CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In 1976, Chairman Mao Zedong suffered a massive heart attack and lay paralyzed for months. His death on September 9, 1976, ended a life of almost mythic proportions. Born a humble peasant, he rose to stratospheric heights as the unchallenged leader of the most populous nation on earth. And while the nation he led depicted itself as a classless society, Mao reigned over China like a modern emperor.
Mao’s state funeral, organized by the Communist Party leadership, was a lavish affair befitting an emperor. Eight full days were devoted to public mourning, and more than a million people paid their respects to Mao’s body, enshrined in a crystal sarcophagus in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where he was laid to rest in a giant mausoleum under the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Publicly, the nation expressed profound grief, but privately many Chinese felt a deep sense of relief. In her memoir Wild Swans, Jung Chang wrote that the moment she learned of Mao’s death, “the news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance.”
Although Mao had been virtually deified as a savior of the Chinese people, the reality was that under his leadership China had experienced one of its worst eras, characterized by starvation and repression. Millions died during the famine caused by the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s 1958 program for the forced, rapid industrialization of China. Then, during the Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976, Mao promised to free China from the “four olds”: old habits, old customs, old ideas, and old creeds. Instead, the Red Guards, his juvenile shock troops, destroyed much of China’s priceless heritage, ransacking libraries and museums, desecrating Buddhist temples, burning irreplaceable books, archives, and historical relics. The Cultural Revolution was in essence a form of cultural genocide. By the time Mao passed away, Chinese agriculture, industry, and intellectual life were in shambles. Perhaps even more culturally destructive, an entire generation had been cheated of a serious education during a time when technical training was the basis of much society-building throughout the world. China’s first census, conducted in 1982, reported a sobering finding: half its people were either partly or completely illiterate.
Mao’s death offered his successor, Deng Xiaoping, the opportunity to reverse the damage. During the 1980s, under Deng, China began to develop a nonideological, capitalist economy. Deng abolished the people’s communes in the countryside and permitted farmers to keep their profits after state taxes. A practical man, Deng valued expertise over ideology: “I don’t care whether the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice,” he once said. Entrepreneurial activity began to flourish, providing a much-needed spur to industry; the per capita gross domestic product doubled every decade. Waste and inefficiency in rural China soon gave way to increased productivity, and then to a broader-based prosperity than China had ever known. Many, including farmers, grew wealthy enough to build mansions, complete with satellite dishes. Some even bought their own airplanes. The nation’s readiness for a new economic path was illustrated by its enthusiastic embrace of one of Deng’s most popular slogans: “To get rich is glorious.”
Deng also opened China to the rest of the world. In 1979, the PRC reestablished diplomatic ties with the United States, inaugurating an era of amity between the two countries. The following year, a new American president, Ronald Reagan, seen by many as an aggressive cold warrior, was swept into office with a landslide victory; to the surprise of his critics, his administration worked to thaw relations between America and its two cold war rivals, the Soviet Union and China.
As the decade progressed, the Reagan and Deng administrations signed historic agreements to promote scientific, technological, and cultural exchanges between the two countries. Mainland Chinese students responded eagerly, knowing that an American education meant greater opportunity in the future not just in the West, but in China itself. A “study-abroad fever” soon convulsed the PRC. Chinese students began taking the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and actively sought contact with foreign scholars visiting their institutions.48
In the cold war years before 1979, most foreign Chinese students in the United States had come from Taiwan. The 1965 Immigration Act had established a quota of 20,000 for the Chinese, and the vast majority of those slots went to Taiwanese Chinese. After resuming diplomatic relations with the PRC, the American government doubled the immigration slots for the Chinese, giving both mainland China and Taiwan their own quotas of 20,000 each. Meanwhile, a separate quota of 600 was reserved for Hong Kong, which the U.S. government increased to 5,000 in 1987. These revisions meant that every year, more than 40,000 Chinese immigrants could establish permanent residency in the United States.
In addition, no limit was placed on the number of Chinese traveling to the United States as non-quota immigrants, such as those on student, diplomatic, or tourist visas. After settling in the United States, many of these non-quota émigrés adjusted their status, first becoming permanent residents, and later U.S. citizens. By the end of the 1980s, more than 80,000 PRC intellectuals had arrived in the United States—the largest immigrant wave of Chinese scholars in American history.
