CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In the 1960s, the Chinese in America may have looked to outsiders like one people with a shared culture, shared traditions, and a shared immigration experience. But this was not the case, nor was it for most other immigrant groups. As discrimination against each immigrant group abates over generations, and the enticement of assimilation increases, ethnic ties are rarely strong enough to bind people of different aspirations and talents to a monolithic group identity. This is especially true when immigration is a continuing process, and later arrivals tend to push earlier arrivals out of the ghettos.
In the 1960s, anti-Chinese discrimination remained strong, but the ethnic Chinese were also no longer bottled up in Chinatowns, as they once were, dependent upon community organizations to protect their rights, their livelihood, and at times their lives. Indeed, some newer arrivals—the intellectuals and those members of the educational and social elite of China who had managed to find their way, however circuitously, to the United States—had not even passed through America’s Chinatowns. They had moved directly into university towns and cities, aided by their English-language skills. They also benefited from the fact that America, whose Declaration of Independence held as self-evident that “all men are created equal,” was about to confront the fearful reality of its own racism.
Of this group of Chinese in America, the intellectuals, mostly graduate students stranded in the United States by the 1949 revolution in China, were likely to socialize and associate with other intellectuals of Chinese descent. But intellectual communities were already becoming the first outposts of multiculturalism, and Chinese scholars were able to participate in university town life without being self-conscious about their non-Caucasian appearance and speech patterns. As I look back on my own youth as the daughter of two academics, growing up in the community organized around the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I remember driving to Chicago Chinatown with my family, but only for the same reason Americans of other ethnicities went there—for a particularly good Chinese meal, not to strengthen any connection to my roots.
In addition, as previously noted, by the 1960s quite a few Chinese Americans had been born in the United States. If others saw them as Chinese, not American, that was their problem. Many of these Chinese Americans saw themselves first as Americans, albeit of Chinese descent, and their only real knowledge of the “old country” came through stories they heard from their parents and grandparents. This lack of personal connection was particularly true of the children of the earliest immigrant waves, especially those I refer to as the “long dispersed” immigrants, whose ancestors had left the American Chinatowns long ago. Many now lived and worked in suburban areas throughout the country, and their children had relatively few contacts with other people of their own race. The children’s lives were in many ways indistinguishable from those of the children of other immigrant groups.
But for Chinese who did not feel secure enough to move out of Chinatown, having strong local community groups to turn to in times of trouble was still important. Their comfort was eroded when, in the 1960s, a large wave of new immigrants, mostly refugees from Communist mainland China, came to the United States. Their arrival in America’s Chinatowns resulted in a clash of cultures between those who were getting ready to move on but had not yet left and those who had just arrived.
In 1957, in what has come to be known as the “anti-Rightist” movement, Mao Zedong encouraged open criticism of the Communist Party by proclaiming, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.” Those who took Mao at his word, however, and actually voiced criticisms of any aspect of the Communist system suffered serious reprisals. Labeled “counterrevolutionaries,” thousands of intellectuals who had foolishly suggested reforms landed in prison or reeducation camps. Many others kept silent and quietly applied for exit visas.
A year later, in 1958, the Chinese Communist government began an obsessive national effort to increase industrial output under a plan named the “Great Leap Forward.” Seven hundred million people were placed in agricultural communes and ordered to build “backyard steel furnaces.” Forced to abandon the fields to tend cauldrons of molten steel, peasants melted down their metallic possessions—from pots and pans to bedsprings—for gains that had only symbolic value. Livestock and crops perished from neglect, and soon the country found itself in the throes of the worst famine in Chinese history, possibly the worst in human history. Food was tightly rationed, but millions of Chinese died of starvation. Eventually the Great Leap Forward was abandoned, and even Mao admitted it had been a mistake, announcing, “The chaos caused was on a grand scale, and I take responsibility.”
To ease the pressure of widespread hunger, the Communist leadership suddenly allowed thousands of Chinese to emigrate. Within a twenty-five-day period in 1962, seventy thousand people, mostly residents of Guangdong province, were permitted to leave. At that time, it was easier to emigrate to Hong Kong than to the United States, so most went there, hoping to move on to America at a later date. But those who attempted this two-step migration to the United States faced numerous frustrations.
