CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The postwar period opened with the Chinese in America enjoying a greater level of acceptance by fellow Americans than they had ever experienced. China and the United States had fought together to defeat an empire that had attacked both nations, and their wartime amity continued into the early postwar period. This new American perception regarding the Chinese led to a whole new direction in government policy, very much easing the lives of Chinese Americans.
But over the next decade, certain international events strained the wartime alliance, and Chinese Americans soon found themselves facing renewed hostility from their fellow Americans. The precipitating events were the start of the cold war, the Chinese civil war, in which the Chinese Communist Party under Chairman Mao Zedong replaced General Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang as the ruling party of China, and the Korean War, in which the new People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States found themselves on opposite sides.
Of the three, the key event was the defeat of Chiang’s forces in the Chinese civil war. Neither the cold war nor the Korean War—which began when the UN attempted to help South Korea repel an invasion by North Korea, and ended as a conflict between the mighty armies of China and the United States—would have strained Chinese-American relations without the Communist victory in China, which put the two nations in opposing cold war camps.
The fall of China to the Communists shocked many Americans. Only a decade earlier, Chiang Kai-shek had the insurgent Communists on the run. In the early 1930s, Mao Zedong established a Communist government in remote Jiangxi province, called the Jiangxi Soviet, and Chiang launched a campaign that appeared to destroy the movement. In 1934 the Communists were forced to retreat northward in an epic journey that came to be known as the Long March. For five thousand agonizing miles, the Communists fled on foot to Shaanxi, fording rivers and crossing mountains in an ordeal that fewer than one in four survived. The Chinese Communist Party as a national institution was surely dead: this exhausted, half-starved group of guerrilla fighters could hardly pose a threat to the central government of China yet again.
But Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 resuscitated Mao’s group. First, it demonstrated conclusively the inability of the Nationalist government to protect the Chinese people against a foreign invader. Second, it gave the Communists an opportunity to win the loyalty of the peasants in north China. As the war exacerbated poverty in the countryside, the Communists won widespread support by embracing land reform and organizing rural forces to fight the enemy. When the Japanese military imposed its ruthless “three all” policy—“kill all, burn all, destroy all”—it bred deep hatred against the invaders and compelled many Chinese to join underground Communist guerrilla forces.
The first priority of Mao’s guerrilla force was to defeat the Japanese military, and in the early years of the war it waged a hit-and-run campaign of harassment against the Japanese.31 But it also adopted a longer view, working to organize the peasants. Communists held meetings, called “struggle sessions,” that resembled religious revivals in their fervor, in which peasants were encouraged to share with others their stories of exploitation by powerful landlords. These emotional, cathartic sessions inspired a cult following among the poor in rural areas, and by the time the Japanese were expelled from China in 1945 the Communists were not only firmly entrenched in the northern countryside, but had also matured as a political and military force, with a trained and dedicated cadre in place. It was now much better prepared to launch a serious challenge to the KMT.
At the February 1945 summit meeting at Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin seemed to give Chiang’s Nationalist government their imprimatur as the legitimate government of China. The Communist Soviet Union, the only one of the three powers in close proximity to China, expressed “its readiness to conclude with the National Government of China a pact of friendship and alliance between the U.S.S.R. and China in order to render assistance to China with its armed forces for the purpose of liberating China from the Japanese yoke.”
But in international diplomacy every syllable of every word is important, and the Western Allies failed to note or question the Soviet Union’s assertion that it was pledging its readiness for friendship and alliance not with the “Nationalist” government of China, but with the “National” government of China, a term that could be construed to describe whatever government exercised effective control over China.
As the Pacific war ground down through early 1945, and the ultimate defeat of Japan drew closer, the Chinese Communists mounted powerful attacks against the Japanese from their strongholds in northern China, liberating great expanses of Chinese territory and seizing immense stores of Japanese weapons. After the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, the situation turned further to the advantage of Mao’s forces when the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and advanced into Manchuria.
As the postwar political map of China was being drawn, both Mao and Chiang scrambled to expand the areas over which they had effective control. Mao’s forces moved quickly to accept the surrender of Japanese military units in the north and replace them as the governing group. Fearful of China establishing a second enormous Communist state, the U.S. tried to contain the area of Communist control by airlifting Chiang’s troops to key cities in northern China, where they could accept and claim credit for Japanese surrenders. The stage was now set for a showdown between the CCP under Mao and the KMT under Chiang.
In an attempt to avert civil war, the U.S. government tried to negotiate peace between the two sides. U.S. ambassador Patrick Hurley arranged talks between Mao and Chiang, but after the talks failed, Hurley resigned his post in disgust. President Harry Truman then dispatched as his special representative to China General George C. Marshall, America’s World War II army chief of staff, future secretary of state, and author of the Marshall Plan, which many would later credit for saving much of Europe from communism. In China Marshall managed to negotiate a temporary cease-fire, but even as both sides discussed the terms of implementation, they were busy preparing for further war. The cease-fire ended in the summer of 1946, after the Soviets withdrew from Manchuria and Chinese Communist troops moved in.