The Deng-Reagan pact ended three decades of isolation under the Mao regime. But as diplomacy lifted the Bamboo Curtain, the initial exchanges were shocking to visitors from both sides of the Pacific.
Before Deng, few Chinese Americans knew what was really happening in their ancestral homeland. The occasional rare visitor saw only a sanitized picture of China through tours carefully arranged by the government. During the 1970s, when a few prominent Chinese Americans were allowed to visit the mainland, PRC authorities quickly released many scholars from rehabilitation camps and prisons in order to project a more favorable image of China to the West. Often, all it took was a single appearance from a Chinese American to transform overnight the status of an individual or an entire family. In 1971, for instance, PRC officials immediately freed Deng Jiaxian, developer of the Chinese atomic and hydrogen bombs, from a “study camp” when Nobel laureate Yang Chen-ning asked to see his old friend. Furthermore, in 1973, when Yuan Jialiu, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, decided to tour the mainland, Chinese authorities frantically attempted to undo some of the Red Guard offenses against his family.49
But gradually, as the number of exchanges increased, uncensored stories of life under Mao emerged. Some former “stranded scholars” in the United States—the Chinese intellectuals who chose to remain in America after the 1949 revolution—had an opportunity to learn what had become of former classmates who had chosen to return to China during the civil war. Computer mogul An Wang remembered that roughly half the Chinese foreign students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had decided to move back to mainland China in the late 1940s. Decades later, he found that some had obtained powerful positions in the Communist hierarchy, while others had perished during the Cultural Revolution.
Linda Yang, another stranded scholar, met a few of her former American-trained classmates at her fortieth college reunion at St. John’s University in Shanghai. Some told her, with downcast eyes, about the persecution their families had endured, and how their children were deprived of the opportunity to attend school. She would never forget the “regret in their eyes,” the searing knowledge that, by returning to China during the Mao years, they had “not only sabotaged their own future, but the future of their children and grandchildren.”
While many Chinese Americans were reeling from the shock of these revelations, new immigrants from the PRC would be equally astounded by what they found in the United States. Some had incorrectly assumed that America was a vast utopia. During the 1930s, Let Keung Mui’s family in south China had gone hungry during the Japanese invasion: “All we ate was wild plants and grass roots.” Things were not much better under the Communists. People fought each other for food, and his favorite daughter committed suicide by taking poison. He was thrilled when, in 1979, a brother in New York secured permission for him to migrate to America. “The U.S. was a place I had dreamt of for a long time,” he recalled. “People had said, ‘America is a place with gold floors, diamond windows, tall buildings, and seven-foot-tall whites with red moustaches.’ ”
The reality was very different. When Let Keung Mui and his family flew to New York, what he found was hardly an American nirvana: “I felt that everything that my people said about how good the U.S. was, was not true. I felt like I had gone to the wrong place.” His brother found him housing in Chinatown, a dilapidated apartment with a crumbling ceiling and only three windows. Living there was a cold and alienating experience. Every resident shoveled his own snow, and he felt “like a stranger” when his neighbors locked their doors at night.
His nephew gave him a job in his garment factory, and there Let Keung Mui labored long hours, past 9 P.M. most nights and often as late as midnight, six days a week. The work was difficult, the pay low, and he received no preferential treatment from his nephew or brother merely because he was family. “I was so mad that I started not to rely on them and started looking for jobs on my own,” he said later. Soon he landed a position as a restaurant chef at a much higher salary, then served as a machine operator in a noodle factory. After toiling in the factory for five years, six days a week, twelve hours a day, he saved enough money to purchase a house in Queens, New York. But his disappointment persisted. He later told an interviewer that he hoped his children would not lead lives like his, or endure what he had suffered in his life.
Other Chinese saw a much different side to America. In 1980, when Liu Zongren traveled to Illinois to study at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University—one of a handful of visiting scholars sponsored by the PRC Ministry of Education to study abroad for two years, at government expense—he was spared the need to work for a living. Still, he was perturbed by the excessive waste and extravagant materialism in the United States. Upset to find six lights in his guest room in Evanston (“Why would one person need so many lights?” he wondered), he asked his host to be more vigilant about conserving electricity. Also, the sight of an American using a metal detector along the shores of Lake Michigan astounded him. Upon learning that the detector cost $100, he exclaimed, “A hundred dollars to buy a machine to look for pennies! How strange these Americans are.”
