The Chinese in America (56 page)

Only when American society is truly empowered by education and committed to respect for the human rights of all will it attain the confidence to see race and culture for what it is—a dynamic, ever-changing life force. The future is impossible to predict, but I believe the definition of “Chinese America” itself will grow more complex with time. Already the lines between the ethnic Chinese and other groups are blurring. The Chinese in the United States marry other Asians in record numbers, and the concept of “Chinese American” may be replaced by a new racial identity: “Asian American.” Meanwhile, marriages between Chinese Americans and non—Asian Americans have produced new generations that resist easy labels. Indeed, for some, ethnic identity has become a matter of personal choice as much as indisputable racial appearance or heritage.

Take, for instance, the actor Cy Wong. His great-grandfather migrated from Cuba to Louisiana in 1867 to work as an indentured plantation laborer. After fulfilling the term of his contract, he remained in the American South and married a Creole woman. His son, Cy Wong’s grandfather, married a mixed-race Native American woman of Choctaw and black ancestry, and Wong’s father married a woman of Chickasaw and black descent. Wong, president of the Chinese Historical Association of Southern California, acknowledges that some people have difficulty accepting his Chinese identity. “From time to time, I have had to deal with prejudices, especially from some African Americans,” he wrote in the
Los Angeles Times.
“They’ll say, ‘well, you may look a little Chinese, but you’re still black.’ I’m not denying that my pigmentation is dark, but the true color of a man is what’s on the inside.” When asked, “Who are you, and where are you from?” Cy Wong responded, “I am a descendant of an African native, a Chinese native, and a native American Indian. But
my
nativity is American. I fought for America. I spent six years for America in the Navy. I am a true American.”

And then there is Lisa See, author of
On Gold Mountain,
whose great-great-grandfather, a Chinese herbalist, came to America in 1867. With her freckles, pale skin, and red hair, See does not look Chinese, but she has many stories to tell about her Chinese ancestors on the western frontier. Even though her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother were all white, Lisa See grew up culturally Chinese, spending much of her childhood in her family’s antique store in Los Angeles Chinatown. As an adult, she was astonished to find that others did not view her as a Chinese American. “Many of the Chinese people I interviewed talked about Caucasians as
lo fan
and
fan gway,
as white people, ‘white ghosts,’ ” See wrote. “Often someone would say, by way of explanation, ‘You know. She was a Caucasian like you.’ They never knew how startling it was for me to hear that, because all those years in the store and going to those wedding banquets, I thought I was Chinese. It stood to reason, as all those people were my relatives. I had never really paid much attention to the fact that I had red hair like my [maternal] grandmother and the rest of them had straight black hair ... Though I don’t physically look Chinese, like my grandmother I am Chinese in my heart.”

Once the rare exception, multiethnic Americans like Cy Wong and Lisa See are rapidly becoming the norm. Between 1969 and 1989, the number of children born to Chinese-Caucasian couples more than tripled. In 2000, scholars estimated that there were some 750,000 to 1 million multiracial Asian Americans in the United States.
⁷¹

Mixed-race Americans of Chinese heritage have also achieved celebrity status, pushing the issue of their ethnicity into the spotlight. Tiger Woods, the world-famous golfer, has described himself as “Cablinasian” to embrace his white, black, Indian, Thai, and Chinese roots. And in Hollywood, a growing number of stars—Keanu Reeves, Russell Wong, Meg Tilly, Kelly Hu, Tia Carrere, and Phoebe Cates among them—are part Chinese.
⁷²

While some racially mixed Americans have retained their Chinese culture, others have taken on a brand-new identity. Many children of white-Chinese unions are now calling themselves “Hapa,” a word that originated in Hawaii to describe the children of white merchants and native Hawaiians. Later, it referred to those with half-white, half-Japanese heritage, and now it is commonly used to describe all mixed-race people of some Asian ancestry. Hapa organizations have proliferated on college campuses such as Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Washington. Indeed, Hapas are now coming into their own as a political force and a burgeoning social movement: Hapa conferences, a Hapa magazine
(MAVIN),
and Hapa social clubs. Universities even offer courses in Hapa history.

As Hapas grow in number, they are asserting their freedom to celebrate the richness of their heritage, as are other multiethnic individuals. In the year 2000, for the first time in American history, the U.S. government permitted people to acknowledge their mixed-race heritage on the census by checking more than one box. When Cy Wong filled out his census form, he drew arrows to three boxes to emphasize his black, Chinese, and Native American lineage, and then wrote “Tri-ethnic and American” in the margin.

These trends provoke new questions: What is racial identity? Who gets to decide it? The government? The experts? Or the people themselves?

Though some find it convenient to see race as solid blocs of humanity, easily organized and controlled by bureaucracies on the basis of shared interests, the reality of individual life defies such neat compartmentalization. In reality, race is—and has always been—a set of arbitrary dividing lines on a wide spectrum of color, blending, almost imperceptibly, from one shade to the next.

Perhaps one day we will rediscover a basic truth—that while identity may be shaped and exploited by the powerful, its essence belongs, ultimately, to the individual. America was founded on this concept, but has never achieved its ideal.

