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CONTENTS
Vol. 4, No. 3: Fall 1972
Victor and Brett Nee - Longtime Californ
H. M. Lai - A Historical Survey of Organizations of the Left Among
the Chinese in America
Connie Young Yu - The Chinese in American Courts
Dianne Mark - Stepping Across, Being a Sister / Poetry
Shawn Hsu Wong - Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the
United States 1830-1870 by Gunther Barth / Book Review
Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn
Hsu Wong - Aiieeeee! An Introduction to Asian-American Writing
Shawn Wong and Connie Yu - Trek, State of the City, December
1942 excerpt from a Japanese American Concentration Camp
Journal
Lum Wing Tek, Sam Tagatak, Lawson Fussao Inada, Shawn Hsu
Wong / Poetry
Frank Chin - Confessions of the Chinatown Cowboy
BCAS/Critical AsianStudies
www.bcasnet.org
CCAS Statement of Purpose
Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose
formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose
should be published in our journal at least once a year.
We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of
the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of
our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of
Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their
research and the political posture of their profession. We are
concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak
out against the implications of an Asian policy committed to en-
suring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the le-
gitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We
recognize that the present structure of the profession has often
perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field.
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a
humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies
and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront
such problems as poverty, oppression, and imperialism. We real-
ize that to be students of other peoples, we must first understand
our relations to them.
CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in
scholarship on Asia, which too often spring from a parochial
cultural perspective and serve selfish interests and expansion-
ism. Our organization is designed to function as a catalyst, a
communications network for both Asian and Western scholars, a
provider of central resources for local chapters, and a commu-
nity for the development of anti-imperialist research.
Passed, 2830 March 1969
Boston, Massachusetts
CODleDls
bulletin of concerned asian scholars [vol. 4, no. 3 / Fall 1972]
Special Editors for this issue: Victor and Brett Nee,
ASIAN AMERICA
Connie Young Yu, Shawn Hsu Wong
Victor and Brett Nee
2 Longtime Californ'
H. M. Lai 10
A Historical Survey of Organizations of the
Left Among the Chinese in America
Connie Young Yu 22 The Chinese in American Courts
Diane Mark
31 Stepping Across, Being A Sister / poetry
Shawn Hsu Wong 32 "Bitter Strength-A History of the Chinese
in the United States, 1850-1870,"
by Gunther Barth / book review
Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan,
Lawson Fusao Inada, and
Shawn Hsu Wong
34 Aiieeeee! An Introduction to
Asian-American Writing
Shawn H. Wong and
Connie Young Yu
49 Trek, "State of the City," December 1942,
excerpt from Japanese-American concentration camp journal
Wing Tek Lum
Sam Tagatac
Lawson Fusao Inada
Shawn Hsu Wong
56 Grateful Here
Starfighter
Night Song in Asian America
City Letter / poetry
Frank Chin
58 Confessions of the Chinatown Cowboy
70 Contributors
72 Announcement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation
of the United States [back cover 1
Editors: Steve Andors/Nina Adams
Managing Editor: Jon Livingston Book Review Editor: Moss
Roberts StafF Steve Hart/Berkeley CCAS Editorial Board:
Rod Aya/Frank Baldwin/Marianne Bastid/Herbert Bix/Helen
Chauncey/Noam Chomsky/John Dower/Kathleen Gough/
Richard Kagan/Huynh Kim Khanh/Perry Link/Jonathan
MirskylVictor Nee/Felicia Oldfather/Gail Omvedt/James Peck/
Franz Schurmann/Mark Selden/Hari Sharma/Yamashita Tatsuo
General Correspondence: Bay Area Institute, 604 Mission
Street, room 1001, San Francisco, California 94105
Manuscripts: Steve Andors, P.O. Box 24, Minetto, N.Y. 13115,
in three copies
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars national office: Build
ing 600T, Stanford, California 94305
A subscription form and information about CCAS appear in the
back of the issue.
BULLETIN OF CONCERNED ASIAN SCHOLARS, Fall 1972, Volume 4, Number 3. Published quarterly in
spring, summer, fall, and winter. $6.00; student rate $4.00; library rate $10.00; Foreign rates: $7.00; student rate
$4.00. Jon Livingston, Publisher, 604 Mission Street, room 1001, San Francisco, California 94105. Second class
postage paid at San Francisco, California.
Copyright @ BULLETIN OF CONCERNED ASIAN SCHOLARS, 1972.
BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
Longtiltle Californ'
Victor and Brett Nee
We were talking with the men on Portsmouth Square in
Chinatown. It was in June, the beginning of the summer, and
the square was sunny and crowded, it never seemed as
crowded after that. At first we just stood around and looked.
There were different kinds of men. Some always stood apart
from the groups. There were the very tall men who leaned
against the railing of the park, their deep-brimmed hats pushed
back on their heads, they were restless, they would shift
positions, we would catch their deep eyes and be embarassed
or wonder what they were like. The other loners were small
and lithe. They dressed shabbily, like wandering tramps we
once saw in Japan, not like American tramps, they wore khaki
pants, khaki shirts that hung loosely at the waist, they were
always on the move. They were proud, and we sensed an angry
pride as Chinese. We were standing by the garbage can once in
the beginning, taking notes on what was in the trash can here
in the square: Chinatown newspaper, the comic section of the
Sunday Chronicle, brown paper bags, beer cans, an Old
Fashioned rootbeer can with two striped plastic straws, the
trash was disappointingly American. One of the men in khaki,
a slim man in sneakers, a dirty blue baseball cap, walked back
and forth circling around us and the can. "Hey," he grabbed
Brett's writing arm. "What are you doing here? Just what are
you doing here?"
It was easier to talk to the men standing in groups. They
were better dressed than the others, but we soon recognized
the cut of the vests and the long coats they wore on raw days.
Their outfits were forty years old. They were proud like the
others. They would tell us their names, but not where they
lived. They would show us a few carefully-folded letters they
kept in their pockets, letters from a daughter in China, sent
through someone in Hong Kong. They would speak vaguely of
a child or some relative who lives in another city in California.
"Yeah, I see him now and again." But if we met or talked with
the same man regularly, we would find that the number of
folded letters was always the same, there were never reports of
visits from the children who supposedly lived not too far
away. It was awkward on the night of the Fourth of July
when we stepped into a bar and found Harry Lee sitting with a
drink. "Hey, my son is coming down for the holidy," he hailed
us. "He's driving down from Sacramento tonight. I'm just
having a drink while I wait." We sit down and talk for a while.
Harry looks at the clock behind the bar. He wonders how the
traffic is. We talk some more. Harry tells us he rations out his
drink money so he can have one shot a night. He looks at the
clock again. A lot of accidents on holidays. We buy Harry
another drink and he begins talking about something he
remembers from the thirties. We talk until midnight. Harry
stops looking at the clock. When we leave, no one says
anything about his son. Harry stays on in the bar. We meet
him other days in the square, but Harry doesn't talk about his
family again.
We wanted to learn from the men who they were. Again,
they would reach into their vest pockets as they began the
story, take out a soft plastic folder with the photograph of a
young man, black hair combed back, eyes looking straight
ahead: an alien registration card. The old men keep these rare
pictures of themselves as youths. "Yeah, that's me! 1915. I
was sixteen years old when I came in!" They talk of coming
off the steamer with a father or an uncle who had already been
working here for a long time. "Me -Longtime Californ'," the
old-timers would say to the immigration officials, but the
fifteen or sixteen year old boys didn't get by so easily, this was
their first time in. "You had to prove, see, that you were really
this man's son," Tom Yuen described his arrival in San
Francisco. "Otherwise, if you were just a Chinese working
man, you weren't allowed in." Tom remembered how the men
stepped down the gangplank from the steamship and the
newcomers were isolated out. "We young ones were separated
into a room with no connection with the others. Then, after
everyone was off the boat, the newcomers were shipped out to
Angel Island." Tom Yuen explained that immigration laws
were strict for Chinese then. No laborers allowed. You had to
prove you were the son of a merchant, or the son of a man
who was a citizen here, before you could get in. "So the
lawyers would testify, and then we had to wait on Angel
Island while they sent it to Washington, D.C., to get the thing
cleared up. I was in Angel Island about three months waiting."
"And then, on Angel Island, we were just like prisoners
there." Tom Yuen is intimate for the first time. "They had
one big room where everybody slept, and a dining room. We
had to eat our meals there standing up. If someone had to stay
a long time-six months, or even a year-they would ask the
parents to pay board. But they treated us just like children
there. Just no freedom to go anywhere. No freedom to
correspond. Whenever you send mail out, they'd inspect it,
because they were afraid you might be telling your witnesses
what to say." When they left the island, they walked in groups
up Washington Street; those who came before 1900 rode in
horse-drawn carriages, into Chinatown. Some of them
2
remember being pelted with stones by white boys, boys about
their own age, as they came up from the pier. When they got
into Chinatown, one of the first things they learned was never
to cross the borders of Powell, Broadway, or Kearny alone.
At first we were surprised that when the men began the
stories of their lives, they began with their arrival into San
Francisco. What about their childhood in China, in the villages
of Kwangtung? The men don't talk much about the village.
When they're talking politics, which is most of the time,
they'll go on for hours about China, her wars, the villains and
heroes of her history, but talk of the village is spare. The son
of a dry goods dealer recalls the rocky mountain behind his
village in Toishan. In late summer, he picked fruit there in the
forest. In September, during the kite festival, banners were
hung on the huge trees. He remembers riding a water buffalo
through the rice fields to the pond beside his father's well,
letting him swim out into the water, to get the mud off his
hide; he used to catch little shrimp in the same pond with a
net. He remembers going to the family grave, to perform rites
to his ancestors. But his family was lucky, he tells us, they had
an uncle sending in money from America. Somebody else was
farming their land.
Most of the men say less. "Toishan? I remember one
thing about Toishan," cracks Paul Wong. He is one of the
toughest men on the square. "I remember the dung house.
They took shit to make fertilizer out of it." By the time Paul
was thirteen, he had left t1!e village, spent his first night
sleeping in the open air on Portsmouth Square, and gone out
to work the rice fields near Colusa. What is there to say about
farming? the other men ask. Get up at seven, work till six.
"There was nothing to do in the village, nothing but farm.
Plant yams, plant taro, gather wood-work all day in the sun
just to get two meals from somebody else." Tom thinks it's
about the same as here. "If you don't work, you don't eat,
right? If you have land or money, you hire other people to
work for you. People like us, we had no money, so we had to
work for others. Maybe they would give us something to eat."
And there was not much money in farming. You work like a
cow or a horse, says Paul, and get enough to eat about two
grains of rice. "You think you can make money that way?"
There were hard times in the village, when a harvest was bad,
and the whole season's crop would barely fill the bushels of
rice they owed for rent. For some, even that didn't make
much difference. "Whether there was food or not, it was all
the same," Tom remembers. "In the village, you were always
trying to live on nothing. Cut down on meat, that was the only
way we could get by." Then, there were the bandits in
Kwangtung, yes, even after the Revolution of Sun Yat Sen.
Peasants and landlords alike were their prey. Sometimes, if too
many children had been born, the parents would have to sell
the youngest one to keep the family going. Usually, it was a
girl child, sold as a servant to a wealthier family or into
prostitution. For many peasants, sending a boy to Hong Kong,
sending him abroad wherever there was a labor market and
money to be earned, was the only way to survive. Try above
all things to come away from the village. Wong Sing Look
remembered the letter from his older brother in Hong Kong:
"Y ou can never make a living there."
Actually, in the village all they thought about was
leaving. All they talked about was coming to America. By
the time they were working age, most of the young men in
the countryside would leave. In some villages, as many as 30%
of the men were overseas, and the whole population relied on
them for income. During the Japanese occupation in the
thirties, the men joke, people in the villages had nothing to
eat. "When the war was over and the men in America could
send in money again, the people in the villages had food on
their tables." Wong Sing Look told how the family decided to
send him to America. "For a while, my brother was able to do
well running a store in Hong Kong. But then he lost money.
He came back to the country and got a job helping in a
grocery store. Not much income in that. He couldn't support
the family. So he decided I should go to America to make a
living. I said, 'No, if I go to America what can I do? I can't
speak English. What can I do, work for the Chinese? I won't
make much that way.' But my brother said, 'Whatever you do
there, you can earn more than here, you'll have something to
save and send to us. Maybe you stay there thirty years or
something, and then you come back.' I said, 'I don't have a
family, I'm a single man, if this is what you want, I don't
mind.' "
We learned that, although few were born in California,
most of them belonged to the second or third generation of
men their families had sent to work in America. No, their
fathers or uncles were not the first to come to the United
States, they say. Those Chinese pioneers came in the 1850's
and 60's when there was gold to be mined and the
Transcontinental Railroad was being built from California, the
state's demand for labor was great. They had been peasants,
pressed by unendurable poverty to seek work abroad, who
borrowed money to pay their passage across the Pacific and
spent the first years in California paying off the debt. In ten
years, twenty years, a few did well enough to realize their
dreams; they returned to the village, bought large plots of
land, and retired to lives of leisure as landlords. Most never
earned enough and continued to depend on wages earned in
America to ensure the survival of their families. Too poor to
stay in China, and not rich enough to leave America, they lived
in California for the duration of their working lives. In time,
some brought wives; they and their offspring began the slow
evolution of a family society in Chinatown. For others, family
pressure, lack of funds, and harsh anti-Chinese immigration
laws passed after 1882 dictated that they come alone. They
returned to China every decade or two, bore sons, and
eventually brought them to America where they lived in a
male society. These sons were the fathers and uncles of the
men who stand on Portsmouth Square today.
Like Paul Wong, most of the men came here as boys in
their teens. Their fathers found them work and simple lodging
in large rooms in Chinatown which they shared with other
men, or in Chinese work camps on the levees and farms of the
Sacramento Delta .. For the first few years, the youngest ones
would work as apprentices or simply help the man who
brought them with whatever he was doing. In time, they were
able to find their own jobs as cooks, waiters, store clerks, or
butchers in Chinatown; as agricultural workers, laundrymen,
or domestic servants outside. Sometimes in five years, usually
in ten, the young boy who had come over accumulated the
savings and experience to go back to China. There he was
expected to take a wife, and procreate a first child. "I saved a
little, and then I got a job as a steward on a steamship," Tom
Yuem recalled. "So I got back for about a year. Well, my
parents had a girl all picked out, so I got married as soon as I
got home." Wong Sing Look has been in California for fifty
3
I
years and has been back to his village twice. He came at
eighteen, went back at thirty to marry, waited for a year, and
had a son. He only went back once again, at forty, to have a
second child. But the return to the village was disappointing.
They were poor and unchanged, and the men found they
missed America. "Same as I told you before," Tom said, when
we asked him how it felt to be home. "Never anything to do in
the village. It was better working in America, even at $50 a
month." So the men would come back after the birth of the
child, and, like their fathers, they returned without their
wives. The few who brought wives were exceptions. Wong told
us it was too much of a risk to try to get his wife in as a
"merchant's wife," besides, he never had the extra $600
passage. As Tom put it, "In those days, one thing about
Chinese men in America was you had to be either a merchant,
or a big gambler, have a lot of side money, to have a family
here. A working man, an ordinary man, just can't." Of course
until 1948, the men remind us, the marriage of a Chinese man
to a white woman was prohibited by California law.
With marriage a man's bond to his family in the village
was sealed. From then on until he returned to his village to
retire, he was expected to send regular remittances to support
wife and family. In the first years after marriage, these
remittances were sent promptly and within regular intervals.
The men were keenly aware that the family depended upon
them for survival, and when an expected remittance failed to
arrive, their mothers would send a reprimand through a
relative in San Francisco. While the men were gone, the wives
farmed and helped with household work in the family
compound. They money they received enabled them at least to
live better than villagers who did not have men overseas. Some
invested in land. But the men had not chosen their wives,
spent only a brief time living with them, and as memories of
the visit to the village faded, remittances were sent
perfunctorily more out of a deep sense of loyalty than love.
For most, after marriage it was possible to go once or twice,
and over time the bond to the village was worn down by long
years working as single men in America. For some of the men,
even their fathers' dream of returning to the village to die
began to lose meaning. Tom Yuen felt he did not want to
repeat his father's mistake. "He had some crazy idea that his
life would be sixty years long. He thought he could work 'til
he was sixty, then go back there and expect to die. But when
the time came, he didn't have any money. Well, he had $200
in bills. That was in 1929. He went back and it lasted exactly
one year. I had to send him money myself to keep him going."
Finally, historic events which occurred outside their own
lives severed the tie between the men and the village: the harsh
years of the Japanese occupation of Kwangtung, when many
of their families fled to Hong Kong, the partial relaxation of
American immigration laws which permitted the entrance of
some Chinese women after World War II, and the Chinese
Revolution. In 1950, land-owning families uprooted by
revolutionary land reform took refuge in Hong Kong and, with
the Refugee Act of 1962, were able to join relatives in
America. It was the men who had earned too little to lift their
families out of the peasant class who were permanently
separated from them by the revolution, the men who spend
their days talking to each other on Portsmouth Square and
who are talking to us now. We learn that they are the last
survivors of the bachelor societies which characterized
American Chinatowns for nearly one hundred years.
For the men who spent their working years here,
memories of the village have been overpowered by a longer,
deeper experience of California. The stories of their own
working lives, the lives of their fathers before them, richly
mirror the history of California, the growth and development
of her land. The men's roots are deep in California. Their
fathers were railroad workers, who came to the West while
networks of tracks still had to be laid in California, Oregon,
Nevada, and Utah. By that time, the 1870's, the blasting of the
Central Pacific through the Sierra Nevada by the first Chinese
work teams had been completed. But fresh recruits of labor
were needed to extend the networks into southern California,
down through the San Joaquin Valley to Los Angeles, across
the Mohave Desert. When the railroads were finished, the men
moved again, this time into camps in the swampy tule land of
the Sacramento Delta. After twenty years, building the levees,
they transformed the valley into fertile land. As farms sprang
up in the valley, and wharves and packing sheds were built
along the Sacramento River, workers from the levee camps
drifted onto the farms or took jobs on the wharves packing
fruit and asparagus, segregating celery and onion seeds for
shipment. A few of the oldest men remember when the last
camps were still working in the Delta. From San Francisco,
Juey Suen Jaw remembers going up to a camp on the levees
near Merced, where the first years of his life in America he and
his father cooked and served meals to the men in the camp for
$5 a day, "minus 75 cents for every dish you broke!" On
weekends they went into Stockton or Locke, and Juey still
talks about the days when crowds of Chinese workers from the
farms along the river would come in to gamble in the Delta
towns on Saturday nights, jammed onto horse-drawn
flat-bottomed wagons.
But as with the stories of their entrance into San
Francisco, there is an undercurrent of bitterness to these
stories of the California past. The men speak matter-of-factly
of the Chinese railroad workers, they recall the levees and the
reclamation of the Delta with pride. During their fathers'
life-times, they say, the Chinese work camps that dotted the
West faded . " .. 1 sight. The settlements in Wyoming, Montana,
and Utah, from California's San Joaquin Valley all the way to
the Mother Lode country died out. No, the men cannot
reconstruct the sequence of events too clearly. What they
remember are stories told t h ~ m by the old-timers of their own
days, knowledge passed on as lessons for survival, and some
things, says Tom Yuen, "nobody has to tell you, you just
know." The information is fragmented, the dates vague: a
feeling in the cities and the countryside, already strong by the
time their fathers arrived, grew. They remembered nights when
bands of white men called out the landowners who employed
them, angry exchanges, demands that the Chinese workers
leave. Then the boycotts and the burnings of fields. The
shootings. The news of agitation in the city. Riots. Beatings.
