of arms and certain raw materials outside the western hemisphere (except to Britain), angering the Japanese.
Simultaneous with the embargo drive were efforts to raise money and supplies for the Nationalists. Starting in 1938, San Francisco Chinatown organized “Rice Bowl” parties—massive street spectacles that drew hundreds of thousands of people. Cities with large Chinese populations, such as New York and Los Angeles, also hosted their versions of these parties. Like Mardi Gras celebrations, they were boisterous, noisy affairs, lavish in scale and lasting for days. Through confetti-filled streets, the Chinese orchestrated dragon dances, floats, fireworks, re-creations of “Old Chinatown,” mock air raids, and sales of “humanity” buttons. Bystanders would pour money into rice bowls to support the Chinese war effort, or toss coins and dollar bills into a giant flag of the Chinese republic that was proudly paraded through the streets by Chinese women.
Fund-raising for the Pacific war united all levels of Chinese American society. Immigrants and American-born Chinese alike solicited money door to door and sold war bonds. Chinese physicians helped organize a blood bank in New York as well as the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, to assist sick and wounded victims of the Japanese invasion. Chinese volunteers served the Red Cross, preparing shipments to China of bandages, drugs, and vaccines. Middle-class women hosted bazaars, dances, and fashion shows for the cause, combining their social lives with social activism. Laundrymen placed relief-fund boxes on their counters and used the money collected to donate ambulances, cotton-padded clothing, and medicine to the Chinese military. In their scarce free time, garment workers sewed thousands of winter garments for wounded Nationalist soldiers. Even teenagers and young children pitched in, collecting tin cans, foil, and other scrap metal for the Nationalists.
In the end, some twenty cities collected about $20 million for the Chinese War Relief Association, and during the eight years of Japanese occupation, the Chinese American community donated a total of $25 million. These sums were not remarkable for their absolute dollar amount, but certainly so for the amount per individual. The ethnic Chinese community in the continental United States was minuscule during the Pacific war: about 75,000 at the start of the 1930s, a number that increased by only a few thousand as the decade progressed. The fund-raising efforts drew about $300 for every Chinese in the country, a substantial figure, particularly given the value of the dollar in the 1930s and the constricted budgets of most Chinatown residents, many of whom earned only five or six dollars a week; some gave almost every cent of their life savings to the cause.
However noble the intent, the effect of these fund-raising efforts on the outcome of the Sino-Japanese War is uncertain. Although some of the money bought clothes, gas masks, mosquito nets, and airplanes for the Nationalists, no one can determine if the funds collected, or provisions purchased with them, actually reached the Chinese soldiers. It is now clear that the Nationalist army was hardly a model of virtue or efficiency; during the war Chinese peasants were routinely kidnapped and conscripted into the army, given starvation-level food rations, and brutalized by their superiors. Montgomery Horn, the filmmaker of We Served with Pride, a documentary about Chinese American contributions to World War II, has expressed the belief that most of the money intended for the soldiers ended up in the pockets of corrupt Nationalist officials.
The heartfelt efforts did, however, give rise to a sense of political unity among the Chinese in the United States. Ironically, these fund-raisers drew on and in turn reinforced dormant feelings of loyalty to China during an era when ever-diminishing numbers of Chinese Americans had personal connections to their ancestral homeland. In 1940, for the first time, the percentage of U.S.-born Chinese Americans surpassed that of foreign-born immigrant Chinese. Thus, a majority of the Chinese in America had grown up in America, and most had never been to China. This left them with very little sense of personal identification with China, except through their parents. The war brought the entire community back together at just the time when a drift toward assimilation was gaining momentum.
By 1940, Japan had occupied nearly all of China’s major cities, and the retreating Chiang Kai-shek was forced to establish a wartime capital in Chongqing, in Sichuan province deep in the interior of China, but still subject to relentless Japanese air raids. With the coast firmly under Japanese control, the only route Chiang had available to obtain military supplies from the outside world was the Burma Road, a single treacherous ribbon of dirt highway twisting through the mountains between west China and Burma. Despite China’s precarious condition, the country itself and its vast territories seemed unconquerable. Japan found itself mired in Chinese guerrilla warfare, overwhelmed by the nation’s size and enormous population.
