The Chinese in America (29 page)

Some Chinese parents were apprehensive about this new freedom. Many immigrants who cherished the Confucian ideals of wifely obedience and filial piety believed that their sons would find the embodiment of these qualities only in native Chinese brides. They worried that American-born Chinese women were “spoiled,” “too Americanized,” and liable to be difficult daughters-in-law. One man recalled that the parents in his community would have been especially proud to have a daughter-in-law from China, because she represented “the real thing.”

In addition, some immigrant parents wanted their daughters to marry native-born Chinese nationals, but often the legal and cultural barriers proved overwhelming. American-born Chinese women who married native Chinese men would lose their citizenship. The Expatriation Act of 1907, which forced all women to adopt their husband’s nationality upon marriage, gave way to the 1922 Cable Act, which stipulated that any woman who married an alien ineligible for naturalization would relinquish her own U.S. citizenship.

While some foreign-born Chinese immigrants had Western educations and considered themselves modern men, they were not always prepared for the degree of female liberation in American society. In the 1920s, second-generation Chinese women enjoyed a level of freedom inconceivable to most families in China: they worked outside the home, volunteered for various social causes, married men of their own choice, and practiced birth control. Some native Chinese men were horrified by the casual displays of intimacy between Americans of the opposite sex. When Yu-shan Han arrived in the United States in 1926, he was greeted by a friend’s girlfriend with a kiss. Appalled, he described the episode in an essay for a Chicago literary contest on the subject of “My Most Embarrassing Moment.” He didn’t win the contest, he later explained, because a kiss from a girl meant nothing in the United States.

“Chinese women who are born here are regular flappers,” Mar Sui Haw, an upwardly mobile first-generation Chinese immigrant in Seattle, declared in 1924. He went to San Francisco to work for his uncle’s store and newspaper, mastered English, and graduated from a business school. Though he viewed himself as modern and Americanized, he still yearned for a traditional Chinese wife:

Other men shared these sentiments. “It is not right for Chinese man born in China to marry Chinese woman born in America,” Andrew Kan asserted. “They will not be happy. They do not have the same training, the same feeling about the home the girls do in China.” In the 1920s, when Wallace Lee, a Chinese immigrant in Buffalo, New York, was searching for a wife, his cousin warned, “Don’t get married in the United States! Chinese girls talk about freedom, freedom, free, free, free too much! Too new, too fresh, couldn’t make a good wife.”

Still other taboos remained to be broken. Some American-born Chinese braved ridicule, gossip, and ostracism by entering into interracial marriages, which in many states were banned entirely by anti-miscegenation laws. For many immigrant parents, such marriages were unthinkable. Some could not tolerate their sons or daughters wedding outside the Chinese ethnic community, and a few Chinese Americans of that era recall being shunned by friends and relatives simply for marrying Japanese or Korean Americans. Within certain families, even marriage to a person of Chinese heritage was not enough to fulfill strict family requirements; Rodney Chow recalled that his grandparents did not want any of their offspring to marry outside their own dialect.

Yet interracial unions were more common than might be expected. Studies in some parts of the country found that as many as a quarter of all marriages involving Chinese partners were mixed marriages. In Los Angeles, Milton L. Barron surveyed 97 Chinese marriages contracted between 1924 and 1933 and found that 23.7 percent were interracial. For the same period, he examined 650 Chinese marriages in New York State (excluding New York City) and discovered that 150 were to non-Chinese partners. The interracial marriage rate for Chinese in the United States was much higher than that for Japanese, at 6.3 percent, or blacks, at only 1.1 percent.

In time, some of these marriages transcended the barriers of prejudice. When Tye Leung, a Chinese American interpreter at Angel Island, married Charles Schulze, a Caucasian immigration inspector, both were fired from their civil service jobs in San Francisco. Many Chinese snubbed them as well. At first, the residents of Chinatown referred to their mixed-race children as
fan gwai jai
(“foreign devil child”). But the Schulze family gradually gained acceptance, if only because Tye Leung devoted countless hours to volunteer service in the community. Later, she reminisced that her husband’s mother and her own parents “disapprove very much” of their marriage, but as she observed, “when two people are in love, they don’t think of the future.”

 

 

While some parents fretted over the behavior of their children, others may have been even more concerned about the well-being of their families back in China. The 1920s were an era of prosperity for the United States, but in China the decade was a time of lawlessness, when the country was ruled by rapacious warlords. By the late 1920s, there were hopeful signs that the Republic of China would survive. A young Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, emerged to unify a fractured nation. The son of a merchant in the coastal province of Zhejiang, Chiang had gained his military training first in Japan and later, as a protégé of Sun Yat-sen, in the Soviet Union. Between 1926 and 1928 he led a campaign, known as the Northern Expedition, to defeat the warlords and consolidate control of China under the Nationalists. The following year, Chiang, now the supreme leader of the Nationalists, established the capital of the Republic of China in the city of Nanjing.

But it was still a troubled republic. The Northern Expedition had been supported by the Chinese Communist Party, but in 1927, shortly after the expedition began, Chiang purged his former allies from power. Enlisting his extensive contacts with organized crime syndicates, such as the notorious “Green Gang” in Shanghai, Chiang orchestrated the massacre of hundreds of left-wing labor activists. As the slaughter spread to other regions, the shattered remains of the Communist Party fled to the mountains. For the next few years, Chiang waged war against the Communist guerrillas, hoping to exterminate them altogether.