Even at this late date, the Kuomintang, the de jure governing party of China because of its control of China’s major cities, seemed to be the stronger contender for national power. Poor leadership, however, had eroded the people’s trust in the Republic. When the Nationalists reclaimed the capital of Nanjing from the Japanese, they failed to punish officials known to have collaborated with the occupiers. Many Chinese believed that the collaborators escaped justice because of their influence within the Nationalist regime. There were also charges that the Nationalists had retained property expropriated by the Japanese instead of returning it to the original owners.
In addition, the Nationalists behaved despotically when Japan was obligated to return Taiwan, an offshore island originally named Formosa by the Portugese, that the Qing dynasty had ceded to Japan in 1895. Under the pretext of confiscating Japanese holdings, the Nationalists indiscriminately seized native homes and businesses. “When a Chinese with some influence wanted a particular property, he had only to accuse a Formosan of being a collaborationist during the past fifty years of Japanese sovereignty,” one Taiwanese observed. When news organizations began to publish such grumblings of discontent, the KMT, rather than address the problems provoking the discontent, chose to arrest a number of local news reporters, editors, and publishers who had brought the issue to light. Many Taiwanese natives now complained, in private, that the “dogs” (the Japanese) had left, but the “pigs” (the Nationalists) had replaced them. On February 28, 1947, simmering hatred of the Nationalists exploded into a serious uprising on the island. KMT reinforcements dispatched from the mainland brutally crushed the rebellion, in the process slaughtering thousands of Taiwanese.
Political unrest in Taiwan and elsewhere was only a fraction of Nationalist China’s concerns. The country was teetering on the brink of economic collapse. During the war, as inflation spiraled out of control, the government had inflicted heavy taxes on farmers and forced them to sell grain at fixed prices. In the immediate postwar years, many Chinese lost what was left of their fortunes when the Nationalist government, attempting to impose strict control over the nation’s money supply, asked its citizens to exchange their gold and foreign currency for government certificates. The result was hyperinflation. In 1947, the government issued at least 10,000 billion Chinese dollars in bank notes. Within one six-month period in 1948 prices soared by a factor of 85,000. A sack of rice priced at 12 yuan in 1937 cost 63 million yuan by August 1948. Shoppers pushed heaps of paper currency in wheelbarrows just to buy a few groceries. When a Guangdong paper mill recycled “eight hundred cases of notes ranging from one hundred to two-thousand-dollar bills which it used as raw material in the manufacture of paper,” it was reasonable to conclude that KMT currency was literally worth less than the paper it was printed on.
Among those who saw their wealth evaporate were many Chinese Americans. After the happy resolution of World War II, thousands of ethnic Chinese, both American- and foreign-born, left the United States to visit relatives in China. Some brought their entire life savings, eager to launch new companies or to retire, only to watch their nest eggs disappear within months. In 1947, for instance, a Houston businessman of Chinese heritage returned to Canton to open a travel agency and rice company. Rampant inflation ravaged his savings, leaving him bankrupt and forcing him to return to Houston to start over again. Another Chinese American deposited $6,000 into the Bank of China, in mainland China, in 1948. A year later his funds were worth scarcely enough to buy a postage stamp.
As the Nationalists were forfeiting the confidence of the people, the Communists were rapidly gaining stature in north China. When Soviet forces withdrew in the summer of 1947, the Communists began to consolidate control over Manchuria, employing well-honed skills in educating those under their control to look at the incipient civil war as a class struggle. As committed recruits expanded the Communists’ numbers, Chiang’s forces were being depleted by a growing discontent within the military that reflected the discontent within the general population. During both World War II and then the Chinese civil war, the KMT exempted young men of privilege from the draft while conscripting sons of peasant families. Ill fed, ill equipped, ill paid, and physically abused by their superiors, many of these Nationalist soldiers deserted at the earliest opportunity, often switching sides to join the Communists. By 1948, the Communists had 1.5 million troops—and each new victory brought more men and arms over to them.
During this period, some upper-class Chinese, alarmed by the successes of the Communists, began to leave the country. But most, even among the wealthy, did not emigrate immediately. For it is a reality universally acknowledged that to leave one’s community, to abandon one’s business or profession, to discard whatever wealth and status has been achieved over a lifetime and start all over again in a new country requires uncommon courage and resolve. For the majority of upper-class Chinese, it seemed better to sit tight and hope what they were witnessing was a transient political aberration, nothing more, and that everything would soon settle back to normal.
As 1948 slid into 1949, the Communists destroyed KMT forces in the north and then turned south into central China. One by one, major regions fell under Communist control: Shenyang, Manchuria, Tianjin, Beijing. In April 1949, the Communists seized Nanjing, the Nationalist capital, and in May, Shanghai, the country’s most populous city. There was no longer any doubt which side would be the victor.
