The Chinese in America (76 page)

The 1924 Immigration Act required foreign Chinese graduate students wishing to study in the U.S. first to complete a college education, gain acceptance by an American university, possess English-language skills, and prove they had the financial means to support themselves and pay for their journey back to China. Of course, these criteria entirely favored students from wealthy elite families. In
Chinese Intellectuals and the West,
Yichu Wang found that the fathers of most Chinese nationals who studied abroad before 1949 had four major occupations: landowner, professional, businessman, or government official. Most of the students had spent their formative years in large coastal cities, one-third from only two metropolitan areas, Shanghai and Canton, and many had graduated from universities established by missionaries, with Western-style curricula, such as the University of Nanjing, Yanjing University in Beijing, and St. John’s University in Shanghai. A few academic superstars—the intellectual cream of the crop—received Boxer Rebellion scholarships, under a program funded by Chinese indemnities to the United States after the failed uprising of 1900, but most students paid their own way, with the backing of their families.

During the cold war, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, also believed the Chinese American community was riddled with spies. Testifying before the Senate, Hoover warned that “Red China has been flooding the country with its propaganda and there are over 300,000 Chinese in the United States, some of whom could be susceptible to recruitment either through ethnic ties or hostage situations because of relatives in Communist China.” He added, “Chinese communists carry out their intelligence activities through representatives in third countries and contacts with sympathetic Chinese Americans. The large number of Chinese entering this country as immigrants provides Red China with a channel to dispatch to the United States undercover agents on intelligence assignments.” Hoover’s words suggest that he saw little if any distinction between Chinese foreign nationals and American citizens of Chinese heritage, and that he viewed the latter as untrustworthy merely because of their race and ethnicity.

Delbert Wong’s life was transformed by military service and federally subsized education. A third-generation Chinese American born in California, Wong served in the Army Air Force during World War II, flying thirty bombing missions over Europe and winning the Distinguished Flying Cross. The government supported his education at Harvard Business School, and after the war he also studied law at Stanford, which launched his forty-year judicial career.

The United States reserved 70 percent of its admission slots for only three countries—the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany—slots that largely went unused. Countries in southern and eastern Europe or Asia had tiny quotas and long wait lists: Italy had an annual quota of only 5,666, Greece 308, and Yugoslavia 942. For the Chinese, the number was even smaller—105. Furthermore, according to the U.S. government, a Chinese alien was not simply someone who originated from China, but any foreigner with at least 50 percent Chinese ancestry, no matter where he or she lived in the world. Thus, immigrants of Chinese heritage born in Europe, or even people of half Chinese, half white ancestry in Europe, were categorized not as European but as Chinese, and were barred from using European quotas.

Supporters of the bill assured their opponents that the purpose was to fight racial discrimination, not swamp the country with newcomers from Third World countries. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) predicted that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset” and that the bill would not “inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.” Hiram Fong (R-Hawaii) echoed these sentiments, pointing out that “Asians represent six-tenths of one percent of the population of the United States” and that “the people from that part of the world will never reach one percent of the population ... Our cultural pattern will never be changed as far as America is concerned.” President Johnson added, “This bill we signed today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives.” These claims, however, were wrong—the act profoundly changed the history of modern immigration and affected millions of lives.

According to the documentary
Sewing Woman,
seamstress Dong Zem spent almost every waking moment hunched over a sewing machine after she migrated to the United States: “I can still recall the times when I had one foot on the pedal and another one on an improvised rocker, rocking one son to sleep while the other was tied to my back. Many times I would accidentally sew my finger instead of the fabric because one child screamed or because I was falling asleep on the job.”
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In her memoir
Paper Daughter,
M. Elaine Mar describes how her family emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver in 1972, when she was five. Her father, employed by a Chinese restaurant managed by one of his relatives, was too poor to buy a ten-dollar T-shirt with her grade school logo printed on it. “Your father has to work a long time, many hours, to make ten dollars,” her mother explained. “How much money do you think we have? We’re not like the Americans, with their English and their four-dollar-an-hour McDonald’s jobs! Don’t you think your father would work at McDonald’s if he could speak English?”

Maxine Hong Kingston, winner of the National Book Award and National Critics Circle Award, is the most widely taught living author in the United States.

Lee and Yang first met as students at National Southwest United University, when the Japanese invasion forced them to flee to the city of Kunming in Yunnan. After World War II, they won doctoral scholarships to study physics under Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, beginning a scientific collaboration that continued even after Yang moved to Princeton University and Lee to Columbia. When they received the Nobel, Yang was only thirty-four years old, and Lee barely thirty-one, the second youngest scholar ever to win this honor.

Chien-Shiung Wu (also known as Jian Xiong Wu), a Chinese woman physicist at Columbia, confirmed their theory experimentally. Though many felt that Wu, then the world’s leading female physicist, also deserved to be honored by the Nobel committee, she ended up winning honorary doctorates from twelve universities, including Harvard and Yale, and earned the title of the “Queen of Nuclear Physics.”
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T. Y. Lin International later built some of the most daring structures in history, such as the giant arches of the Moscone Center in San Francisco, which support, without columns, the biggest underground room in the world.

The natives later claimed that Taiwan was the “number three” choice for mainland refugees: the most powerful went to the “number one” destination, the United States, and those with money went to the “number two” location of Hong Kong. Everyone else, they said, headed for Taiwan.