Chiang also faced relentless attacks from Japan, which viewed the chaos in China as a prime opportunity for military expansion. The first sign of trouble surfaced at the end of World War I. In the 1919 Versailles Treaty, Western powers decided not to return German concessions in Shandong province to China, but gave them to Japan instead. In a furor of national outrage known as the May Fourth movement, Chinese intellectuals held mass demonstrations in Beijing and across the country, but the Nationalist government was too weak to ward off Japanese encroachments. Less than a decade later, in 1928, Japan bombarded the city of Jinan in Shandong, killing or wounding more than seven thousand people. In 1931, Japan seized Manchuria, renamed it Manchukuo, and installed Henry Puyi, the last emperor of China, as puppet ruler. The following year, Japanese marines attacked Shanghai, but Chinese resistance forced them to retreat.

With heavy hearts, the Chinese American community followed these developments through ethnic newspapers and letters from relatives. Many immigrants wanted to help the new republic defend itself against Japanese assaults, but were uncertain how to do so beyond sending money home to their own families. But soon, even those remittances would be put in jeopardy, as their newly adopted country found itself mired in the deepest economic depression in its history.

T
he Great Depression struck most Americans without warning, ending one of the nation’s most glittering decades. The 1920s, otherwise known as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties, now evoke images of shocking new fashions and pleasures—of bootleggers in speakeasies, of flappers in short skirts dancing provocative new dances at wild parties flowing with gin. Everyone seemed to have money. The pervasive feeling of prosperity arose from off-the-chart economic growth in the twenties, a period when American business was given free rein by the government. New technological wonders that promised to liberate millions of Americans from drudgery—automobiles and radios, washing machines and vacuum cleaners—rolled off factory assembly lines and were snapped up by a boundlessly optimistic public, often on credit. The United States was now by far the wealthiest nation in the world, with a national income surpassing that of much of Europe and a dozen other countries combined. American corporations built skyscrapers as towering monuments to their ability to do so. Large numbers of people—not just moguls, but maids and shoeshine boys—eagerly played the stock market, hoping to amass a fortune, and most were doing well at it. It seemed that in this age of perpetual prosperity, with some companies starting to include workers in their stock plans, labor unions would soon become obsolete.

But after a decade of frenzied stock market speculation, the bubble burst. On October 24, 1929, “Black Thursday,” came the first great crash on Wall Street, followed by a series of secondary shocks, and then a long, sickening slide toward a national depression.
²⁴
The effect rippled away from New York deep into the hinterlands of the country, shutting down banks and putting companies out of business, until twenty million Americans found themselves unemployed, about 16 percent of the entire U.S. population.

The wheels of capitalism ground to a halt. Bankrupt executives flung themselves out of high-rises, hoping that their families could collect on their life insurance policies. Thousands of laid-off workers went hungry, as farmers, facing foreclosures, burned their crops because the new, lower prices for many farm products did not cover shipping costs. Young men and women lived as hobos, jumping freight trains and riding in boxcars, crisscrossing the country in their futile search for jobs. Growing numbers of homeless Americans slept in shanties made of newspapers and cardboard—“Hoovervilles,” they were sarcastically named, referring to President Herbert Hoover’s inability to revive the economy. Eventually, the depression spread across the globe. As pessimism deepened about the ability of capitalism to heal itself, youths began to read Communist literature and talk revolution.

California was spared the worst effects of the depression, largely because, unlike the industrialized East, its economy centered on agriculture. But the 1930s saw horrendous working conditions in the fields of California. The depression coincided with a severe drought in the Great Plains states, which baked the overworked soil into a giant “dust bowl.” White farmers from those regions, especially Oklahoma, loaded their possessions into jalopies and fled to California, hoping to serve as migrant farm workers, crowding into squalid shacks in private labor camps where they were treated almost like slaves. Their plight was immortalized in John Steinbeck’s novel
The Grapes of Wrath,
as impoverished whites, known as “Okies,” the new serfs of California, took their place in the fields where the Chinese had worked decades earlier.

Most Chinese were able to avoid these upheavals in rural California. By the 1930s, they were largely concentrated in major cities, usually in their own racially segregated neighborhoods. The Great Depression did not affect the Chinatowns of 1930s as badly as the crisis of the 1870s, largely because of the self-sufficiency of these ethnic communities. The knowledge that they could not get easy access to white venture capital had long ago instilled in them certain protective habits, such as frugality, reliance on family connections, and avoidance of frivolous debt. Isolated from white mainstream America, deeply distrustful of white banks, most Chinese businesses had established their own informal credit systems. Aspiring entrepreneurs would borrow money from their own relatives, or partner with other Chinese immigrants to create a
bui,
a pool of capital into which they would make regular deposits and out of which loans would be made at mutually agreed rates of interest.

This is not to say, however, that they did not feel the impact of the depression. As growing numbers of white Americans were thrown out of work, there was less money to pay for services the Chinese provided, such as restaurant dining or laundry. As money grew tighter, Chinese families, like millions of white families, had to make do with less. “I remember wearing sneakers with holes in them,” Lillian Louie said of her New York Chinatown childhood. She would patch the shoes with cardboard and not tell her parents. “We didn’t want to bother them, you know, they had enough to do. They worked so hard.”

As the decade progressed, the United States passed emergency legislation to combat the effects of the Great Depression. When Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, he inaugurated, under an agenda known as the New Deal, a flurry of federal programs to regulate banks, initiate public projects, and put the unemployed back to work. Some programs benefited ethnic Chinese by giving them government jobs and financial assistance. By 1935, 2,300, or 18 percent, of the Chinese in San Francisco were receiving government aid, thanks to the Federal Emergency Relief Act. The number was lower than that for the general American population (22 percent), because many Chinese refused to participate in these programs, scorning them as charity. “During the Depression, I’d see these people taking canned goods [home] from school,” recalled Mark Wong, an American-born Chinese in San Francisco. “And my dad refused. He told me simply, ‘You’re not going to bring back any canned goods back here, period.’ I think the pride of the Chinese is very strong. We’re not going to accept food from anybody even to feed ourselves, even when we’re eating less.”