Although foreign correspondents sent back grisly reports for U.S. newspapers, and short newsreels about the Japanese invasion were shown in theaters, the war in China meant little to most Americans. The United States, with its predominately European-descended population, focused much more attention on the war in Europe, where one country after another was falling to the Nazi blitzkrieg. But so strong were the isolationist sentiments among Americans that even the rise of Hitler—and reports of atrocities by refugees who had seen firsthand the horrors committed by Third Reich—could not induce the country to enter another world war. Far-sighted American leaders made the case that if the United States did not enter the fray quickly it might well be too late to save itself. Even this dire warning could not engender support for action. Noninterventionist feelings remained so high that President Franklin Roosevelt made neutrality an important part of his 1940 reelection campaign. Addressing the mothers and fathers of America, he promised, “I have said this before and I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
On December 7, 1941, Japan solved the quandary for America’s leaders, by launching a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Earlier that year, Roosevelt had already ordered an embargo on war supplies to Japan—an embargo made politically feasible in part by the Chinese American rallies on the shipping docks. The Japanese high command, fearful that their plan for Asian conquest would be thwarted, recommended to Emperor Hirohito a short-sighted and, in retrospect, suicidal response—an aerial attack on the American Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. At dawn on December 7, carrier-based Japanese planes bombed the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, sinking or badly damaging twenty-one naval vessels, destroying almost two hundred American aircraft on the ground, and killing or wounding approximately three thousand naval and military personnel.
From that moment forward, America no longer considered the Pacific war a remote Asian event. The next day, in his address before Congress, Roosevelt, referring to December 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy,” asked the legislature to declare that “since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December seventh, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.” Japan’s allies—Nazi Germany and Italy—quickly declared war on the United States, thrusting the formerly isolationist country into a titanic global struggle on both sides of the world.
Almost overnight, the attack on Pearl Harbor transformed the American image of China and Japan—and redistributed stereotypes for both Chinese and Japanese Americans. Suddenly the media began depicting the Chinese as loyal, decent allies, and the Japanese as a race of evil spies and saboteurs. After the attack, a Gallup poll found that Americans saw the Chinese as “hardworking, honest, brave, religious, intelligent, and practical” and the Japanese as “treacherous, sly, cruel, and warlike”—each almost a perfect fit with one or the other of two popular stereotypes formerly promoted by Hollywood, in characters like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu. The unspoken question for many Americans was how to tell the good guys from the bad guys. On December 22, 1941, Time, the premier newsweekly in the United States at the time, published an article entitled “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs.” According to Time:
Virtually all Japanese are short ... Japanese are likely to be stockier and broader-hipped than short Chinese. Japanese—except for wrestlers—are seldom fat; they often dry up and grow lean as they age. The Chinese often put on weight, particularly if they are prosperous (in China, with its frequent famines, being fat is esteemed as a sign of being a solid citizen). Chinese, not as hairy as Japanese, seldom grow an impressive mustache. Most Chinese avoid horn-rimmed spectacles. Although both have the typical epicanthic fold of the upper eyelid (which makes them look almond-eyed), Japanese eyes are usually set closer together. Those who know them best often rely on facial expression to tell them apart: the Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant.... Japanese are hesitant, nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time. Japanese walk stiffly erect, hard heeled. Chinese, more relaxed, have an easy gait, sometimes shuffle.
Time conceded, however, that there is “no infallible way of telling them apart, because the same racial strains are mixed in both. Even an anthropologist, with calipers and plenty of time to measure heads, noses, shoulders, hips, is sometimes stumped.” The magazine noted that its Washington correspondent, Joseph Chiang, “made things much easier by pinning on his lapel a large badge reading ‘Chinese Reporter—NOT Japanese—Please.’ ”
Pearl Harbor brought devastating consequences for the Japanese American community, even though as a group they had played no role in the attack. The U.S. Department of Justice rounded up a hundred thousand Japanese Americans along the Pacific coast and in Hawaii and interned them at remote concentration camps (in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and elsewhere), even though many were loyal American citizens who had lived in the United States for generations. Rodney Chow, who spent his boyhood in Los Angeles, remembers how Pearl Harbor changed the dynamics of playground politics in his neighborhood. A few Japanese American children, he recalled, used jujitsu to torment Chinese kids on the block. After December 7, these bullies were suddenly trying to convince their schoolmates that they were Chinese American, not Japanese. Then the Chinese in the neighborhood started to wear badges to distinguish themselves from the Japanese. Before long, the Japanese children disappeared altogether, and Chow did not see them again until the war was over, when they returned from the relocation camps.