Even though they were now residents of a British territory, and U.S. emigration policy still heavily favored northern Europeans while restricting immigration from other parts of the world, most of these Chinese émigrés were still denied entry. According to the McCarran-Walter Act, the statute on immigration, U.S. nation-of-origin requirements separated applicants not by country of residence, but by country of birth.35 Thus, the Chinese trying to get to America from the British territory of Hong Kong were treated not as British applicants, but as Chinese. The established quotas permitted only a token 105 Chinese to be admitted annually. Beyond the quota, some Chinese, thanks to special legislation, could enter either as political refugees or on the strength of their individual talents, but their numbers were small.
Many did not even make it to Hong Kong. With so many Chinese streaming across the border, conditions in the city became so overcrowded that British authorities threw up barbed wire to prevent more from entering and rounded up as many refugees as they could to ship them back to China. Hong Kong’s problems were exacerbated by the callousness of the British to the plight of these homeless Chinese as well as restrictive U.S. immigration practices. These issues prompted President John F. Kennedy to sign a presidential directive on May 23, 1962, admitting refugees who were in Hong Kong but had been born in mainland China. By 1965, some fifteen thousand Chinese refugees had arrived in the United States.
Even more were able to come after the U.S. revised its immigration law. In 1963, President Kennedy attacked the nation-of-origin provision as having “no basis in either logic or reason,” arguing that “it neither satisfies a national need nor accomplishes an international purpose. In an age of interdependence among nations, such a system is an anachronism, for it discriminates among applicants for admission into the United States on the basis of the accident of birth.” Two years later, on October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed a new Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolishing racial discrimination in immigration law.36 Under the new act, each independent nation beyond the western hemisphere had a yearly quota of twenty thousand, while the spouses, parents, and unmarried minor children of American citizens could enter as non-quota immigrants. This legislation would have a dramatic impact on the size of the Chinese community in America. Before the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, the 1960 census counted only 236,084 ethnic Chinese in the United States—about one-tenth of one percent of the general population. After the act, the ethnic Chinese population in the United States would almost double in size every decade.
The newest Chinese arrivals moved directly into Chinatown neighborhoods. They were by no means the poorest or least educated in Guangdong province, but most came without savings, having sold almost everything they owned to pay for transport to the United States. Worse, most could speak no English, which restricted their job searches to Chinese-owned businesses.
At the end of the 1960s, Lillian Sing, then associate director of the Chinese Newcomers Service Center, conducted a small survey of the occupational changes of several Chinese men who had left Hong Kong for new lives in the United States. Their downward mobility was apparent.
In Hong Kong
Chinese doctor
Sweater-weaver
Seaman, first mate
Factory owner
Accountant
Chinese doctor
Social worker
Teacher
Newspaper reporter
In San Francisco
Laundryman
Cook
Kitchen helper
Janitor
Busboy
Errand boy
Student
Busboy
Busboy
These new arrivals weakened the negotiating position of the ethnic Chinese who were already living in Chinatown but still working as laborers. The original inhabitants were also insufficiently fluent in English to take other jobs or to start their own businesses. With a fresh pool of labor available, local Chinese businessmen understood that they could slash salaries and stretch work hours at will. Workers who fell ill could easily be replaced, those who complained, blackballed. With this imbalance in power, employers ha no incentive to improve working conditions. Chinatown factories became so hazardous that conditions there prompted several government investigations. One, by the 1969 San Francisco Human Rights Commission, discovered that ethnic Chinese women garment laborers were receiving no overtime pay, no vacation time, no sick leave or health benefits. “It’s really amazing how the Chinese exploit themselves,” one worker noted.37
For some families, even minimum wage was an unattainable American dream,† and some émigrés made desperate, almost pathetic attempts to learn English, to help them break out of a ruthless job market. In San Francisco and New York, they enrolled in federally funded adult education courses to study English, but their age and physical exhaustion from sixty-hour work weeks made it difficult to concentrate. More significant, their isolation from native-speaking Americans prevented them from practicing English on a daily basis.