Much of what remained of the establishment—bureaucrats, businessmen, intellectuals—now left in great haste. Abandoning businesses, homes, and real estate, they sewed gold bullion and jewelry into belts and seams of clothes, even shoes, and shoved their way onto trains so mobbed that people clung to the tops and sides of the railway cars in order to get away. During later stages of their journey, many left trunks and suitcases filled with cherished family possessions at the side of the road.
As a group, these new émigrés had more education, status, and wealth than the earlier waves of Chinese to the United States, but they also had a less coherent plan. Given the confusion of the last few months of the civil war, some Chinese were not sure, initially, whether to leave the mainland or to simply move to another region farther from the conflict. Many exhausted their savings to book passage to Hong Kong or Taiwan, leaving China with little more than the clothes on their backs. The impulse behind their migration was not, like the first wave of Chinese gold rushers in America, to provide a better living for themselves and their families, but to escape persecution and possible death at the hands of the Communists.
On October 1, 1949, in Beijing, Mao Zedong declared the birth of the People’s Republic of China. In December, Chiang Kai-shek abandoned mainland China and fled to Taiwan with the remainder of his troops and the bulk of the nation’s gold supply. The Qing dynasty had lasted almost three centuries; the first Republic of China had lasted fewer than four decades on mainland soil.
In the United States, the Communist revolution shook the halls of academe, leaving about five thousand foreign Chinese intellectuals marooned. While some were skilled professionals and scholars, most—4,675 of them—were students at colleges and universities scattered throughout the country. With few exceptions, these students came from the privileged upper strata of society, precisely the group that had the most to lose from Mao’s victory.32 Their original plan had been to return to China with the pedigree of a Western education and to establish their careers there. A foreign diploma offered an inside track to the best positions in Nationalist China; an examination of the 1925 edition of Who’s Who in China shows that most entrants—about 57 percent—had studied abroad. “We joked about getting gold-plated,” recalls Linda Tsao Yang, a former student at Columbia University who became the U.S. executive director on the board of directors for the Asian Development Bank in Manila. “That means you go abroad, you study, you get a fancy degree, and then you can go back and say, ‘I’ve been to the United States and I graduated from a leading university.’ ” Now Chinese students at American universi-tiesfaced the unimaginable prospect that upon graduation there would be no country to go home to.
As the society they had known crumbled away under Communist reorganization, many students stared into an uncertain and frightening future. Even before Chiang’s final rout, they had received letters from home about the rampant inflation, the impending Communist victory, and the frantic family conferences about what course of action to take. Some parents urged their children to return immediately, so that the family, for better or for worse, would at least be together. Others counseled their children to stay in the United States, telling them they had decided to abandon all business and property in order to move to either Hong Kong or Taiwan. “We came to a fork in our lives, not knowing whether to take branch A or branch B and what the final destination would be,” Linda Tsao Yang remembered. “And there was no one who could give you advice because we were all in the same boat.”
Now those who decided to stay in the United States had to fight for survival, unable to rely on parents or even the Nationalist government to pay their tuition or mail them scholarship checks. The ugly sequence of skyrocketing inflation, followed by a Communist revolution that was social, political, and economic, had depleted the fortunes of entire families, many of whom were now themselves refugees. With their private funding cut off, these students desperately needed money. By 1949, the entire foreign Chinese student community was in crisis—not only had these students lost their country, most could no longer even meet their basic living expenses. Time magazine estimated that more than 2,500 Chinese students lacked basic funds for rent and tuition.
Some American colleges and universities helped out by waiving tuition payments and giving the Chinese part-time jobs and loans, but the scope of the problem required federal intervention. After 1949, the United States allocated emergency funds for Chinese foreign students, whether or not they intended to return to mainland China. In total, between 1949 and 1955, the government appropriated slightly more than $8 million to help the stranded students complete their degrees in the United States.
During this time, many of these stranded scholars resolved to build new lives for themselves in the United States. Some decided to work for their doctorates, if only to remain full-time students and avoid cancellation of their visas. Those who already held a Ph.D. took research positions as visiting scholars at various institutions. As it turned out, their timing was fortunate: they had obtained their credentials just before American universities began a rapid expansion. The arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union brought massive U.S. government investment in science and technology, which led to new academic departments in those fields at many universities. At the same time, World War II veterans, eager to get their degrees on the GI Bill, were filling college classrooms, necessitating the hiring of new professors. With universities scrambling to find qualified faculty, and with a shortage of existing Ph.D.s in the United States, foreign Chinese intellectuals soon became hot commodities in the academic market.
When the government of the world’s most populous country is ousted and replaced by a radically different form of government, the reverberations are felt around the world. As China became a second Communist world power, few groups were more sensitive to the aftershocks than the ethnic Chinese in the United States.