Despite or because of the abundance in his host country, Liu did not feel he could ever become an American. In 1982, shortly before returning to the PRC, Liu saw E. T., Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film about an extraterrestrial who befriends a little boy while trapped on earth. “I liked E. T.for a reason that most American kids might not think of: E.T. wanted to go home,” he later wrote. Many of his friends in the United States were like E.T.’s friends: “They had helped me in every way they could to understand American life. But few of them really understood me or knew why I couldn’t feel comfortable among Americans, why I preferred to live a poorer or simpler life in China.”
The great disparity in experiences among newcomers from the People’s Republic of China owed much to a growing American social inequality. During the 1980s, steep cuts in the income tax rates paid by the highest earners increased the gap between the haves and have-nots. It was a decade of intense class envy in America, with extremes in wealth and poverty not seen since the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. It was also a time when a culture of greed ruled Wall Street. Moguls such as Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky made billions of dollars by acquiring some companies and merging others, often relying on illegal tactics and insider trading, with little regard for the general public or the consequences to workers who would lose their jobs as a result of their activities. During the Reagan years, the wealthiest one percent of Americans almost doubled their share of the national income, and the four hundred richest Americans almost tripled their financial worth. The decade also saw the rise of a new class of young urban professionals, known as “yuppies,” their lifestyles marked by the conspicuous and competitive consumption of luxuries, usually purchased on credit.
Simultaneously, a host of new problems began to plague the inner cities and small towns of America, exacerbated by deep cuts in federal spending on social programs. As financiers reaped huge profits by manipulating paper rather than building industries, thousands of middle-class Americans were thrown out of work. Decaying urban neighborhoods became fertile ground for a highly addictive narcotic—crack cocaine. Cutbacks in spending for public health may have seriously delayed the recognition of a deadly new epidemic, AIDS.50 This decade of economic expansion, now remembered as an era of high living, saw increases in the size of the homeless population, and new despair within the minority underclass.
The 1980s were also a time when the national debt soared, turning America from the world’s greatest creditor into the world’s greatest borrower. Much of the country’s wealth flowed to foreign investors in Germany and Japan. During the previous decade, the oil crisis had boosted the Japanese automobile industry, which, unlike American manufacturers, offered small, fuel-efficient, reliable cars. The American automobile industry had used its monopoly and its influence with the government to resist changes in the safety, performance, and durability of its products. As American consumers recognized that Japanese-made cars were safer, more serviceable, and more fuel-efficient, the American auto industry went into recession, widening the country’s trade deficit with Japan.
Even as Sino-American relations thawed, anti-Asian hostility smoldered in certain regions of the United States, for reasons that had nothing to do with China. The Japanese—or Asians in general—were widely perceived to be the source of America’s troubles, foreign competitors who stole American jobs by working cheaply. “Many of Detroit’s corporate heads, politicians, and leaders are blaming the Japanese for America’s economic woes,” said Helen Zia, a Princeton-educated Chinese American writer who had been working in auto factories to build Asian American political consciousness on a grassroots level. ”In Detroit, the bumper stickers say it all,” she observed. ”Honda, Toyota, Pearl Harbor“ was one. ”Unemployment—Made in Japan” was another. The reality, of course, was that the rejection of American-made cars was related to management failures in planning and design, not to cheap Asian labor. It was not that Japanese workers worked for less, but that Japanese cars worked better.
In June 1982 in Detroit, Vincent Chin, the adopted son of a Chinese laundry owner, was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two disgruntled auto workers who mistook him for Japanese. Chin, a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese American engineering student about to be married, had gone to a topless bar with three friends to enjoy that quintessential American prenuptial activity, the bachelor party. At the bar, two Caucasian auto workers—Ronald Ebens and his step-son Michael Nitz, who had been laid off from his job—began to taunt them. They called Chin a “Jap” and yelled, “It’s because of you motherfuckers that we’re out of work!” Insults soon led to blows, and when the manager threw them out, Ebens and Nitz grabbed a baseball bat from the trunk of their car and chased Chin through the streets. Twenty minutes later, they seized him in front of a McDonald’s restaurant. Nitz held back Chin’s arms while Ebens shattered his skull. Expecting to attend his wedding, Chin’s friends and relatives came to his funeral instead.
