The Chinese in America (28 page)

Some Chinese Americans learned to ignore such racism, and forged ahead with little more than the energy of their own ambition. Frank Chuck, son of a Chinese schoolteacher in Hawaii, arrived at Stanford University with only twenty-five cents in his pocket. In desperate need of cash and housing, and knowing that Chinese students were not welcome in Stanford’s dormitories (one Chinese boy, he recalled, was bodily “thrown out of Encina Hall”), Chuck worked his way through college by cooking for a Stanford professor in exchange for room and board, and earned a bachelor’s degree in organic chemistry in 1922 and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1925.

Chuck’s education changed not only his life but America’s eating habits as well. In 1927, after a stint teaching in China on a Rockefeller Fellowship, he became a research chemist for Western Condensing Company, the parent company of Carnation Milk. There he discovered the chemical actions responsible for milk dehydration and whey stabilization and in the process, invented powdered milk and instant cocoa. Later, Chuck would identify a way to prevent the parasitic disease coccidiosis from ravaging the poultry industry. He also developed livestock vitamins that profoundly benefited the American food industry.

Another American-born Chinese who pursued his career with relentless, single-minded determination was Chan Chung Wing. Born in Napa, California, he spent his early childhood in China, in the care of his grandfather, a merchant. When he returned to Napa at age nine, shortly before the turn of the century, he showed an early aptitude for learning, skipping from first to fourth grade within a single year. He continued his education in the San Francisco Bay Area, graduating from Lowell High School and Berkeley, where he studied engineering. His grandfather wanted Chan to be an engineer, but Chan opted instead for law. Upon graduation from the Saint Ignatius School of Law, he passed the bar exam with a score of 96 percent—one of the highest on record—and became the first Chinese lawyer to practice in California.

Friends warned Chan that as a lawyer he would starve to death. Indeed, he “found it very difficult to defend my clients, because there was a lot of discrimination against Chinese and many judges tried to throw me out of the courtroom,” he recalled. “But I was very persistent and soon found out that playing golf with the judges and district attorneys afforded me the opportunity to discuss the problems of the Chinese community with them.” Soon the Chinese community found Chan Chung Wing to be one of its greatest champions, a formidable defender of their civil rights. For instance, when Chan learned that the San Francisco police would habitually attack unemployed Chinese workers, striking them with their billy clubs and ordering them to leave town, he filed more than thirty lawsuits against the police, effectively ending the violence.

Second-generation Chinese American women also served as pioneers in their fields, but their struggle for acceptance was far more difficult than the men’s. Before the turn of the century, the majority of working-class Chinese families could not afford to educate their daughters beyond primary school, but after World War I, the introduction of compulsory education in the United States permitted Chinese girls to attend and graduate from high school in numbers equal to Chinese boys. College, however, remained out of reach for most. These women were only a generation or two removed from an era when it was unthinkable for a respectable woman—white or Chinese—to appear alone in public. As was true of other immigrant groups, and the majority of native-born white Americans as well, many Chinese American families employed a double standard, urging their sons to go to college while expecting their daughters either to stay at home or to marry, preferably an educated man. Jade Snow Wong, author of
Fifth Chinese Daughter,
wrote poignantly of her San Francisco youth in the 1920s, and of how her father refused to finance her college education so he could send her brother to medical school instead.

Even if an ABC woman had financial support to pursue her degree and the encouragement of enlightened parents, she had few role models to inspire her. During the nineteenth century, the number of ethnic Chinese women—either American- or foreign-born-who had graduated from college could be counted on the fingers of one hand: between 1881 and 1892, a total of four Chinese female students, sponsored by missionaries, obtained medical degrees from American universities. They are believed to have been the very first Chinese women to study in the United States. Even at the secondary school level, it was difficult to find female mentors for Chinese girls. It was not until the 1920s that the San Francisco public school system began hiring female Chinese schoolteachers. Any Chinese American woman who wanted higher education needed extraordinary persistence and dedication to achieve her goal.