A loyalty schism opened within the Chinatowns of America, with KMT agents and pro-PRC supporters jousting for influence within and control over the Chinese American community. In October 1949, the liberal China Workers Mutual Aid Assocation hosted an event in San Francisco Chinatown to mark the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China. Suddenly, a “Guomingdang-hired goon squad,” as one Chinese-language newspaper put it, burst into the auditorium, vandalizing property, stealing a PRC flag, and spraying blue dye over the crowd. Bystanders were assaulted and some needed to be hospitalized. The pro-KMT Chinese-language press, however, blamed the incident on “Communist bandits.”
The revolution also sent tremors through the small community of diplomats and government bureaucrats stationed in Washington, D.C., and in consular offices across the United States. Appointed by the Nationalist government, they now faced an uncertain future. Although its area of effective control was now restricted to the island of Taiwan, the Nationalist Republic of China would for many years continue to claim, with the support and concurrence of United States, to be the legitimate government of China, but its prospects for a victorious return to the mainland were dim.
As the foreign-born Chinese desperately sought to build new lives, the American-born Chinese began to rethink their own futures. Many had grown up believing that if they failed to establish themselves professionally in the United States, they could always find careers in China. That option was now foreclosed, and assimilation became a much more attractive possibility. In 1949, the participants of the Chinese Young People’s Summer Conference in Lake Tahoe urged youths not only to leave Chinatowns, but to discard Chinese traditions altogether—the best way, they believed, to advance “understanding” between the races.
Racial harmony, however, was difficult to realize as world events led Americans to see themselves as the last bulwark against a giant worldwide Communist conspiracy. The end of World War II had inaugurated the cold war, a quiet but intense struggle between the two great superpowers of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the United States watched with growing alarm as one Eastern European country after another became a Soviet satellite and disappeared behind the “Iron Curtain.” Viewing communism as operating like a contagious disease, the United States tried to contain the spread of Soviet power in 1949 by establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance whose members—the U.S. and democratic Western European countries—pledged to unite if any one of them were attacked. Later that year, the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, ending the American monopoly on nuclear weapons.
This Soviet triumph sent the United States into hysteria. Many Truman administration experts had thought the Soviets incapable of developing an atomic bomb for at least fifteen years; some, such as Harry Truman himself, believed that, left to their own devices, they might never be able to build one at all. To them, the clear explanation was that the Soviets had gotten help from the outside. Thus the Soviet atomic bomb triggered not only a U.S.-Soviet arms race, in which scientific secrets on both sides would be jealously guarded, but a witch hunt for those suspected of loyalty to the other side. In January 1950, the American public’s deepest fears were confirmed when Dr. Klaus Fuchs, a British atomic scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, was arrested for passing secrets to the Soviets. The Chinese Communist revolution and the developing Sino-Soviet alliance subjected the Chinese American community to the same suspicions of disloyalty.
The following month, February, Senator Joseph McCarthy capitalized on the national mood by proclaiming he had a list of 105 card-carrying Communists in the State Department—a claim he never substantiated, but which provoked a frenzy of finger-pointing. McCarthy’s accusations fueled suspicions in Washington that the government was infested with subversives who had assisted China’s fall to communism. Supporters of Chiang Kai-shek demanded to learn who “lost” China, and Republicans in Congress called for a wholesale purge of the State Department, accusing the Far East experts of “sabotage,” treason, and conspiracy to oust the Nationalists from the mainland. The inquisition destroyed the careers of several prominent China specialists in the State Department, who were scapegoated for international events far beyond their control.
National paranoia permitted almost limitless excesses, as long as their ultimate goal was defending America against communism. In what is now known as the McCarthy era, anti-Communist investigations in the U.S. Senate and House ravaged Hollywood, the media, academe, and government. The Communist Party was outlawed, loyalty tests were established, mail-opening and wire-tapping operations were conducted by the CIA and FBI. During this period of national hysteria Chinese were particularly vulnerable, because they looked foreign and were presumably linked to a country that had chosen communism over freedom.
In Chinatowns, U.S. government surveillance of left-wing organizations began as soon as the People’s Republic was founded. Federal authorities bugged the headquarters of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance and kept close watch over liberal Chinese American organizations, like the China Youth Club and the China Daily News. If during World War II China was America’s great friend, the cold war thrust it into the role of Communist ally of the Soviet Union—and potential enemy.
Surely many Chinese Americans hoped that U.S. anxiety would subside over time, that diplomacy would bring greater acceptance of the new government in China. But with the outbreak of the Korean War, matters went from bad to worse to worst.
