The Chinese in America (43 page)

With extraordinary resolve, Tien’s father rebuilt his life as well as his fortune, eventually becoming the CEO of a major bank and Shanghai commissioner of commerce. Their world became lavish once again, complete with servants and chauffeured cars: “We lived like the Rockefellers!” But then, once again, it all disappeared: the 1949 revolution wiped out their charmed existence, and the family, once again refugees, escaped from Shanghai to Taiwan with little more than the clothes on their backs.

“My father couldn’t cope with the loss,” Tien later told a
San Francisco Focus
reporter. “It was the second time he had lost everything.” When Tien first arrived in Taiwan at age fourteen, his entire family—twelve people—had to squeeze into one tiny room. “There wasn’t even room for all of us to sleep at the same time,” he recalled. “We had to take turns.”

One evening, Tien awoke to find his father sitting in the room, staring into the darkness. “Go to sleep,” Chang-Lin told him. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll find jobs.” Bitterly, his father retorted, “I don’t care whether my children even have nothing to eat. What I worry about is I cannot send my children to get an education.” Young Tien never forgot those words.

Shattered and depressed by the memories of his ruined career, Tien’s father later died of a heart attack, at the relatively young age of fifty-four. To help support the family, Chang-Lin worked odd jobs in high school and college. After graduating from National Taiwan University, he left nothing to chance and applied to 240 schools in the United States. The University of Louisville in Kentucky granted him a full scholarship, and in 1956 he borrowed money to pay for an inexpensive plane ticket to Seattle, then boarded a Greyhound bus for the seventy-two-hour ride to Louisville.

In the American South, Tien caught his first whiff of America’s obsession with race. The moment he stepped off the bus, he saw signs marking bathroom doors and water fountains “Whites Only” or “Colored.” He felt uncertain about his category, but local whites told him to use the white facilities, explaining that he was a guest of the United States. Tien was privately repulsed by the system and agonized over its injustice. Observing that all local buses were segregated by race, with whites sitting in front and blacks in back, he chose to walk whenever possible instead of taking public transportation.

Later he found that racism permeated not just street life, but academia as well. At the University of Louisville, one of his professors repeatedly called him “Chinaman” (at first, Tien recalls, “I was so ignorant, I thought it was a term of endearment”). Eventually he decided to put an end to these insults. “For two nights I could not sleep, staying awake and thinking about what I should do ... As a refugee, I had insecure status; I owed my livelihood to his employment. He could end my position and I might have to go back to Taiwan. I was very afraid.” Finally Tien worked up the nerve to tell the professor never to call him “Chinaman” again. The confrontation was a partial success—while the professor reacted defensively, saying it would be difficult to remember Tien’s “foreign” name, he never again used the derogatory term of “Chinaman.” However, he looked for other ways to humiliate Tien, leaving him uneasy and insecure. On one occasion, this professor ordered him to climb a ladder and shut off a steam valve. He slipped and broke his fall by seizing a 400-degree Fahrenheit pipe, but he dared not complain about his severely burned and bleeding hand for fear of being ridiculed.

A less resolute man might have abandoned academic life, but Tien forged ahead with laser-like focus. In 1957, only one year after his arrival, he earned his master’s degree at the University of Louisville. Two years later, he got his doctorate at Princeton and immediately joined the mechanical engineering department at the University of California at Berkeley. He would spend the next four decades at Berkeley, rising swiftly through the ranks, becoming a full professor, chairman of the department, vice chancellor of research, and finally chancellor of the university. On top of his administrative duties, he would also work on the design of the Saturn booster rocket, correct a heat-shield problem in the U.S. space shuttle, and conduct breakthrough research on superinsulation that would be used to construct high-speed levitation trains in Japan.

The energy and ambition that Taiwanese immigrants applied to academia also helped build the American high-tech industry. David Lee, a computer pioneer, became one of the first Chinese success stories in Silicon Valley. His resilience in the fast, ruthless world of technology can be traced to his childhood. Born in Beijing in 1937, David—then called Sen Lin Lee—grew up amidst war and revolution, where abrupt change was part of his daily existence.

