The Chinese in America (38 page)

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.

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.
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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:

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:

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 sympa
thy. “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.”