On June 25,1950, Communist North Korea, under the leadership of Kim II Sung, invaded South Korea, and within days seized 90 percent of the peninsula. Believing that Moscow had masterminded the invasion, President Harry Truman immediately called on the United Nations to join an American military effort to assist South Korea. UN troops, predominantly American and under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, swiftly drove the North Korean forces back. Through diplomatic channels the People’s Republic of China warned it would attack if the United States crossed the 38th parallel, the preinvasion border. UN forces sped far into North Korea, and on November 24, 1950, as they neared the Yalu River, the border between Korea and China, the PRC held good to its promise and threw more than a quarter of a million troops into the conflict.
The Korean War was the salvation of the Nationalist regime in Taiwan. Before the Korean conflict, the CIA had predicted that the Communists would invade Taiwan before the end of 1950, and the State Department was prepared to recognize the People’s Republic of China as the official government of China. But as American soldiers died in the Communist Chinese onslaught, the United States decided to protect Taiwan and cultivate the island as a Pacific base from which to combat communism in Asia.
For Americans of Chinese descent, the Korean War meant something else entirely. As the American public heard reports of white soldiers being slaughtered, imprisoned, and tortured in POW camps, they were baffled that their government did not drop nuclear bombs on China, as General MacArthur had suggested before Truman relieved him of his command. Chinese Americans, meanwhile, endured an atmosphere of hostility reminiscent of what Japanese Americans had experienced during World War II. A white mob tore apart a Chinatown restaurant in San Francisco to avenge American deaths in Korea. Reports began to appear of ethnic Chinese being physically attacked, their property vandalized.
As the shadow of the cold war fell over their communities, Americans of Chinese heritage found their finances scrutinized. The Korean War led to a U.S. trade embargo of the PRC, which not only prohibited Chinese imports but also prevented American money from entering China. On December 17, 1950, the United States Treasury Department used the Foreign Assets Control Regulation to ban all remittances to mainland China, shutting down the flow of capital from the Chinese American community to relatives across the Pacific. Even Hong Kong, then a British colony, fell under this regulation, preventing Chinese Americans from using the city to funnel money to their families in China. The regulation had teeth. Violators could be fined up to $10,000, and imprisoned for up to a decade. In counties such as Toishan, this created tremendous hardship for those who depended on American money for their very existence.
The regulation did more than choke off the pipeline of funds between the United States and China. On at least one occasion, it helped silence pro-Communist voices in Chinatown. In 1951, in a crackdown that ruined careers, the Treasury Department subpoenaed several staff members of the China Daily News, the largest Chinese American newspaper sympathetic to recognizing the PRC as the government of China. The following year, the Justice Department charged that Eugene Moy, the managing editor, and four others had violated the Foreign Assets Control Regulation, the only time anyone had been prosecuted under this law since its passage in 1917. Sentenced to two years in prison, Moy died shortly after his release.
To undermine leftist newspapers, the U.S. government launched a campaign to intimidate subscribers. Throughout the country, FBI agents visited Chinese Americans, warning them to drop their subscriptions to the China Daily News. In New York, the FBI interrogated Tan Yumin, the English-language secretary of the left-wing Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, asking him the same question over and over: why did he read the China Daily News? The distraught Tan later jumped off—or was pushed from—the Brooklyn Bridge, his body buried under river mud for days before it finally surfaced.
As they found their mail opened, their phone lines tapped, their movements shadowed in the streets, some Chinatown residents felt trapped in a police state. American authorities even probed the lives of U.S. World War II veterans of Chinese heritage, and interrogated children in Chinatown playgrounds. One Chinese man had a public shouting match with an agent who was following him: “The FBI guy shouted back—‘You are a Communist!’ I stepped forward and pointed my finger at his nose—‘You are a Communist!’ He got frustrated. He did not have any evidence to prove that I was a Communist. So I called him a Communist without evidence—in his own way.”
Even the end of the Korean War in 1953, and the cessation of open hostilities between China and the United States, brought no respite. Indeed, the darkest moment may have come in December 1955, when Everett F. Drumwright, the U.S. consul in Hong Kong, released a report in his Foreign Service dispatch that accused the community of, among other things, orchestrating “a fantastic system of passport and visa fraud.” Drumwright insisted that almost all Chinese in America had entered the United States illegally, all the way back to those who mined for gold and built the transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Drumwright not only leveled a host of broad-brush charges (trafficking in narcotics, using fake passports, counterfeiting American currency, and illegally collecting Social Security and veteran’s benefits), but also suggested that a network of Chinese spies had exploited the paper sons system to infiltrate the country. All the PRC had to do, according to the report, was to dispatch agents to the port of Hong Kong to buy fake American citizenship papers. Steps had to be taken “to destroy that system once and for all,” before “Communist China is able to bend that system to the service of her purpose alone.”33
After Drumwright’s report was released, virtually the entire Chinese community fell under federal scrutiny. No one was immune from investigation: if you were Chinese it was likely that you would soon receive that knock on the door and be subjected to a long series of questions about every aspect of your life. “Only once before in modern times, has an entire race been charged with ‘a criminal conspiracy,’ ” wrote Dai-ming Lee, editor of the China World. In 1956, U.S. Attorney Lloyd Burke subpoenaed forty major Chinese American associations, demanding that they produce all records and photographs of their membership and a full account of their income within twenty-four hours. “Chinatown was hit like an A-bomb fell,” one observer wrote. Another called it “the worst incident since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.”