A few progressive Chinese Americans, like the activist Hung Wai Ching in Hawaii, spoke out on behalf of Japanese American rights. But Hawaii had a fairly long tradition of Asian American activism, as well as better integrated Chinese and Japanese communities.28 In the continental United States, however, the majority of Chinese Americans kept silent about the civil rights abuses against other Asian Americans while accepting the temporary, short-term gains they might enjoy as a preferred minority. Terrified of being mistaken for Japanese, some Chinese Americans even carried identification cards signed by a Chinese consul general, wore buttons announcing “I am Chinese,” and placed similar signs in their shop windows to warn off potential vigilantes.
But ethnic profiling would hurt the entire Asian American community. Inevitably, some whites refused to distinguish between foreign Japanese nationals serving Japan’s imperialist designs and Americans of Japanese and Chinese ancestry; it was easier to lump all Asians into a single despised group, “the Japs.” Yu-shan Han became the target of anti-Japanese xenophobia when he was renting a house in Beverly Hills, California, during the war. Believing that Han was Japanese, the neighbors repeatedly reported him to the police, insisting that he was using a secret radio transmitter to communicate with enemy agents. Even Chinese Americans in the military were not immune to racist attacks. One Chinese American woman enlistee recalled how a white man spun her around in the middle of a street in Baltimore screaming, “You damn Jap, get out of that uniform!”
Some Chinese Americans saw a silver lining in this shift of racial antipathy and used the newly favorable Chinese image to bring about the repeal of the exclusion laws. After Pearl Harbor, several influential Americans, both ethnic Chinese and Caucasian, lobbied to overturn the ban on Chinese immigration that had been enacted back in 1882. In May 1942, more than 180 Caucasians founded the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, arguing that the United States should end exclusion for both moral and practical, war-related reasons.29 The movement’s leading activists included Ng Poon Chew, editor of Chung Sai Yat Po, Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Good Earth and daughter of Christian missionaries in China, and Buck’s second husband, Richard Walsh, a New York publisher. But the woman who dealt exclusion the strongest blow was Meiling Soong, the wife of the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek.
Madame Chiang Kai-shek grew up in one of China’s most powerful families. Her father, Charlie Soong, was a Shanghai mogul who earned his first fortune printing Bibles for Western missionaries. A former preacher who spent part of his youth in Boston and North Carolina, Soong used his Christian contacts to send his own children to the United States for their education. Meiling Soong first studied in Macon, Georgia, where she learned to speak fluent English with a slight southern drawl, then in 1913 enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in English literature. Upon her return to China, she and her American-educated siblings forged a dynasty within the new Nationalist regime. One sister, Chingling, married Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Chinese republic; another sister, Ailing, wed the wealthy industrialist H. H. Kung; her Harvard-educated brother, T. V. Soong, helped Chiang Kai-shek finance his Northern Expedition to defeat the Chinese warlords, and was awarded the position of minister of finance in Chiang’s government.
After America’s entry into the war, President Roosevelt invited Meiling Soong to visit the United States. In November 1942, she arrived to rally support against Japan’s campaign of aggression. The following spring, she embarked on a one-month cross-country tour, visiting New York, Wellesley, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The tour was a triumph. The articulate Soong attracted tens of thousands of supporters, captivating American audiences with her beauty, charisma, and elegance. The darling of the American media, her image graced every major magazine and newspaper. One of her most ardent fans was Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life. The son of missionaries, Luce was delighted that the first family of China was Christian. He put Chiang Kai-shek and his wife on the cover of Time and called Chiang “the greatest man in the Far East.”
Madame Chiang Kai-shek became the first Chinese woman and second woman ever invited to address a joint session of Congress, and she earned a standing ovation. One congressman was later heard to mutter, “Goddamnit, I never saw anything like it; Madame Chiang had me on the verge of tears.” After her tour, Senator Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.) introduced a bill repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act. Enjoying wide support and passed on December 17, 1943, the bill abolished exclusion, provided for an annual quota of 105 Chinese immigrants, and gave Chinese who had entered the country lawfully the right to naturalization. While the quota was extremely low, especially compared to admission rates for many European countries, the Magnuson Act was a landmark in Chinese American history: for the first time in six decades, foreign-born Chinese could become American citizens.
