The Chinese in America (49 page)

With an ocean separating parent from child, discipline was difficult to enforce. One boy said his parents counseled him to “work hard, to focus, no drugs, no smoking, no dating, and no this, no that. That kind of phone call got boring after a while. Now I call home only because I am expected to. I really don’t have much to say on the phone with them.” To tighten their control, some parents demanded that their children fax them copies of report cards and homework, punishing low marks with cuts in their allowance. Many youths admitted that so long as they earned high grades, they could do just about anything they wanted. And so, in some families, the parent-child relationship mimicked that of employer and telecommuter, in which attentiveness to the demands of the job was controlled through bonuses or wage reductions.

In a sink-or-swim environment, some parachute children excelled academically, while others, unable to cope with the situation, ended up dropping out of school. By the early 1990s, both the mainstream and Chinese ethnic media exposed serious problems among the Taiwanese parachute population. There were reports of juvenile delinquency, gang warfare, and suicides—all of which did much to erode the “model minority” image of Chinese Americans. In the most extreme cases, parachute kids turned to violence. In 1995, a sixteen-year-old Taiwanese girl was arrested for attempted murder after she detonated a homemade bomb in her host family’s residence. The following year, another sixteen-year-old parachute student who had lived in Los Angeles for two years was charged with arms smuggling and apprehended in Taipei. Alarmed by the level of truancy among its Taiwanese student population, in 1991 the officials of the San Marino school district in the Los Angeles area adopted a policy mandating that all students live either with legal guardians, such as court-appointed foster families, or with relatives no more distant than first cousins. Offenders would be expelled or reported to immigration authorities.

As the decade progressed, Taiwanese parents had to face yet another danger in their parachute children’s lives: kidnappers who preyed on youths with rich parents. In December 1998, abductors seized seventeen-year-old Kuan Nan “Johnny” Chen from the driveway of his home in San Marino, California. Chen was a parachute child whose parents commuted between Los Angeles and their native Taiwan, and after a secretary in his father’s office revealed to the kidnappers the extent of the family’s wealth, they monitored Chen for more than a month before striking. Gagged and shoved into a waiting car, Chen spent two terrifying weeks in the clutches of his assailants, his limbs chained and shackled, his eyes and mouth sealed with duct tape. Immediately after his abduction, Chen tried to escape, but the kidnappers caught and tortured him by striking his head with a hammer. They demanded a $1.5 million ransom from his father, a fee that was negotiated down to $500,000. Before the money was delivered, however, the FBI, local police, and authorities in both the PRC and Taiwan all joined forces to rescue the teenager. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department later asserted that a shocking two out of three abductions like Chen’s in the Chinese community—some said it was more like nine out of ten—were never reported to the police.

About 80 percent of parachute children were Taiwanese, yet there was also a largely unreported flow of parachute children from the very country that had precipitated the phenomenon in the first place: the People’s Republic of China. Ironically, even some of the most powerful officials in the PRC saw the United States as a safe haven for their children, a form of protection against the vagaries of Chinese politics.

In 1999, American immigration authorities discovered what appeared to be a conspiracy to smuggle mainland Chinese youths into the United States. A group of prestigious, elite families from Shanghai, including Communist Party leaders, bankers, and executives, had paid $19,000 each to send their children to Los Angeles for English-language studies. The original plan, it appears, was to have these youths enter legitimate academic programs, obtain student visas, then remain in the United States for years. As long as the students stayed enrolled in school, the visa could be extended almost indefinitely, permitting the families to work on achieving naturalization for their children through the sponsorship of friends, relatives, or American companies. No doubt for some of these Chinese nationals, this was the easiest way to obtain U.S. citizenship.

