The Chinese in America (40 page)

All this required a delicate balancing act, especially since blacks formed most of the customer base for Chinese stores. For decades, the Chinese community had survived in the South by appearing to be friendly to both black and white interests. However,. as the 1960s went on, this façade was difficult if not impossible to maintain, as Chinese grocers found themselves caught in the crossfire of a race war. Black civil rights leaders asked Chinese grocers for financial donations and for display space for political signs in shop windows. Meanwhile, white supremacist groups, in a supreme stroke of irony, insisted that the Chinese join their White Citizens’ Councils, to help them counter black activism. Aware of their precarious status in the South, the Chinese, as a group, made every attempt to remain politically neutral. Some tried to hedge their bets by hiding their White Citizens’ Council memberships from black customers, and their civil rights contributions from the white business elite. This was not an entirely successful strategy, and their unwillingness to take a stand finally angered the black community. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, Chinese stores in Memphis were singled out for violence during black riots.

“If you sided with the whites, the blacks would be all over you, but if you sided with the blacks, the whites could crucify you,” said Sam Chu Lin, a California radio and television broadcaster who grew up in Mississippi. No Chinese American, he recalled, dared to become a civil rights activist in his region: “I saw none on the picket lines—they would been either killed or socially ostracized.” The Chinese in the South, he said, were “skating on thin ice,” anxious to survive in a society where even the smallest transgression of the racial code could be met with violent retaliation. Once, while he was working as a radio disc jockey in Mississippi during the 1960s, two young white women came into the station looking for him, completely unaware that the voice they admired was not the voice of a white man. “They were groupies who wanted to make moon-eyes at the deejay,” Lin remembered. “And I told them, ‘I’m just cleaning up the station—the guy’s busy right now.’ The Chinese knew what happened to blacks who dated white girls. And Sam Chu Lin wasn’t going to take any chances.”

An undertone of bitterness can be detected in many interviews of American-born Chinese who grew up in the South during this era. Like the Jewish community in the region, the Chinese had successfully adopted white culture, yet they could not earn full acceptance by the white elite, not even as honorary Caucasians. Nor did they feel entirely comfortable among their own people, especially the gossipy, tight-knit social network of their parents. “I didn’t go to the Chinese dances,” one American-born Chinese woman told sociologist James Loewen. “My parents tried to push us to go, and we resented it. I always tore up the invitations before Dad saw them.” In addition, they expressed disgust for the Jim Crow laws that humiliated the black community. When they came of age, many ABCs protested not with their mouths, but with their feet. Gradually, the South witnessed an exodus of the American-born Chinese, who left the small towns of their childhood for the cities of the North and West.

Such was the decision of Sam Sue, son of an immigrant Chinese grocer in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His father had worked seven days a week, every night until ten o’clock, providing blacks with essential social services. His store was not only a warehouse and a home but also an informal bank and accounting firm. Speaking broken English in a black dialect, his father would extend black sharecroppers the credit denied them by white institutions. The conditions under which local black farmers labored for whites landowners resembled the Dark Ages, and the primitive cabins they rented from whites had no running water or electricity. The blacks bought from Sue’s father kerosene for lamps and Clorox to purify drinking water. Sam Sue, who grew up in the store, did not recognize his own poverty until years later. “It was tenement-like conditions, though we didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t even know how poor we were until I left. Everyone slept in one big room. There was a kitchen in the back. We used to use the place to store goods too, so there would be boxes all around. If you went into the living room, you’d be sitting on a box of laundry detergent.”

Worst of all was the vague sense of being a second-class citizen, yet having an unspoken, tentative membership in the first class. “As a kid, I remember going to the theatre and not really knowing where I was supposed to sit,” Sam Sue told an interviewer. “Blacks were segregated then. Colored people had to sit upstairs, and white people sat downstairs. I didn’t know where I was supposed to sit, so I sat in the white section, and nobody said anything. So I always had to confront those problems growing up. So these experiences were very painful.”