Charged with second-degree murder, Ebens and Nitz entered into a plea bargain and pled guilty to manslaughter. Charles Kaufman, a Wayne County circuit judge, apparently unwilling to confront the xenophobia in that part of the country, placed the pair on probation for three years and fined them $3,750 each. Neither spent a single night in jail. “What kind of law is this? What kind of justice?” cried Lily Chin, mother of the victim. “This happened because my son is Chinese. If two Chinese killed a white person, they must go to jail, maybe for their whole lives ... something is wrong with this country.” Others echoed her outrage: “Three thousand dollars can’t even buy a good used car these days,” one Chinese American protested, “and this was the price of a life.”
Infuriated Chinese American activists organized the Justice for Vincent Chin Committee, which prompted an investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The federal government indicted Ebens on charges of committing a racially motivated crime. In a new trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but an appellate court overturned the conviction. Lily Chin, Vincent’s mother, felt betrayed by the justice system. “I don’t understand how this could happen in America,” she cried. “My husband fought for this country. We always paid our taxes and worked hard ... Before I really loved America, but now this has made me very angry.” Disillusioned, she moved back to China to live there permanently.
The only positive outcome was that this tragedy reminded the Chinese American community—immigrant and ABC alike—of the need to organize politically. Suddenly people realized that as long as they looked Asian, they could all be vulnerable to assault. The murder of Vincent Chin galvanized the ethnic Chinese community. “My blood boiled when I first learned that Vincent Chin was deliberately attacked and murdered as an act of racial hatred,” said Harold Fong of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance at a rally in San Francisco. George Wong pointed out, “The killing of Vincent Chin happened in 1982, not 1882, the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act!” The Chin murder spawned demonstrations, films, and a new generation of Chinese American political activists. It launched the careers of several prominent human rights leaders in the Chinese American community, among them Helen Zia, author of Asian American Dreams, and Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles.
The tremendous publicity generated by the Vincent Chin murder did not mean that the United States had actually become more dangerous for Chinese Americans. A century earlier, when the Exclusion Act precipitated anti-Chinese riots, dozens were murdered with virtually no media scrutiny whatsoever, the victims presented more as clumps of statistics than as individuals whose lives were snuffed out. But by the 1980s, the Chinese American community had come to expect more from the United States, and had learned to broadly disseminate information about injustices suffered by their people. Seven years after the death of Vincent Chin, activists drew on the political lessons learned from his tragedy when another Chinese person became a fatal victim of a hate crime.
Jim Loo (also known as Ming-Hai Loo) was a twenty-four-year-old immigrant from China, working in a restaurant to save enough money for college. In 1989, Loo and several Vietnamese friends were playing pool in a Raleigh, North Carolina, billiards hall when two whites started to push them around. Robert Piche and his brother Lloyd Piche called them “chinks” and “gooks,” and even blamed them for American deaths in Vietnam. “I don’t like you because you’re Vietnamese,” Lloyd Piche told them. “Our brothers went over to Vietnam, and they never came back.” He also threatened, “I’m gonna finish you tonight.” The manager ordered the two brothers to leave the premises, but they waited outside, ambushing Loo and the others as they walked out. Robert Piche struck Loo in the back of the head with a gun, causing him to collapse onto a broken beer bottle. The glass forced a bone fragment through his brain, killing him.
Initially, Lloyd Piche was found guilty of only two misdemeanors—simple assault and disorderly conduct—and his brother Robert was sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison by a state court for second-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon. But the Chinese American community, observing the parallels between the Jim Loo and Vincent Chin cases, lobbied for federal intervention. After the U.S. government stepped in with a federal trial, Lloyd Piche was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $28,000 in reparations to Loo’s family.
Not all the murders of Chinese Americans during the 1980s were committed by whites. As diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the PRC steadily improved, the KMT appeared obsessed with the idea of controlling Taiwanese intellectuals in the United States. There was, for instance, the mysterious death of a Carnegie Mellon professor, Chen Wencheng, when he returned to his native Taiwan in 1981. Shortly after being interrogated by authorities about attending certain political meetings during his student days in the United States, Chen fell to his death from the window of his Taiwan hotel room. Though exactly what occurred will probably never be determined, many Chinese Americans believe the KMT gave Chen some help through the window.