Trying to make do on very little, many immigrants crowded into unfurnished single-room apartments, with no furniture or heat. “We each slept on a small piece of plywood which we put on top of two oil cans or chairs right before bedtime,” one recalled. “That’s how we all learned to sleep perfectly still.” Her family bathed just once a week because they had no hot water or bathtub, only a galvanized iron tub that they also used to wash clothes. After she rented a room of her own, she admitted, “I have been showering twice a day! Just to make up for the past.”
Neglect and exhaustion soon bred disease and despair. Immediately after the influx of the refugees, San Francisco Chinatown suffered the greatest tuberculosis rate in the country, six to seven times higher than the national rate at the time. The most despairing resorted to drugs, alcohol, and even suicide. San Francisco Chinatown recorded the highest suicide rate in the country: between 1952 and 1969, Chinese men took their own lives at the mean rate of 27.9 per 100,000, almost triple the national figure.
Immigrant children suffered as well. During the 1960s, teachers in San Francisco Chinatown observed students dozing off behind their desks in class. When confronted, some youths confessed that after school they had to labor in sweatshops for at least eight to ten hours a day. Edward Redford, then assistant superintendent for secondary education, explained why: “They work half the night in laundries or sewing shops, apparently because they owe money to someone who brought them here.”
Sleep deprivation was not the only problem. Another was that classes were conducted in English, and that most of these children had minimal English-language skills. Even though some had spent their childhoods in the British colony of Hong Kong, the public schools there had offered woefully substandard English-language instruction.
Fights broke out frequently between the ABCs—the American-born Chinese—and the FOBs, the “fresh off the boat” foreign-born Chinese from Hong Kong. In his memoir Chinese Playground, Bill Lee, a native of San Francisco Chinatown, remembered the taunts as the first Hong Kong families moved into his neighborhood in the early 1960s:
It began with the newcomers getting hassled.
“Fresh-off-the-Boat!”
“Fuckin’ China Bugs!”
“Ching Chongs!”
“Look at them clothes, dude!”
“No speaka’ English?”
In turn, the FOBs called the ABCs “Tow Gee” (privileged and spoiled landowners) and “Juk Sing” (empty and hollow bamboo). Soon, some of the immigrant teenagers banded into a gang of their own called the Wah Ching, or “China Youth.” According to Lee, they terrorized the ABCs:
It was payback time and their retaliation was fierce. This was now a different ball game. ABCs were getting jumped left and right and the beatings were severe. After school, if you made it out of the grounds, they’d find you at the bus stop or cable car turn-table. It wasn’t just a one-time payback. The assaults were repeated over and over. Make fun of any foreign-born kid in class or bump one of their brothers or cousins in the hall and you’d pay dearly for it. These guys grew up in the rough streets of Hong Kong and Macao where gangs were hardcore. Many had spent a good part of their youths in brutal prisons.
Unable to learn English quickly enough to succeed in school, many children of the newest arrivals dropped out and hit the streets. Dressed in black from head to toe, wearing bouffant hairstyles and high-heeled boots, they strutted through Chinatown, followed by little boys who idolized them and helped carry their guns. Skirmishes broke out between rival factions, and within a few years, juvenile violence had escalated into full-fledged battles. Journalist Ben Fong-Torres recalled that era: “delinquency was too clinical a word for what was going on in Chinatown. People were being killed in the streets, merchants were being extorted; gangs were at war not only with each other but with community leaders and cops.”
Beneath the violence came open pleas for help. At a Human Rights Commission hearing in San Francisco in 1968, the Wah Ching gang asked for a community clubhouse and a two-year training program so they could gain vocational skills and high school diplomas. In response, the Human Rights Commission turned for assistance to the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), an umbrella organization that grew out of the historic Six Companies in Chinatown, but the CCBA responded coldly: “They have not shown that they are sorry or that they will change their ways. They have threatened the community. If you give in to this group, you are only going to have another hundred immigrants come in and have a whole new series of threats and demands.”