“To men of our generation, World War II was the most important historical event of our times,” journalist Charlie Leong noted. “For the first time, we felt we could make it in American society.” The war, he wrote, took them out of Chinatown ghettos, put them into American uniforms, and sent them overseas, where they became “part of the great patriotic United States war machine out to do battle with the enemy.”
This was a theme heard frequently among Chinese Americans. The war, in which China and the United States had a common enemy, allowed them to contribute simultaneously to the survival of China and to victory for the United States. Some worked for the government as interpreters, code-breakers, and intelligence analysts. One notable example was Colonel Won-Loy Chan, a 1936 Stanford graduate who attended the Military Intelligence Service Language School after Pearl Harbor. As part of the U.S. Army’s G2 intelligence and a member of General Joseph Stillwell’s staff, Chan served in the China-Burma-India theater and later headed the Pacific Military Intelligence Research Section (PACMIRS) in Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Under his direction, a team of translators, some of them Chinese American, gathered and disseminated captured documents from the Pacific battlefront.
Chinese Americans also went to the front lines. Today, anyone envisioning men parading in World War II American military uniforms would see no Chinese faces, yet during the war, ethnic Chinese men gave their lives in numbers disproportionate to their presence in the country. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese served in the military, representing about 20 percent of the Chinese population in the continental United States; the comparable figure for the general population was 8.6 percent. Almost 40 percent of the Chinese population in New York City was drafted, the highest rate among any of the city’s ethnic groups. One reason for this high percentage, of course, was that most Chinese in the United States were male, single, and without dependents, the legacy of the Chinese exclusion laws, and the majority of the Chinese in New York were Chinese men living a bachelor existence in Chinatown. Nonetheless, it seems clear that if 40 percent were inducted, few tried to evade the draft when called. “New York’s Chinatown cheered itself hoarse when the first draft numbers drawn were for Chinese Americans,” the sociologist Rose Hum Lee wrote. “Some below-age boys tried to pass on their ‘Chinese age,’ which is often a year or two older than the American count. Since their birth certificates told a different tale, they had to be patient and wait.”
Many joined the military voluntarily, even eagerly. “I remember Sunday, December 7th, vividly,” wrote Dr. Richard Lee, the son of Clarence Lee, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.30 “We were raking leaves at our home in West Islip and my father upon hearing the news became very upset. I was terrified! He tried to enlist the next day but was told he was too old. He kept pestering the military selection process and was finally accepted into Army officer training despite his flat feet, poor vision and age.” Clarence Lee would become the assistant chief of staff of the Army Air Force Bomber Training Command and retire in 1947 as a full colonel.
Some Chinese were enticed by government promises of U.S. citizenship in exchange for their service; others who were already citi-zensby being born on American soil signed up to eliminate doubts about their loyalty to the land of their birth. But many, perhaps most, enlisted for no other reason than patriotism. Sociologist Lee reported that all single Chinese American males of draft age in Butte, Montana, volunteered for service before they were called up. Chinese American David Gan spoke for countless others when he recalled, “I had never felt so happy and proud that I was an American, ready to fight for my country even if it meant that I must give up my life.”
The Chinese in the U.S. military occupied a unique position, a “gray” area, as some would describe it, in which they were neither fully accepted, nor persecuted as outcasts. Unlike African Americans and Japanese Americans, whom all branches of the military segregated from whites, the Chinese were partially integrated into the U.S. armed services. Their experience reflected their ambiguous status in American society, and their treatment varied from region to region as they were sent throughout the country for training. In the Midwest, new Chinese American soldiers met people who had never seen an Asian before, and who asked if they were part of the Chinese army. Some recalled that in the South local whites eyed them suspiciously but accorded them more freedom than blacks, such as permission to sit wherever they wanted on buses.
For most young men in the military, World War II would be the first time in their lives they would be thrown together in close quarters with strangers from other parts of the country. Some had never before befriended men of a different race, much less slept and showered next to them. Although the new Chinese American troops wore their uniforms with pride, these uniforms did not always shield them from outright hostility. One Chinese American was labeled a “goddamn Chink” and assigned the dirty work in his unit; another had all his possessions thrown out the window by a GI who refused to sleep in the same room. “I was told that ‘no Chinaman will ever fly in my outfit,’ ” William Der Bing recalled of his experience with the U.S. Navy. “I was told that by a doctor—a navy doctor. He gave me a physical. He said, ‘I want you to know that I would do anything I can to fail you in your physical.’ I looked at him and said, ‘If you do, it would be the most dishonest thing that an officer in this United States Navy could ever do to another member of the United States Navy.’ ” True to his word, the navy doctor flunked him, but Bing managed to schedule another physical with another doctor, and passed.