Sam Sue eventually became a lawyer in New York City, but his father remained in Mississippi after retiring, despite efforts by the family to get him to leave. “It is all he knows,” Sue said. His father was “attached to the area—not that he has affection for it, only that he is used to it—he feels it is home.”

One group remained relatively untouched by the chaotic 1960s—the community of scholars who had migrated to the United States to study, teach, or conduct research. While American-born Chinese youths talked revolution, these foreign-born immigrants had already witnessed one, or escaped its effects. Ensconced at universities, research laboratories, or corporations, often high tech, they had a mindset different from the rest of Chinese America. As creative artists and intellectuals, they defined themselves more by ideas than ethnicity or region, belonging to international communities that recognized no borders. Many, especially those who came from lives of education and privilege, believed they could adapt to life anywhere, as long as they had their work to sustain them.

Their interviews fairly glow with confidence. I. M. Pei, the world-famous architect and son of a Shanghai banking magnate, recalled a childhood filled with servants, summer vacations in Suzhou, and private schools. “I had the impression that anything I wanted, I could get,” he said. An Wang, a self-made computer mogul and son of a teacher in China, felt optimistic about his future prospects when he arrived in America at the age of twenty-five to study at Harvard. “I had heard that there was discrimination against Chinese in the United States, but I came here with no insecurities about what I might try to do.” For a young man who had spent his formative years in the international city of Shanghai, the United States did not seem at all like a foreign country: “Frankly the United States seemed a lot like China to me.” Perhaps most importantly, as a doctoral student in applied physics, he understood the lingua franca of his field: “Science is the same the world over—a language I could speak.”

What this group had lost in China they quickly found—or rebuilt—in the United States. Success came rapidly for them, and some would emerge as world celebrities by the 1960s. I. M. Pei designed many of the most important structures of the twentieth century. An Wang, who started Wang Laboratories in 1951 with $600, took his company public in 1967 in one of the largest initial public offerings in history, turning him into a billionaire and one of the richest men in the world. Chin Yang Lee, born in Hunan, China, and educated at Yale, wrote
The Flower Drum Song,
which achieved instant best-seller status upon its publication in 1957, was turned into a Broadway musical in 1958 by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and then into a film musical in 1961. In 1957 Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-ning Yang became the first Chinese American Nobel laureates
³⁹
after their research on the decay of the subatomic K-meson shattered a universally accepted “inviolate” law of physics, the principle of the conservation of parity.
⁴⁰

Other stranded scholars were not household names, but their colleagues revered them as giants. In mathematics, Shing-Shen Chern developed differential geometry theories that would later earn him the National Medal of Science, and Chia-Chiao Lin, a theoretical astrophysicist, created a famous density wave theory to explain the spiral structure of galaxies. In engineering, Tung-Yen Lin, a professor at Berkeley and the founder of T. Y. Lin International, became one of the greatest authorities on bridges and pre-stressed concrete.
^†
In medicine, Min-Chueh Chang, a Cambridge-educated scientist at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, co-invented the birth control pill and successfully performed in-vitro fertilization with rabbit ova, a process that later helped make possible the first “test tube babies.”

These pioneers would serve as the academic role models for a new wave of Chinese intellectuals who began arriving in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. They too would come from upper-echelon families, seeking graduate degrees and fortunes in America. But unlike the generation of scholars who preceded them, they would not come directly from mainland China. Instead they would migrate from the island of Taiwan—the last hope and refuge of the exiled Nationalist regime.

J
ust a step ahead of Mao’s advancing forces, thousands of Chinese who had supported Chiang’s Nationalist government made hurried plans to leave mainland China. Their children would later recall their panicked, even hysterical parents attempting to coordinate last-minute departures of family and close relatives. Suddenly yanked out of lives of luxury and crammed into trains and ships, swept along by a mass exodus characterized by fear and chaos, these former children of privilege would never forget being torn away from the security of their previous lives.