"The Chinese Must Go!" Then Exclusion. The driving out. The
departure.
It was after the passage of the Exclusion Act, their
fathers told them, which forbade absolutely the entrance of
Chinese laborers to America, (although merchants and their
wives could still legally enter) that the driving-out began. First,
not in California, but in other Western states where railroad
building was still in process and small settlements of miners
remained. They heard that in Rock Springs, Wyoming, 28
Chinese were murdered, hundreds burned out of their homes.
4
It spread to Washington. In Tacoma, men were pushed into
boxcars and shipped out of the city. Murders in the hop fields.
A murder in the mines. Finally Federal troops were sent into
Seattle. In Idaho, lynchings. In Oregon, dynamite. And then in
California the driving-outs began. Sometimes fire, sometimes
threats, sometimes armed crowds, drove the Chinese from the
countryside. No, not from every town, and sometimes there
were white men who defended them. But the men name the
names. From Tulare and Visalia, from Fresno and Chico, from
the Lava Beds, Grass Valley, Oroville, Roseville, Rocklin,
Compton, Redlands, their fathers fled. Those who had money
departed. Men who could afford it went back to China. Men
who could affird it went to the East Coast, where maybe it
would be different. Men who had no money poured into
Chinatown, and, surrounded by a hostile city, began the search
for new ways to survive.
The men heard that the departures went on for about
twenty years. Settlements where there had been thousands of
Chinese dwindled to a few hundreds. By the turn of the
century, even San Francisco, to which most Chinese from the
rural areas had fled, had had its Chinese population cut nearly
in half because of the massive departures for China. It was
almost impossible to find work. "About all they could be was
laundrymen or vegetable peddlers then," the men remember.
"You couldn't work in the cigar factories, or the jute or the
woolen mills any more, all the Chinese had been driven out."
You could sell shrimp, if you could live on that. You could be
a cook or work as a house-boy in some rich man's house. You
could figure out a way, as Wong Sing Look put it, "to work
for the Chinese." And if everything failed, you could go back
to the countryside again, this time neyer settling in one town,
keeping on the move from season to season, place to place,
where Chinese were still accepted as migrant workers, to
perform the lowest class of labor in the state. "Chinatown was
his home base, that was the safest place," Tom says of his
father just after 1900. "In the summer, he went out to
Watsonville and picked fruit. In November, he was cutting
sardines in Monterey. He went up to Alaska, to the salmon
canneries in winter-time, and then he got back to the valley
again in time to harvest the asparagus in the spring."
There were still white employers who used the men for
jobs which white workers did not want, and here and there in
the countryside, small groups of Chinese discharged from
railroads and plantations, who had scraped together their
savings to rent plots of land as tenant farmers, hired the men
who came out from Chinatown to harvest. It was at this point,
when the Chinese population in America was at its lowest ebb
and these bands of Chinese migrant workers were still
scattered through the state, that the men in Portsmouth
Square entered California. Like their fathers, men who could
not afford passage back at the time of Exclusion and
continued to depend on work in America during the dangerous
period that followed, the sons had been sent in by poor
families in Kwangtung despite all risks, and usually on false
entry papers. In those days, only the hardiest sons were sent to
America, the men say, and they braced themselves for it.
Conscious of the defeat of their fathers, aware that with each
year the number of Chinese working in the countryside was
declining, they joined the last bands of Chinese migrant
workers. A life on the move, going in and out of Chinatown,
travelling up and down the valleys and the coast looking for
work, has been their past. They were and are the last of their
kind.
"In our days, say up until about the Second World War,"
a friend of Paul says, "Chinese were just like the Latins are
now. You could see them all over the valleys, moving by the
season." As a young man, he worked on the tenant farms
where Chinese grew fruit: peaches in Oroville, apples from
Watsonville to Sebastopol. Since Chinese could not buy land, a
group of relatives would rent a fruit-drying plant and operate
the kilns at cost. When the fruit was ripe, crews of fity or sixty
men would come out from Chinatown to pit, sulphurate, and
dry it. Many of the men would work through a summer,
starting with cherry picking, doing a little planting, and ending
up with the apple harvest before they went north. Kam Wai
started farm work when he was 19. "That was around '28, '29,
in the summer. For a buck and a half, you could ride these
little limousines that went out from Chinatown to the farm. In
the beginning of the summer, you picked cherries, after that
pears, after that you planted tomatoes." Kam Wai was in
Courtland, and he remembers how he got out on the farms and
"mixed with the elderly Chinese, the old guys who would go
from Courtland to Fresno picking grapes, then rest awhile,
then come back again." On the farms, the men lived together
in crowded bunk-houses where they cooked and slept in
bunk-beds that lined the walls. "Maybe ten of us would sleep
together. I remember, some of the older ones smoked opium.
They used to ask us younger ones did we want to try it, sniff
it, but we knew better, we would say, no, no. But it seemed
like it was just nothing to them. They didn't get crazy, or that
kind of thing. I used to watch them every day, you know, and
they could climb a tree as well as I could."
The men remember the bleakness of the years on the
farms. "For one thing," says Kam" "there's not much life in
farm-working. You're travelling from one town to another,
and everybody sort of looks down on the farm workers, you
know, the lowest type of people on the totem-pole. And then,
you don't really have much social outlet as far as I can see. I
remember all the men used to talk about was where they were
going next. When I finish here, I'm going to so and so, finish
there and go to so-and-so. Saturday night's the only night you
go out and do anything, if you do anything at all. 'Course, if
you're married, it's a different thing altogether. Saturday night
you might go to a show or something like that. But for the
single men like myself, and I saw many men like myself, you
can do only two things. I could spend my time in a gambling
joint, that's one thing. Or I could go around to the prostitute'S
towns, making all the rounds. So, as I say, at that time, life
doesn't mean too much to us."
There is a last significance to the era of their working
lives which the men do not omit, for, as the passage of the
Exclusion Act had begun the process of the "driving-out"
while their fathers were young, the passage in 1924 of another
act restricting Chinese immigration brought the final death of
the Chinese settlements in the countryside while these men
were in their working prime. Even in the difficult decades at
the beginning of the century, the men remember, about 150
Chinese women a year would manage to get in. Usually they
were sponsored by the merchants or "big gamblers" Tom
talked of. Very rarely, late in life, a Chinese laborer was able
to save enough to bring his wife in on false papers. But with
the Immigration Act of 1924 all these possibilities were gone.
The entrance of all Chinese women immigrants to the United
States was prohibited. In the five years that followed not a
7
single Chinese female entered California to live, and in the
next decade, for the first time since the years just after
Exclusion, the number of Chinese men who returned to China
permanently was larger than the number coming in to look for
work. Many of the younger men, perhaps more realistic about
conditions in the villages, decided to stay, the older men were
completely disillusioned. "The way the older ones saw it," one
of the men thought back to how the men spoke on the farms,
"they had been holding on here a long, long time but they
could see America didn't have any place for them. A few of
them brought over wives and there were starting to be families
at that tim.e. And then it was as if the Americans noticed it, we
were beginning to repopulate a little now, so they passed this
law to make us die out altogether." Especially in 1929, with
the onset of the Depression, the older men decided to leave.
"First, they can't bring their wives over now, no matter how
much money they make, can't live like family men. We can't
marry white women either. And then when the Depression hit,
everybody went broke." It was during the Depression years
that men like Tom's father went back to China, after a lifetime
of work in California, sometimes with just a few hundred
dollars in their pockets. The others worked on as single men,
doing farming in the valleys, until they died.
"When my father was young, that was the time for the
heroes for the Chinese in America. It was the hardest times,
because of what they've been through, but they were the
greatest ones. In our times, it was just dying out." Perhaps of
all the men we talked with, Johnny Ginn expressed the feeling
of his era most poignantly. Johnny is one of the small, wiry
men, he looks past us when he talks, veins on his arms beneath
short sleeves. He is one of a dying breed of Chinese migrant
workers. "Since 1934," he introduces himself, "I was
travelling from one end of the United States, matter of fact,
down the whole Pacific coast. I was working up in Oregon,
Washington, in the great farm country, mostly in apples. I
came down to San Francisco around the time of the '34 strike
and I puttered around the waterfront for awhile, saw the
conditions there with the troops shooting and all that, and I
thought that was no place for me so I got out fast. Since that
time, I worked in City Lights, Fresno, Dianoba, Reedley,
Porterville, any of those farm towns. I picked grapes, I picked
oranges, I picked lemons, I picked pomegranates and whatever
there is. And I worked down in Watsonville, too, on the
apples, and then I worked all up and down the Salinas Valley,
King City, and a few other places I don't recall, mainly on
lettuce and carrots and not much on beets, and so I worked on
up to '42. And the way I travelled, see, is mainly by box-car
from one destination to another." Johnny's life as a migrant
worker grew out of the failure of his father's dream.
Johnny's father came to America'in the 1870's to build
the Union Pacific. At the age of 65, he spent his life's savings
to bring his wife across the Pacific, thus becoming one of the
rare Chinese laborers to live with a family in America. It was
on the apple orchard where his father was a tenant farmer
outside Sebastopol that Johnny first became aware of the
effects of a history he had not seen. "There were about 300
Chinese farm workers up there, and they were all old men. I
asked my dad about it and he told me they had come over
here about the same time he did, and they were working on
the railroad. Then he began to talk a little about the railroad,
something happened after they were done building it, but I
didn't listen to him carefully enough then. I just knew that
8
alter the railroad was over, these guys worked on a lumber mill
for a while doing shingle work, and then when the lumber mill
shut down, they went from there to farming. Naturally,
they've been doing this type of stuff most of their lives
anyway." Johnny helped his father on the farm, gathering
wood, cooking for the crew, picking in the field with them,
and came to understand the lives of the men. As he grew into
his twenties, he realized that the farm settlement in Sebastopol
was dying. "Well, there they were, with three hundred Chinese
workers, and except for my mother, not a single woman. That
was the whole Chinese settlement in Sebastopol. All these old
guys thought about was how they wanted to go back to China.
But there's only about six months' work in the year on apples,
so they never saved a thing. And the only other thing besides
work was gambling. Gambling was the social life, and gambling
was the pasttime. Everybody hoped to make a few bucks so
they could go home in the easy way. The others lost their
money and got stuck from year to year. And the reason there's
no Chinese in Sebastopol today is that eventually they all died
off because there was no reproduction."
In 1929, the only Chinese woman in Sebastopol died. In
the years that followed, for the first time, Johnny's father
unfolded the story of his past. "In March 1929, my mother
took sick and she died in May. With the Depression, my father
already lost all his money on the farm, so when she passed
away he was heart-broken. He began to get sick, too, and never
got better after that. That was when my dad began talking like
the other men, always wanting to go back to China. He kept
saying, 'Let's just fold up here. You come with me and we'll
go back home.' And I think in those years, if he told me once
he told me five hundred times, 'This is a white man's country.
You go back to China when you make your money, that is
where you belong. If you stay here, the white man will kill
you.' At first, when he told me that, I used to get very angry. I
felt he must have been very badly treated sometime in the
United States, and I didn't want him to talk about it then. But
in 1934, we finally saved up the $600 to send him home. He
didn't want to go at that time, because he wanted me to go
with him. I think he felt if I married in China, I'm more apt to
be tied with my home country than with the United States.
Now, it wasn't that I didn't want to get married in those days,
but I didn't see any future in going back. I would only have to
come back here to work, and I knew darn well that I would
never in my life be able to sponsor my wife and family over
here. Then, there's no use kidding myself I can have the
money to go back there and visit any time I want to, either. So
I convinced him that he should go back there alone, he has a
sister there, he has the tie.
"Well, he did decide to go back in the end, even though
he went back broke and sick. We were still up in Sebastopol
before he left. And I never used to listen to him before, when
he talked about the old days, but this time the story came out.
He told me that he was working the Union Pacific, laying the
tracks from California to Utah, and he worked there right up
till the railroad was done. And when the railroad was done,
there was this chasing of Chinese. Chasing from one end of
Utah to the other, all over Utah state. The Chinese were
stranded out there, he said, didn't know where to go. And the
ones that got beaten and the ones that got killed have never
been stated, to this day, I don't think the United States
government has ever made reparation to our people for the
ones that lost their lives because of brutality. Well, at least the
railroad did one good thing for our people. They rounded up
as many as they could find and brought them back to San
Francisco. Then the railroad people took them to an army
stockade, in the Presidio, and then the city people could come
down from Nob Hill and Pacific Heights to pick up the
Chinese they need. You know, this guy as a farmer, this guy as
a cook, this guy as a laundryman, and so forth. So that was
what happened to the railroad workers. But my father
remembered a lot of men committing suicide then. Ran out
and threw themselves in the bay.
"That was how my dad got up to Duncan's Mill. There
was a lumber company up in Sebastopol and they sent two
men down to the Presidio, John and Robert NoHan, and they
saw my dad. I guess he was bigger than most of the Chinese,
he's part Mongolian, so they picked him up to be foreman of
the lumber mill at Duncan's Mill, working on the shingles.
Then when the war started in 1914, they closed the lumber
camp down and they gave my father a certain amount of
money to pay him off. That was when he started the farm,
him and most of the other Chinese in the camp.
"After my dad went back, I couldn't make a dime. And
I felt I no longer had any tie to Sebastopol, I had no property,
no relationship, no nothing there. So that was when I began to
travel from job to job on farms. Actually, I wanted to find
something steady then. I know farm work is never steady
except when you own your own farm. Working as a migrant
worker-that's only seasonal. Three months there, two months
there, and in between you're lucky if you don't get caught in
the rainy season. But at that time, back in Sebastopol, I guess I
didn't know what I wanted. I was the sort of person that
didn't have much of an interest in anything because, to begin
with, my family was gone, and when your family is gone you
have no place to go. You have no one to turn to. So what are
you going to do? And the only way I knew how to survive was
by doing the work I did before. So therefore I had to travel a
lot of different routes."
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A Historical Survey of
Organizations of the Left
Among the Chinese

America
H. M. Lai
Introduction
The history of the left among the Chinese in America is
a neglected chapter in the history of the Chinese community.
This is a preliminary survey of the left movements until the
end of the 1950's; most of the emphasis in the present essay is
on activities in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is the author's
hope that this initial sketch, superficial as it may be, will
inspire others to probe to greater depths into this little
investigated but significant phase in the history of the Chinese
in this country.
There were two factors entering into the causation of
left-wing activities among the Chinese in from
China, was inspired by national salvation and national
revolution, while the other, arising from the exploitation and
discrimination in America, was motivated by a desire for
betterment of their own lot. These two factors were present
throughout the history of the left among the Chinese In
America, although one or the other predominated at times.
The Introduction of Socialist Doctrines to the Chinese
The latter half of the 19th Century was a time of travail
for the Chinese people. After the bayonets and cannons of the
West had battered down China's wall of isolation, the ancient
empire fourid herself unable to cope with the aggressive
Westerners as her traditional social structure and self-sufficient
economy crumbled before their thrusts, and territories and
concessions were yielded to the pugnacious occidentals.
Toward the end of the century, partitioning of China by the
powers and submittal to colonial status appeared inevitable.
This was a time of peril for the nation. Concerned
Chinese began quests for ways toward national salvation.
Among these were a number of intellectuals who examined
and accepted socialism as the goal toward eventual
regeneration of the Chinese nation.
At the turn of the century, China was greatly dependent
upon Japanese sources for information on Western culture,
and the introduction of socialism was no exception.! It was
through Japanese wntmgs that Chinese students and
intellectuals were first exposed to the doctrines of Marx,
Engels, and others. Beginning in 1903, books, pamphlets and
articles on socialism also were published in Chinese. Many
articles on this subject appeared in the newspapers and
periodicals established at the time by both the Chinese Empire
Reform Association (Zhongguo Weixinhui) led by Kang
Youwei and Liang Qichao, and the revolutionary Zhongguo
Tongmenghui, led by Sun Vat-sen. Drawing much of their
support from the overseas Chinese, both organization's
publications had broad reading audiences in the overseas
Chinese communities, and as a result had wide circulation
abroad. Certainly, in an age when most Chinese readers were
not familiar with Western languages, these publications were
important sources for those Chinese interested in socialist
doctrines.
Initially the brand of socialism from the West espoused
by the Chinese writers was generally that advocated by
social-democrats of the Second International. Ideological
limitations of most of these intellectual socialists, derived as
they were mainly from the gentry classes, led to grea t hostility
toward violent revolutionary methods. Paralleling this
development, however, was a growing interest in anarchism
and nihilism among some of the younger revolutionaries.
2
By mid-decade, articles advocating anarchism as the
guide for revolution began to predominate in Chinese socialist
writings. The doctrines of Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin
became the fad in Chinese revolutionary circles. Many young,
impatient, romantic petit bourgious intellectuals became
attracted to the simple solution of committing individual
heroic acts of terrorism to pull down and destroy the old order
10
as represented by the Manchu dynasty.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 gave further impetus to
the growth of popularity of anarchism, and by 1907 anarchist
groups formed among students in Japan and France. Within a
short time the doctrine spread to China and to the overseas
Chinese.
3
The American Milieu and Development of the Left among the
Chinese in America
Chinese peasants emigrating to America had hoped to
find a better life. Instead, in the land of liberty they found not
freedom and prosperity, but discrimination and intolerance,
and finally suffered the dubious distinction of being the first
ethnic group to be singled out for exclusion from the u.s. in
1882. The great majority of Chinese who lived and worked in
America were exploited by employers, merchants and labor
contractors both within and without their own community.
Although Chinese labor had been characterized as being docile
and tractable, the not so infrequent strikes and sometimes
violent reactions of Chinese labor to exploitation showed that
they did not take their miserable lot as passively and
fatalistically as some Western historians had put it.
Contemporary accounts show that they fought back when
given the proper leadership and organization.
4
It was expected
that the socialist doctrines as the way toward that better world
would strike sympathetic chords among at least some of the
Chinese in America.
At this time, many members of the American working
class were strongly influenced by the socialist do ctrines.
Worker solidarity was one of the basic tenets of socialism,
whether Marxist or Anarchist. However, during the early years
of the 20th Century, this was a myth as far as Chinese workers
are concerned, because the American labor movement in
general was extremely hostile to Chinese labor. Even the
so-called Marxist Socialists, in spite of their professed belief in
the brotherhood of the working man, supported the
"unconditional exculsion of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and
Hindus.... " from this country.s Only the anarcho-syndicalist
Industrial Workers of the World (iWW) held true to the belief
that fraternal bonds existed among all wage earners regardless
of racial lines, and set about to enroll Asian workers, including
Chinese, into the unions on an equal basis with workers of
other racial groups. The I.W.W. was never too successful in
their recruiting campaign. But at least some Asians were won
over to their cause, for during this period at least two Chinese
were translating I.W.W. literature into Chinese in San
Francisco.
o
At this time, the Chinese in America were excluded from
large scale modern industries, thus they lacked the discipline
that workers in large industries qcquired. Moreover, stimulated
on the one hand by anarchist writings from China, and on the
other by the fraternal hand extended to them by the I.W.W. it
was natural for some early Chinese radicals to lean toward
syndicalist ideas.