To escape the Japanese invaders, and later the Communists, his family moved thirteen times during the first twelve years of Lee’s life, each time leaving more wealth behind. In 1949, the family fled the civil war for Taiwan. The twelve-year-old Lee left China with nothing more than the clothes he was wearing and two silver dollars hidden in his shoes. Fearful of a Communist invasion of the island, the family moved again in 1952, this time to Argentina. They settled in Belgrano, a suburb of Buenos Aires, where the family had no business contacts, no knowledge of English or Spanish, and no idea about how they would survive.

Relying on ingenuity fueled by desperation, they opened a Chinese restaurant in the living room of their apartment. Lee’s parents hired a Chinese man bilingual in Mandarin and Spanish to serve as the host in front, while the family labored in the back of their home to cook the meals. The restaurant thrived (soon expanding into the bedrooms), and the following year the Lee family used their restaurant earnings to launch an eventually successful import/export business. David, then a teenager, swiftly became fluent in Spanish and served as his father’s translator. As he negotiated with vendors by translating his father’s exact words, he learned invaluable lessons in business, lessons he later believed equivalent to earning an MBA.

His father wanted David to have the formal education that had eluded him during the war years, specifically, to study toward an engineering degree at an American university. In 1956, David enrolled at Montana State University in Bozeman, where he worked two hundred hours a month to pay his way through college. “I worked every job in the dorm,” he later told a reporter, “cleaning rooms, making beds, counselor, dietitian, washing dishes—you name it, I did it.” It was hard, but overall his experience at Montana State was positive. In 1960, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, then earned a master’s in the same field from North Dakota State University.

At first, David took the conventional path of working as an engineer at established companies. In 1962, he started at NCR in Dayton, Ohio, then moved to Frieden in San Leandro, California, then the largest mechanical calculator company in the United States. There he designed the keyboard for the first electronic calculator, as well as the first electronic calculator printer. But in 1969, several employees at Frieden left to form their own company, Diablo, and Lee decided to join them.

It was a radical move at the time, for the majority of Taiwanese arrivals in the early 1960s aspired to become professors, a career deemed both prestigious and secure. Those who did not plunge into academia tended to work as scientists or engineers at large commercial companies, like IBM or Bell Laboratories. In David’s memory, there were perhaps no more than a thousand Chinese American engineers in Silicon Valley—and most of them were wage-earning professionals, not capitalists. Very few dared to create their own companies.

At the Diablo start-up, Lee developed the first daisywheel printer for mass production. In 1972, the Xerox Corporation, avidly seeking a product to compete with IBM ball-type printers, bought Diablo for $28 million, turning David into a multimillionaire. Xerox retained him as head of its printer department, but appointed someone else as his boss—a white man whom Lee asserts knew nothing about daisywheel printers. “During that time, Chinese Americans were not viewed as capable managers,” he remembered. “Many companies didn’t want to promote the Chinese—they just wanted to use them.” Knowing that he had hit the glass ceiling at Xerox, Lee trained his new boss and resigned in 1973.

The same year Lee left Xerox, he co-founded Qume Corporation, a manufacturer of computer peripheral equipment, with the primary goal of creating a new daisywheel printer to compete with the one purchased by Xerox. In 1978, ITT bought Qume for $164 million and asked David to stay at the company to manage its growth. He rose to become the president of Qume, then a vice president of ITT and chairman of its business information systems group.

Under his leadership, Qume grew into the largest printer company in the world as well as the largest manufacturer of floppy drives in the United States. By contracting with Chinese manufacturers, Lee also helped foster the growth of the personal computer industry in Taiwan. Three Taiwanese companies that built products for Qume—Acer and Mitac for personal computers, and Jing Bao (also known as Cal-Comp Electronics) for terminals—became giants in the industry, transforming the island into a major export leader in PCs and computer peripherals.