Chinatown leaders fought back by appealing to politicians for help and by posing legal challenges to the constitutionality of the Justice Department investigations. Fortunately, in March 1956 a federal judge threw out the subpoena attack, calling it a “mass inquisition.” But by then, much damage had been done. Business activity dropped when investigators raided Chinatowns on both coasts; Chinese merchants in New York City lost $100,000 a week in sales. American authorities also leaked the Drumwright report to the press, which ran stories accusing the Chinese community of immigration fraud.
In 1956, three years after the end of the Korean War, the U.S. government initiated a “confession program” to encourage the Chinese who had immigrated illegally to voluntarily confess their true status. Each confession, however, could implicate dozens of Chinese relatives, who in turn would be compelled to cooperate with authorities to protect themselves. In San Francisco, some ten thousand Chinese confessed, and 99 percent of them were permitted to stay in the country. A few, however, were deported as a direct result of their political activities. In psychological terms, the impact was far greater than the number of actual deportations. Long after the Drumwright-inspired inquisition was over, its shadow remained over Chinatown, instilling in the Chinese American community a terror of government authority and a legacy of silence.
Another group vulnerable to accusations of espionage were Chinese intellectuals at the universities who were capable of designing technology vital to national security. As Communist China developed into a world power and technologically competent cold war opponent, many American officials failed to distinguish between Chinese Americans and foreign Chinese nationals, nor did they overcome the suspicion that members of both groups were passing secrets to the PRC. With new State Department regulations, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, and President Harry Truman’s proclamation of 1953, the American government assumed the power to stop the departure of foreigners whose knowledge might jeopardize national security. As a result, some 120 Chinese intellectuals were detained and not permitted to leave for years.
One of these was Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen, a top Chinese aerodynamicist who helped pioneer the American space program before becoming involved in one of the strangest episodes of cold war history. His story illustrates not only the capriciousness of the American government during the McCarthy era, but also the disastrous consequences for U.S. defense brought about by the frenzied witch hunts of the time.
Though much of Tsien’s later life is hidden in shadow, the story of his early days is relatively straightforward. In 1935, Tsien arrived in the United States on a Boxer Rebellion scholarship to study at MIT, and then later at Cal Tech. He rapidly ascended to the very top of his profession, making substantial contributions to both American science and national defense. He revolutionized the fields of fluid dynamics, the buckling of structures, rocketry, and engineering cybernetics, all of which helped the U.S. enter into the space age early. While still a graduate student at Cal Tech, he helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he was intimately involved in designing some of America’s earliest missiles. Because his contributions during World War II were so valuable, the U.S. government repeatedly granted Tsien clearance to work on classified government projects, despite his legal status as a Chinese national. By the end of the war, Tsien had received numerous commendations and praise from the American military establishment.
In 1949, the year China fell to the Communists, Tsien must have decided that his future no longer lay with his homeland, but with the United States. He applied for U.S. citizenship and accepted a professorship at and directorship of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology. What he had not counted on, however, was America’s entrance into cold war hysteria. In 1950, the FBI accused him of being a former member of the American Communist Party, on the grounds that during the 1930s he had befriended a number of pro-Communist Cal Tech students.
Although Tsien fervently denied being a Communist, the U.S. government revoked his security clearance, something Tsien considered an unforgivable insult, especially after his record of substantial contribution to the U.S. war effort. A proud man, he impulsively decided to return to China. After informing Cal Tech that he was taking an indefinite leave of absence, he booked passage for himself and his family to mainland China. His real troubles began when a U.S. customs agent found thousands of pounds of scientific papers in his luggage. Believing he had nabbed a spy red-handed, the agent held a press conference to announce that he discovered secret “code books” in Tsien’s possession.
The Los Angeles media went wild, printing articles with headlines Such as “SECRET DATA SEIZED IN CHINA SHIPMENT.” The putative codebooks in Tsien’s luggage turned out to be logarithmic tables, and a subsequent government investigation disclosed that nothing at all in the shipment had been classified. But the newspapers did not run a retraction or even a follow-up story, leaving many readers believing that Tsien was indeed an agent for the PRC.
Within days of the seizure of his baggage, Tsien was arrested and locked in a cell in San Pedro for more than two weeks. Confused if not panicked, he lost twenty pounds. The renowned physicist Robert Oppenheimer offered his help, suggesting that Tsien move to Princeton University. That turned out not to be an option for Tsien. Upon his release, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, to the surprise of everyone, started deportation hearings against him, proceeding on the grounds that Tsien, a foreign national Communist, was an undesirable alien deportable by law.