By 1914, a small group of socialists had formed a
Chinese Socialist Club in San Francisco.
7
With the coming of
the post-World War I depression and the steady deterioration
of the Chinese worker's economic position,
anarcho-syndicalists became increasingly active among the
workers and in 1919 the Sanfanshi Gongyi Tongmeng Zonghui
(Workers' League of San Francisco) was formed.
8
The League aimed its first action at Chinese shirt
manufacturing factories in San Francisco and Oakland. On
May 18, 1919, the new workers' organization presented nine
demands to factory owners.9 After strike threats and several
negotiating sessions at the Young Wo Association in San
Francisco, they finally signe,d agreements with 32 factories.
Following this initial success the league soon created two
additional departments: one for agriculture and one for
miscellaneous occupations. In September 1919 a branch was
established among Chinese agricultural workers in Suisun,
California. The League then changed its name to Meizhou
Gongyi Tongmeng Zonghui (r,,;/rJ "FAMer;c<!..j
() 0-11 ) to suit the new situation.
In the meantime, the owners had organized to
counter-attack. During the next few years, by presenting a
united front against the workers. the employers defeated
several strikes led by the U GoA. The WLA's fortunes
declined as they were unabie to rally worker support and it
disappeared from the Chinatown scene around 1927.
At its height the Uc;..A claimed a nominal membership of
about a thousand. It was the high point of anarcho-syndicalist
activity among Chinese workers in America. This pea_k was
never to be approached again. The demise of the U A,
however, demonstrated the difficulty Chinese workers would
have in achieving lasting gains in a situation where they were
going it alone without much fraternal support from workers in
the larger society.
Following the disappearance of the UCA" the anarchist
movement in San Francisco's Chinese community was
sustained by the Ping Sheh (Equality Society), a political club.
Occasional police harassment
lO
and lack of community
support made it difficult for this small group to accomplish
much except to publish pamphlets and a monthly magazine
Pingdeng (Equality) from 1926 to around 1931,11 and
infrequently to distribute leaflets in support of workers'
struggles in Chinatown.
12
In 1934 another group of anarchists
organized the Wuzhengfu Gongchanzhuyizhe Lianmeng
(Alliance of Anarcho-Communists) and issued another
monthly publication, the Wuzhengfu Gongcban Yuekan
(Anarcho-Communist Monthly). 13 But this, however,
represented the efforts of only a few zealots without much
mass following.
Times continued to be difficult for the anarchists in the
midst of the Great Depression of the 1930's. By this time
Marxism had become dominant in the socialist movement.
However, the Equality Society managed to survive until the
eve of World War II.
The Chinese anarcho-syndicalist movement of the 1920's
and 1930's was not limited only to the San Francisco Bay
Area. The Chinese Labor Association (Huaren Gonghui),
founded in Vancouver, B.C., during the mid-1920's to struggle
against labor contractors, had an anarchist leadership.14 And
during the 1930's a Jue She (Awaken Society) was organized
in New York City.IS
By the end of the 1930's, however, the anarchist
movement had run its course. The cause of its decline among
the Chinese in America was directly connected with its decline
in America as a whole. The growth of mass unions and large,
complex industries was contradictory to anarcho-syndicalist
decentralization and anti-leadership concepts. Bigness
engendered a need for disciplined mass action which was
contrary to the syndicalists' ideas of spontaneity. Their
11
extreme left wing tactics, such as standing aloof from
conservative trade unions, isolated them from the mass of
workers. Moreover, following the Russian Revolution, the
better-organized Marxist communists attracted many elements
from the syndicalist organizations, thus sounding their death
knell.
16
As syndicalism withered to a mere splinter on the left
anarchists tended to become anti-capitalist, anti-soviet and
anti-communist (Marxist).
The anarcho-syndicalists formed one of the earliest
radical socialist organizations among the Chinese in America.
Bur just as the Neanderthal Man was an early branch-off from
the main line of development le;lding to homo sapiens, the
anarchIst movement in Chmatown was an early development
of the Chinese left which led into a blind alley. Today its
effects upon the Chinese community can hardly be detected.
The Communist-Kuomintang Alliance in China and its Effects
It is not known when the Chinese in America first
became interested in Marxism. Undoubtedly there were
already some who received a smattering of the socialist
doctrines during the 1900's. The October Revolution was the
stimulus spurring more Chinese in China as well as Chinese in
this country to study the Marxist doctrines. For instance, in
Dec. 1919 there was already a group calling themselves Xin
Shehui (New Society) formed in San Jose, California, "to
study capitalism and communism and the radical politics of
the New Russia."I? However Marxism was not influential
among the Chinese left in America until after the Canton
Revolutionary Government led by Sun Yat-sen made an
alliance with the USSR and admitted Communists to the
Kuomintang. Because of this alliance, Marxists among the
Chinese in America were very active in support of the Chinese
Revolution. They were found m many Kuomintang
organizations.
Given the discriminatory conditions under which the
Chinese in America lived, and the hope for the creation of a
strong independent China by the successful completion of the
Chinese Revolution led by the Revolutionary Government of
Sun Yat-sen, it was not surprising that Marxism augmented its
influence in the Chinese community at this time. This period
saw the first political involvement of many who were to
continue to participate in activities of the Chinese left in
America during the next three decades. And it was probably
during these years that the first Chinese in the U.S. joined the
America Communist Party. A Chinatown Branch of the party
had been established in San Francisco by the late 1920's,
where it was active until around the beginning of the Korean
War. IS However, it was the popularly-based organizations of
the left which had the greatest effect on the Chinese
community. And in these organizations, Marxists, liberals,
nationalists and others worked together to carry into effect
certain economic and political programs as reflected by the
needs of the times.
One of the earliest such organizations, established among
Chinese workers in San Francisco during the mid-1920's, was
the Huaqiao Gonghui (Chinese Workers' Club), which aided
and educated Chinese workers and especially gave aid to the
Chinese Revolution. This organization, alleged to be one of the
first to fly the Kuomintang's national flag in San Francisco's
Chinatown, lasted only a few years and disappeared around
1930, its demise hastened no doubt by the
Kuomintang-Communist split in China during the late
1920'S,19 which caused political repercussions in Chinese
communities allover the world.
Another organization supporting the Chinese Revolution
during this period of the Kuomintang-Communist Alliance
the Chinese Students Club (Zhongguo Xueshenghut),
composed of Chinese students of various political beliefs all
over the U.S. interested in the building of a China free from
foreign domination. In the San Francisco Bay Area the group
included university and high school students, mostly from
China but also included some American-born. Following
Kai-shek's coup in Shanghai in 1927, when the more
conservative students in the Chinese Students Club turned
their backs on the Revolution, student supporters of the
Chinese Revolution in the San Francisco Bay Area regrouped
to form the Sanfanshi Zhongguo Xueshenghui (San Francisco
Chinese Students Club). In the same period, revolutionary
working class elements formed another group, the Zhongguo
Gong-Nong Geming Datongmeng (Grand Revolutionary
Alliance of Chinese Workers and Peasants, ACWP) to oppose
the KMT right in San Francisco's Chinatown. The ACWP also
published a weekly newspaper, Xianfeng Zhoukan (The
Vanguard) to air their support of the Chinese Revolution.
20
In
the community feelings ran high as the left and right
denounced each other. Political street meetings frequently
broke up as hecklers from the opposition engaged in fights
with the participants.
21
On the Eastern seaboard, left elements opposing the
Kuomintang right wing also were active as early as their
compatriots on the Pacific Coast. A branch of the ACWP also
existed in Philadelphia as early as 1928. By 1930 the Chinese
Anti-Imperialist Alliance of America (Meizhou Huaqiao Fandi
Datongmeng), which appeared to be a successor organization
to the ACWP, established the Chinese Vanguard (Xianfeng
Bao), as a monthly in Philadelphia.
22
Later it was moved to
New York City and published as a weekly. After its demise
during the mid-1930's, another weekly of similar editorial
views, National Salvation (Jiuguo Shibao)" was transferred
from Paris to commence publication in New York City.23
However, the masses in Chinatown then were not in a
revolutionary mood and the circulations of these papers
remained small; their effects on the Chinese community were
limited. However, these publications marked the beginnings of
the press of the Marxist left among the Chinese in America.
Besides hostility from the right in the Chinese
community, the left also received much harassment from the
police. For example in 1929 the San Francisco police, perhaps
egged on by the KMT right-wing, raided the headquarters of
the San Francisco Chinese Students club and closed it for
alleged communist activities.
24
25
By the end of the decade, overt activities in support of
the Chinese Revolution had ebbed among the Chinese in
America. The Kuomintang right, in collaboration with the
police and supported by the conservative merchants, gained
control in the community.
The new alignment of forces in Chinatown saw increased
contacts between the Chinese and American left. It was
undoubtedly through such collaborative efforts that resulted
in a delegate of the militant Chinese Laundry Workers Union
(Xifutang) being asked to attend a San Francisco Labor
Council meeting in 1929 to report on their victory in a week
long strike against Chinese laundries in the San Francisco Bay
12
Area.
26
This was the first time a Chinese organization was
invited and marked the small beginnings which led to fuller
participation of Chinese workers in the American labor
movement. (Earlier in 1925 the WLA had appealed to
American labor unions for donations and support for Chinese
striking in protest against Japanese and British brutality in
Shanghai; however, this was not followed up by further efforts
at closer collaboration.)27
The Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association
The 1930's were hard times for the American working
class, as industry stagnated during the Great Depression. The
labor-management struggle in American became acute as labor
fought for better working conditions. In Chinatown the
Chinese left worked actively with the American Marxist left.
Early in the decade a group of Chinese leftists formed an
unemployment council in San Francisco's Chinatown and led
unemployed Chinese on a march to the Chinese Six
Companies,28 the nominal spokesman for the Chinese in
America, to ask for relief. The Chinatown marchers later
joined a demonstration of the unemployed on Market St. to
mark one of the earliest instance of American Chinese
participating in such action outside the Chinese community.29
Soon afterward the same group organized the Chinese Workers
Center (Huagong Zhongxin, CWC) to help Chinese workers
find employment, and call upon them to unite and to support
the Chinese Revolution. However, after a brief career, the
headquarters of the CWC was demolished by the San Francisco
Police around the time of the San Francisco General Strike of
1934.
30
The following years saw increasing collaboration
between the Chinese left and left-wing elements in the
American labor movement. The experience gained by these
Chinese militants led to an increasing awareness among
Chinese that cooperation with groups outside the Chinese
community was essential to help effect changes in Chinatown
and to improve workers' conditions.
In the mid-1930's, in cooperation with American
progressive elements, the Chinese left in San Francisco
undertook an abortive attempt to unionize the garment
industry by establishing an independent Chinese Lady
Garment Workers Union. (The more conservative,
well-established, and wealthier Ladies Garment Workers Union
was more successful in their rival attempt.)31
In another try, which was more successful, Chinese left
elements worked with American labor to attack the notorious
Chinese contract system existing in the Alaskan salmon
canneries and to demand collective bargaining rights. In 1936,
picket lines were set up at the docks to halt loading of ships of
Alaskan Packers Association. (However, because of
intimidation and threats by the Chinese contractors, the
Chinese only worked behind the scene and did not appear on
the picket lines.) The association capitulated and the workers,
which included many racial groups, gained the right to
unionize, and the contract system was finally abolished.
32
As
an aftermath of the victory, a group of Chinese workers on a
ship returning from a canning season in Alaska developed the
idea of forming a Chinese workers' association.
33
The Chinese
Workers' Mutual Aid Association (CWMAA, Huagong
Hezuohui) was officially established in September 1937. Its
aim was to unite Chinese workers and through the cooperation
and exchange of experiences, raise the status of Chinese
workers in the labor unions and improve their working
conditions.
34
Its formation was a manifestation of a more
mature stage in the development of the Chinese left movement
as it profited from experience.
Starting as a center for channeling information on
employment in the canneries and as a gathering place for
returned cannery workers, the CWMAA went on to broaden
the scope of its functions to encourage Chinese workers to join
the trade unions and to recognize the value of working
collectively to better the working man's condition. The
CWMAA filled a need in the community, for soon after its
formation there were 400 to 500 members on its membership
rolls.
35
The CWMAA was the first Chinese workers' organization
to work actively with people in the American labor movement
to achieve a common goal. Their many links with CIO and AF
of L unions such as the International Longshoremen's Union,
the Cannery Workers' Union and Miscellaneous Workers
Union, etc., were extremely useful in introducing Chinese to
employment in the larger society. However, it was true that
contacts of the CWMAA with the larger community were
hampered somewhat by the fact that many members lacked
facility in the use of English. But the basic philosophy of
identity of interests among the members of the working class
regardless of ethnic background was accepted. Much of the
association's strength and success was based on the
demonstration of this concept.
The Chinese Hand Laundry AIIiance
36
There was no catalyst leading toward the formation of a
Chinese workers' association in New York City, because of the
greater dispersal of Chinese workers in the Eastern part of the
country. Instead, the great number of laundries, many with
common problems and grievances, served as the nucleus for
the formation of a popularly based organization of the left.
By the 1930 's, Chinese exclusion had been in effect half
a century. Those "fortunate"enough to be able to reside in the
land of liberty accepted discrimination as part of daily life.
Economically the Chinese were systematically excluded from
many industries and relegated to the least sought after areas of
occupations, such as the laundry business. But even in these
areas generally despised by most whites, the ugly head of racist
discrimination reared itself.
A systematic campaign was directed against Chinese
laundrymen in the eastern U.S. In 1933 an ordinance was
proposed in N.Y.C. to charge a license fee of $25 per year on
all public laundries plus a security bond of $1,000. This was
designed to discriminate against small laundries, many of
which were run with marginal profits by Chinese who could ill
afford exorbitant fees. The traditional Chinese organi-zations,
especially the Chinese Benevolent Association (Zhonghua
Gongso),37 handled the issue ineptly. As a result, a coalition
of dissatisfied radical and liberal Chinese, with the support of
the Chinese Journal, a New York City paper, organized the
Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (Huaqiao Yiguan Lianhehui,
CHLA) in 1933 to oppose the bill. After much maneuvering
the ordinance was passed, but the license fee was reduced to
$10 and the security bond to $100. The CHLA received the
major credit for these reductions.
After this initial success the Alliance won a large
13
following. New York City laundrymen who joined were
organized into districts each with their own representatives to
the CHLA council. It raised small amounts of revenue by
serving as witness to the sale of laundries, a function which
formerly was the prerogative claimed by the Chinese
Benevolent Asso<;iation, the nominal leader of the New York
Chinese community. It also provided help for its members to
fill out tax forms and license applications. It became the first
successful Chinese organization to work outside the
framework of the traditional Chinese establishment.
The CHLA's outlook on Chinese relations with the
greater community was far more progressive than most other
Chinese groups. During the depths of the depression, for
example, more than 500 Chinese laundrymen from the
Alliance marched in the NRA (National Recovery Act) parade.
This was a high water mark for the participation of a Chinese
organization in the East in American national affairs.
The traditional Chinese power structure was unwilling to
let the Alliance's challenge to their authority go by without
reaction. One year after the formation of the CHLA, a
conservative faction within it was induced to split away and
form the Chinese Hand Laundry Association (Huaqiao Yiguan
Tongye Zonghui). Most of the members remained loyal to the
CHLA, however, and in 1934 it still enjoyed an active
membership of over 3,200.
The CHLA considered itself a new type of Chinese
organization. It put itself on record against what it considered
to be outmoded ideas and feudal customs in Chinese society.
Many members had little to do with traditional Chinese
organizations.
38
Some members of this organization helped to
found and support the first daily paper of the left among
Chinese in America-the Chinese Daily News, which succeeded
the National Salvation Weekly in 1940.
39
The CHLA was never more than an alliance of small
proprietors. Its importance lay in the demonstration of the
value of collective strength. For years it was a staunch
supporter of the Chinese Revolution within the New York
Chinese Community, the largest in the eastern part of
America.
The War Against Fascism
The CWMAA and the CHLA were both born in a time of
troubles for the peoples of the world. Beside the economic
disaster of the Great Depression, the 1930 's saw the marching
armies of the axis powers-Germany, Japan and Italy,
menacing the world. By the end of the decade, internal
contradictions such as that existing between labor and capital
had to be temporarily shelved as both turned to concentrate
upon defeating the common enemy. In the Chinese
community this had added meaning as the motherland, China,
was fighting for survival against Japanese aggression. One of
the major programs of the CWMAA was to rally support
among Chinese workers to oppose the Japanese aggression in
China. At this time, the Communists and the Kuomintang had
effected a truce in China, similarly both left and right in the
Chinese community called a temporary halt to their quarrels
to unite against Japanese militarism, and the Association
became very active in the United China War Relief Society (Lu
Mei Huaqiao Tongyi Yijuan Jiuguozonghui), the overall
organization coordinating war relief fund drives and other
activities in the U.S. Chinese community.
Before the Pearl Harbor attack, some profit-hungry
American businessmen were still selling material to the
Japanese war machine. However, an increasing sector of U.S.
public opinion, in which the left and the liberals figured
prominently, opposed this short-sighted policy. Among the
most visible targets for the protesters was the sale of scrap iron
to Japan, and during the closing years of the decade, picket
lines were often seen at various U.S. ports to protest against
loading scrap iron on ships headed for the Land of the Rising
Run.
In San Francisco, this protest was expressed particularly
vehemently in December 1938 when the Greek freighter
Spyros began loading scrap iron destined for Japan. The
CWMAA received news of the intended shipment from friends
in the American labor movement. While its members manned
hastily thrown up picket lines at the pier, the organization
called on the rest of the community to join them. A few days
later students, workers, merchants, housewives and others
from Chinatown, as well as many sympathizers, converged
upon the waterfront to register their disapproval. The
longshoremen refused to cross the picket lines. By the time the
action ended, the number of pickets had swelled to 3,000.
Even though the freighter finally did load its holds with the
scrap metal, this dramatic exhibition of unity by the Chinese
impressed many Americans and led to renewed calls to ban the
sale of scrap iron to Japan. During the suc<:eeding months the
CWMAA continued to play a prominent role in picketing
actions involving other ships loading scrap iron.
The CWMAA also held weekly public meetings at which
guest speakers representing different political opinions were
invited to air their views on subjects ranging from support for
the war effort to union activities.
4O
However, the new
left-right alliance among the Chinese was built on shaky
grounds and lasted only a few years. When the New 4th Army
Incident of 1940 disrupted the Communist-Kuomintang truce
in China,41 the CWMAA withdrew from further active
participation in the Kuomintang-dominated United China War
Relief Society in San Francisco's Chinatown.
In the Eastern part of the country the CHLA also took
part in similar war activities as the CWMAA. These two
organizations raised large sums of money to support China's
war effort. But it was the youth organizations, however, who
were most active and conspicuous in the cultural aspects of
propaganda work required to further this effort. The rise of
such organizations can be attribued to the Japanese invasion of
China.
During the late 1930's many Chinese refugees of the
Sino-Japanese War emigrated to the U.S. They included a
number of young people and intellectuals who had been
exposed to two decades of new ideas and changes in China and
whose style and thinking differed significantly from that of
established Chinese groups in the U.S. Their ideologies
included nationalism, liberalism, and socialism. Many had
partici pated in anti-Japanese war propaganda work in China. It
was natural for these young people of kindred interest to seek
each other out in the new environment. Youth clubs
supporting the Chinese war effort developed in many of the
larger Chinese communities. One of the earliest was the
Niuyue Huaqiao Qingnian Jiuguotuan (familiarly known as
Qing-Jiu, Chinese Youth Club) founded in New York City in
1938. The club not only participated in anti-Japanese war
work within the community but was also active in the U.S.