Three years later, another death shook the Taiwanese community in America. In 1984, Wang Xiling, head of KMT military intelligence, dispatched members of the island’s criminal “Bamboo” gang to Daly City, California, where they assassinated Henry Liu in his home. Liu had written an unauthorized biography of Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek and at that time president of the Chinese Nationalist government on Taiwan. Though the story of Liu’s activities before his murder was far more complicated than it appeared on the surface (he was apparently a triple agent between the United States, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China), the fact that the KMT could operate with such impunity in the United States sent a chill through both the Chinese American community and the intelligentsia in Taiwan.
Knowing that even American borders might not protect them from retaliation caused many Chinese to focus their energies on economic achievement rather than politics. Most grew up in families that had fled mainland China to either Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the United States, and had witnessed firsthand the risks of being caught on the losing side of a political struggle. Many of their parents had urged them since childhood to seek their fortune in a lucrative field that required neither English-language skills nor personal connections in a foreign country. One obvious career path ran through the newly developing high-tech industries.
The 1980s spawned a revolution in personal computers, and the Chinese in the United States would play their part right from the beginning. In 1980, David Lam, a Hong Kong immigrant with a doctorate from MIT, founded Lam Research, which produced the first completely automated plasma etcher for chip wafer processing. The firm later grew into a global giant in the semiconductor field. In 1987, David Wang, a Taiwanese immigrant with a Berkeley Ph.D. in material sciences, co-invented the Precision 5000 multiple chamber single-wafer system, which combined two of the most complex steps in chip-making into a single process, thereby transforming the manufacture of integrated circuits.
Taiwanese immigrants John Tu and David Sun became billionaires with memory modules, Pehong Chen with software. In the 1980s, Charles Wang, son of a supreme court justice from Shanghai, kept a small company, Computer Associates International, alive by juggling credit cards and bartering computer services in Manhattan. Within two decades, his company grew into the second largest independent software maker in the world, an empire that spans two dozen countries on five continents.
The 1980s would bear witness to the growth of a nouveau riche class of Chinese immigrants. As the People’s Republic gained political support from the United States, many better-situated residents of Taiwan and Hong Kong, fearing that the PRC might soon take over Taiwan and Hong Kong, quietly searched for new sanctuaries. Taiwanese and Hong Kong capital began to flow to American cities. While many Chinese businessmen moved their families into exclusive white neighborhoods in the United States, others created their own communities, mostly in California. As they invested in real estate, banks, restaurants, malls, and Chinese-language newspapers, they formed wealthy new ethnic enclaves that some would later call “suburban Chinatowns.” These communities, populated by people of diverse backgrounds, such as émigrés from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, are called “ethnoburbs” by sociologist Wei Li. Within these enclaves, many relied on their Chinese heritage to broker symbiotic business deals, such as matching Taiwanese or Hong Kong money with ethnic Chinese manpower from Southeast Asia. “Say I am Chinese, I come from Vietnam,” a journalist explained. “You are Chinese and you come from Taiwan or maybe Singapore, or maybe Hong Kong. I need money—I need you to support my business ... you have the money, but you don’t know how to run [this] business. So you check my credit and ask the other people ... Maybe you are partner or maybe I give you interest in six months. It works because we [are] all Chinese.”
One affluent enclave was Monterey Park, near Los Angeles, nicknamed the “Chinese Beverly Hills.” Toward the end of the twentieth century, Chinese constituted more than one-third of Monterey Park’s population and more than one-quarter in the nearby communities of Alhambra and San Marino. Before long this region of southern California, known as the San Gabriel Valley, would contain the largest suburban concentration of ethnic Chinese in the United States, surpassing the populations in the long-established Chinatowns of many major American cities.
So great were the number of new Chinese arrivals that some whites came to view them as part of a massive foreign invasion. “I feel like I’m in another country,” a white resident of Monterey Park complained to Timothy Fong, author of The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California. “I don’t feel at home anymore.” “I feel like a stranger in my own town,” another said. Cars flashed bumper stickers with messages like “Will the Last American to Leave Monterey Park Please Bring the Flag?” In 1986, a gas station in town posed the same question, along with a picture of two slanted eyes.