Other Chinese Americans, however, eager to defuse a situation they recognized as a ticking time bomb, expressed far greater sympathy. “Some of these kids are talking about getting guns and rioting,” one observer noted. “And I’m not threatening, the situation already exists.” Socially progressive Chinese Americans—in particular, college students and young professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area—began returning to their old Chinatown neighborhoods to volunteer as mentors to foreign-born Chinese youths. At San Francisco State College, students organized the Inter-Collegiate Chinese for Social Action, a group that worked with immigrant youths in the Bay Area and tutored them in English. In 1968, the Concerned Chinese for Action and Change, founded by American university students and professionals, picketed Grant Avenue, one of the busiest streets for tourists in San Francisco Chinatown, to draw attention to the social problems in their community, in hopes of embarrassing the Chinese elite into making much-needed reforms.
Some American-born Chinese felt a special obligation toward these émigrés as a result of early parental influence. In his memoir The Rice Room, Ben Fong-Torres describes belonging to two separate worlds during the 1960s: one as a pioneer rock radio deejay and the first Chinese American writer and editor at Rolling Stone, the second as the “number two son” of immigrant restaurant owners in Oakland Chinatown. In the evenings, his mother took piecework home from local garment factories and talked as her children held skeins of yarn for her. “I knew to expect stories about China,” Fong-Torres recalled, “and what the Communists were doing to our family in the village, and how important it was for us to do well, so that we could help provide for them.”
The Communists were never out of the minds of certain Chinese American families. Although they could never visit mainland China, because of either finances or the lack of legal permission, they received occasional, tissue-thin air mail letters from relatives, their last fragile link to China during the cold war. “I was nine years old when the letters made my parents, who are rocks, cry,” wrote Maxine Hong Kingston,38 daughter of Chinese immigrant laundry owners in Stockton, California, and author of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. The letters described how the new Communist regime forced her uncles to kneel on broken glass and confess to being landlords. They told of relatives who had been sent to rural communes, of others who had been executed, and of still others who had simply disappeared. A few resurfaced in Hong Kong and asked her parents for help. “The aunts in Hong Kong said to send money quickly; their children were begging on the sidewalks, and mean people put dirt in their bowls.”
The crusading spirit of the 1960s prompted some American-born children of Chinese immigrants to respond to Chinese calls for help. Two forces in particular stoked the fires of activism. One was the civil rights movement led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., which began as a grassroots effort among southern blacks in the 1950s to end Jim Crow but spread rapidly across the country through the following decade, when television cameras brought into middle-class homes the ugly spectacle of southern sheriffs turning hoses and police dogs on blacks engaging in peaceful protests. Sympathy for the plight of African Americans in the American South soon expanded to include a more general interest in human rights, particularly for people of color living in white-controlled societies.
The second force was the Vietnam War, in the background of which was the largest college enrollment at any time in American history. As the nation debated why we were in Vietnam, students on campus after campus organized marches to protest the war. Once again, television played a critical role, first in dramatizing the horrors of war in a way never before possible, and second by sensitizing white Americans to the fate of nonwhites in developing countries across Asia.
Few regions in the country were more politically active than the San Francisco Bay Area. Campuses like the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State College became centers of protest, not only over the war but also about a wide spectrum of social ills in American society. Relatively large numbers of ethnic Chinese students attended these schools, and, inevitably, many of them, inflamed by the passion of the times, carried that passion back to their Chinatown neighborhoods, determined to address the discrimination, against American-born Chinese as well as new immigrants.
The results of their activism were mixed. For one thing, reentering Chinatown put some of these ABC crusaders at tremendous risk. Not only were they at loggerheads with the powerful capitalists who exploited new immigrants, but they also came into close daily contact with dangerous youth gangs. Volunteers were often threatened and harassed, and one social worker was murdered. Barry Fong-Torres, the idealistic, Berkeley-educated twenty-nine-year-old brother of journalist Ben Fong-Torres, had taken a one-year leave of absence from his job as a probation officer to become director of the Youth Service and Coordinating Center in San Francisco Chinatown. Despite his genuine efforts to reach out to troubled immigrant teenagers, the local gangs feared he was an undercover agent and resented his talking to leaders of rival groups. Eventually, Barry Fong-Torres was gunned down in his apartment, with a misspelled note left near his body: “PIG
INFOMERS DIE YONG.”