14
youth movement generallr' participating in such events as May
First Labor Day parades.
4
In San Francisco, the Chick Char Musical Club was
established in 1937 with the encouragement of Chinese
educator Tao Xingzhi.43 This club had a generally liberal
outlook and often took part in cultural programs at war rallies.
By 1941, however, it had lost much of its initial momentum
and another group, the New Chinese Alphabetized Language
Study Society (NCALSS, Sanfanshi Xinwenzi Yanjiuhui),
arose to playa more prominent role.
The NCALSS was originally organized to push the
alphabetic spelling of Chinese words and doing away with
Chinese characters, as a means of eradicating illiteracy. It grew
out of a mass movement in China during the 1930's which had
similar aims.
44
By 1936 news of the movement had spread to
the Chinese in Hawaii,45 and in 1940 the Society was formed
in San Francisco.
46
In addition to language reform, younger
members of the society began to organize activities such as
harmonica playing, choral singing, drama, etc. Within 3
months the activities of the organization were vastly
expanded, and the membership increased to approximately 30,
most of whom were recent immigrants in their late teens and
early twenties, all fired with the enthusiasm and idealism of
youth. The club rented a headquarters in a basement at 812
Stockton Street a few buildings from the headquarters of the
local KMT. For almost 20 years this was to be the center of
progressive youth activities in San Francisco's Chinatown. The
NCALSS soon became the most active youth group in the
community.47
In 1942, a coalition called the Lianhe Jiuguo Suanchuan
Tuan (United National Salvation Propaganda League)
comprising the NCALSS and two other local Chinese youth
clubs, presented a drama, whose proceeds went toward the
purchase of gifts for Chinese serving in the U.S. armed forces.
This organizational structure proved to be unsuitable for
recruiting new members, however, and early in 1943, the
Propaganda League was reorganized as the Jiasheng Huaqiao
Qingnian Jiuguotuan (familiarly known as Qing-Jiu, Chinese
Youth League). Cultural activities were diversified and vastly
expanded. Funds were raised to buy gifts for servicemen and
to send them publications and letters. This organization,
because of its superior organization and esprit de corps,
remained throughout the war the most active among
Chinatown youth groups. Excellent liaison was maintained
with other Chinatown youth clubs and with left and liberal
groups outside the Chinese community.48
Maximum CYL membership was about a hundred, but
their programs, including music and drama of modern China,
reached a public many times this number. Like the CWMAA,
the Chinese Youth League is also significant as a pioneer
Chinese group in reaching out to groups outside the Chinese
community.
Between Hot and Cold Wars
During the years immediately following the end of
World War II, the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA) in
the East and the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association
(CWMAA) and the Chinese Youth League (CYL) in the West
all were particularly strong vocally in support for the Chinese
Revolution. In New York City the China Daily News
continued to speak out as the news organ of the left among
Chinese in America. As civil war between the KMT and the
Communists seemed increasingly likely, several members of
the CWMAA in San Francisfo had organized the Co-operative
Publishers (Hezuo Chubanshe) for the purpose of printing, in
Chinese, several classics of Chinese communism, thus for the
first time offering to U.S. Chinese the opportunity to
themselves with the program of the Chinese Revolution.
4
The period during and immediately after the war had
seen some erosion in the mass base of the left organizations in
the Chinese community. On the Pacific Coast the Alaska
Packers' Association moved its headquarters to Seattle upon
the outbreak of hostilities between the U.S. and Japan and no
longer recruited workers in San Francisco. As a result,
membership of the CWMAA, a large number of which had
been cannery workers, began to dwindle.
50
The end of the
war saw the wilting of the Chinatown youth movement. Many
erstwhile youths acquired family responsibilities; others lost
the idealism and fire of youth. There no longer appeared to be
any urgent task to unify youths. The Chinese Youth League
was one group that survived although with reduced
membership rolls. It established links with groups outside the
Chinese community such as the American Youth for
Democracy (A YD). In 1946 it changed its name to Chinese
American Democratic Youth League of San Francisco
(CADYL, Sanfanshi Minzhu Qingniantuan, familiarly known
as Min-Qing).51
The CADYL was active politically, giving support to
candidates of the Progressive Party in local and national
election campaigns. However its effectiveness among the
generally politically the tic Chinese community was li.initea.
The post-war period also saw the formation of other
short-lived organizations of the left among the Chinese in
America. The Overseas Chinese League for Peace and
Democracy in China (Lu Mei Zhongguo Heping Minzhu
Lianmeng, OCLPDC) was founded in New York City in
November 1947 by Gen. Feng Yuxiang who at that time was
in exile in the U.S. The proclaimed aim of the organization,
which had chapters in New York, Washington, D.C., Minnesota
and San Francisco, was to urge a stop to American
interference in Chinese internal affairs, especially in the civil
war. Members of the group, which at its height totalled more
than 200, were mostly businessmen and intellectuals. 52 Later
as the Chinese Revolution drew to a successful conclusion,
organizations also appeared among Chinese university students
which advocated returning to the homeland to join in the
construction of a new China. 53 Among these was the
nation-wide Alliance of Chinese Scientific and Technical
Workers (Liu Mei Kexue Gongzuozhe Xiehui).
This was indeed a most favorable period for the left in
the Chinese community. And on May 4, 1949 the China
Weekly (Jinmen QiaD BaD), some of whose backers were
members of the CWMAA, began publishing in San Francisco,
joining the China Daily News as news organs in the U.S.
Chinese community supporting the New China. It would seem
that slowly but surely, the forces supporting the Chinese
Revolution were gaining ground among the Chinese in
America. Fate was to prove treacherous, however.
On the evening of Oct. 9, 1949, at the 12th anniversary
celebration of the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association
held at Chinese American Citizens' Alliance Hall in San
Francisco's Chinatown, a celebration of the recent founding of
the People's Republic of. China was in progress. The
15
five-starred red flag of China was prominently displayed. The
meeting had hardly commenced when KMT-hired hoodlums
invaded the premises, seized the flag, beat up some
participants and dashed blue dye all over clothing of members
of the audience. The next day, KMT elements passed out
leaflets marking 15 individuals for eradica:ion .from the
Chinese community.54 This show of the mailed by th.e
KMT was a blunt warning to U.S. Chinese not to display their
sympathy for the Chinese Revolution too openlf' .
For a time, however, the forces supportmg New Chma
appeared to have recovered. The China Weekly and the China
Daily News continued to publish. Later in 1949 another group
of businessmen, some of whom were members of the OCPDC,
purchased the right-wing Chung Sai Yat Po and changed to a
editorial policy favorable to People's China. However, the
Korean War soon brought an end to this era.
The Right-wing Reaction
The 1950's signaled hard times for the left in the U.S. as
the forces of reaction launched a full-scale attack upon them.
Left organizations either dissolved or suffered drastic declines
in membership. The Chinese organizations were no different;
in fact, they suffered attacks from both the American right
and the KMT.
The cold war had already begun as the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R. confronted each other in Europe. In June 1950, war
broke out in Korea. Later that year, when Gen. MacArthur's
armies threatened China's frontier, Chinese troops crossed the
Yalu River. Many Chinese in this country became fearful that
they would be put in concentration camps just as the Japanese
were during World War II. Increased activity by F.B.1. agents
and immigration officials in the Chinese community added to
this apprehension and succeeded in intimidating many.
first victim among the left Chinese newspapers was the Chma
Weekly. It ceased publication when the Chinese firm printing
the paper refused to service it after Chinese entered
Korean War. Next was the Chung Sai Yat Po which folded m
Jan. 1951 due to declining circulation as frightened readers
cancelled their subscriptions. In 1955 the U.S. government
moved against the China Daily News, accusing it of traffic with
the enemy because of its advertisements for the Bank of
China. The paper was found guilty, fined and its manager
jailed.
55
The paper's circulation dropped precipitously
harassment of subscribers. Today it struggles along, publIshmg
twice weekly with a small circulation of about 800, and exists
by relying on donations from its few remaining loyal
supporters. .
Among the left-wing Chinese organizations, membership
declined during the 1950's as apprehensive Chinese ceased to
attend meetings and stayed away from social functions. In San
Francisco, the CWMAA finally closed its doors in 1954 after
the membership dwindled to about 20. In New York. the
Chinese Youth Club also was dissolved at about the same time.
The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance nearly suffered the
same fate. When Chinese armed forces entered the Korean War
the CHLA refused to join the anti-communist campaign
launched by the Chinese Benevolent Association (CBA) of
New York City. For this heresy the CHLA was expelled from
the CBA.
56
During the 1950's, immigration authorities and
F .B.1. agents continually huassed CHLA and. its
membership declined sharply. Today the orgamzatlon eXists
only as a pale shadow of its former self. .. .
The only group which managed to a
extensive program during this era was the Chmese-Amencan
Democratic Youth League of San Francisco (the name was
later changed to Chinese Youth Club, but it was still known
familiarly in Chinese as Min-Qing). During the late 1940's,
many members had dropped out because of family or business
responsibilities, and it looked as if Min-Qing was a dying
institution. However, in 1949 and for a few years afterward, a
number of newly arrived young immigrants from China joined
the club and infused new life. In spite of this revitalization, the
cold war, the Korean War, and the assault against liberals and
the left during the McCarthy era, all severely curbed the club's
scope of activities. There began a period of harassment of
individual members by governmental investigation agents.
Practically every member was questioned by the F.B.I. as the
federal agents sought a non-exist ant link with the Chinese
People's Republic. Members who were in the armed forces
were barred from sensitive positions, and attempts were made
to give several of them undesirable discharges. However, in this
the government was unsuccessful as they were unable to
establish their charges of subversion. In spite of these
unfavorable circumstances Min-Qing managed to keep a fairly
constant membership of about 40 for almost a decade, and
was the most active independent youth group in Chinatown.
During this difficult period the club concentrated
heavily on educational and social activities. A counseling,
tutorial and remedial program was initiated in 1952 for the
benefit of members and friends, most of them new
immigrants. Members were encouraged to learn some skills in
order to become more useful members of society. The club
presented cultural programs at its headquarters at 812
Stockton St. two to three times per year. The performances
included plays, songs and other representative aspects of the
new Chinese culture. Min-Qing was one of the first
organizations in the San Francisco Chinese community to
present Chinese folk dances as well as the famous Yellow River
Cantata (Huanghe Dahechang) of Xian Xinghai. In addition to
this a biweekly mimeographed publication in the Chinese
language, Min-Qing, gave friends and members to
express their views. It is worth noting that thiS publicatIOn
was probably the first in this country to use the simplified
characters promulgated by the Chinese government in 1956.
The club also pioneered the use of the Hanzi Pinyin spelling to
teach Mandarin to members and friends. The club provided a
social gathering place for members and friends. Through
emphasis on mutual aid, group guidance and wholesome
collective activities, Min-Qing was able to achieve for its
members things which each individual could not have done.
The success of Min-Qing from start to finish was limited
by the difficulty of instilling and maintaining a truly collective
spirit within a larger society which encourages individualism.
As long as the club held together with an active, going program
the basic guiding principles of collectivism worked well. But
whenever activities declined or when the organization was
temporarily broken up, members tended to become more
concerned with personal career and family. Youth
organizations are notoriously ephemeral in nature.
through its various metamorphases from the New Chmese
Alphabetized Language Study Society to the Chinese Youth
Club survived almost two decades wherein it witnessed the rise
and fall of many other short-lived youth clubs. Few
16
independent youth organizations in the Chinese commmunity
of America can match this longevity record.
In 1959 Min-Qing lost its headquarters and disbanded.
Some members attempted to form another organization called
the Haiyan Club, but this club never regained the momentum
of Min-Qing. However, even if the club had not disbanded, it
probably would have been drastically affected by the
immigration investigations during the late 1950's, for during
the Chinese exclusion era, many Chinese, including some of
those who subsequently became active on the left, had entered
this country by fraudulent claims of citizenship. The
immigration authorities were well aware of this, and by
threats, coaxing, and other means they induced or forced
many Chinese to confess their fraudulent citizenship status.
Members of the left were special targets as they and their
relatives were systematically harassed. Many, including most of
the members of Min-Qing, were stripped of their
"citizenships." Some were prosecuted for defrauding the
government so as to warn others to be more cooperative.
Others were not given the right of permanent residence in this
country, thus having the threat of deportation hovering over
their heads indefinitely. In this manner the left and their
sympathizers were put on the defensive and their effectiveness
in the community was curbed drastically.
Some Concluding Words
For almost half a century from the eve of World War I to
the dying years of the McCarthy era, there was nearly always
some organization representing some ty'pe of socialism within
the Chinese community in America. In the past these groups
were always a minority in the community, but in spite of this
they made a significant impact. This was especially true of the
groups springing up after the late 1930's.
The Chinese left faced many obstacles. They were often
subjected to acts of harassment by government officials. Raids
by the San Francisco Police upon the Ping Sheh and the
Sanfanshi Zhongguo Xueshenghui in the late 1920's were clear
examples of this. Moreover, the Chinese exclusion acts over
the years had led to numerous illegal and fraudulent entries
among Chinese immigrants. Thus many Chinese have
questionable immigration status. American authorities were
not oblivious to this and for years they have used this as a
weapon to crack down on politically active Chinese. Thus the
threat of deportation and prosecution on criminal charges was
always hanging over the heads of these political
non-conformists. For example, Xie Cang, one of the activists
in the Sanfanshi Zhongguo Xueshenghui, was deported.
s7
Even during the 1960's, deportation was still the favorite
weapon of the U.S. government against the Chinese left. As
late as 1965 an official of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance,
Louie Pon, was charged with fraudulent entry, and threatened
with deportation by the Justice Department. One of the
counts against him was that he was affiliated with the China
Daily News. 58 Another weapon often resorted to by the
authorities was to prosecute members of the left for
fraudulent entry, as was the fate of four members of Min-Qing
during the late 1950's and early 1960's.59 The effect of
actions such as these has generally been to cow the Chinese
population into silence, and to intimidate Chinese with
sympathies for the left.
For the most part of the first half of this century China
was convulsed in struggle as the Chinese people sought the
road to national rebirth while at the same time fighting for
national survival against Japanese aggression. Since most
members of the Chinese left in America at this time were
China-born, it was natural that they reacted strongly to events
across the Pacific, and concern for support of the Chinese
revolution and for resistance to Japanese aggression dominated
their activities. In this area they were able to render valuable
service by informing and educating the larger society as well as
the U.S. Chinese community.
The organizations of the left also were interested in
effecting certain domestic programs aiming toward change in
the community. In this regard they encountered obstacles
which were difficult to surmount. Successful implementation
of their programs of course ultimately rested upon the support
of the people within the Chinese community; however, since
the Chinese were but a small minority in this country, radical
change in the Chinese community could not be fully effected
independently of the situation in the larger society. The
anarchists of the 1920's were at first successful in bringing
some improvement to workers' conditions in the Chinese
community, but ultimately failed because the conservative
forces in the Chinese community were too strong for them to
tackle alone without some support from the larger society.
The Marxists of the late 1930's and 1940's were able to
achieve a somewhat greater degree of success because they
could draw upon the backing of friendly American progressive
forces. On the negative side, when the anti-communist hysteria
swept the larger society during the 1950's, the Chinese left in
America was among its victims.
The popular organizations formed by Marxists in alliance
with liberals during the 1930's displayed some promise of
growth into strong organizations counter-acting the
conservative Chinatown establishment and providing
leadership for the forces desiring a change from the status quo,
for the groups were originally organized around popular
economic issues which had great appeal. However, after a
promising start, the coming of World War II curbed their
development as the American people were asked to make
sacrifices in order to win the war against Fascism. Other
objective factors such as wartime "prosperity," as well as the
factors previously mentioned, all worked to prevent the
Chinese left from maintaining and augmenting its popular base
in the community, thus hampering the carrying out and
expanding of any programs for change. After the hot war, the
cold war hysteria put the brakes on the resumption of such
activities. Thus even though the situation in Chinatown called
for drastic change, the KMT conservative merchant coalition,
in collaboration with U.S. governmental authorities, was able
to sustain an atmosphere discouraging any challenge to the
established order.
In view of their limited mass support, their continual
harassment and other handicaps, it is surprising that these
groups have been able to accomplish as much as they have.
They have for years brought idealism, zeal, and a sense of
direction into Chinatown's atmosphere of materialist
mediocrity and political apathy. They have been the vanguard
presenting new ideas and concepts and representative samples
of the new Chinese culture. They have been pioneers in
recognizing that the Chinese in America must work across
racial lines in order to achieve change. More than a decade has
elapsed since the last of the "old" left organizations of
Chinatown has faded into the past. Other groups representing
17
the "new" left have appeared in the Chinese community, their
ideologies varying from left-liberal to Marxist. Again in
conjunction with the larger society, much of the new
movement has taken off from the momentum generated by
the civil rights, Black power, and the Third World movements
of the 1960's, and was reinforced by identification with the
positive image generated by a victorious Revolutionary New
China.
The ties between the "new" and "old" left groups are
few since the decade that elapsed between disappearance of
the one and appearance of the other was an effective divide.
However the "old" and the "new" left share common goals in
striving for a better community and a better world.
Three significant characteristics distinguish the "new"
left from the "old" left: First, the new activists are
predominantly native-born; their appearance represents a new
stage in the historical development of the Chinese community,
a stage in which the Chinese of America have completed the
transformation from sojourners to permanent residents.
Second, the "new" left consists largely of students,
professionals and intellectuals; so far few workers have
participated in the movement. Third, although the "new" left
organizations are still interested in the Chinese Revolution, the
movement exhibits much greater concern in community
problems such as housing, employment, racism, etc., and
participates to a greater extent in the politics of the larger
society.
Today these groups still have only limited support in the
Chinese community and they are split into several factions.
Most of the Chinese in America are still barely affected by
their activities. However, the rise of these groups after 2
decades of total domination of the Chinese community by the
KMT, is a sign that the forces for change are again stirring.
Judging by their activities, a new stage has been reached in the
development of the Chinese left in America, and with proper
implementation of programs administering to the aspirations
of the people of the Chinese community, this "new" Chinese
left can grow to become a significant force. However, the full
story of this "new" Chinese left is outside the scope of this
essay and will have to be the subject of another paper.
NOTES
I. An account of the introduction of the socialist doctrines into
China may be found in "The Triumph of Anarchism over Marxism,
1906-1907," by Martin Bernal in Cbina in Revolution: Tbe First Pbase
1900-1913, edited by M.C. Wright (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1968), pp. 97-142.
The organs of the Chinese Empire Reform Association were the
first to introduce socialist writings to China. In 1903, the Guangzhi
Shuju (Broadening of Knowledge Book Co.), founded in Shanghai in
1902 by reformist Liang Qichao and his supporters, published three
surveys on socialism translated from the Japanese. That same year two
other books on socialism were issued by other publishers in Shanghai.
Also, from 1903 on many articles on socialism appeared in Xinmin
Congbao (New People's Miscellany) a Yokohoma periodical also
founded by Liang's supporters in 1902.