Looking back on his life, Lee observed that many of his fellow émigrés followed safe trajectories and shunned entrepreneurialism, while he was inclined—eager, even—to take risks. “To this day I believe that if you have a Ph.D., you can always get a regular job if your company fails,” he said. “My father—who could not speak Spanish and who had no advanced degrees—faced far worse odds when he launched his own business in Argentina.”

 

 

Not everyone, however, shared Lee’s optimism. During the 1970s, Chinese American professionals began voicing complaints of racial discrimination, and of exploitation by white employers. Some felt they were treated like honorary whites rather than as fully equal fellow Americans, and believed their advancement in academia, government, and corporate America had been arrested by an artificial barrier, what some called a “bamboo ceiling.”

Many claimed they had to work harder just to win second-level status in their companies. “Orientals are inordinately industrious, reliable, and smart in school but like Avis Rent-A-Car, ‘being only number two,’ Chinese must try harder to prove their middle class Americanization,” James W. Chin wrote in the
East/West
newspaper in 1970.

On the surface, the statistics seem to refute charges of racism. In the 1970s, studies found that on average, the Chinese in America possessed more education than whites and earned more money per household. But these studies neglected three important factors: the regional concentration of the Chinese American population, the number of wage earners per family, and the professional and financial returns on their academic degrees. Most Chinese resided in urban centers with higher costs of living, so any somewhat higher earnings were spent on significantly higher rent and taxes.
⁴⁷
Also, while the average household income of Chinese Americans exceeded that of whites, more Chinese women worked full-time than white American women, and more children held part-time jobs.

The one dimension in which many new Chinese immigrants managed to compete successfully was education. In 1970, one in four Chinese American men sixteen years or older had college degrees, compared to 13 percent of the white male population. In advanced degrees, they were even further ahead of the mainstream. But the true measure of a minority’s success is not just the number of advanced degrees attained, but the career gains achieved as a result of those degrees, and here comparisons do not favor the group. In the Bay Area at that time, for instance, the median income of Chinese men was only 55 percent that of white men.

In 1970, the California State Fair Employment Practice Commission (FEPC) held hearings to investigate charges of job discrimination against Chinese and other Asian Americans, the first such hearing of its kind. That year, five Asian American health inspectors claimed to be victims of racial discrimination at the San Francisco department of public health. During the hearings, the Chinese American community learned that all five Asian inspectors had graduated from the School of Public Health at Berkeley, but several Caucasians promoted over them had earned nothing more than high school diplomas. One of the five Asian Americans had received the highest score on a written test but was assigned to work at the lowest level because “he presumably lacked the ability to deal with the public.”

The complaining inspectors asserted that the oral examinations were subjective and racist, and later, tape recordings of the oral exams proved that some questions indeed drew on negative stereotypes of the Chinese. When Chong D. Koo mentioned that he occasionally vacationed in Reno, A. Henry Bliss, the examiner, responded, “I suppose you like to play the lotteries like all good Chinamen.”

The Fair Employment Practice Commission also uncovered prejudice against Chinese American women. According to the 1970 hearings, many employers believed that “Oriental women had been trained to be subservient to the man at home, and therefore would make good secretaries.” That year, $10,000 was considered a top earnings bracket, but only 2.5 percent of Chinese women made that much. Overall, their median income was only 27 percent of white male income.

Judy Yung, author of
Unbound Feet,
wrote that female clerical workers of Chinese descent of that era, seen as docile “office wives,” received low returns on their education compared to whites. A Chinese American woman had to work twice as hard to be judged the equal of a Caucasian. “In fact, the better educated we became, the further our income fell behind relative to white men, white women, and Chinese American men with the same educational background,” she observed.

Though Chinese Americans soon earned a reputation for being talented, diligent workers, they were viewed as shunning power, uninterested in management. Many considered this perception about Chinese Americans more of an impediment to career advancement than outright anti-Chinese racism, and they resolved first to document it and then to address its inequitable consequences.