Our founding fathers articulated a dream of creating a unique form of government, a democracy that would protect from the tyranny of the majority the rights of the minority, down to the individual. Unfortunately, this dream was, and continues to be, a far cry from the realities of American life. Despite their lofty rhetoric, many of the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights owned slaves and did not believe that their privilege of freedom extended to women, minorities, or even non-landowners. And tragically, over the past two centuries, this country—In its dealings with blacks, Native Americans, and other ethnic groups—broke faith with the promise of these founding documents. Consequently, the history of America, like the history of so many other countries, has been one long struggle with group identity, an ongoing struggle, with an ever-unclear outcome.

The subjugation of individual rights to the group, leading inevitably to ultranationalism, has long been a cause and justification for war and genocide across the planet. It was to escape the oppression of group identity—the burden of racial antagonisms, inherited by blood—that thousands of Chinese and other immigrants abandoned the homes of their ancestors, for unknown futures in a strange land. Only time can tell if their journey will have been successful. This will depend entirely on whether America can continue to evolve toward the basic egalitarian concept upon which it was founded—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” For it was the haunting, elusive dream that such a place really existed that first drew many of the Chinese to American shores.

For nineteenth-century eyewitness descriptions of China, see Mrs. J. F. Bishop (Isabella L. Bird),
The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China, chiefly in the province of Szechuan and among the Man-Tze of the Somo Territory
(London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1899); Robert Fortune, A
Residence Among the Chinese; Inland, on the Coast and at Sea
(London: J. Murray, 1856); Robert Fortune,
Three Years of Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China, including a visit to the tea, silk and cotton countries: with an account of the agriculture and horticulture of the Chinese, new plants, etc.
(London: J. Murray, 1847); John Scarth,
Twelve Years in China; The People, the Rebels, and the Mandarins; By a British Resident
(Edinburgh: Thomas Constable
and
Company, 1860); Bayard Taylor,
A Visit to India, China and Japan; In the Year 1853
(New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862).

13 60 million
liang
of silver:
Jacques Gernet, A History
of Chinese Civilization,
translated by J. R. Foster (Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 530-31.

14
Lin confiscated 20,000 chests of opium:
Gernet, p. 537.

15
“Should I break his nose or kill him”:
Paul Carus, “The Chinese Problem,”
Open Court XV
(October 1901), p. 608, as cited in Robert
McClellan, The Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes Toward China, 1890-1905
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), pp. 88-89.

17 Guangdong credit crisis in 1847:
Madeline Y. Hsu,
Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2000), p. 25.

17 a hundred thousand laborers found themselves unemployed:
Ibid., p. 25.

17 a Chinese resident in California wrote a letter:
San Francisco Chronicle,
July 21, 1878.

19 “Swallows and magpies”:
Marlon K. Horn, “Rhymes Cantonese Mothers Sang,”
Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1999
(Brisbane, Calif.: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1999), p. 63.

20 23 million people:
Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O‘Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds.,
The Oxford History of the American West
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 814.

20 430 million:
Jonathan D. Spence,
The Search for Modern China
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 210.

20 towns of more than 2,500 people:
Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, p. 814.

21 Population statistics for Paris and London:
Adna Ferrin Weber,
The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 450.

21 a mere six cities in the United States had more than 100,000 people:
Robert Sobel and David B. Sicilia,
The Entrepreneurs: An American Adventure
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), p. 119.

21 New York population in mid-nineteenth century:
Adna Ferrin Weber, p. 450.

21 Description of New York and Brooklyn:
Ruth Barnes Moynihan, Cynthia Russett, and Laurie Crumpacker, eds.,
Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 209.

21 Information on Irish and German immigrants:
Roger Daniels,
Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), pp. 129, 146.

22 Life expectancy data on China and the United States:
James I. Lee and Wang Feng,
One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 54; Michael Haines, “The Population of the United States, 1790-1920,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The
Cambridge Economic History of the United States
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996-2000), p. 159; Michael R. Haines, “Estimated Life Tables for the United States, 1850-1910,”
Historical Methods 31:4
(Fall 1998).

23-24
Life in American Midwest:
M. H. Dunlop,
Sixty Miles from Contentment: Traveling in the Nineteenth-Century American Interior
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Catherine Reef,
An Eyewitness History: Working America
(New York: Facts on File, 2000), p.
7.

24 “people were settling right under his nose”:
Lillian Schlissel,
Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey
(New York: Schocken, 1982), p. 20.

25 Statistics on American Indians:
Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O‘Con-nor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, p. 175; Howard Zinn,
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
(New York: HarperCollins, 1999; first Perrenial Classics edition, 2001), p. 125.

26 On the number of Chinese before gold rush:
Him Mark Lai, “The United States,” in Lynn Pan, ed.,
The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 261.

26 Information on Afong Moy; “monstrously small”:
New York Times,
November 12, 1834.

27 Barnum exhibit; twenty thousand spectators:
John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Staging Orientalism and Occidentalism: Chang and Eng Bunker and Phineas T. Barnum,”
Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1996
(Brisbane, Calif.: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1996), p. 119.

27 A “double-jointed Chinese dwarf Chin Gan”:
John Kuo Wei Tchen,
New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 97.

27 Details on Chang and Eng Bunker:
John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Staging Orientalism and Occidentalism, pp. 93-131; Ruthanne Lum McCunn, ”Chinese in the Civil War: Ten Who Served,”
Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1996;
John Kuo Wei Tchen,
New York Before Chinatown,
pp. 106-13, 134-42; Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace,
The Two
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978).