The government kept Tsien in a state of limbo while trying to decide what to do with him. One faction—mainly defense officials—fought to keep him in the United States, arguing that his technical knowledge was too valuable to let fall into the hands of Communist China, while another—primarily immigration authorities—believed he should be packed off. Meanwhile, the government would not let Tsien leave the boundaries of Los Angeles until his case was resolved. For five years, from 1950 to 1955, he lived under constant FBI surveillance, with his phone bugged, his mail opened and read, his family followed in the streets. Finally, on September 17, 1955, the U.S. government deported Tsien and his family to mainland China.
Whether Tsien was a Communist in the United States cannot be determined, but the evidence suggests that he was not. His wife was the daughter of a top military strategist for Chiang Kai-shek, and survivors of the Cal Tech Communist cell to which Tsien had allegedly belonged insist he was not a member. After a five-year investigation, the INS failed to turn up any documentary proof of Tsien’s Communist involvement. As it later turned out, however, his political leanings had no bearing whatsoever on the final decision to deport him. Decades later, declassified State Department documents revealed that the United States and the PRC had negotiated a secret prisoner swap: Tsien Hsue-shen for a group of American POWs captured during the Korean War.
In the end, the case against Tsien hurt rather than helped U.S. national defense. By deporting him, the nation lost a first-class scientist who almost certainly would have been a valued adviser to the American lunar and missile programs. As early as 1949, Tsien had predicted that a trip to the moon would be possible within thirty years and that the journey could be accomplished in a week. Meanwhile, with Tsien’s return the PRC gained a man who helped launch a technological revolution in his homeland. As the director of the Fifth Academy of National Defense, China’s first missile institute, Tsien oversaw the development of China’s first generation of nuclear missiles, the Dongfeng “East Wind” series. He also proposed and guided the development of the first artificial Chinese satellite, a tracking and control telemetry network for ICBMs.
Perhaps Tsien’s attorney, Grant B. Cooper, best summed up the repercussions to the United States of its irrational persecution of Tsien: “That this government permitted this genius, this scientific genius, to be sent to Communist China to pick his brains is one of the tragedies of this century.”
As the cold war escalated, American society turned inward, as if cocooning itself against the risk of nuclear destruction. It was an age of burgeoning suburbs, when American men embraced the security of a safe income in a large corporation, while women were encouraged to forgo careers and devote themselves to motherhood. Glossy advertisements projected images of the ideal American marriage: the company man cruising in his long-finned car to his job in the city, the blissful housewife surrounded by gleaming new gadgets in her suburban kitchen. TV dinners—packaged food with disposable utensils and trays—enabled families to eat at home, often right in front of the television, under the hypnotic power of mass media. It was a time of affluence, consumerism, and anesthetizing conformity. Yet underneath it all was a persistent anxiety, arising out of fear that some national leader would miscalculate and the Bomb would annihilate them all.
Despite this anxiety, or because of it, the postwar baby boom produced a culture centered almost exclusively on the needs of children. Couples married earlier and had more children, until birth rates exceeded even those of India. People who had survived the Great Depression and World War II were determined that their own children would want for nothing, and soon the rhythm of American society was governed by the scheduling of Brownie and Boy Scout meetings, birthday parties, and PTA meetings.
Chinese American culture, with its own explosion of births, became even more family-oriented as well. In San Francisco Chinatown, Cameron House, formerly a rescue mission for prostitutes, became a community center that hosted recreational activities for Chinese American children. Youths enjoyed slumber parties there, sleeping in a room painted like a log cabin so they could pretend to be campers in the wilderness. Historian Judy Yung, who spent her youth in 1950s San Francisco, recalled that “many of my peers strove to be all-American, participating in integrated high school club activities and competing to be cheerleaders, student body officers, and prom queens. Others of us chose to become socially active in the Chinese YMCA, Cameron House, Protestant churches, or Chinese language school.”
The 1950s were also a period of decline for Chinatowns. Quietly, the “old-timers” of Chinatown—the elderly Chinese men who had led a bachelor existence as they supported families overseas—were aging, losing affluence, and dying. The passing of these men coincided with both the government surveillance of Chinatowns, which decreased business revenue, and the conservative political climate of the 1950s, which devastated Chinese casinos and nightclubs. In 1954, the federal government passed an anti-gambling law that crushed Chinese lotteries across the country, thereby destroying a significant source of business revenue for Chinatown neighborhoods and causing residents to move out and seek new business opportunities elsewhere.
Simultaneously, upwardly mobile young families were reluctant to rear their children in old Chinatown tenements, most of which required significant retrofitting. In 1950, a New York State Housing Survey of New York City Chinatown dwellings found that almost a third did not have flush toilets, almost half lacked showers and bathtubs, and almost three-fourths had no central heating. To escape these privations, many of the children or grandchildren of the nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants or exclusion-era “paper sons” left their ethnic neighborhoods and headed for the suburbs, to join their fellow Americans.