And education was only the first hurdle. The labor situation, dismal as it was for American-born Chinese men, could be even worse for their sisters, who occupied the lowest tier of a labor market stratified by race and sex. In the early twentieth century, most employed Chinese women, both native- and foreign-born, worked in low-wage, piece-rate industries. Home-based jobs, like sewing and shrimp peeling, gradually evolved into factory jobs that exploited cheap female labor. After World War I, Chinese immigrant women dominated the rank and file of the garment industry. Local Chinese businessmen, obtained contracts from white manufacturers and opened sweatshops with poor ventilation, dim lighting, and inadequate child care, where mothers worked with infants strapped to their backs or with children crawling across the factory floor. Some of the first memories of ABCs who grew up in the San Francisco or New York Chinatowns were of their mothers, mute and exhausted, hunched over sewing machines.

The American-born Chinese women, however, enjoyed better—slightly better—opportunities than their immigrant mothers. With education, fluency in English, and familiarity with American culture, they could move out of labor-intensive industries and into jobs that required specialized skills. By the 1920s, there was a detectable pattern of gradual upward mobility for talented female ABCs. Bilingual and high-school-educated women, overqualified for factory jobs, began working in gift shops and local businesses in Chinatown. Some became operators for the Chinatown Telephone Exchange in San Francisco, where they were required to speak fluent English, several Chinese dialects and subdialects, memorize 2,200 phone numbers, because the exchange handled an average of 13,000 calls a day.

Landing work outside Chinatown, however, remained a challenge. A few found employment in so-called pink-collar positions: as secretaries, clerks, or stock girls for large white corporations, largely because of the popular view that the Chinese were a hardworking and docile people. Sexism magnified the problems of race. White firms hired young Chinese women simply to capitalize on their physical appearance, outfitting Chinese department store salesladies, elevator girls, theater ushers, and restaurant hostesses in Asian costumes to provide an exotic atmosphere for white customers. But for every Chinese American woman hired, countless others met a wall of resistance—they could not obtain even the lowest-paid, most dead-end jobs; they were told flatly that the company didn’t “hire Orientals.”

Nevertheless, in the first few decades of the twentieth century a female Chinese American professional class began to emerge. Second-generation Chinese women entered arenas traditionally dominated by white middle-class women, such as teaching, nursing, and library science. When hired by the San Francisco public school system in 1926, Alice Fong Yu became one of the first Chinese American teachers in the country. Three sisters from a prosperous San Francisco family became pioneers in their chosen occupations: Martha Fong was the first Chinese American nursery school teacher, Mickey Fong the first Chinese American public health nurse, and Marian Fong the first Chinese American dental hygienist. College-educated ABC women also stepped into careers normally occupied by men. Faith So Leung is believed to have become the first Chinese American female dentist in 1905, and Dolly Gee the first Chinese American female bank manager in 1929.

Given the obstacles, it took women with exceptional willpower to rise to the top. Bessie Jeong, one of the nation’s earliest Chinese American women physicians, was one such. Jeong saw what could happen to women who surrendered complete control of their lives to their husbands. In the 1910s, her sister Rose was told to choose between two marriage proposals from men she had never met—a man in his twenties and a fifty-year-old cook—with only their photographs and her family’s advice to guide her. She decided to marry the older man: “Better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave,” her parents advised. But her husband turned out to be jealous, suspicious, and tyrannical—a “hard taskmaster,” as Jeong described him. Sixteen-year-old Rose was far too Americanized and educated for his taste, even though she had had only two years of public schooling, and she found herself caught in a disastrous marriage, a life of poverty, a world of shrinking possibilities. In a poorly insulated log cabin in the lumber camp of Weed, California, Rose watched her husband fail in one business enterprise after another; he sold her wedding jewelry to recoup his losses. Finally, an exhausted Rose died at the age of twenty-six during a flu epidemic.