Sun Yat-sen and some members of the revolutionary
Tongmenghui were also influenced by western socialism.
2. An account of the development of anarchism in China may be
found in The Cbinese Anarchist Movement, by Robert A. Scalapino and
George T. Yu (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 1961).
3. One of the first to bring the anarchist doctrines to Chinese soil
was a student revolutionary, Liu Sifu, better known as Liu Shifu, a
native of Xiangshan (now Zhongshan) district in the Pearl River delta
near Canton. The relation of Liu Shifu to the anarchist movement
among the Chinese in America is not clear at present but it is worthy of
note that his native district of Xiangshan was the region of origin for
many Chinese in America. And certainly, at least in the San Francisco
Bay Area, Xiangshan (Zhongshan) people were prominent in the
anarchist movement. According to Wending, "The Biography of Mr.
Shifu," in The Collected Works of Sbifu (Shanghai, 1928), Liu Shifu
went to stl,ldy in Japan in 1904. In the following year he took an active
role in the formation of the Tongmenghui in Tokyo. Liu left Japan in
1906 and for the next few years engaged in revolutionary activities in
the Hong Kong area. Afterthe revolution he and his followers founded
the Huiming Xueshe (Society of Cocks Crowing in the Dark) in Canton
in 1912. The object was to propagate anarchism to the masses.
In 1913 reflecting his disgust at his former comrades of the
Tongmenghui who now seemed to be concerned only to advance their
personal interests, Liu helped to organize the Xin She (Heart Society)
which was intended to be a preliminary to a nation-wide anarchist
movement. However, Liu died in 1915 of tuberculosis. He was only 31
at the time.
4. Chinese strikes for better working conditions were not rare.
The first recorded instance occurred on June 8, 1852 when Chinese
construction labor working on the Parrott building in San Francisco
went on strike for more wages (Cbinese Historical Society Bulletin, San
Francisco, Vol 2 No.5, May 1967). Other instances occurred among
the railroad workers, the most famous strike being the one on June
1867 when some 2,000 Chinese in the Sierra Nevadas walked off their
jobs on the construction site of the Central Pacific (Sacramento Union,
July 1, July 3, 1867).
Violence also accompanied some of the Chinese labor disputes.
For instance the San Francisco Call, Aug. 17, 1896 reported attempted
arson by members of the Garment Workers Guild against a factory
owner who was reluctant to come to terms with the guild.
5. Isabella Black, "American Labour and Chinese Immigration"
Past and Present, No. 25 (July 1963), pp. 59-76, quoting from The
International Socialist Review, Vol. 10 (1910), p. 1121.
6. Philip S. Foner, History of tbe Labor Movement in tbe U.S.
(New York: International Publishers, 1947), Vol. 4, p. 82.
7. A pamphlet, China and the Social Revolution, was published
by Kiang Kang'hu, care of the Chinese Socialist Club, 1045 Stockton
St., San Francisco, Calif. The preface of this pamphlet, written by
Kiang himself in California, was dated June 25, 1914. The club may
have been the Pingmin Shu-Baoshe formed by Kiang Kang-hu (See Feng
Ziyou Shebuizhuyi yu Zbongguo [Hong K9ng, 1920J).
8. Kung Sing, No.1 (Mar. 1, 1924) and No.2 (Apr. 1, 1924),
included a detailed account ot the history of the Workers League of
America up to 1924. The publication is the monthly magazine issued
by theWLA.
9. The 9 demands were as follows:
(1) The work day is to be limited to 9 hours.
(2) The employers are to guarantee that in the future wages are to
increase and not decrease.
(3) Time and a half is to be paid for work over 9 hours.
(4) Double time is to be paid for Sunday work.
(5) Paid time off is to be given for American holidays
(6) The employers are to pay medical bills for injuries incurred during
performance of work on the factory's premises.
(7) The term of apprenticeship shall be set at two months, during
which time the apprentice is to be allowed weekly expense money
of $1.00.
(8) In case of a fire if a worker lives on the premises of his employer,
the employer shall recompense him $50.00 to pay for losses
incurred.
(9) Workers not obeying the above regulations are subject to discharge
by the League.
All but the 9th demand were eventually accepted by the factory
owners.
10. Cbung Sai Vat Po (San Francisco), April 14, 1928 gave an
account of a raid by San Francisco plain-clothes police officers on the
Ping Sheh, where two members were arrested for preaching anarchism.
This was typical of the general police attitude toward radical groups in
the 1920's.
11. The Ping Sheh advertised free copies of various pamphlets in
18
Ctlung Sai Vat Po, Nov. 29, 1926. The first issue of Equality was
published July I, 1927, according to an advertisement in Chung Sai Vat
Po, June 24, 1927.
12. The author possesses copies of leaflets issued by the Ping
Sheh in support of the Laundry Workers' strike of 1929 and the
garment workers' strike against the Chinatown factory of the National
Dollar Stores in 1938.
13. The first issue was published June I, 1934. Communications
were to be addressed to Ray Jones' (Liu Zhongshi).
14. Ping Sheh, May Day Special Issue, May I, 1927.
15. Wuzhengfu Gongchan Yuekan combined Nos. 5,6 (Oct., Nov.
1934).
16. William Z. Foster, Outline Political History of the Americas
(New York: International Publishers, 1951), pp. 391-2.
17. Chung Sai Vat Po" Dec. 4,1919.
18. Interview with former member of the San Francisco Chinese
Students Club.
19. Ibid.
20. Minutes of the Second Convention of the Kuomintang in San
Francisco (Zhongguo Guomindang Zhu Sanfanshi Zongzhibu Di'erci
Daibiao Dahui Shimoji), 1928, p. 163. The Xianfeng (Vanguard) may
have been the precurser of the publication of the same name published
in Philadelphia in 1930.
21. See Note 18.
22. Leong Gor Yun, Chinatown Inside Out (New York: Barrows,
1936),pp. 143, 154, 156.
23. Interview with former worker at the China Daily News (New
York).
24. Chung Sai Vat Po, Apr. 8, 13, 1927.
25. See Note 18.
26. Chung Sai Vat Po, Jan 14, 28, 30, 1929.
27. Philip Taft, Labor Politics A merican Style, The California
State Federation of Labor (Cambridge: . Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), p.
175, quoting from the Proceedings of the 34th Annual Convention of
the California Federation of Labor, 1929, p. 29.
28, Chung Sai Vat Po, 1925, June 10, 11; July 1, 6,10,13,15,
16,20,22,24; August 17, 1930. The occasion was the celebrated "May
30th Incident" in Shanghai.
29. The Chinese Six Companies or the Chinese Consolidated
Benevolent Association of the U.S.A. is the organization claiming to be
the spokesman for all the Chinese in America. It is at the apex of the
pyramid formed by Chinese organizations in the community and is
formed by the seven major district associations in San Francisco: Ning
Yung, Sam Yup, Kong Chow, YoungWo, Shew Hing, Hop Wo and Yan
W0 Associations.
30. Interview with former member of CWMAA.
31. See Note 30.
32. L.W. Casaday, Labor Unrest and the Labor Movement in the
Salmon Industry of the Pacific Coast (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Univ.
of Calif. Berkeley), pp. 387-97. Also see "Yushiye Jianshi" ("Alaska
Cannery Workers"), Getting Together (Tuanjie Bao), (San Francisco),
Mar. 18-21, 1972.
In the Chinese contract system the cannery owner makes
agreement with contractors to can the salmon at certain fixed price per
case during the canning season. The contractor then hires the workers.
During the 19th Century practically all the labor at the canneries were
Chinese. Later Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Mexicans, etc. were hired.
Under this system, the workers were under the control of the
contractors. They were frequently provided poor food, charged
exorbitant prices for goods, and provided inadequate and unsanitary
quarters. Thus it became one of the most hated features of cannery
work.
33. Interview with Willie Fong, one of the founders of the
CWMAA. Two Chinese most active in the founding were Willie Fong
and Sam Young.
34. Jianfu, "Shi'ernianlai di Gongzuo Guocheng ji Jinhou di
Renwu" ("A Review of Work of the Past 12 Years and the Task for
Now and the Future"), China Weekly, Oct. 8, 1949. Lin Jianfu (Happy
Lin) was secretary of the CWMAA, also one of the founders of the
NCALSS.
35. See Note 32.
36. Leong Gor Yun, Op. Cit. Chapter 5 gives a good account of
the early history of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance.
37. The Chinese Benevolent Association or Zhonghua Gongso of
New York City is an organization similar to the Chinese Six Companies
(See Note 30), and claims to speak for the Chinese in New York City.
38. Virginia Heyer, Patterns of Social OYJ!anization in New York
City's Chinatown (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University),
Chapter 8.
39. Liu Boqi, "Meiguo Huaqiao Baoye Fanzhanshilue" ("Brief
History of the Development of Newspapers of the Chinese in America")
in Wenyi Fuxing Yuekan (Literary Renaissance Monthly) (Taiwan) No.
19, pp. 49-56. Also verified by verbal information from former worker
at China Daily News.
40. For example there were meeting announcements in the Chung
Sai Yat Po, Mar. 4,12,1938, May 15, 22, 1938, etc.
41. During the Sino-Japanese War the Communist New 4th Army
was operating in the lower Yangtze Valley near Shanghai. The
Nationalists felt it to be a threat to what they considered to be their
territory, even though at that time it was held by the Japanese. In 1940
the KMT government ordered the New 4th Army to withdraw north of
the Yangtze. While the army was withdrawing, protesting to the KMT
government, in the meanwhile the Nationalists attacked the New 4th
Army Headquarters Unit and accompanying rear guard and inflicted
several thousand casualties.
Many overseas Chinese protested this action, pointing out that
the most important task should be to unite to fight the common
enemy, Japan.
42. The Chinese Youth (Huaqiao Qingnian), published by ,he
Chinese Youth Club, N.Y.C. Special Issue, No.3 (Oct. 1940) pp. 7-11.
43. Interview with former member of the NCALSS.
44. Ni Haishu, Zhongguo Pinyinwenziyundong Shi Jianbian
(Shanghai, 1948), Chapter 6.
45. Chen Qiao, "Guanyu Yatgo Gaoyuk Daijong Muntai ge
Hinyi" ("On a Proposal with Regards to the Problem of mass
Education") in 25th Anniversary Commemorative Album of the Mun
LunSchool, Honolulu (1936).
46. Yuwen Yanjiu (Ymen Ingau) (Lauguage Study) published by
the New Chinese Alphabetized Language Study Society (Apr. 1942).
47. See Note 46.
48. Rucong, "Xiaoxiao Shinian" ("A Brief History of 10 Years")
in Min-Qing Tuanbao, New Series No. I, (Dec. I, 1949). This is a
mimeographed publication issued biweekly by the Chinese-American
Democratic Youth League. The development and activities during the
period 1940 to 1949 is covered in this article. Zhu Rucong (James
Young) was one of the founders of the NCALSS.
49. The publications were:
(1) New Democracy, by Mao Tse-tung
(2) The Truth about the Liberated Areas, by Dong Biwu
(3) On Coalition Government, by Mao Tse-tung
(4) Critique of "China's Destiny, " by Chen Boda
50. See Note 33.
51. The aims of the CADYL as stated in its constitution were as
follows:
(1) To unite Chinese and American youths to study and work together
for the interest of young people.
(2) In cooperation with all Chinese here and abroad to fight for the
establishment of a free, peace-loving, democratic, united,
independ.ent, wealthy and strong new China.
(3) In cooperation with Chinese and non-Chinese liberals and
progressives to work toward freedom and equality for all mankind
and world peace.
(4) In cooperation with other progressive organizations, to undertake
educational programs, protect the public interest, and establish a
democratic way of life.
(5) Through collective strength, to advocate ways of serving society, to
strengthen the membership's belief in service to society, and to
increase the usefulness of the membership in serving society.
52. James E. Sheridan, Chinese Warlord, The Career of Feng
Yu-hsiang (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 279-280. Also,
Feng Yuxiang Jiangjun Ji'niance (Album in Memory of Gen. Feng
Yuxiang) (Hong Kong: 1948), pp. 114-115.
53. LiuMei Xuesheng Tongxin, Nov. 26, 1949; Jan 21, Feb. 4,
1950.
54. San Francisco Chronic/e, Oct. 10, 1949.
55. China Daily News, editorial July 4,1970.
56. Heyer, op. cited, p. 94. i
57. See Note 18.
I
58. Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, 1965, p. 11.
59. These were the cases of Jackson Chan, Maurice Chuck, Kai
Dere and Wing Joe. I
,
19
I
\
Chinese Glossary for A Historical Survey of Organizations of the
Left Among the Chinese in Amerlca, by H. M. tai
The Hanzi Pinyin system is used for transliteratinll; I..'fWc!!' '. ':ceT)t
for those spellings which are us.ed officially by the nersons or or..'niza
tions concerned or which are commonly used and accented in lanl!;ual!;e
publications (e.g., Canton, Tse-tung).
Organizations & Institutions
Chick Char i'hJsical Club
(Qicha Yinyueshe)
Guangzhi Shuju
Haiyan Club
Hezuo Chubanshe 1rWlIll&ln
Huiming Xueshe
Huagong Zhongxin "*,,.I'flJL,
Huaqiao Yiguan Lianhehui
Huaqiao Yiguan Tongye
Zonghui
Hua-Qing
Huaren Gonghui .".I'1'
Jiasheng Huagong aezuohui
Jiasheng Huaqiao Qingnian l<W
Jiuguotuan
Jue She
Kuomintang (Guomindang)
Lianhe Jiuguo Suanchllantllan
Lian-Hui
Liu ;lei Kexue Gongzuozhe
Xiehui
Lii Mei Huaqiao Tongyi
Yijuan Jiuguozonghui
Lu Hei Zhongguo Heping Minzhu
Uanmeng
Meizhou Gongyi Tongmeng
Zonghui
Meizhou Huaqiao Fandi
Datongmeng
Min-Qing
Mun Lun School (Minlun
Xuexiao)
Niuyue Huaqiao Qingnian Mj:.r.'NJ'r;iibmOf.:WI!1l(J
Jiuguotuan
Pingmin Shu-Baoshe
Ping Sheh (Ping She) 4-nM:
Qing-Jiu i4';f.l[
Sanfanshi Gongyi Tongmeng
Zonghui
Sanfanshi l1inzhu Qingniantuan
Sanfanshi Xinwenzi Yanjiuhui
Sanfanshi Zhongguo Xueshenghui
Tung Sen Association (Tong-
shantang) .
wuzLhiengfu Gongchanzhuyizhe
anmeng
-
Xifutang
Xin She JL,rrti:
Xin Shehui
Young '.10 Association
Huiguan)
I' (. I','
4,.i/fU ."llifl
Zhonghua Gongso
Zhonghua

"11< IBHglH

Geographical Terms
13010 trJl-,\\(f\
Canton (Guangzhou) )i.'t1+1
Dongguan Ji jg
:Zong -i\\ilil!
fti,( if{
J)\l
Shekki (<:hiqi) .{lllt!i:
Chen 30da
Chen Qia 0 llp:!j
Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang )W.:1\',fi
Jieshi)
"'onl!: Biwu
Fenl!; 1.t!}::\Slftl
ren<>: fj III
Jill,fU l.*
Kang Youwei ).,kffi.i;
i(an,!!:-Hu (Jiang Kanghu) uJL)jC
Uan<; Qichao
Uu
Liu Shifu (oseudonym for
Liu Sifu) 'l!f 'Ix
Liu Zhongshi (Also Ray Jones)
;Viao Tse-tung (;'Iao 'Di*
Ni Haishu 15ilMIJ\li
Rucong i'P:JUe,
SUn 'iat-sen (SUn Yixian. also Sun Zhongshan) 1*:iill1i11 ( -f*rJ=1W )
Tao Xlngzhl i\(l\Jhj.;[]
Wendlng 3tJE
Xian Xinghai 6tii<f.
Xie Cang Illj
Publlcations & Published Works
Chung Sal 'iat Po (Zhongxi '=pgtj B1fl
Ribao)
Feng Yuxiang Jiangjun i.tli:::r::01't 'l'ili ""''''"-JJJt
Jinlance ,tJ ="cr7T'T "l"-ifL..,'",
Guanyu 'iatgo Gaoyuk Daljong Huntai- ,-"'_ ,,". 'oj,
ge Hlnyl (Guanyu Yige Jlaoyu Dazhong FI
Wentl dl Xlanyl)
Hezuo %1'f
Huanghe Dahechang mfilJ:k.g-pl'l
Huaqlao Qlngnlan *mill'if.
Jlnmen Qlao Bao
Jluguo Shlbao
Kung Slng (Gongsheng) Itf
Llu Mel Xuesheng Tongxln
Baoye Fanzhan-
Melzhou Huaqlao Rlbao
Min-Qing Tuanbao
Plngdeng
Shehulzhuyl yu Zhongguo [ixl
Shl'ernlanlal dl Gongzuo Guocheng
jl Jlnhou dl Renwu
Shlfu Xlansheng Zhuan
Tuanjle Bao [IIM$&
Wenyl Fuxlng 'iuekan tlj
WUzhengfu Gongchan Yuekan +Ij
Xlanfeng Bao
Xlanfeng Zhoukan
Xlaoxiao Shlnlan ;J,;j,Tif.
Xinmln Congbao !#r.iJ.';w,*
Ymen Ingau ('iuwen Yanjlu)
Yushlye Jianshl
Zhongguo GuomlndangZhu Sanfanshl
If' wll rIi*\\'.:5ZMi)
Zongzhlbu Dl'ercl Daibiao Oahui
Shl-mo Ji
Zhongguo Pinyinwenzlyundong Shi
Jlanblan rp
In American Courts The Chinese

Connie Young Yu
The huge convention of three thousand distinguished
delegates had gathered in the Metropolitan Temple of San
Francisco at the invitation of the BQard of Supervisors of the
city. There were mayors from cities and towns throughout the
state, Congressmen, labor and civic leaders, prominent
businessmen and clergymen. The governors of Montana,
Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and California sent telegrams of
support. The Honorable James D. Phelan, Mayor of San
Francisco, announced to the convention that the Chinese
population of the state, "due to the beneficent efforts of
exclusion," had fallfm from 75,000 in the year 1890 to 45,000
in 1900. He received applause and cheers from the audience.