One unexpected and controversial legacy of ABC activism in Chinatown was the growth of the bilingual education system in the United States. During the 1960s, Chinese immigrant parents in San Francisco had complained that their children were unable to follow classroom instruction in English. The Chinese for Affirmative Action, founded in 1969 to fight racial discrimination against Chinese and other Asian Americans, helped ethnic Chinese students file a class action lawsuit against education officials to get them to address their language needs in the public schools. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which in 1974, in Lau v. Nichols, overruled a lower court decision, not on constitutional grounds but instead by finding, “It seems obvious that the Chinese-speaking minority receive fewer benefits than the English-speaking majority from respondents’ school system, which denies them a meaningful opportunity to participate in the educational program—all earmarks of the discrimination banned by [H.E.W] Regulations. In 1970 H.E.W. issued clarifying guidelines which include the following: ‘Where inability to speak and understand the English language excludes national origin-minority group children from effective participation in the educational program offered by a school district, the district must take affirmative steps to rectify the language deficiency in order to open its instructional program to these students.’ ” The Supreme Court concluded that it was a “mockery of public education” to demand that all children possess basic skills in English before availing themselves of a public education. This decision paved the way for historic language reforms within the American education system.
At San Francisco State College, ethnic Chinese students joined the Third World Liberation Front, which called for solidarity among Americans of Asian, African, Latin, and Native American descent. In 1968, demonstrators at San Francisco State refused to attend class and demanded an ethnic studies program that would include not only black studies but also Asian American studies. The strike lasted more than four months, the longest college strike in American history, leading not only to the establishment of the first ethnic studies program in the country but also to the beginnings of the Asian American political movement. Other strikes quickly followed at Berkeley and UCLA, which instituted similar departments.
While many activists were educated and middle-class, some came from the margins of Chinatown society. They too seized the opportunity to demand more, and the end of the 1960s bore witness to the rise of militant groups calling for actual revolution. In 1969, in the San Francisco Bay Area, American-born Chinese youths, many of them former street gang members, founded the Red Guard Party, in honor of the state-sanctioned vigilantes of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. (Three years earlier, as Mao struggled with other Communist leaders for power, he had asked millions of Chinese adolescents to continue his revolution as “Red Guards,” to destroy the last vestiges of feudal, bourgeois tradition in China.) As youths on the mainland studied The Quotations of Chairman Mao (also known as the “little red book”), so did ABC members of the American Red Guard Party wave copies of Mao’s book in the streets of Chinatown. Unlike their counterparts in China, however, the Red Guards in America remained a small fringe group. Forging alliances with the Black Panther Party in Oakland and the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State, the Red Guard Party went underground for weapons training and later disappeared.
Chinese American radicals who adopted socialism as their platform were often long on rhetoric and short on results. A few, however, did achieve tangible gains for the working-class community in Chinatown. In 1969, Chinese American youths in New York partnered with other Asian Americans to start the I Wor Kuen, named after the secret society that terrorized Westerners in China during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. I Wor Kuen provided free health services to the poor, administered tuberculosis tests in Chinatown on weekends, served meals to the elderly, and fought for the right to low-income housing. Their causes included joining forces with the “We Won’t Move” committee that prevented the Bell Telephone company from evicting thousands of tenants to construct a switching station, a cause that temporarily united ethnic Chinese and Italian residents in the area.
Much of America, however, did not associate the ethnic Chinese with radical activism. The images burned into the national consciousness were starkly black and white—the throngs of African American demonstrators, linking arms, singing “We Shall Overcome,” followed by Black Power advocates and white hippies in tie-dye and dread-locks laying siege to university administrators. Even less visible were the quiet upheavals shuddering through another group of Chinese Americans—those who had spent their youth in suburbs and small towns, far from the Chinatowns of major cities. During the 1960s, the emphasis would shift away from simply fitting in, and more toward openly questioning their place in society.