Bessie Jeong resolved not to share her sister’s fate. When her father began to invite men to the house, and then asked her to return to China, she inferred it was her turn to be married off. “He was going to realize money out of it, or he was fulfilling his duty as a father,” she speculated. “But I still would be on the auction block. Prized Jersey—the name ‘Bessie’ always made me think of some nice fat cow!” In 1915, at the age of fourteen, she fled her parents’ home to live with Donaldina Cameron, the head of the Presbyterian Mission Home in San Francisco, which sheltered runaway Chinese prostitutes and battered Chinese wives. With Cameron’s protection and financial support, Bessie enrolled first at the Lux Normal School for girls, then at Stanford (where in 1927 she became the first Chinese American woman graduate), and finally at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. To help pay her way toward becoming a doctor, she performed a series of domestic tasks—cleaning and laundry, baby-sitting children, and serving dinners.

Like many successful people, Bessie Jeong approached life with a mixture of natural optimism and resilience. She harbored no bitterness toward her tradition-bound family and even reconciled with her father, who eventually came to terms with her refusal to return to China. (He visited her several times, but died before her graduation from Stanford and never saw her become a doctor.) She had a wide circle of friends, both Chinese and Caucasian, and claimed never to have experienced any racial prejudice in her entire lifetime. Jeong also proved adept at managing a career along with a family, balancing a happy marriage to an educated man of her choice—Wing Chan, the Chinese consul in San Francisco—with a private medical practice that flourished for almost forty years.

 

 

Women like Bessie Jeong, however, were rare. The majority of Chinese American women were still under enormous pressure to place family above their careers. But with the old traditions falling away, even aspiring young homemakers were uncertain about their roles in the arena of courtship and marriage.

Different expectations of courtship and marriage inevitably created misunderstandings between Chinese immigrant parents and their children. In the early twentieth century, the rituals of courtship fluctuated between old-country mores and American-style dating. Some ABCs submitted to arranged marriages brokered by their parents; others rebelled. “My parents wanted to hold onto the old idea of selecting a husband for me, but I would not accept their choices,” Lillie Leung told an interviewer for the 1924 Los Angeles Survey of Race Relations:

As they entered the Western world of romance, many Chinese American youths invented their own rules as they went along. In the 1910s, teenagers in San Francisco Chinatown defied their parents by “spooning” along Dupont Street. Because single Chinese American women and men were not supposed to be seen together, the spectacle of youths openly kissing scandalized Chinatown.

A more acceptable form of social behavior was group dating: for instance, outings sponsored by respectable Western organizations like the YMCA. Such chaperoned activities—picnics, museum tours, church suppers—radiated a wholesome image and provided a setting where members of the opposite sex could meet. Many American-born Chinese youths got to know their future spouses at these events. One San Francisco ABC couple told historian Judy Yung that during the 1920s the two of them did not venture out alone on a date until they had known each other for four years.

A developing Chinese American subculture afforded young ABCs opportunities to select their own marriage partners. Excluded by white fraternities and sororities, Chinese American college students in California built their own Greek system. In 1928, six Chinese engineering students founded Pi Alpha Phi (nicknamed “Pineapple”) at the University of California at Berkeley. Two years later, Chinese American women at San Francisco State Teachers’ College created the first ethnic Chinese sorority in the country, Sigma Omicron Pi.

Cities with well-established Chinatowns, like Los Angeles and San Francisco, organized Chinese American social clubs at local high schools and colleges, where students could hold their own dances and parties. In 1929, a reporter in San Francisco observed large posters of a Chinese flapper dancing with a young Chinese man in formal wear; the caption read “Chinese Collegiate Shuffle!” “What would old John Chinaman think,” the reporter wrote, “could he see one of these lively dancing parties of the Chinese students of the San Francisco district, jazz music, bright costumes, beautiful young women, gaiety on every hand. ‘Everything but hip flasks,’ someone said of the dance.” In regions with smaller (or nonexistent) Chinese communities, such as the South, some ABCs were willing to travel long distances to socialize with other ABCs. Edward Wong recalled that “our parents always preached that you need to marry a Chinese. We used to have dances together. We used to drive from San Antonio all the way to New Orleans or Houston for a dance on Saturday night and go back home on the same night.”