Anti-Chinese jokes began to surface: about senior citizens wearing pajamas in the streets, about reckless driving habits. “I Survived the Drive through Monterey Park,” one bumper sticker boasted. Monterey Park was dubbed the “Traffic Collision Capital of the World” and Atlantic Boulevard was “Suicide Boulevard,” causing residents to remark it should be illegal to be “DWC”—Driving While Chinese. But simmering below the taunts and snickers was hatred that often reflected envy of the openly displayed success of the new arrivals. When the local newspaper, the Monterey Park Progress, announced it would print a section in the Chinese language, vandals attacked Chinese-owned movie theaters, smashing windows and throwing paint on the marquees.
Hostility toward the newcomers in Monterey Park came not only from Caucasian residents but from many local Chinese Americans as well. Previously, up to the early 1970s, the Chinese in Monterey Park were mainly young professionals, usually salaried engineers, respectable, upper-middle-class Chinese Americans with quiet, conservative lifestyles. Like their white neighbors, they were scarcely prepared for the arrival of fast-talking, aggressive businessmen from Hong Kong and Taiwan, who turned the streets of the city into a crass showcase for their expensive jewelry, designer suits, and custom-made mansions. The newcomers grated on the nerves of those who could not afford such ostentation, or who believed that flaunting wealth was unspeakably vulgar. “First it was the real estate people, and then trading companies, heavy investors, people who came with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash,” Wesley Ru recalled. “Their first stop would be the Mercedes dealer, and the second stop would be the real estate broker.”
Another way the nouveau riche Chinese disturbed their neighbors was their children’s success in school classrooms. In an increasingly class-conscious America, Chinese academic ability would create another source of anxiety.
By the 1980s, ethnic Chinese children no longer had to struggle for educational opportunities. Generations of civil rights activists had ended the system of segregated schools, and federally funded public schools and public libraries made education more accessible to even the most impoverished Chinese immigrant families. At the same time, America saw the rise of a Chinese professional class, who comprised not only the descendants of earlier Chinese Americans but also new émigrés with education and status. The children of these groups grew up in privileged settings such as white suburbs or university towns. Their parents were professors, scientists, engineers, or doctors, not laundry or restaurant workers who needed their children to help out with the family business. These parents spared no expense in sending them to the best schools, where they could devote their full energy to academic achievement.
Large numbers of Chinese American students were now attending elite private preparatory schools, such as Phillips Exeter, Groton, and Deerfield, or top academic programs in competitive public programs, like the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School in New York, or Lowell High School in San Francisco—all of which served as fast-track conduits to the best universities in America. Many spent their summers in gifted children’s programs run by universities like Stanford and Johns Hopkins. By the 1980s, they were routinely entering prestigious Ivy League schools and winning national competitions, like the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (now called the Intel Science Talent Search), in disproportionate numbers.
The Chinese immigrant community soon considered excellence in school not as a lofty standard, but as a minimum expectation. Franklin Ng, a professor of anthropology at California State University, revealed the intensity of parental ambition for their children when he published an inside joke circulating in the Taiwanese American immigrant community:
HOW TO BE A PERFECT TAIWANESE KID (from the first generational perspective)
Score 1600 on the SAT.
Play the violin or piano on the level of a concert performer.
Apply to and be accepted by 27 colleges.
Have three hobbies: studying, studying, and studying.
Go to a prestigious Ivy League university and win enough scholarships to pay for it.
Love classical music and detest talking on the phone.
Become a Westinghouse, Presidential, and eventually Rhodes scholar.
Aspire to be a brain surgeon.
Marry a Taiwanese-American doctor and have perfect, successful children (grandkids for ahma and ahba!)
Love to hear stories about your parents’ childhood ... especially the one about walking seven miles to school without shoes.
HOW TO BE A PERFECT TAIWANESE PARENT (from the second generational perspective)
Don’t “ai-yoh” loudly at your kid’s dress habits.
Don’t blatantly hint about the merits of Hah-phoo (Harvard), Yale-uh (Yale), Stan-phoo (Stanford), and Emeh-I-tee (MIT).