In her autobiographical novel Mona in the Promised Land (1997), Gish Jen opened a window onto Chinese American life in a privileged white suburb during the 1960s. Describing a prosperous Chinese American family, owners of a pancake house, who live in the fictional Scarshill, an affluent Jewish community, Jen shares memories of her hometown of Scarsdale, New York. It is 1968: “the blushing dawn of ethnic awareness has yet to pink up their inky suburban night,” and there are hardly any other Chinese in town, but in another ten years “there’ll be so many Orientals they will turn into Asians; a Japanese grocery will buy out that one deli too many.”
Jen’s work describes a world of contradictions, where youths talk about subverting society while also preparing to take their places within the East Coast establishment. When not obsessing over SATs, college admissions, and scholarships, Mona and her classmates experiment with ethnicity, acquiring or discarding new cultures like designer suits. Mona decides to be Jewish, her Jewish boyfriend decides to be black, an African American friend decides to be Buddhist. But her parents cannot shed their heritage as quickly as Mona can—and Mona’s private thoughts betray her impatience with them:
“You know, the Chinese revolution was a long time ago; you can get over it now. Okay, you had to hide in the garden and listen to bombs fall out of the sky, also you lost everything you had. And it’s true you don’t even know what happened to your sisters and brothers and parents, and only wish you could send them some money. But didn’t you make it? Aren’t you here in America, watching the sale ads, collecting your rain checks? You know what you are now?” she wants to say. “Now you’re smart shoppers” ... But in another way she understands it’s like asking Jews to get over the Holocaust, or like asking the blacks to get over slavery. Once you’ve lost your house and your family and your country, your devil-may-care is pretty much gone too.
In the midst of this suburban soul-searching, a few Chinese Americans would discover black culture, borrowing liberally from it to create new personae of rebellion. In the 1960s, composer Fred Ho found that jazz could voice his alienation from white society, his rejection of Chinese American bourgeois values, his kinship with the oppressed and downtrodden. The son of a professor of Chinese politics, Ho grew up in the wealthy white communities of Palo Alto, California, and Amherst, Massachusetts, where, unable to win acceptance from his Caucasian classmates, he turned to the Black Power movement instead, becoming an avid reader of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Fusing his fascination with both Chinese and African American cultures, Ho applied ancient Chinese instruments to jazz, thereby inventing a new strain of music. His works include Bound Feet, to expose the ancient abuse of Chinese women; Chi Lai! (literally, the Chinese term for “rise up!”), to celebrate the struggle of early Chinese laborers in the United States; Journey Beyond the West, a ballet based on the myth of the Chinese monkey king; and Chinaman’s Chance,a Chinese American opera documenting the epic story of the Chinese immigrant experience, the first to be written in jazz.
Grace Lee Boggs was another Chinese American who drew spiritual and political sustenance from the black community. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, Boggs, a highly educated, middle-class intellectual, refused to become a token member of the white elite. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Barnard and a doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, she turned to radical politics as a protégée of C. L. R. James, a renowned West Indian Marxist scholar. The first president of Ghana proposed marriage to her, but she decided instead to wed James Boggs, an African American automobile assembly-line worker and Black Power activist. Through the 1960s—and for decades afterwards—she and her husband served as tireless civil rights leaders in Detroit, organizing unions and reviving the inner-city black community. The FBI labeled her an “Afro-Chinese Marxist,” but Boggs resisted easy categorization: “Through sheer will, without waiting for social conditions to come around and without waiting to explore her identity, she turned her back on who she was and barged into new territories,” Louis Tsen wrote of Boggs. “She was a woman who barged into men’s territory; she was a Chinese who barged into black territory; she was an intellectual who barged into workers’ territory.”
Indeed, Boggs was an exceptional activist, even in an age filled with self-proclaimed rebels. Many Chinese Americans paid lip service to fighting the system in the 1960s, but few had the courage to dedicate their whole life to such a cause. Instead, like the majority of Americans, most preferred to accommodate to the status quo, to not challenge it, or, still better, to quietly distance themselves from social problems.