This was the Chinese Exclusion Convention of 1901, a
body of men which, in the estimation of Mayor M.P. Snyder
of Los Angeles, was the most impressive he had ever faced. It
was, he said, "of one mind," the exclusion of Chinese: "for
country, home and civilization."l
Former Congressman Thomas J. Geary, introduced as
"the framer of the great Chinese Exclusion Act," was received
with resounding applause and launched eloquently into the
evils of Asiatic immigration. His legislative act, authored in
1892, ten years after the first Chinese Exclusion Act, required
all Chinese in the United States to register and obtain a
certificate of eligibility to remain in the United States. It
further extended all bills in force against the Chinese for an
additional ten years. D.E. McKinlay, a delegate from the
United States Attorney's office, advocated strengthening the
Geary law to close all loopholes, declaring that "every crack
and cranny of the law has been probed by skillful lawyers in
the pay of the Chinese to widen, if possible, the aperture so
that a Chinaman might crawl through; every link in the chain
which guarded us has been tested and strained to the utmost in
the hope that one link would break .... ,,2
The Rev. William Rader gave a blazing speech on the
effect of Chinese immigration on public morals. As other
delegates affirmed before him, he made the point that the
attitude of the convention was not one of race prejudice; after
all, they opposed Negro slavery in the South ("We have fought
for the blacks"). Rather, he declared, "The issue is that of
American civilization as against the venerable paganism of
China.... " Also, orated the reverend: "The class of coolies
which make up the rank and file of the Chinese in California,
who come without wives or wealth, who interfere with
American workingmen on the one hand and affect public
morals on the other, should have the door of the nation closed
tight against them and locked with a Geary key!,,3
Congressman Wood responded appreciatively to repeated
cheers and applause for his strong exclusionist stand: "That is
the way to do it, boys. That is the kind of spirit that the boys
had at Manila when George Dewey sank the whole Spanish
fleet. (Applause) That is the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon, that,
under God Almighty, has made the American flag supreme on
one side of the world. ,,4
The scores of grand, patriotic speeches repeated over and
over the danger of the invasion by Mongolian hordes, the great
destiny of America, the love for California (bravely fighting
the effete snobs of the liberal Eastern establishment who
would rob the Western working man of his pursuit of
happiness) and the wonderful mixture in this melting pot of
European countries.
The spirit of this gathering of the Golden State's most
illustrious leaders had its origins in the rough mining camps a
half century earlier when the fathers of many of these
delegates, like the Chinese, appeared in California with neither
wives nor plans for settling down. They had come for the
purpose of finding gold as quickly as possible. Those were the
days when California was, in the words of a Chinese observer,
"a cesspool for all the elemen ts of the world":
Fighting and quarreling were the daily amusements of the
early Californians. The condition of affairs was then like a
boiler overloaded with steam, which seeks for the weakest
part of the cylinder to escape. The unfortunate Mongolians
were the weakest element. 5
When California was admitted as the thirty-first sta te in
1850, fifty Chinese merchants were invited to participate in
the inaugural ceremonies. But when in 1852 20,000 Chinese
arrived and most of them appeared in the California mines,
encroaching on "white man's territory," many mining districts
forcibly expelled them. The legislature of the "settlers," who
had lost no time in diminishing the indigenous Californians in
numbers and spirit, passed during its first year of statehood a
pioneer anti-Chinese law. It required all foreign miners to pay
a tax of twenty dollars a month.
When the exorbitant tax of 1850 succeeded in driving
the Chinese out of the mines without enriching the State's
depleted treasury, the law was repealed and re-enacted the
next year with the tax set at $3 a month. In 1852 the tax was
raised to $4 a month. For the Foreign Mining Tax Collector,
the law was license to plunder: he would keep a portion of all
taxes collected and was free to seize and sell the property of or
even whip those who could not pay. The situation gave rise to
22
bogus tax collectors who roamed through the mining districts
with arms and counterfeit receipts. Mark Twain commented
on the situation of the Chinese miner in Roughing It:
In California he gets a living out of old mining claims that
white men have abandoned as exhausted and
worthless -and then the officers come down on him twice a
month with an exorbitant swindle to which the legislature
has given the broad general name of "foreign" mining tax,
but is usually inflicted on no foreigners but Chinamen. The
swindle has in some cases been repeated once or twice on
the same victim in the course of the same month-but the
public treasury was not additionally enriched by it,
probably.
In 1855 a new law increased the mining tax for
"foreigners" by two dollars per month every year. The Alta
California, the first weekly journal in California, noted the
increase in numbers of Chinese boarding ships for China after
the passage of this law.
6
. _ . it is apparent that under this law it will be impossible
for the Chinamen to pay their taxes and make a living in
the mines much longer. We may, therefore, expect to see
this class of our population diminish rather than increase
hereafter.
7
Although the tax was set again at $4 in 1856, the effect
of this discriminatory legislation was decreased Chinese
immigration and labor adjustments by the Chinese who
remained. Discouraged miners who could not afford passage
home went to work in the agricultural counties or to perform
menial tasks in towns and cities. There was no way the Chinese
could stop the tide of open violence and discriminatory
legislation. The brutality they confronted in the gold fields
had discouraged them from competing openly with white men,
and they became gap-fillers, willing to work at anything to
survive and for the survival of their families in China who
depended on the earnings they sent home. Doing laundry,
cooking, laboring in swamps and fields, they appeared humble
and inconspicuous, useful, ready-to-please, avoiding any
excuse for the white population to annihilate them or run
them off. Incidents such as these were common in the early
history of the Chinese in America:
An American yesterday attacked a Chinaman on Dupont
Street, beating him shamefully_ The Chinamen in the
neighborhood were afraid to interfere and the Americans,
of whom there was a large crowd, stood by and saw the
poor Chinaman abused. The assailant held the unfortunate
Celestial by the queue and kicked and beat him until he was
tired, and when the poor fellow got loose and was going off
a policeman came up, saw by his bloody face that he had
been in a fight and arrested him. II
In 1854 when a white man, George Hall, was convicted
of murder upon the testimony of Chinese witnesses, the judge
reversed the verdict, refering to the Criminal Act of April 16,
1850, which provided that "No Black, or Mulato person, or
Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against
a white man."9 The court reasoned that the Chinese were in
the same category as Indians, on the basis of the fact that
when Columbus discovered America, he called the natives
Indians because he thought he was on the shores of Asia.
"From that time on," declared Judge Charles J. Murray,
"down to a very recent period, the American Indian and the
Mongolian, or Asia tic, were regarded as the same type of the
human species." The pedantic opinion of the court, filled with
ethnological garble, revealed its true intention with this
conclusion: "The same rule which would admit them to testify
would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship, and we
might soon see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the
bench and in our legislative halls. ,,10
Through this ruling, which stood for two decades,
private violence against the Chinese in California was
encouraged. Whites were able to rob, assault and slaughter
Chinese with relative impunity. Protest by the Chinese could
only take the form of mannerly appeal, such as the open letter
to the people of California, signed by twenty-seven Chinese
merchants, whichstates that:
Instead of the equality and protection which seemed to be
promised by the laws of a great nation . .. we find only
inequality and oppression. Oppression by the law, which
subjects us to exorbitant taxes imposed upon us
exclusively-oppression without the pale of the law, which
refuses us its protection and leaves us prey to vexations and
humiliations which it seems to invoke upon our heads by
placing us in an exceptional position. 11
The Chinese had no recourse if they decided on staying
in America but to endure the victimizing rulings of the court
and the harassment which accompanied them. The humiliating
legal harassments suffered by the Chinese were not objected to
by the populace who observed such conditions with curiosity,
if at all. B. E. Lloyd, writing his impression of the Chinese in
1876, makes this colorful comment:
The Chinaman is ever under the vigilant eye of the
tax-gatherer. He is met on the street corner by the poll-tax
collector, who calls out in a commanding voice, "John you
give me two dollars, and I give you receipt "-or "John, you
show me receipt. " If he has not yet paid his tax, John soon
produces the two dollars, and after receiving a receipt folds
it up neatly and places it in some mysterious receptacle or
pocket and the next time he is called upon by the
collector-no matter if it be in the mines of Nevada-that
iden tical receipt will be produced as proof that he has paid
his tithe. Again that voice is heard at the ferry-slips, as John
is hurrying aboard the boat, starting on a journey to the
interior in search of a job-'']ohn, you got receipt?" and
straightway to that hidden pocket go the nimble fingers of
John Chinaman, and the receipt is brought forth. As he is
stepping aboard the eastern bound train, across the bay, his
blanket in one hand and bag ofprovisions in the other, that
ever-present voice is again heard-'']ohn, Ie' me see
receipt;" and the receipt is again produced. So persistent
are the collectors, that John seldom escapes, and if he be so
unfortunate as to lose his receipt, he will be compelled to
replenish the public treasury by a second payment. 12
Ridiculed for their appearance, language, customs and
clannishness, the Chinese were rejected in all their efforts to
assimilate. In 1859 the California Superintendent of Education
asked that state school funds be withheld from schools which
23
enrolled Chinese. In March 1866, the law was changed to
permit Chinese to attend public schools if the parents of white
children did not object. In the case Mamie Tape vs. Jennie
M.A. Hurley, a Chinese won his case to send his daughter to
public school in 1884. A separate school was then established
in San Francisco's Chinatown by the Board of Education,13
and Chinese were not allowed to attend other public schools in
the city. After the turn of the century legal segregation of
Asians and whites ended on the West Coast, although de facto
segregation remained. Discrimination continued for Chinese
children in the South in the 1930's. In the Chinese Digest of
June 1937, the plans were announced for an all-Chinese school
in the Delta region of Mississippi.
Joe Hing Lett, a young prominent store owner here,
succinctly explained the urgent need of a Chinese school in
the following words: Mississippi is the only state in the
Union in which the law is so worded that in the operation
of schools Chinese children are discriminated against. In
only a very few communities are they allowed to attend the
white schools!13
Chinese who petitioned the courts for naturalization as
citizens were refused on the basis of the first naturalization
law of 1790, making such a privilege available only to "any
alien being a free white person." After the Civil War, when
naturalization was extended to those of African nativity and
African descent, Chinese petitioners were refused on the basis
that they were neither "free white persons" nor black.
In the 1860's the Chinese frequently took their
grievances to the courts, testing the legality of discriminatory
laws. In 1862 Lin Sing, a Chinese resident of San Francisco,
brought action to the Supreme Court of California (Lin Sing
vs. Washburn) to recover the sum of five dollars, being two
months of the "police tax" (a poll tax for aliens) imposed
upon him by the state of California. Lin Sing won his case, but
the Attorney General of California, the great anti-Chinese
orator Frank M. Pixley, delivered a strong exclusionist speech
"on the grounds of self-interest and self-preservation against
this inundation of barbarism."
The Anglo-Saxon race will carve out its own destiny, in its
own way, on the continent where Providence has placed it,
will make its own laws, mould its own character, choose its
domestic associates and will claim to exercise the privilege
of determining, among its incidental privileges, how much
money a Mongolian, or Chinese shall pay each month for
the protection of our State Government and for the
privilege of conducting their avocations within its
jurisdiction. 14
The Alien Poll Tax law was again enacted by the
California Legislature during the session of 1921, requiring
alien registration and a tax of $10 a year for every alien male
inhabitant over 21 and under sixty. A Japanese, Heikichi
Terui, was arrested for refusing to pay the tax. His lawyer,
using Lin Sing vs. Washburn as a precedent, pointed out that
the poll tax of 1862 was declared unconstitutional even before
the passage of the 14th Amendment. The Twentieth Century
Alien Poll Tax Law was thereby also declared
unconstitutional.
Refused housing in other areas of the city, the Chinese
were forced to live in crowded buildings and squalid enclaves
of Chinatowns. In San Francisco in 1873 the police authorities
harrassed the Chinese by activating a city and country
ordinance regulating lodging houses, requiring 500 cubic feet
of space for each occupant. In their first raid on Chinatown
the police hauled fifty-one lodgers out of abasement on
Jackson Street. The violators of the ordinance were fined, but
they were advised by their lawyers not to pay to try to render
the law impossible to enforce. The San Francisco Bulletin of
May 22,1873, reports:
There was a good deal of difficulty in enforcing this
ordinance on account of the number of Chinese who
violated it, and their ommission to pay the fines imposed.
They were arrested in great numbers, and packed in cells
where they had not 100 cubic feet of air to the person.
They overcrowded the jails, and it was thought necessary
by the authorities of the city to adopt a policy which
would compel,the Chinese to pay their fines.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors met to create
new, more oppressive measures to force the Chinese to pay
their fines. The new rulings were:
1. Each and every male prisoner shall have the hair of his
head cut to an inch of his scalp.
2. No person or persons shall remove any remains from any
cemetery without a permit.
3. Laundries "who employ no vehicle drawn by animal
power" shall pay $15 a quarter for their licenses. IS
The word "Chinese" was not used, but the rules were
obviously contrived with the Chinese in mind: cutting off a
queue would shame a Chinese deeply, forbidding the sending
of his brethren's remains to his native village in China would
frustrate him, taxing his meagre laundry business (he delivered
his wash on foot) would impoverish him. Although Mayor
William Alvord of San Francisco vetoed the queue and laundry
ordinances, the laundry ordinance was enacted over his veto
and drove hundreds of Chinese laundries out of business. The
queue ordinance was enacted under the succeeding Mayor
Bryant. Such experiences with American justice instilled in the
Chinese an enduring distrust of white man's law which was
repeatedly altered and used as a weapon against them.
In the case of the People vs. Soon Kung in the County
Court of San Francisco, July 9, 1874, the laundry ordinance
was declared invalid on the ground that it was unequal in its
operation. Two years later the supervisors passed another
laundry ordinance which was tested and declared void. In
1880 an even more severe measure against Chinese laundries
was enacted in San Francisco, making it illegal to carry on a
laundry business in buildings not made of brick or stone.
Scores of Chinese were arrested, but white laundry owners
who operated in wooden buildings were left alone. A
laundryman, Yick Wo, was tried, found guilty and fined
$1000. His case was carried to the Federal Supreme Court,
which reversed the decision on the basis of the 14th
Amendment, but only after many Chinese were driven out of
business.
During the economic depression in the latter part of the
19th Century, there was no occupation other than that of a
domestic servant in which Chinese were safe, legally or
otherwise. Chinese vegetable and fish peddlers were attacked
by an ordinance forbidding persons from carrying goods in
baskets suspended from a pole, and this measure was upheld
by the State Supreme Court. Various measures threatened the
Chinese in fishing industries, such as regulating the size of nets
24
and preventing the importation of dried fish and shrimps. In
some cases higher courts threw out discriminatory laws. A law
forbidding "aliens ineligible for citizenship" from fishing in
the waters of California was declared unconstitutional.
16
An
attempt to confine the Chinese to the ghetto by passing an
ordinance forbidding them to live or do business in other areas
was declared a violation of the 14th Amendment and the
Burlingame Treaty wi th China.
l7
In 1879 Ho Ah Kow, found lodging in crowded quarters
with much less than 500 cubic feet of space to himself, was
convicted and sentenced to pay a fine of ten dollars. He
refused and was imprisoned for five days, during which time
Sheriff Matthew Nunan cut off his queue, under the auspices
of the hair-cutting ordinance of June 1876. The Judge, Steven
J. Field, declared that this law was a violation of the Civil
Rights act of 1870, the 14th Amendment and the Burlingame
Treaty:
The ordinance is known in the community as the 'Queue
Ordinance' being so designated from its purpose to reach
the queues of the Chinese, and it is not enforced against
any other persons. The reason advanced for its adoption,
and now urged for its continuance is, that only the dread of
the loss of his queue will induce a Chinaman to pay his fine.
That is to say, in order to enforce the payment of a fine
imposed upon him it is necessary that torture should be
superadded to imprisonment. 18
The judge warned that "hostile and spiteful" legislation by the
city and state could not discoumge immigration, which is
determined by the federal government.
But in an attempt precisely aimed at discouraging
immigration the Second California State Constitutional
Convention in 1878 adopted a four-section anti-Chinese
article: 1) The legislature is authorized to enact necessary
measures to protect the state from aliens who are dangerous
and detrimental; 2) No corporation may employ directly or
indirectly any Chinese or Mongolians; 3) No Chinese shall be
employed on any state, county, muncipal, or other public
work; 4) The presence of foreigners "ineligible to become
citizens" is dangerous to the well-being of the State and the
Legislature shall discourage such immigration by all means
within its power.19 In 1880 the Legislature passed "an act to
amend the Penal Code" making any officer or clerk of any
corporation who hired any Chinese or Mongolian guilty of a
misdemeanor, punishable by fine or imprisonment. The
President of the Sulphur Bank Quicksilver Mining Corporation,
which employed a large number of Chinese, was arrested for
violating the Constitution of California. He asked to be
discharged on the grounds that the provisions of the
Constitution were passed in violation of the Burlingame Treaty
and the 14th Amendment, and he won his case.
20
The
anti-Chinese articles of the California Constitution were
declared void.
Although the courts in the 1870's established that the
Chinese had constitutional rights, there was no effective way
to protect them from public and private violence. When
Chinese landed in America they were stoned as they emerged
from the steamships, receiving no police protection, since the
authorities tacitly approved the violence?1 In San Francisco
twenty-five laundries were burned in a single month in 1877.
When a white was killed in a police raid on Los Angeles'
Chinatown a huge mob destroyed the quarters, killing at least
twenty-two Chinese including women and children, fifty
persons hung from the lampposts.
Railroad towns in Calitornia, Utah, and Colorado, where
former Chinese railroad workers had settled, expelled their
entire Chinese populations. In 1874 there were several
thousand Chinese in Truckee, Nevada, and neighboring areas,
"and most of them were driven en masse out of these places
and into the midst of other anti-Chinese demonstrations all
over California. ,,22 In 1885 twenty-eight Chinese were
massacred in Rock Springs, Wyoming, by a mob of white
workers outraged at the appearance of competing coal miners.
The same year in Issaquah Valley a number of Chinese hop
pickers were killed by whites while they slept in their tents. In
1893 when one Chinese appeared in Great Falls, Montana,
preparing to open a laundry business with his life's savings, he
was arrested, jailed, smuggled out of town at night and
threatened with death if he dared to return. The Great Falls
Tribune expressed the sentiment of the town: " ... as long as
the stars and stripes float over Great Falls no pig-tailed saffron
will be allowed to call this city his home. ,,23
In 1884 in Tacoma, Washington, the citizens of the town
drove the Chinese out and burned their dwellings. Soon
thereafter, in 1886, one of the largest anti-Chinese riots took
place in Seattle. An Anti-Chinese Congress for Washington
State had issued a manifesto that all Chinese in the area depart
by a specific day. The members of the committee for Seattle
were indicted by a Grand Jury for violating the Civil Rights
Bill, but they were acquitted. Led by this group, a number of
men went to the Chinese quarters with wagons, forced the
Chinese to pack their belongings and drove them to the docks
to be loaded on a steamship bound for San Francisco. The
acting Chief of Police and nearly the entire police force were
involved in this action.
24
An opposing group of citizens
organized a "Home Guard" and fought to prevent the mob's
actions. President Cleveland summoned the National Guard
and several rioters were killed in the ensuing struggle. After the
riot the anti-Chinese leaders threatened revenge, but in the
face of armed opposition, they decided to work within the
system. The captain of the Home Guard reported:
... the leaders succeeded in persuading their followers to
abandon armed resistance and prepare for the fall election,
at which they believed they could elect their men to every
County office, which they did, with the exception of one
County commissioner. 25
The elected leaders attempted to arrest certain citizens who
opposed them during the riots, but, according to Captain
George Kinnear, "Gradually the smothered feeling of
opposition to good government subsided and security was
restored.... "
A Chinese fishing village on the outskirts of Monterey
which had been in existence for a half a century was burned to
the ground on May 16, 1906. When the Chinese tried to return
and rebuild their homes, they were legally run off with a'
thirty-six page eviction notice.
26
The Webb Act of 1911
barred aliens "ineligible for citizenship" from buying land in
California, although some Asians held land in their
American-born children's names. In Texas, Title 5 of the
Revised Civil Statute of 1925 also barred Asians from owning
land, with some exceptions for certain classes of aliens and in
certain areas.
27
The same United States which had pressured the Chinese
27
into accepting the Burlingame Treaty,28 to ensure free flow of
laborers and trade, sought to revise the treaty in order to force
China into allowing the United States to regulate, limit, or
suspend' immigration. Local exclusionist attitudes became
national policy with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which
suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years.