The natives viewed them as the latest arrivals in a long parade of conquerors. During the seventeenth century, the island fell under the domination of the Dutch, the Spanish, and then the Manchus. In 1895, after its humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan. Half a century later, when Japan lost World War II, they returned Taiwan to Nationalist China. Originally, many Chinese natives on the island, ecstatic at Japan’s surrender, looked forward to reunification, but their excitement soon turned to rage and disappointment. In 1947, KMT malfeasance and corruption ignited a local revolt, which the Nationalists swiftly and brutally crushed.

Soong had exploited his position to exchange worthless Chinese currency into U.S. dollars, which he used to profit through black market speculation, and before the entire Nationalist monetary system collapsed, Soong had converted his wealth into gold and moved to New York City.

For instance, one journalist who had read Marxist literature before migrating to Taiwan found himself sentenced to several years of hard penal labor after authorities discovered evidence of his literary tastes by reading his friend’s diary.

One Chinese American, who asked to remain anonymous, remembered that his childhood home in Taiwan became a miniature factory. Between 1948 and 1979, his father purchased tons of milk powder stored in metal buckets, as well as hundreds of food cans with rusted surfaces. “We children had to use sandpaper to scrub away the rust to make the can like new for resale,” he recalled.
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The KMT needed scientific expertise to fill the ranks of a new government technocracy, and in 1979 the government created the Hsin-chu Science-Based Industrial Park to recruit talent from the United States.

Born in Ann Arbor in 1936, the son of a Chinese engineering student at the University of Michigan, Ting moved to mainland China at the age of two months. The Communist revolution forced the family to migrate to Taiwan, where his father taught at National Taiwan University, and Ting later returned to the United States to study at the University of Michigan in the 1950s.

In 1960, almost half of all Chinese people in the continental United States—43 percent—lived in either the New York or San Francisco Bay areas, two of the most expensive regions in the country.

TOEFL is an English-language proficiency exam for international students aspiring to study in North America or other regions with English-language curricula.

Yuan was the grandson of Yuan Shikai, a military commander who had served briefly as emperor after the 1911 Republic revolution, and his family had suffered heavy persecution during the Cultural Revolution. But Yuan Jialiu’s sudden appearance from America changed everything. Acting under orders from Premier Zhou Enlai, local officials hastily returned confiscated houses to Yuan’s relatives and even gave them job promotions. (They were not, however, able to repair in time Emperor Yuan Shikai’s tomb, which the Red Guards had tried to demolish with explosives.)

At the forefront of the battle against AIDS is Taiwanese American scientist David Ho. Born in Taiwan in 1952, Ho migrated with his parents to Los Angeles at the age of twelve, and after graduating from the California Institute of Technology with a degree in physics and earning an M.D. from Harvard, he decided to devote his career to finding a cure for the HIV virus. As the world-famous director of the Aaron
Diamond
AIDS
Research Center
in New York, Ho has created a potent blend of three antiviral drugs to suppress HIV in his patients, giving them fresh hope after the failure of traditional AZT treatments. To reward Ho’s revolutionary findings,
Time
magazine placed him on the cover and named him its 1996 Man of the Year.

In 1995, the University of California regents decided to remove race and gender from consideration during admissions, hiring, and promotion; the following year, Californians voted to pass Proposition 209, which outlawed racial quotas in the state.

After several ABCs were rejected, Chinese American families in 1994 sued the school district, the state of California, and the NAACP, alleging that unfair racial quotas were unconstitutional. Six years later, the school board resolved the suit by abandoning its plans for affirmative action and upholding a racially neutral admissions policy. Immediately, the number of black and Latino acceptances plummeted while that of Chinese Americans and whites soared; severe racial imbalances emerged within a year.

Research has shown that adolescence is already one of the most traumatic stages of human life, and moving from one culture to another during this period only makes the experience worse. For those who arrived without the protective support of their parents, the experience could be devastating.

A symbiotic relationship evolved between the Bay Area and Asia. For instance, while new companies in Silicon Valley produced cutting-edge hardware and software, the island of Taiwan served as a manufacturing center, supplying the industry with computer components and peripherals.

During those heady years of the Internet boom, there were other success stories, though less well known. Tony Hsieh founded a startup called LinkExchange with a fellow Harvard classmate and immediately sold it to Microsoft for a reported $250 million. (The terms of the agreement prevented him from disclosing the actual figure.) Initially, his parents—both scientific professionals with doctorates—had been distressed by Tony’s decision to become an entrepreneur. “At first my parents were a bit surprised and not happy that I was leaving a steady job at Oracle to start this company,” Hsieh said. “Actually, they weren’t even happy that I went to Oracle in the first place, because they wanted me to get my Ph.D.” It didn’t matter whether the Ph.D. was in computer science or not: “They just wanted the letters after my name.” few corporate players. By the end of the twentieth century, even colossal semiconductor companies began cutting costs by farming out their fabrication work to Taiwan.

Most of the Chinese H1-B visa holders came from the People’s Republic of China, not Taiwan. During the late 1980s and 1990s, Taiwan experienced a reverse brain drain in relation to the United States. Unlike the Taiwanese who chose to stay in the United States after graduating from American universities during the 1960s and 1970s, more Taiwanese students are now returning to the island after obtaining their degrees, to take advantage of better employment opportunities there. High-tech workers from the PRC, however, are more eager to stay in the United States.