Perhaps nowhere did Chinese Americans tread more carefully than in the South, where a small population of ethnic Chinese had long kept low and quiet, avoiding open conflict with the white community. Not until the civil rights movement erupted in the 1950s were southern Chinese forced, at last, to confront the racial codes by which they had lived their lives.
By the 1960s, Chinese Americans in the South, primarily a community of grocers and merchants, had already made the remarkable transition from “colored” to “white,” leaping over the chasm of race and class to win acceptance as honorary Caucasians. Their social rise was made possible by both their financial status and their racially ambiguous position. Although the Chinese worked closely with black customers, they also gained entrance to white institutions, such as churches, schools, barbershops, and theaters. Their children excelled in white classrooms and mimicked white customs. Incredibly, the Chinese community had achieved integration in white society not by dint of federal intervention or organized protest, but through quiet networking with white friends and behind-the-scenes negotiations with local white leaders.
All this required a delicate balancing act, especially since blacks formed most of the customer base for Chinese stores. For decades, the Chinese community had survived in the South by appearing to be friendly to both black and white interests. However,. as the 1960s went on, this façade was difficult if not impossible to maintain, as Chinese grocers found themselves caught in the crossfire of a race war. Black civil rights leaders asked Chinese grocers for financial donations and for display space for political signs in shop windows. Meanwhile, white supremacist groups, in a supreme stroke of irony, insisted that the Chinese join their White Citizens’ Councils, to help them counter black activism. Aware of their precarious status in the South, the Chinese, as a group, made every attempt to remain politically neutral. Some tried to hedge their bets by hiding their White Citizens’ Council memberships from black customers, and their civil rights contributions from the white business elite. This was not an entirely successful strategy, and their unwillingness to take a stand finally angered the black community. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, Chinese stores in Memphis were singled out for violence during black riots.
“If you sided with the whites, the blacks would be all over you, but if you sided with the blacks, the whites could crucify you,” said Sam Chu Lin, a California radio and television broadcaster who grew up in Mississippi. No Chinese American, he recalled, dared to become a civil rights activist in his region: “I saw none on the picket lines—they would been either killed or socially ostracized.” The Chinese in the South, he said, were “skating on thin ice,” anxious to survive in a society where even the smallest transgression of the racial code could be met with violent retaliation. Once, while he was working as a radio disc jockey in Mississippi during the 1960s, two young white women came into the station looking for him, completely unaware that the voice they admired was not the voice of a white man. “They were groupies who wanted to make moon-eyes at the deejay,” Lin remembered. “And I told them, ‘I’m just cleaning up the station—the guy’s busy right now.’ The Chinese knew what happened to blacks who dated white girls. And Sam Chu Lin wasn’t going to take any chances.”
An undertone of bitterness can be detected in many interviews of American-born Chinese who grew up in the South during this era. Like the Jewish community in the region, the Chinese had successfully adopted white culture, yet they could not earn full acceptance by the white elite, not even as honorary Caucasians. Nor did they feel entirely comfortable among their own people, especially the gossipy, tight-knit social network of their parents. “I didn’t go to the Chinese dances,” one American-born Chinese woman told sociologist James Loewen. “My parents tried to push us to go, and we resented it. I always tore up the invitations before Dad saw them.” In addition, they expressed disgust for the Jim Crow laws that humiliated the black community. When they came of age, many ABCs protested not with their mouths, but with their feet. Gradually, the South witnessed an exodus of the American-born Chinese, who left the small towns of their childhood for the cities of the North and West.
Such was the decision of Sam Sue, son of an immigrant Chinese grocer in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His father had worked seven days a week, every night until ten o’clock, providing blacks with essential social services. His store was not only a warehouse and a home but also an informal bank and accounting firm. Speaking broken English in a black dialect, his father would extend black sharecroppers the credit denied them by white institutions. The conditions under which local black farmers labored for whites landowners resembled the Dark Ages, and the primitive cabins they rented from whites had no running water or electricity. The blacks bought from Sue’s father kerosene for lamps and Clorox to purify drinking water. Sam Sue, who grew up in the store, did not recognize his own poverty until years later. “It was tenement-like conditions, though we didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t even know how poor we were until I left. Everyone slept in one big room. There was a kitchen in the back. We used to use the place to store goods too, so there would be boxes all around. If you went into the living room, you’d be sitting on a box of laundry detergent.”