The Act specified that "hereafter no State Court or court of
the United States shall admit a Chinese to citizenship, and all
laws in conflict with this act are hereby repealed."
Between 1880 and 1924 fourteen different Chinese
exclusion laws were enacted. In 1888 the Scott Act prohibited
the entry of laborers, permitting only certain privileged classes,
and classified Chinese as a member of a race regardless of
nationality. Chinese born in the Philippines or France or Brazil
were considered Chinese alike. Laborers who left the United
States were denied re-entry certificates; others were required
to re-enter at the same port from which they had departed and
they were interrogated and detained. The Supreme Court held
that the Scott Act violated U.S. treaty obligations with China,
but it also insisted that Congress had the right to pass such a
law. As the Nation commented wryly in 1893, "In other
words a nation, like a man, had the right to declare that it
would not stand by its agreements. ,,29
When the Geary Act was passed in 1892, extending all
anti-Chinese legislation for another ten years, all Chinese were
required to obtain a certificate of eligibility to be in the
United States and to carry this "photo-passport" at all times.
The Chinese Six Companies, the protective society for all the
Chinese in America in the first fifty years of Chinese
immigration, fought such discriminatory laws in the courts. A
Chinese explains the procedure of the Six Companies:
To test this law in the Supreme Court it certainly needs
money for the lawyers' fees and other expenses, so the Six
Companies levied a dollar upon every Chinaman to meet
these expenses. 30
This legal battle against the Geary Act was viewed by
exclusion enthusiasts as an insidious, immoral means used by
the Six Companies to hold on to its thousands of "coolie
slaves" and to import more. Wrote Charles Holder in 1898:
The law of exclusion was obstructed by the creation of a
false sentiment by bribery, and finally we had the spectacle
of the Six Companies fighting it in the Supreme Court,
where they were defeated after a hard struggle. 31
The writer observed further on the Chinese in the legal
battlefield:
As a race they are astute politicians, and singularly, one of
the most active fields for the demonstration of their skill is
found, not in China, but on the American continent and
among the A merican people, where without a vote or even
the desire for citizenship the Chinese political bosses
succeed in defeating justice, retarding the passage of laws,
and adding materially to the financial burden of the
American citizen and tax payer. 32
Losing the fight against the Geary Act meant daily
harrassment for the Chinese. A community leader named Moy
Jin Mun recalled an incident which occurred to many Chinese:
stopped by immigration officers and asked to produce his
certificate of eligibility or "chak chee" as the Chinese called it,
he found that he did not have it with him. lie was thereupon
detained for hours until he could contact a judge who vouched
for him. 33
Men such as Congressman Everis A. Hayes feared that
without exclusion laws the Pacific Coast states would become
like Hawaii, little more t.han an Oriental colony. He advocated
stronger Chinese exclusion laws to apply also to "Japanese,
Koreans, Tartars, Malays, Afghans, East Indians, Lascars,
Indoos (sic) and all other persons of the Mongolian or Asiatic
,,34
race....
The same year of Hayes's statement Ng Poon Chew,
editor of the San Francisco Chinese newspaper Chung Sai Yat
Po, declared that "the Exclusion Law has been carried out
with such a vigor that it has almost become an extermination
law.,,35 The question was not the immigration of laborers, he
maintained, which both sides have agreed should not be
admitted to the U.S. The issue was that privileged classes
should be given the same courtesies that are extended to
newcomers from other nations. He recounts incidents in which
teachers, distinguished merchants, their wives and children,
and students of "high official families" had been detained and
humiliated:
Ladies of highly respectable families have been asked all
sorts of questions in the examinations by the immigration
officials which they would not dare mention in the hearing
of American ladies.
A Methodist minister was arrested as a laborer, tried, and
ordered deported on the basis that a preacher is a laborer. Ng
Poon Chew made his appeal to the middle-class attitude that
respectable, Christianized Chinese should not be badly treated.
He warns of antagonizing China (for America's own good),
quoting William H. Taft, Secretary of War: "One of the great
commercial prizes of the world is trade with the 400,000,000
Chinese. ,,36
Despite diplomatic protest by China and China's
economic boycott of U.S. goods to protest anti-Chinese laws,
harrassment of the Chinese continued. In the first quarter of
the twentieth cenrury many Chinese immigrated on false
papers, posing as sons of citizens or merchants. Thousands
were deported on petty technicalities; children and wives were
frequently deported while husbands were admitted. Every
Chinese entering with or without legal papers was at the mercy
of the immigration examiners who interrogated everyone as a
suspected stowaway. Men often did not want to subject their
families to such an ordeal. In an interview in the early 1920's a
Chinese explained why for ten years he has not sent to China
for his wife:
Because my wife come over bere, and you A mericans cause
ber alot of trouble. You pen her up in the immigration
offIce and then bave doctors come and say sbe has liver
trouble, bookworm, and the doctor does not know
anything about it, to tell the trutb. When my little boy
come to this country, he was kept in the immigration office
for over two months. Poor little fellow-he was so
homesick. That is the reason why my wife hates to come
over here. It would break her heart to have to stay so long
in the immigration office. 37
The Immigration Act of 1924 was to make reunions in
America virtually impossible even for those who were willing
to endure the hardships. Previously, wives of American-born
Chinese and wives of the privileged classes were admitted. But
28
the 1924 law, which was designed to phase Chinese out of the
U.S. by preventing them from having families, stipulated that
no alien ineligible for citizenship be admitted to the U.S. This
separated husband and wife, in many cases forever.
Miscegenation laws prevented Chinese from marrying outside
their race, and Chinese women in America were scarce. The
alternative to bachelorhood was trans-Pacific marriage. Such a
situation is typified by the family history of a fifty-five year
old cafe owner from Needles, a California railroad town. Wing
Vee tells of how his grandfather came to America, worked
hard, saved his money, went back to China to get married, and
was prevented by the exclusion laws from bringing his wife
back with him. Wing Vee's father, brought to America by an
uncle, also later returned to China to get married, and again,
because of the laws returned without his wife. She bore a son
in Canton, Wing Vee, who came to America when he was
twelve. Repeating the same cycle, he returned to China in
1935 to find a wife. A year later he returned to Needles while
his wife, who was pregnant, remained in China "because of the
damn immigration laws." "We were separated thirteen years. I
never saw my oldest daughter until she was thirteen years old
in 1948.,,35
In every Chinese-American family history there are such
stories, of lives made miserable by the immigration laws,
harrassment and fear: the lonely old single men in condemned
hotel rooms, the suicides of deportees, the fragmented
families. I remember being told frequently how lucky my
father's father had been because he came to America in 1881,
a 12 year-old laborer, just a year before the Exclusion Act. My
mother's mother had a less fortunate story: though the wife of
an American citizen, she was detained upon her arrival in 1920
on a health technicality and held prisoner on Angel Island (in
San Francisco Bay) for two years.
When China and the United States were allies in World
War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the "Act to
Repeal the Chinese Exclusion Acts, to Establish Quotas, and
for Other Purposes." The Chinese in America became eligible
for naturalization, immigration restrictions were eased, and
sojourners became immigrants and finally citizens.
Agitation by the active Chinese civic organization, the
Chinese-American Citizen's Alliance, continued into the
1960's for fairer immigration laws. In 1952 the
McCarren-Walter Act, or the Immigration and Nationality Act,
was enacted by Congress, eliminating race as a bar to
immigration yet still adhering to the national origins quota,
which was particularly restrictive for Asians. This act was
amended in 1965, ab olishing the national origins quota system
from July 1,1968.
39
California did not repeal its miscegenation law
forbidding Chinese marrying whites until 1948. Oregon's
miscegenation law was repealed three years later and many
states such as Idaho, Mississippi and Virginia maintained their
laws preventing the marriage of persons of Mongolian race and
whites until the Supreme Court ruled such laws
unconstitutional in 1967.
The history of the Chinese in America is one of
continual battles with discriminatory laws on local, state and
federal levels. The paranoia and distrust caused by
discriminatory laws remained after they were repealed, and the
feeling of estrangement from American life was passed from
one generation to the next. The shadow of the poll tax
collector, the immigration interrogator and anti-Chinese
legislators remained to haunt the consciousness of
Chinese-America.
The Japanese, arriving at the latter part of the
nineteenth century, bringing their families with intentions of
settling, inherited the anti-Asian obstacles set up against the
Chinese. Japanese immigration hassles were less severe than
those of the Chinese because of the "Gentleman's Agreement"
between the U.S. and Japan whereby the latter country
regulated the flow of its emigrants, and because Japan was a
strong country. But the Japanese, too, were "aliens ineligible
for citizenship," were excluded from labor unions, and were
barred from buying land under the Webb Act. Japanese
children, together with the Chinese, attended an all-Oriental
school in San Francisco. In the Ozawa case of 1916, a
Japanese who had lived in the United States for over twenty
years was denied citizenship, the court citing precedent cases
of Chinese petitioners and reaffirming that only free white
persons and persons of African descent were eligible for
citizenship.
In 1912 a U.S. district court in Pennsylvania declared
that Filipinos were not eligible for citizenship. The 1921
petition of Easurk Emsen Charr was denied in the U.S. court
of the Western District of Missouri because he was "a native of
Korea, owing allegiance to and subject of the Mikado of
Japan" and not a free white person. Natives of the Hawaiian
Islands resident in the United States were considered of the
"Malay, or brown race" and therefore not eligible for
citizenship.4o
An alien who had served in the Navy, whose father was
an Englishman and whose mother was one-half Chinese and
one-half Japanese was not white enough to be an American in
a New York court in 1909.
41
In 1913 a Wisconsin judge
granted naturalization to a "high-caste" Hindu because he was
considered "white" by ethnological classification, whereas the
judge in a similar case in Pennsylvania denied a Hindu's
petition,42 drawing the color line instead.
Citizenship proved to be no protection for the rights of
the Japanese on the West Coast in World War II when 11 0,000
persons, two-thirds of them American citizens by birth, were
rounded up and sent to concentration camps. This precedent
of group proscription created a wave of fear among the
Chinese during the Korean War. Chinese students studying in
the United States on student visas during this time were
considered poor security risks by the government, and
President Truman invoked laws restraining the departure of
students who wished to return to China.
43
Title II of the
Internal Security Act (The Emergency Detention Act), passed
over the veto of Truman, provided that in time of war,
invasion or insurrection, the government could incarcerate in
detention camps persons it deemed a threat to the internal
security. The act was not repealed until September 14, 1971,
and only after continual efforts by Asian-Americans,
particularly the Japanese-Americans. Two years previously, J.
Edgar Hoover had testified before the House Subcommittee on
Appropriations that Chinese either coming to or living in the
U.S. could be a danger, as possible enemy agents. They could,
he explained, "be susceptible to recruitment either through
ethnic ties or hostage situations because of relatives in
Communist China."
Unlike the blacks, yellow people came to America for
the most part by choice and as free men, but nonetheless
suffered enslavement by repressive legislation and social
29
restrictions. The Chinese suffered legal persecution longer than
other Asians because they were the first Asians to arrive in
America and because of the tremendous fear of their numbers
overrunning the West Coast. Laws against the Chinese
stemmed from the white man's greed, his prejudices, and his
fears of the Yellow Peril or the Red Menace. On one level
persecution came in the form of mob action, stonings,
burnings of homes and shops; on another it took the form of
"legal" decisions which prevented Asians from having families,
jobs and homes. The legal barriers of a hundred years left their
mark on the Chinese-American character. Prl!vented from
assimilation by laws and racist attitudes, the Chinese were
continually accused of being "Unassimilable" and were
believed suitable only for certain lowly occupations. (As Wing
Yee says, "Chinese didn't become laundrymen by choice.")
It was not the small group of fanatics-charismatic
characters such as Denis Kearny (of "The Chinese must go"
fame)-who created the atmosphere of racism. Deeply
ingrained racism was already present when the first band of
yellow men arrived, and it quickly became institutionalized by
law. Experienced, respected law-makers and leaders-not
ignorant rabble-rousers-enacted the exclusion laws and
repressive ordinances. Members of the ruling class were
involved, such as Leland Stanford, who exploited the labor of
the Chinese to build the Central Pacific Railroad, yet later, as a
Senator, spoke out against Chinese immigration.
NOTES
I. Proceedings, California Chinese Exclusion Convention,
November 21 and 22, 1901, San Francisco.
2. Ibid., p. 48.
3. Ibid., p. 56.
4. Ibid., p. 64.
5. Fong Kum Ngon, "The Chinese Six Companies," Overland
Monthly, May 1894, Vol. XXIII, p. 522.
6. Alta California, October 15, 1855.
7. Alta California, October 27,1855.
8. Alta California, August 8,1853.
9. The People vs. Hall, October 1854.
10. Ibid.
11. Alta California, September 19, 1855.
12. B.E. Lloyd, Lights and Shades of San Francisco (San
Francisco: A.L. Bancroft and Co., 1876), p. 252.
13. William Hoy, "Chinese in Mississippi to Build Own School,"
Chinese Digest, June 1937, Vol. 3, no. 6, p. 12.
14. Lin Sing vs. E.H. Washburn, Supreme Court of California,
1862.
15. San Francisco Bulletin, May 27,1873.
16. Re Ah Chong, 6 Say. 45,2 Fed. 733.
17. Lee Sing, 45 Feb (1890),359.
18. Ho Ah Kow vs. Matthew Nunan, Circuit Court of the U.S.
District Court of California.
19. John W. Caughey, California (New York: Prentice-Hall, 2nd
ed.), p. 389.
20. In re Tiburcio Parrott on Habeas Corpus, Circuit Court of the
United States, 1880.
21. Frederick A. Bee, Opening Argument Before Joint
Congressional Committee on Chinese Immigration, San Francisco,
1876.
22. William Hoy, "Moy Jin Mun-Pioneer," Chinese Digest, May
15, 1936, Vol. 2, no. 20, p. 11.
23. The Nation, April 16, 1893, Vol. 56, no. 1449, p. 248.
24. George Kinnear, "Anti-Chi;lese Riot at Seattle, Wash., Feb. 8,
1886," printed for 25th anniversary of the riot, Seattle, February 8,
1911, p. 6.
In his keynote address at the 31st Biennial Convention
of the Chinese-American Citizens Alliance in 1971, Wilbur K.
Woo described the legal struggles of the Chinese, saying,
"These legislative battles, some defeats, some victories, best
describe our early climb up the gold' mountain." When
discriminatory laws were challenged, the outcome depended
on the skill and the influence of individual challengers. It is
but a cherished myth, a long-perpetuated fallacy,. that the
United States is a nation of laws before which all men are
equal. What we have in reality is a nation of men whose
legislative works and courtroom decisions reflect prevailing
biases, a nation which has used the law as a tool for the
persecution and genocidal treatment of minorities.
The Chinese Exclusion Convention of 1901 is an
eloquent testimony to the racist intent of legislation regarding
minorities, and the efforts of American legislators to keep the
U.S. an Anglo-Saxon country. This is made very clear in the
statement by the delegate from the United States Attorney's
office to the convention as he advocated strengthening the
Geary Law to close all loopholes to the Chinese, "in order that
a perfect exclusion law shall be placed on the statute books of
the nation. ,,44
In challenging such legislation the Chinese showed their
desire to become part of the American experience, and, in the
ensuing struggle, they did.
25. Ibid., p.11.
26. Winston Elstob, Old Cannery Row (Condor's Sky Press,
1965), p. 26.
27. Chinese Digest, April 1937, Vol. 3, Ito. 4, p. 12.
28. The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 "recognized the inherent and
inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance" and
established that citizens of the United States visiting or residing in
China shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, and exemptions in
respect to trave! and residence as may be enjoyed by the citizens or
subjects of the most favored nation and vice versa.
29. Op. Cit.
30. Fong Kum Ngon, Overland Monthly, May 1894.
31. Charles F. Holder, "The Chinaman in American Politics," The
North American Reveiw, February 1898, p. 229.
32. Ibid.
33. William Hoy, Op. Cit., p. 14.
34. Speech of Rep. Everis Hays, Republican of California, before
the House of Representatives, May 27, 1908.
35. Ng Poon Chew, "The Treatment of Exempt Classes of
Chinese in the United States. A Statement from the Chinese in
America," San Francisco, January 1908, p. 4.
36. Ibid., p. 15.
37. Race Relations Survey Document 241, quoted by R.D.
McKenzie, Oriental Exclusion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1928), p. 94.
38. Interview of Wing Yee by Charles Hillinger, Los Angeles
Times, reprinted in EASTIWEST, April 6, 1971.
39. Thomas W. Chinn, ed., A History of the Chinese in America
(San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969).
40. In re Kanaka Nian, 21 Pac. 993. Supreme Court of Utah.
41. In re Knight, 171, Red. 299 (District Court of New York,
July 13, 1909).
42. In re Sadar Bhagwar Singh, 246, Fed. 496, 1917, Penn.
43. Rose Hum Lee, The Chinese in the United States of America
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), p. 309.
44. D.E. McKinlay, Proceedings, California Chinese Exclusion
Convention, November 21 and 22, 1901, San Francisco, p. 48.
30
STEPPING ACROSS,
BEING A SISTER
being immersed in grey limbo, in seven-up syndrome
feeling like
the un-cola
the un-makeup
the un
perpetuating yesterday's roles
rereading old scripts
"step up the cinema scope"
put minds in fast motion
so actions catch
up with feelings
colors change on the surface of your eye
but we continue to
wage our Godfather struggles
we sit back and watch as
a seal hangs its skin on coat rack
and comes in singing away
in a manger
and a tank suited oyster drops off
after he can tread no longer
melts into heart of open wave
thinking on the spiritual l e ~ of love
there in a world mass of natural happenings
there amidst all the jive crap
believe me
sometimes you are too much about
individual
freedom
tripping so much
and so hard
you're gonna trip over
your trip
and we all know
that be
un
cool
harmonicas and bongos
free rhythm
flu te and congas
mellow/ness
auto harp and bass
rock steady
to the
sound of walking Grant,
simple
complex
complicated
and simple again
wrapped in tapa cloth
growing yellow with age ... we wait
and some Ming pottery is found
and we glaze our Buddhas
are we pu tting words in
Mother Culture's mouth
when we
take off our aprons
for a while?
looking back at Betty F. and Marsha X
and United Women Against M.C.P.'s
i am
stone convinced that we
should be more like
bamboo than oak
beauty of motion vs. beauty of stillness
learning to move
like bamboo in breeze
like a Coltrane progression
dressed in
blade leaves
and smooth stems
do we have the same reality?
Kono looks Steve McGarrett in the eye
and says, "No, boss."
Reagan visits the International
Hotel to
express his
solidarity
and Nixon's fig leaf is
falling down
legends of universal grannies
crocheted into glass snow jars for the long
winter
seeing the alternative
brown marx thoughts in dart rhythm
talking in your chamber
she did the same thing
lit a candle and
sat there a long, long time
you fell in one slow movement into
her arms
knowing she was your mama
no longer
-D. Mark
31
book reVlew
Shawn Hsu Wong
Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States,
1850-1870, by Gunther Barth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1964) 305 pages.