On the day they were scheduled to fly back to Shanghai, the teenagers disappeared from the Los Angeles airport. Fearing abduction and a possible international crisis, American authorities launched an investigation, only to discover that the youths had been spirited away to private homes, to be enrolled in a different English-language program. The situation created terrible press for the Shanghai families and inspired proposals within the PRC to bar all high school teenagers from studying overseas. When interviewed later, a few parents said they had wanted to give their children better opportunities by having them live in the United States. “In China, we can have only one child,” said one father, with tears in his eyes. “These are our princes and princesses. We will do anything for them.”

F
or the United States, unanticipated success in the international sphere during the 1980s paved the way for unbridled prosperity at home in the 1990s. A forty-year nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union had ended in 1989 not with a bang but with a series of cheers across Eastern Europe as the Berlin Wall was demolished by people using nothing more than sledgehammers and bare hands. When one satellite state after another broke away from the Soviet bloc, and when in 1990 and 1991 the republics of the Soviet Union declared themselves to be independent nations, the United States found itself the winner of the cold war by default. Miraculously, the long-dreaded and seemingly inevitable nuclear apocalypse had never materialized. The disintegration of America’s former antagonist brought to Americans a new era of confidence born of the fact that the United States was now the world’s number one economic and military power.

Supporters of Ronald Reagan like to say that he ended the cold war not by backing off from the arms race but by accelerating it. According to this scenario, he engaged the Soviet Union in a high-stakes, no-rules poker game that threatened to bankrupt both countries, but a game in which the poorer of the two would have to cry uncle first. This last-stage arms race left the United States two legacies. The first was an enormous national debt, by far the largest ever. But the huge expenditures were not solely for weaponry, but also to develop and support new technologies, especially in computers and information processing. Once unleashed, these technologies placed enormous pressure on the American industrial economy, triggering a business revolution that would have broad social consequences.

In the new economy, power flowed to those who could create or master new technology faster than their competitors. It should be no surprise that the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, would make his fortune in computers, as the co-founder and leader of Microsoft. By the end of the decade, his net worth was estimated at $85 billion, greater than that of entire countries, as well as the one hundred million poorest Americans combined. The wealthiest one percent of America emerged from the 1990s with 40 percent of the country’s assets, twice as much as they had held only two decades earlier.

Meanwhile, the poor—indeed, all those without the skills demanded by this new economy—grew poorer. According to economist Edward N. Wolff, between 1983 and 1995, poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class families—the bottom 40 percent of American society—lost 80 percent of their net worth; when adjusted for inflation for 1995 dollars, their holdings shrank from $4,000 to $900. One reason for the disappearance of their wealth was that highly paid manufacturing jobs, which had once afforded working- and middle-class Americans a certain measure of prosperity, gradually disappeared as corporations farmed labor-intensive work to Third World countries.

The growing divide between American haves and have-nots was felt keenly not only among whites and blacks, but within the ethnic Chinese population as well. The decade of the 1990s would witness the development of a two-tiered society among new Chinese arrivals: the rise of an elite group of highly visible, educated people, and the disappearance of thousands of illegal aliens into servile positions in an underground economy, where they were forced to endure dismal working conditions. But whether they were “high-tech” or “low-tech” immigrants, both groups would face a series of crises during the 1990s related to their Chinese ethnicity.

 

 

For “high-tech” Chinese, the 1990s resembled the gold rush days, except that the 1990 fortune seekers were mining for nuggets in a new form of sand—silicon. The modern gold rush, like the 1849 gold rush, occurred in northern California, but this time south of San Francisco, in a region dubbed Silicon Valley. The area had already witnessed the birth of the personal computer revolution in the 1970s, when two young men, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, started the Apple corporation, selling desktop computers they had built in their garage. Proximity to Stanford University in Palo Alto, the University of California at Berkeley, and San Francisco as a major port for trade with Asia, helped transform the area into a world center of the high-tech industry.
⁵⁴
But an even bigger revolution erupted in the 1990s—the Internet revolution.