Worst of all was the vague sense of being a second-class citizen, yet having an unspoken, tentative membership in the first class. “As a kid, I remember going to the theatre and not really knowing where I was supposed to sit,” Sam Sue told an interviewer. “Blacks were segregated then. Colored people had to sit upstairs, and white people sat downstairs. I didn’t know where I was supposed to sit, so I sat in the white section, and nobody said anything. So I always had to confront those problems growing up. So these experiences were very painful.”
Sam Sue eventually became a lawyer in New York City, but his father remained in Mississippi after retiring, despite efforts by the family to get him to leave. “It is all he knows,” Sue said. His father was “attached to the area—not that he has affection for it, only that he is used to it—he feels it is home.”
One group remained relatively untouched by the chaotic 1960s—the community of scholars who had migrated to the United States to study, teach, or conduct research. While American-born Chinese youths talked revolution, these foreign-born immigrants had already witnessed one, or escaped its effects. Ensconced at universities, research laboratories, or corporations, often high tech, they had a mindset different from the rest of Chinese America. As creative artists and intellectuals, they defined themselves more by ideas than ethnicity or region, belonging to international communities that recognized no borders. Many, especially those who came from lives of education and privilege, believed they could adapt to life anywhere, as long as they had their work to sustain them.
Their interviews fairly glow with confidence. I. M. Pei, the world-famous architect and son of a Shanghai banking magnate, recalled a childhood filled with servants, summer vacations in Suzhou, and private schools. “I had the impression that anything I wanted, I could get,” he said. An Wang, a self-made computer mogul and son of a teacher in China, felt optimistic about his future prospects when he arrived in America at the age of twenty-five to study at Harvard. “I had heard that there was discrimination against Chinese in the United States, but I came here with no insecurities about what I might try to do.” For a young man who had spent his formative years in the international city of Shanghai, the United States did not seem at all like a foreign country: “Frankly the United States seemed a lot like China to me.” Perhaps most importantly, as a doctoral student in applied physics, he understood the lingua franca of his field: “Science is the same the world over—a language I could speak.”
What this group had lost in China they quickly found—or rebuilt—in the United States. Success came rapidly for them, and some would emerge as world celebrities by the 1960s. I. M. Pei designed many of the most important structures of the twentieth century. An Wang, who started Wang Laboratories in 1951 with $600, took his company public in 1967 in one of the largest initial public offerings in history, turning him into a billionaire and one of the richest men in the world. Chin Yang Lee, born in Hunan, China, and educated at Yale, wrote The Flower Drum Song,which achieved instant best-seller status upon its publication in 1957, was turned into a Broadway musical in 1958 by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and then into a film musical in 1961. In 1957 Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-ning Yang became the first Chinese American Nobel laureates39 after their research on the decay of the subatomic K-meson shattered a universally accepted “inviolate” law of physics, the principle of the conservation of parity.40
Other stranded scholars were not household names, but their colleagues revered them as giants. In mathematics, Shing-Shen Chern developed differential geometry theories that would later earn him the National Medal of Science, and Chia-Chiao Lin, a theoretical astrophysicist, created a famous density wave theory to explain the spiral structure of galaxies. In engineering, Tung-Yen Lin, a professor at Berkeley and the founder of T. Y. Lin International, became one of the greatest authorities on bridges and pre-stressed concrete.† In medicine, Min-Chueh Chang, a Cambridge-educated scientist at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, co-invented the birth control pill and successfully performed in-vitro fertilization with rabbit ova, a process that later helped make possible the first “test tube babies.”
These pioneers would serve as the academic role models for a new wave of Chinese intellectuals who began arriving in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. They too would come from upper-echelon families, seeking graduate degrees and fortunes in America. But unlike the generation of scholars who preceded them, they would not come directly from mainland China. Instead they would migrate from the island of Taiwan—the last hope and refuge of the exiled Nationalist regime.