Even those who had grown up with a certain degree of prosperity were anxious to move on. One such individual was William Chew, whose family had achieved upper-middle-class status in two generations. His grandfather labored on the transcontinental railroad, worked in mines, and sold vegetables for a living. His father served with distinction during World War I, became one of the first Chinese American Masonic Lodge masters in the United States, and rose to the position of superintendent at the Bayside Cannery in Isleton, California. William, who earned a master’s degree in engineering, would later design an experiment for the space shuttle and watch his two sons become a dentist and a professional sports photographer. But when his boys were young, Chew faced a difficult decision: “whether to [remain in] the Chinese community where I grew up, or to move away to rear my family in a medium-income community with more opportunities and a better lifestyle.” He chose the latter. Although he knew moving into a white neighborhood would “eventually dilute my family’s cultural identity,” the enticements were too strong to resist: “I longed to mow a green lawn and wax my car on weekends; to take my children to Sunday school and have backyard bar-b-ques with our neighbors and friends.”
Many Chinese now had the means to buy into this life. During the 1950s, increasing numbers of ethnic Chinese—among them college-educated children of the immigrant Chinese merchant class, and the World War II veterans who earned university degrees on the GI Bill—rapidly assumed white-collar or professional positions as engineers, doctors, accountants, lawyers, and businessmen. Some were achieving national prominence, and by the end of the decade the new Chinese American luminaries included mogul Chinn Ho, whom Time magazine dubbed the “Chinese Rockefeller of Hawaii,” his high school classmate Hiram Leong Fong, the first American of Chinese as well as Asian ancestry to win a seat on the U.S. Senate, Delbert Wong,34 the first Chinese American (and Asian American) judge in the United States, and James Wong Howe, one of the best cinematographers in the world, whose mastery of the camera would win him two Oscars.
Through this period, the Chinese American community achieved material wealth far above national averages. In 1959, for instance, they had a median family income of $6,207, while the comparable figure for all Americans was $5,660. Flush with disposable income, the Chinese American middle class could now afford mortgages in upscale white suburbs, if the legal obstacles to their purchasing such homes could be eliminated.
For generations, racist laws, mostly in California, had barred the Chinese from living in white neighborhoods or attending white schools, though some Chinese were informally integrated into white society. After World War II, these laws, both state and federal, were rapidly disappearing from the books. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the real estate covenants that barred homeowners in certain areas from selling to Chinese or other minorities, giving the Chinese the legal right to purchase housing or land anywhere in the country. Legislators in California also struck down laws in the education code mandating racial segregation.
The absence of these laws did not mean, however, that new Chinese suburbanites were welcomed with open arms. Many white homeowners feared that minority families in their neighborhoods would lower property values, and many local realtors catered to those fears, refusing to show homes to Chinese buyers. To circumvent these exclusionary tactics, some Chinese purchased homes directly from progressive-minded whites, or worked out secret arrangements with white friends, who bought the property first and then immediately resold it to them. To avoid possible confrontation with angry white neighbors, many of these new Chinese homeowners moved in furtively, in the middle of the night.
In extreme cases, a few whites resorted to harassment, vandalism, and even violence in hopes of driving out the Chinese newcomers. It was not uncommon for Chinese American families in prestigious suburbs to find unpleasant notes tacked on their doors, or garbage thrown into their yards. “The first night, they broke my windows, but I ignored them,” recalled Lancing F. Lee, who bought a house in a white neighborhood in Los Angeles. “Then they brought dogs over to cause trouble. If you crossed the street, they would bully you.”
Underneath the placid surface of suburbia, some Chinese American families would soon learn, lay a dormant xenophobia. In an era when homeowners erected fallout shelters in anticipation of nuclear war, when children practiced “duck and cover” exercises in schools in the event of a nuclear missile attack, fear was often an instinctive if irrational reaction to anyone who did not look true-blue American.
Alice Young, a Harvard-educated attorney, remembers growing up in “the only Asian family in what was then essentially Pentagon-CIA land”: the lily-white, conservative Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia. One day, her third-grade teacher showed a social studies film on the Communist threat, in which all the Communists depicted happened to be Chinese. “At the end of the film they said if you notice anyone suspicious, please call your local CIA or FBI,” she recalled. “There I sat in the third-grade class and when the lights came on all of my classmates had moved their chairs further back.”
Yet the exodus out of the Chinatowns into America’s suburbia continued. Not only did the Chinatowns shrink in size, but some vanished altogether. In 1940, a nationwide study recorded twenty-eight American cities with Chinatowns; by 1955, that number had fallen to sixteen. Some predicted that the Chinatowns of America would soon become ghost towns.
They were wrong. By the next decade, the People’s Republic of China would undergo cataclysmic political changes so severe that American Chinatown neighborhoods were soon filled with new immigrants.