Don’t reveal all the intimate details of your kid’s life to the entire Taiwanese community ...
Don’t give your child a bowl haircut or your daughter two acres of bangs ...
By the 1980s, the media began to report the educational triumphs of ABCs, profiling those who won National Merit Scholarships and the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. In 1982, Newsweek ran a favorable article under the headline “Model Minority.” Sociologist William Peterson had invented the term in 1966 to describe Japanese Americans, but the media soon borrowed the phrase to describe other Asian Americans, including the Chinese. Other stories soon appeared in the popular press to celebrate Chinese achievement. In 1986, both the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and the NBC Nightly News praised the academic prominence of the Chinese and Asian American community. “Why are Asian Americans doing so exceptionally well?” Mike Wallace of CBS’s 60 Minutes asked in 1987. “They must be doing something right. Let’s bottle it.”
Chinese American enrollment at top universities soared. MIT soon gained the nickname of “Made in Taiwan,” UCLA of “University of Caucasians Lost in Asians,” UCI (the University of California at Irvine) of “University of Chinese Immigrants.” In certain academic departments where ethnic Chinese students were concentrated (such as math, science, and engineering), the elevators were called the “Orient Express.” Engineering became synonymous with Chinese. At Stanford, when a professor scolded a Caucasian engineering student for not scoring higher on his tests, the student responded, “What do you think I am, Chinese?” Rumor had it that certain white engineering majors at Berkeley would drop a class if they counted too many heads of glossy black hair in the auditorium. Some ABCs even started wearing buttons on campus announcing, “I am NOT a Chinese American electrical engineer.”
Even the ABCs themselves were intimidated, and often overwhelmed, by the large numbers of Chinese American students on college campuses. Phoebe Eng, the daughter of a Taiwanese American and an American-born Chinese of Cantonese heritage, grew up in Westbury, a suburb near New York. When she attended college in California, she was shocked: “I had never been around so many Asian faces, so much black hair,” she wrote in her book Warrior Lessons. “Berkeley seemed like China to me. It took me a full year to learn how to distinguish one Asian face from another.”
If Chinese achievement provoked awe in some quarters, it incited fear in others. Anti-Chinese hate graffiti suddenly appeared on college campuses: “Stop the Yellow Hordes”; “Stop the Chinese before they flunk you out”; “Chink, Chink, Cheating Chink!” And by the 1980s, some ABCs began to feel victimized by their own success. Some complained of institutional racism, insisting that the harder they studied, the higher the bar was raised to block their admission to top universities. Many alleged that university officials at elite schools, concerned by the growing presence of Asian Americans on campus, intentionally sought to reduce their numbers through racial discrimination.
In 1983, the East Coast Asian Student Union, a coalition of Asian American student organizations at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, analyzed the admissions data at twenty-five universities and concluded that an “alarming barrier” had been erected to prevent ethnic Asian students from “seeking higher education and better lives.” This inspired other studies, and from 1983 through the rest of the decade, students and administrators alike would search for evidence of racial bias. At Princeton, it was found, the admission rate for Asian Americans was only 14 percent, compared to 17 percent for white applicants and 48 percent for children of alumni. At Brown, research revealed that the admit rate for Asians had plummeted from 44 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 1987. At Stanford, Asians had filled out as many as one-third of the applications, but secured less than one-tenth of the enrollment. At Harvard, critics asserted that Asian Americans had the lowest rate of admissions for any racial group, even though the number of Asian applicants kept rising, and the applicants were “actually more qualified than anybody else.” After scrutinizing Harvard’s 1982 statistics, an outside team even concluded that, “in order to be offered admission, Asian Americans had to score an average of 112 points higher on the SAT than the Caucasians who were admitted.”
Even the state schools were turning away qualified Chinese American applicants. Traditionally, the best students in California had viewed Berkeley and other UC schools as safety nets in case they were rejected by more prestigious universities such as Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, and the Ivy League schools. For years, the only requirement for admission to Berkeley or UCLA was graduation within the top 12.5 percent of one’s high school class. Given the high concentration of Chinese and other Asian Americans on the West Coast, their numbers soared within the University of California system. Between 1966 and 1980, for example, the percentage of Asian American undergraduates at Berkeley had quadrupled from about 5 percent to 20 percent of the students. According to the New York Times in 1981, Berkeley officials fully expected 40 percent of the entering freshman class to be Asian American by 1990. But suddenly, in the mid-1980s, the pattern reversed and the numbers abruptly dropped.