From November 1948 through early 1949, more than five thousand refugees, many former rank-and-file bureaucrats in Chiang’s government, arrived in Taiwan from the mainland each day.
⁴¹
Eventually, between one million and two million refugees would reach the island. To get a sense of the size and character of the dislocation, one would have to imagine the United States government suddenly moving virtually its entire bureaucracy to the island of Puerto Rico.

It was easier for children, because of their youth and inexperience, to adapt to their new surroundings. Many saw Taiwan as a tropical paradise, a welcome change in their lives. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had named the island Ilha Formosa (“Beautiful Island”), and its natural splendor was not lost on the young arrivals. Years later, they would remember fondly the joy of netting exotic butterflies, of playing in rice paddies on the outskirts of town, of savoring all the juicy mangos, papayas, and pineapples they could eat. They were far better off than the mainland refugees who entered the United States directly from China during the early 1960s, who had suffered the extreme hardship of the famine years under Mao’s rule. Still, the relocation to Taiwan was not entirely positive for these children. They grew up under a different set of oppressive conditions, under a regime-in-exile determined to install and sustain on Taiwan the same strongly authoritarian and oligarchic system of governance with which it had ruled China.

The adult émigrés had a difficult time on all fronts. Accustomed to sophisticated urban life, most were ill-prepared for the humid climate and slow pace of the island. People who had lived in mansions now found themselves in bamboo houses, with rooms separated only by paper screens and with open-air windows that insects and lizards crawled through at will. In many areas there was no electricity or natural gas, so housewives were forced to cook with
maige,
cakes of mud mixed with coal. Some had to sleep on bare reed mats, under mosquito tents, breathing air as oppressively hot and moist as steam.

Yet these primitive conditions were hardly the most pressing problems on their minds. The migration had been so swift and so immense that the natives of the island were stunned. Every day the émigrés had to contend with the smoldering hostility of the indigenous Taiwanese, who deeply resented KMT confiscation of their property and the brutal reprisals to their 1947 rebellion.
⁴²
Worst of all, the Nationalist newcomers lived in constant fear that the Communists would attack from the mainland.

During their early years on Taiwan, some mainlanders refused to accept the island as a permanent home and set their sights over the horizon. My own mother’s family, like many other mainland refugees, believed an invasion of Taiwan was imminent. In late 1949 and early 1950, my maternal grandfather, who had been a poet, scholar, and journalist in mainland China, anxiously pored over stacks of books, researching the culture and geography of other countries in which the family might settle. America was out of the question, because my grandfather believed only rich, well-connected Nationalists could go there, but the Philippines or perhaps Brazil might lie within their reach. A year after arriving in Taiwan, the family moved to Hong Kong, intending to proceed to another country, either in Asia or Latin America. Courageously—or perhaps naively—my grandfather attempted to support himself, his wife, and their five children in Hong Kong as a freelance writer. As Chinese American Anna Chennault would later write in her memoirs, Hong Kong in the 1950s was a “desolate place both in literary and in cultural terms. Writers could seldom practice their craft and make ends meet, and even well-known columnists could rarely hope to make more than ten dollars an article.” My mother’s entire family squeezed into a single room without a kitchen, and prepared meals over a charcoal burner in the hallway. They later moved to another boarding house where water for cooking or cleaning had to be fetched from a faucet in the street. While my grandfather diligently wrote editorials and political commentary for a local newspaper, my grandmother looked into the possibility of earn-ing extra money by frying beans for vendors or mending clothes. Decades later, my mother says her family was just one step away from being homeless.

Many, even some of those who stayed through the 1960s, saw Taiwan as only a temporary resting ground, a refugee way station en route to their next destination. By the time the first generation of Taiwanese Chinese children came of age, it was clear that starting a career on this island, just a few miles across a narrow strait from Communist-controlled China, could not promise a glowing future. With the encouragement of their parents, the best and brightest of them actively worked to leave Taiwan and start new lives abroad. The most popular destination turned out to be the United States, the former patron of the Nationalist government. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, about two thousand students were leaving Taiwan each year to pursue graduate degrees in America.