Despite overt racism, for many the benefits of military service far outweighed the disadvantages. It empowered Chinese Americans, giving them a sophistication and worldly knowledge they never could have achieved in the insular world of America’s Chinatowns. Their daily contact with white men made whites less threatening and mysterious. When Paul S. Wong taught an English-language class to illiterate white recruits, the myth of white superiority was forever demolished for him. “I was so damn surprised when they could not write their name [or] even add,” he said.
The military also gave Chinese Americans the opportunity to be heroes. One such was Gordon P. Chung-Hoon, a Honolulu-born ABC and 1934 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. In the spring of 1945, Chung-Hoon served as commanding officer of the USS Sigsbee, which helped destroy twenty Japanese planes near the island of Kyushu. When a kamikaze pilot smashed into the Sigsbee, throwing the port engine and steering control out of commission, Chung-Hoon skillfully handled two crises simultaneously: he directed anti-aircraft battery fire against the enemy while overseeing damage control to allow the Sigsbee to reach port safely. He won the Navy Cross and Silver Star for conspicuous gallantry and extraordinary heroism, and in 2001 the Navy honored Rear Admiral Chung-Hoon posthumously by naming a guided missile destroyer after him.
Maybe most important, service in the U.S. military forced Chinese Americans to question their identity and every value taught them by their parents since childhood. For many ABCs, the war was the defining moment of their lives, the pivotal years that changed them, psychologically, from “Chinese” to “Americans of Chinese descent.”
One military unit in China—the all-Chinese American 14th Air Service Group (part of the “Flying Tigers”), which had approximately 1,300 members—vividly illustrates this transformation. When Lawrence Chen was a boy, his parents told him, “China is your home.” But after Chen joined the U.S. Army Air Force and entered the Pacific theater, China became more than a glorified abstract concept to be discussed over the dinner table; it was a daily reality. It soon became clear to Chen and other ABCs in the U.S. military that China was not, and never could be, “home.” Their experience destroyed all their romantic illusions about China. They were shocked by the levels of KMT corruption—by the sight of Nationalist soldiers marching in straw sandals (or sometimes barefoot), of peasants being dragged out of their homes and forcibly impressed into the military. Their lives had been threatened not only by the Japanese but by hostile Nationalist troops. (One ABC, John Chuck, was accosted at gunpoint by a Nationalist guard demanding money, until others convinced him that Chuck was American.) They were disturbed by the level of poverty in some regions of China—the lack of flushable toilets, showers, or indoor running water, the construction of pebble roads by brute manpower, the throngs of starving refugees fleeing the Japanese invasion and ignored by Nationalist officials. China, in the words of these young ABCs, was “behind time—like cavemen,” “primitive,” and “scary.” Wing Lai of the 555th Air Service Squadron described the people in China as “so poor. These beggars there—boy you feel sorry for them. You just had to give them something to eat, but how much can you feed so many people?”
These cultural barriers precluded true friendship between the ABCs and the native Chinese they met during their service overseas. Members of the 14th Air Service Group felt that the local villagers profoundly distrusted them, even though many ABCs could speak the local dialect fluently. Some natives called the Chinese American soldiers yang guizi (“foreign devils”). Others feigned friendship in an effort to use Chinese American soldiers as potential sponsors for emigration to the United States.
What the war did for the 14th Air Service Group was to forge a new Chinese American identity among its members. Not that there was a cookie-cutter similarity among them. They represented a cross-section of the ethnic Chinese population in the United States in terms of age, geography, and cultural background: the members ranged from teenagers to middle-aged men, from a guitar-playing Montana cowboy to college graduates from New York and San Francisco. Some spoke mainly Chinese; some did not understand Chinese; some were fluent in both languages. But their shared wartime experiences helped dissolve regional differences and create a new national Chinese American consciousness.
After the rollback of Japanese control of the eastern coastal area of China, Harry Lim and a few other Chinese American soldiers had an unsettling experience while walking along the Bund in Shanghai, one that reminded them of their own precarious status in the United States, and the fact that some white Americans would never accept them as equals. Coming upon a group of Japanese prisoners of war sweeping the road, the first time they had seen enemy soldiers up close, they suddenly realized that these prisoners looked just like them. “Except for the uniforms, those boys could have been us,” Lim observed. “They were even about the same age. I was shocked. Incidents like these really made you think about the double standards in America and had you wondering how you would be treated when you went home.”