The roots of the Internet stretch back to the 1960s, when academic and government experts envisioned building a global computer network that could function even in the event of nuclear war. Preliminary research at MIT led to a government contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which linked together a few computers at major universities through telephone lines. For the next two decades, a small community of academics—mostly computer scientists, engineers, and librarians—would exchange information with colleagues by posting messages on this cyberspace bulletin board, a government-funded system of electronic mail (or “e-mail”).

In the early 1990s, this network crashed into public awareness when companies such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigybegan offering the general public unlimited access to this new form of communication for a monthly fee. The unprecedented growth of what came to be called the Internet spawned a rash of new Silicon Valley startups. Known as “dotcoms,” these companies were typically run by young men and women fresh out of school. To attract employees with the special computer talents needed, most of these cash-poor start-ups offered employees stock options in lieu of high pay. When the companies were able to offer their stock to the general public, a rush to get in on the ground floor of a brand-new industry that seemed to have an unbounded future led to oversubscribed initial public offerings (IPOs). The outstanding stock was then bid up to astronomical levels, despite the fact that most of these companies had not yet shown a profit (and many never would). Before the dotcom bubble burst, many young Americans of Chinese heritage, both founders and those who had received stock options, joined the ranks of twenty-somethings with million-dollar portfolios, with many expecting to accumulate their first billion before age thirty. This kind of wealth, noted Stanford historian Gordon Chang, transformed the image of the young Asian American male from “son of a laborer or laundryman” to “future Internet millionaire.”

One icon of the dotcom world was Jerry Yang, the billionaire founder of Yahoo!, an Internet search engine and Web service. Born in Taiwan in 1967, Yang moved with his family to San Jose, California, while he was still a teenager. His company grew out of a simple idea: to create a directory of his favorite sites on the international network of information now referred to as the World Wide Web. By the early 1990s, any location on the Web could be accessed by typing the location’s Web address into an address box. Yang helped develop the first popular search tool for the Web, so that users could type names or relevant phrases into a search box, and have the search engine find all documents with a string of characters matching those in the search box. In a tiny office trailer at Stanford University, Yang, then a twenty-six-year-old doctoral student in electrical engineering, and his classmate, David Filo, sorted hyperlinks by subject and posted them on the Web. Their directory grew so popular that its level of traffic crashed the computer servers at Stanford, forcing the company to move off campus. Yang and Filo took Yahoo! public and watched its worth increase exponentially as the Internet market exploded. By March 2000, the market capitalization of Yahoo! had exceeded $100 billion.
⁵⁵

Of course, not all Chinese moguls of the information age made their wealth through dotcom firms. Some, like Morris Chang, earned their fortunes by enabling high-tech companies to outsource their manufacturing to Taiwan. Revered as the “godfather of high technology” in Taiwan, Chang, an electrical engineer educated at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, pioneered the integrated circuit foundry industry as the founder and chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Recognizing that fabricating chips required enormous startup capital (a semiconductor factory could cost literally billions of dollars), Chang’s company, largely funded by the government of the Republic of China in Taiwan, permitted small American chip companies to contract their fabrication work in Taiwan. Taiwan Semiconductor provided independent chip designers, who could not compete on their own against giants like Intel, Motorola, and NEC, access to affordable manufacturing services, freeing them to focus on creative design work. Thus Chang’s insight accelerated the pace of computer innovation worldwide. Thousands of entrepreneurs were now able to compete by offering their own innovations, instead of leaving the industry’s development to just a

Any gold rush has a few celebrity winners and many exhausted losers. Some Chinese immigrants found themselves in a quandary when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990, introducing the H1-B visa program for highly educated and skilled immigrant workers, but restricting the time such visa holders could work in the United States to a maximum of six years. The act abruptly reversed previous immigration policy, which had eagerly welcomed foreign immigrants with advanced education or professional occupations. After 1965, the government had imposed virtually no limits on the admission of Chinese foreign nationals with specialized training. In 1989, the foreign Chinese students who happened to be in the United States during the Tiananmen Square massacre were allowed to obtain green cards immediately. But for those who came after the 1990 act, it was a different story.