In 1984, Ling-chi Wang, an ethnic studies professor at Berkeley and veteran activist, noticed that the number of Asian American enrollments fell 21 percent within a single year. Something, he believed, was terribly wrong. “As soon as the percentages of Asian students began reaching double digits at some universities, suddenly a red light went on,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t want to say there’s a conspiracy but university officials see the prevalence of Asians as a problem, and they have begun to look for ways to slow down the Asian American admissions. Are they scared of Berkeley’s becoming an Asian university? They’re shaking in their socks.”
A volunteer task force in the San Francisco Bay Area—including activists, judges, and professors of Chinese descent—quickly formed in 1984 to investigate the situation. They were shocked to discover that Berkeley had turned away students with perfect GPAs while admitting others who had not even submitted their grades or test scores. Reporting on the Berkeley controversy, the media began to draw parallels between the declining admission rates for Asian Americans and the stringent racial quotas that Jewish students had faced at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale between the 1920s and 1940s.
The media started to interview Chinese Americans who believed they had been unfairly treated by Berkeley. In 1987, Berkeley rejected Yat-Pang Au, the son of Hong Kong émigrés and a star student at Gunderson High School in San Jose, California. A straight-A student, Au had been the valedictorian of his class, won prizes for ten extracurricular activities, earned letters in cross-country and track, served as a justice on the school’s Supreme Court, and even operated a Junior Achievement company. When Au received the rejection letter in the mail, he read it over and over, “because I thought maybe I had misunderstood or that it wasn’t addressed to me,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I had my mind and heart set on Berkeley. I’d thought about Berkeley for years; I’d worked hard in high school to get into Berkeley. I couldn’t believe I’d been turned down.”
Stunned to learn that ten other students with lower grades and test scores had been admitted, Au went to the press and publicly complained about the situation. When the Bay Area media reported the story, the Au family’s house was vandalized, and Au’s terrified mother ended up buying a gun and taking shooting lessons. For two years, Au attended De Anza, a local community college, before finally enrolling at Berkeley.
In 1989, NBC Nightly News interviewed Hong Kim, an A student of Taiwanese heritage. He had been rejected by Berkeley, while two of his black friends with lower grades were accepted. “I don’t hold it against them, they’re my friends,” he told NBC. “I want to tell them I still love them, but ... I think I’m more qualified.”
The public furor in the Chinese American community triggered federal investigations and policy changes. In the wake of the controversy, the Justice and Education departments began to probe allegations that Chinese and other Asian American applicants were victims of racism. Federal officials eventually exonerated Harvard and Berkeley but found UCLA guilty of bias.51
The discrimination even extended to the high school level. In 1983, prestigious Lowell High School in San Francisco adopted different admissions standards for different ethnic groups, with the harshest ones reserved for Chinese Americans. To settle a lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the San Francisco school district agreed to increase the number of black and Hispanic students in the city’s top public schools. The settlement mandated that at least four ethnic groups had to be represented at each school and that no more than 40 to 45 percent of the enrollment could be dominated by one single ethnicity. To enforce this racial cap, Lowell required Chinese American applicants to outperform Caucasians and all other ethnic groups in order to be accepted. The minimum test score for admission to Lowell was 62 (originally 66) for ethnic Chinese applicants, 59 for Caucasians, 58 for other Asian Americans, and 56 for Hispanics and African Americans.52
Some activists depicted the fight over racial quota systems as a struggle for limited slots between Asian Americans and other minority groups, such as blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. But in reality, asserted Henry Der, head of Chinese for Affirmative Action, “Asian applicants are competing with white applicants.” The “legacy” programs for children of Ivy League alumni, the “old-boy networks” that maintained places in elite universities for the children of the East Coast establishment, Der said, were a form of affirmative action for Caucasians. Noting that two-thirds of all Asian Americans opposed the system of affirmative action, Der told A magazine, “Most Asian immigrant families would ask for meritocratic standards. These families don’t understand that selection has never been based on meritocratic standards.”