The Chinese had suffered severe racism and a tight job market during the depression, but the war now gave them a better public image, as well as a booming American wartime economy that needed all the help it could get. As fighter planes rolled off assembly lines, as factories sought to fill the insatiable demand for new technology and new weapons, the Chinese easily found work in arenas previously closed to them. With so much work to be done, and with hundreds of thousands of young white men away in the armed services, the United States found itself facing what may well have been its greatest labor shortage in history. In 1944, California, home to an exploding defense industry, repealed a nineteenth-century law that forbade the state or public corporations from employing any Chinese.
The result was an era almost boundless in opportunity. Many educated Chinese landed positions as engineers, scientists, and technicians in the burgeoning high-tech industry. In the lower-echelon labor market, Chinese broke away from menial jobs to enter the industrial sector. Thousands of waiters and laundrymen found employment in shipyards and aircraft factories offering union wages and benefits. During this exodus from Chinatowns, as workers found more lucrative positions, small, family-run businesses suffered desperately from lack of manpower. During the war, Chinese restaurants operated with fewer waiters, while cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia borrowed help from larger Chinatowns in Chicago and New York.
Job opportunities multiplied for women as well. Many left Chinatown to secure new positions as secretaries, clerks, and assistants for government contractors. The U.S. government also recruited second-generation ethnic Chinese women to work for the Army Air Force as Air WACs (Women’s Army Corps), whose duties included air traffic control and photograph interpretation. (In deference to the high esteem in which the first lady of China was held, these women in the Army Air Force were often referred to as the “Madame Chiang Kai-shek Air WACs. ”) Another valuable source of employment came from the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, which trained Chinese American women to become powerful leaders in the military. Helen Pon Onyett, who nursed wounded soldiers in the North African campaign, earned the Legion of Merit and other major citations during her thirty-five-year army career. She would later retire as a full colonel, one of the few American women ever to do so.
In August 1945, the war finally came to a close when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender. After four years of combat in the Pacific, thousands of battle-scarred veterans returned home, anxious to put the war behind them, eager to start new lives and new families. The resulting baby boom comprised not only white births, but Chinese American ones as well.
Before the war, many Chinese men could not find wives because of the terrible shortage of Chinese women. In 1924, an immigration act prevented American citizens of Chinese heritage from importing alien Chinese brides, and as a result, no Chinese immigrant woman—not one—gained admission for the next six years. Then in 1930, the U.S. government decided Chinese wives could enter as long as the marriage had occurred before May 26,1924, a specific time requirement that limited the number of women arrivals. During the next decade, only about sixty Chinese women a year joined their husbands in the United States, but more recent Chinese brides faced difficulty gaining admission.
After World War II, the U.S. government decided to overhaul this immigration policy to reward Chinese American veterans for their service. The 1945 War Brides Act permitted them to marry in China and bring their wives to the United States. Given the low number of ethnic Chinese women at home (the male-female ratio was three to one), many servicemen decided to wed foreign-born Chinese women. Before the act expired on December 30, 1949, almost six thousand Chinese American soldiers went to China and returned with brides. For many, there was no time for elaborate rituals or lengthy, romantic courtship. They faced not only the deadline of the act’s expiration date but also the time constraints of their own furloughs. One soldier on leave flew to China, picked a bride, married, and then landed at San Francisco airport the night before his month’s furlough expired. As a result of such hasty marriages, after the war about 80 percent of all new Chinese arrivals were female. In March 1948, the maternity ward of the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco recorded an average of two births a day. According to historian Him Mark Lai, so many pregnant women came into this hospital that many had to sleep in the hallways. In part because of these new arrivals and new births, during the 1940s the ethnic Chinese population in the United States soared from 77,000 to 117,000.
For thousands of Chinese American men and their wives, the end of World War II was a time of celebration—a time of new hope, new beginnings. But in China it would be a different story. The defeat of Japan would inaugurate a new era of bloodshed and tragedy. Few people could have foreseen that the horror of war—the eight agonizing years under Japanese occupation—would serve as only the prelude to more war, this time a civil war between the Nationalist government and rebel Communist forces.