Gunther Barth's Bitter Strength has been considered a
good history of the Chinese in America for too long. Critics
often measure greatness by prodigious research. And Barth's
60 pages of notes and sources certainly account for some
measure of academic greatness. Barth states that
"Conventional sources for this history of the Chinese in the
United States are limited. Illiterate or poorly educated, the
sojourners left few written records of their experience." Barth
then states that "Missionary letters and newspaper reports
were the most important sources of information"-two of the
most racist institutions in American history. He disregards
Mary Roberts Coolidge's classic study of the Chinese in
California (1906) as "overly sympathetic." Barth, showing
incredible bad taste in his selections, first praises the
sojourners in the following section then ridicules them by
quoting from one of his "important sources":
The publication of Chinese newspapers in California
spurred the growing curiosity about Chinese culture, and
engendered a respect for the Orien tal, evidently on the
unwarranted assumption that, since most Californians
deciphered their own journals, all sojourners were also able
to read the pages filled with characters. "There are several
Chinamen here," the editor of the Columbia Gazette in
Toulumne County marveled, "who speak English and
Spanish fluently, while . .. they all, without an exception,
are able to read and write their own difficult language. "
From the beginning of the contact the sojourners' spoken
and written language had been the object of editorial
humor, rivaled only by the journalists' remarks about
Chinese music. With a set offictitious "Chinese letters" the
Pioneer caricatured Chinese prose ;tyle and thought. In
their confused reports covering Chinese affairs newsmen
apologized to their readers for all shortcomings with the
hint that they spoke only "what Mrs. Partington would call
broken China. " They compared the typographical
appearance of the lithographed characters in Chinese
newspapers with the crawling of a spider out of an ink
bottll! over a sheet of paper.
32
In the introduction to Bitter Strength Barth states:
The wider significance of Chinatown and work camp
obscured their (the Chinese) specific functions. These
institutions not only sustained the machinery of supervision
and drudgery but also brought the sojourners into contact
with the alien world outside the system of control. Work
camp and Chinatown provoked strife and stimulated
humanitarian attempts at acculturation.
The word humanitarian appears countless times throughout
the book and most times it is awkward and out of place
because the more appropriate word would be "racist."
Humanitarians have always arrived on the wings of the great
white Christian bird.
The first Chinese were sojourners to America. They
came as indentured servants and coolie laborers and only
intended to remain in America to make money and return to
China and live a life of ease. America only meant humiliation
as long as they remained. And if they died their bones were
shipped back to China. If they could not live a life of ease in
China, they could at least be buried there among friends away
from the country where they were humiliated and mistreated.
White Christianity, the humiliation of the sojourners and blatant
racism became the sources of the sojourners' self-contempt for
their condition in America.
To further entrench this humiliation, America denied
the sojourners their own women and the right to marry
outside their race. Barth attributes much of the problems to
the living conditions of the Chinese in Chinatown, "Chinatown
continued to harbor hordes of indentured emigrants in
dilapida ted structures and to support gambling houses, opium
dens, and brothels. After the failure of their reform drives
Californians came to consider filth and immorality as the
sojourners' second nature." Gambling, opium dens, and
brothels were the only signs of the sojourners' masculinity
remaining and Barth confuses masculinity with immorality.
Barth's introduction seems abstract and vague as he
continously uses conceptual words that contain preconceived
notions that remain undefined:
The process of acculturation accompanied the strife which
as the other extreme of reaction, also marked the
emergence of Chinese California. On the one hand, the
development turned around the American response to the
humanitarian challenge presented by hordes of
downtrodden newcomers. On the other hand, acculturation
involved the sojourners' reaction to the strange world which
they encountered for these phases of acculturation. In
response to the humanitarian challenge Californians
endeavored to bring all Chinese into the encompassing
realm of American culture. They extended the universal
blessings of their institutions and values to the newcomers
as a group.
In two pages of the introduction the words humanitarian and
acculturation appear nine times. Barth is like a school boy
trying to define a word by saying it over and over and it soon
sounds ridiculous and loses meaning. Barth seems to have
difficulty with the language.
He never progresses farther than those abstract
statements of the introduction. In Chapter Seven entitled
"Acculturation" we see that he is still repeating those sketchy
ideas found in the introductory pages. He misinterprets 19th
Century racist acts as reform drives:
California's encounter with the regimentation of work
camp and the sufferings of Chinatown inspired a series of
humanitarian endeavors to expose the Chinese sojourners to
the liberating influences of American culture . .. The goals
of the Californians and the Chinese differed. The former
attempted to extend to blessings ofAmerican culture to all
Chinese as an answer to the challenge of their humanitarian
concepts . .. The Growing interest of Americans about
China and of the Chinese in California was an incidental
result. Californians, inspired by the universal message of the
American democratic creed, aimed at reaching all Chinese
within the boundaries of their commonwealth. While their
venture fell far short of success in their own state, at times
they unhesitantly sought to embrace the Chinese in toto.
These passages all appear in just the first three paragraphs of
Chapter Seven. Repetition serves as a substitute for historical
insight. The recurrence of Barth's sweeping statements like,
"Californians inspired by the universal message of the
American democratic creed..." finally points to one
thing-that Barth's concept of America is all wrong. Barth
interprets history according to an ideological template and
America, to Barth, must fit in some idealized political
framework of the state. And as a result, his illusory view of
"America" and "American culture" represents the Chinese as
victims of culture:
. " the concentration of human misery also stimulated
humanitarian attempts to alleviate the conditions by
bringing the Chinese into the realm of American culture.
Barth sees that the hatred for the Chinese was founded on the
sojourners' inability to give up their own culture for the
"liberating" white American culture, not for any racist
reasons. Unlike racism, anti-Semitism is a result of cultural
prejudices rather than racist hatreds. The Jews were persecuted
for cultural reasons, therefore, assumes Barth, the Chinese
must have been persecuted for the same reasons.
Anti-Chinese activities accelerated during the 1870's, a
period not covered by Bitter Strength. Barth never once sees
that the legislative acts against the Chinese were blatantly
racist, but puts the blame on the Chinese for not
understanding "American culture." With the passage of the
Chinese Exclusion Act, the Chinese became the only race to be
legislated against by name. While maintaining white Christian
attempts at acculturation were purely humanitarian, Barth
states over and over throughout the book that the sojourners'
own people served to keep them in a state of humiliation and
oppression. Contrary to what Barth states, the Chinese Six
Companies fought all anti-Chinese legislation:
Behind a facade of benevolent precepts, the companies and
tongs of Chinese California in the 1850's supervised or
oppressed their countrymen. With the aid of district
companies and clan associations, the merchant-creditors
controlled the mass of indentured emigrants. Under
manifold compulsions, forced in to submission by their
basic allegiances of district loyalty and filial piety, most
sojourners readily accepted the confines and dictates of
Chinese California.
In the following interview done by Nathan Lee of the
Combined Asian American Resources Project, we see that
Barth's understanding of the American minority experience
suffers as a result of his concept of America. His arguments
stop short of their logical conclusions giving way to
abstraction.
LEE: You devetoped the argumen t that the Chinese were
originally liked and then hated because they represented a
threat to the establishment of the California Dream. How
do you see that problem being . .. ah, have you seen that
tbe problems have changed, the attitudes changed?
BARTH: Well the attitudes have changed on account of the
fact that the developing hysteria came finally face to face
with the reality of numbers. The numbers, the actual
numbers of the Chinese in California has remained so
minimal, has remained so small, do you, do you see that?
Even the most bigoted, even the most unenlightened man
cannot come away from a study of these numbers with an
impression that the problem ... ah, that he seems to be
creating through his hysteria is vastly overstated, that is,
that is true. Secondly, other groups have come to take, to
take the place of the Chinese, I remind you of the fate of
the Japanese in the relocation camps, in the relocation
camps of the Second World War. I remind you of the plight
of the Mexican in East Los Angeles something like that. Ah
... it seems to me as if attention has shifted extensively
away from the Chinese.
Attention has shifted away from the Chinese because the
stereotype is no longer a threat. Fourth, fifth, and sixth
generation Chinese-Americans are still looked upon as
foreigners in this country. Prolonged periods of oppression and
hatred have liberated Black, Chicano, American Indian and
Japanese-American sensibilities.
LEE: And so, you consider the Chinese moving into the
mainstream of American culture?
BARTH: Yes, in 1965 I was asked to speak here (University
of California, Berkeley) to the Chinese students. When
asked what I considered the greatest contribution that the
Chinese had made to the United States. You know how
that is, it is always a stereotype question. You know. You
noticed that earlier, the contributions of the Scotch, the
Presbyterian, the Irish, then the Germans, you know there
is hardly an immigrant group that has not an extensive
literature that turns around that contribution. And you can
trace that very meaningfUlly, to my mind I found that
answer very rapidly. I thought that the greatest
contribution the Chinese world has made to the United
States were those human beings those students that were
before me, people like you who represent to my mind . ..
ah, who represent to my mind a form of the movement of
the Chinese world into American . .. into the American
world.
B a ~ t h _. ~ a n n o t ans_wer the second question because by
mamtammg cultural silence, Chinese-America is accepted by
white society. Only one book-length work of fiction out of
five written by Chinese-Americans does not embrace the
stereotype of the Chinese in America as foreign.
,
t
33
l
Aiieeeee! An Introduction to
Asian-A:merican Writing
Frank Chin,
Jeffery Paul Chan,
Lawson Fusao Inada, and
Shawn Hsu Wong
PREFACE
Asian-Americans are not one people but several, Chin
ese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans.
Chinese and Japanese Americans have been separated by
geography, culture, and history from China and Japan for
seven and four generations respectively. They have evolved
cultures and sensibilities distinctly not Chinese or Japanese and
distinctly not white American. Even the Asian languages as
they e x i " ~ t today in America have been adjusted and developed
to express a new sensitivity created by a new experience. In
America, Chinese and Japanese American culture and history
have been inextricably linked by confusion, the popularization
of their hatred for each other, and World War II.
Filipino-America differs from Chinese and Japanese
America greatly in its history, the continuity of culture
between the Philippines and America, and the influence of
Western European and American culture on the Philippines so
greatly that it is definable only in its own terms, and therefore
must be discussed separately.
Our anthology is exclusively Asian-American. That
means Chinese and Japanese Americans, American born and
raised, who got their China and Japan from the radio, off the
silver screen, from television, out of comic books, the pushers
of white American culture that pictured the yellow man as
something that ... when wounded, sad, or angry, or swearing,
or wondering ... whined, shouted or screamed, "aiiieeeee!"
Asian-America, so long ignored and forcibly excluded from
creative participation in American culture, is wounded, sad,
angry, swearing and wondering, and this is our AIIIEEEEE!!!
It's more than a whine, shout or scream. This is fifty years of
our whole voice.
Seven generations of suppresssion under legislative
racism and euphemised white racist love has left today's
Asian-America in a state of self-contempt, self-rejection and
disintegration. We have been encouraged to believe that we
have no cultural integrity as Chinese and Japanese Americans,
that we are either Asian (Chinese or Japanese) or American
(white), or are measurably both. This myth of being either/or
and the equally goofy concept of the dual personality haunted
our lobes while our rejection by both Asia and white America
proved we were neither one nor the other. Nor were we half
and half or more one than the other. Neither Asian culture nor
American culture was equipped to define us except in the
most superficial terms; however, American culture was
equipped to deny us the legitimacy of our uniqueness as
American minorities, did so, and in the process contributed to
the effect of stunting self-contempt on the development and
expression of our sensibility that in turn has contributed to a
mass rejection of Chinese and Japanese America by Chinese
and Japanese Americans. The Japanese-American Citizens
League (JACL) weekly, the Pacific Citizen, in February 1972
reported that over 50% of Japanese-American women getting
marrried, were marrying outside their race, and that the figure
was rising annually. Available statistics indicate a similar rising
trend among Chinese-American women, though the 50% mark
may not have been topped yet. These figures say something
about our sensibility, our concept of Chinese and Japanese
Americas, our self-esteem, as does our partly real and partly
mythic silence in American culture.
The age, variety, depth and quality of the writing
collected here proves the existence of Asian-American
sensibilities and cultures that might be related to but are
distinct from Asian and white America. American culture,
protecting the sanctity of its whiteness, still patronizes us as
foreigners, and refuses to recognize Asian-American literature
as "American" literature, not to speak of recognize
Asian-America as a presence, though we've been here seven
generations. For seven generations we've been aware of that
refusal, and internalized it, with disastrous effects.
34
Our Asian-American sensibility is so delicate at this
point that the fact of Chinese or Japanese birth is enough to
distinguish you from American-born, in spite of the fact that
you may have no actual memories of life in Asia, and your
sensibility was formed here. However, between the writer's
birth and birth of the sensibility, we have used the birth of the
sensibility as the measure of being an Asian-American. Victor
Nee was born in China and came to the United States when he
was five. Novelist Louis Chu came over when he was nine. For
both, Chinese culture and China are not so much matters of
experience as they are hearsay and study. Victor and his wife
Brett have written the first Chinese-American history of
Chinese-America. It was published in 1973'.And Louis Chu's
Eat a Bowl of Tea (Lyle Stuart, 1961) is the first
Chinese-American novel, set in Chinese-America. Though here
we get sticky, for the first novel published by an
American-born Chinese-American is the Frontiers of Love, by
Diana Chang, a Eurasian. She was born in American but moved
to China before her first birthday, to be raised in the
"European Compound" of Shanghai as an American in China,
and writes of that experience, while Chu writes of Chinatown,
New York. Between them, so many questions are raised as to
what is or isn't Chinese-American that to save and in another
sense encourage confusion (our criterion of Asian-American
literature and identity is not a matter of dogma or party line)
we've included them both. Chu's book honestly and accurately
dramatises the Chinese-American experience from a
Chinese-American point of view, and not from an exclusively
"Chinese or Chinese-according-to-white point of view." And
Diana Chang, in her protagonists of mixed blood, and their
singleblooded parents provides us with a logical dramatic
metaphor for the conflict of cultures. Her protagonist, Sylvia,
cannot choose between her parents or identify her blood as
one thing or the other, the question of choice is shown to be a
phoney one imposed on her by outside forces.
Sensibility and the ability to choose differentiate the
Asian-American writers in this collection from Americanized
Chinese writers Lin Yutang and c.y. Lee. They were intimate
with and secure in their Chinese cultural identity in an
experential sense, in a way we American-born can never be.
Again, unlike us, they are American by choice. They
consciously set out to become American, in the white sense of
the word and succeed in becoming "Chinese-American" in the
stereotypical sense of the good, loyal, obedient, passive, law
abiding, cultured sense of the word. It's no surprise that their
writing is from whiteness, not Chinese-America. Becoming
white supremacist was part of their consciously and
voluntarily becoming "American." Lin Yutang'sA Chinatown
Family (1948), and C.Y. Lee's Flower Drum Song affected our
sensibility but didn't express it. They come from a white
tradition of "Chinese" novelty literature, would-be Chinese
writing about America for the entertainment of Americans in
books like As a Chinaman Sees Us, Chinaman's Chance, and A
Chinaman Looks at America. These travel books were not so
much in the tradition of de Tocqueville as of Gulliver's
Travels. The attraction of these books was comic. The humor
derived from the Chinese mangling of the English language and
their comic explanations of American customs and
psychology. They appeared in the early 20th Century after
almost fifty years of travel books on China written by
Christian missionaries and "world travellers" who cited
missionaries as authorities on China. The reversal of the form,
books of American adventures by Chinese travellers, was a
comic inevitability. During this period, the exploitation of the
comic potential of Asian dialect became, forever, a part of
popular American culture, giving rise to Earl Derr Bigger's
series of Charlie Chan novels, and Wallace Irwin's Hashimoto
Togo stories, that were like much of the maybe-so-maybe-not
Chinese traveller writing, written in the form of letters home.
The Hashimoto Togo stories were featured in Good
Housekeeping magazine and described the adventures in a
Japanese house servant in an American household, who is both
unintelligible and indispensible. A sample of the wit and
wisdom of Hashimoto Togo, from Togo Assists in a Great
Diamond Robbery, (Good Housekeeping, March 1917):
With occasional ofteness she approached up to me and
report with frogged voice, "Togo where did you put my
diamond broach and Mother Hubbard chamois ring when
you stole it?"
The substance and imagery of these books and stories
was reinforced by the whining apologetic tone of books done
by Chinese government officials glvmg the official
explanations of Chinese culture and the non-threatening,
beneficial, humble motivations of Chinese presence and
immigration to America. Books like The Real Chinese in
America, by J .S. Tow, Secretary of the Chinese Consulate at
New York, with the Rank of Consul-Eleven (Academy Press,
New York, 1923). The subservient character of Chinese and
the inferiority of China were major themes in works by
Chinese converts to white supremacy and Christianity. Yung
Wing's My Life in China and America (1909) is the
outstanding example of early yellow white supremacy.
In the Thirties and Forties the travel book form evolved
into "Inside Chinatown" books authored by
Chinese-Americans, the prototype of what was to become
"The Chinatown book." The formula of word map, cook
book, "I'm an American because I eat spaghetti and Chinese 'cuz
I eat chow mein" model of Chinese-Americans was developed
in books like Inside Los Angeles Chinatown, Garding Lui
(1948) and several others "Inside" New York, San Francisco,
and two books titled Chinatown, U.S.A., one by Calvin Lee
and the other by a white, Elizabeth Coleman. The travel
format, going from one place to another, became in these
books going from one culture to another; thus the form that
evolved into the Chinatown book itself reinforced and clearly
articulated today's popular notion of being a
Chinese-American. The concept of the dual personality of
going from one culture to another.
This period from the late Twenties through the Thirties had
seen a rash of popular songs, Charlestons and foxtrots about
"China boys" being stranded in America without their women.
Songs with titles like "Little Chinky Butterfly," "Hong Kong
Dream Girl" and dozens of others appeared to be Tinpan
Alley's way of celebrating America's closing the last loopholes
in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 192 3 by finding ways to
exclude entry to Chinese women into the country. Also a
series of popular novels and movies involving passive Chinese
men worshipping white women, and being afraid to touch
them, appeared in Son of the Gods, East is West and the Fu
Manchu and Charlie Chan series.
Meantime Japanese-America cranked up an underground
press and literary movement in English, publishing their own
poetry magazines, literary quarterlies and newspapers that
35
featured, as they still do, creative writing supplements in their
holiday issues.
The "Inside Chinatown" books were done by
American-born Chinese for the most part, but Chinese from
China capped on the formula, and played it for bucks and
popularity. Secure in their Chinese identities and Chinese
cultural values-both of which were respectable in America, in
the Mandarin versions-these books were not as significant or
personally affecting to them as they were to the
American-born, for whom these books represented manifestos
of Chinese-American identity and assimilation. The Chinese
(not Chinese-Americans) writers Lin Yutang, and C. Y. Lee
refined the "spagetti-Chow mein" form. In Arthur T. S. Chu:,s
We Are Going to Make the Lousiest Chop Suey in Town
(Vantage, 1966) the form takes its most ridiculous shape. The
formula of map of Chinatown and recipes is summed up in the
title.
In World War II the inside books became more personal and
more manipulated. Patriotic Chinese-Americans wrote
anti-Japanese propaganda disguised as autobiography. Pardee
Lowe's Father and Glorious Descendant was the first. And
though Fifth Chinese Daughter was published in 1950, it fits
the propaganda as autobiography mold perfectly. There's
reason to believe work on it actually began during the war.
Chapters of it appeared in magazines in 1947. America's
anti-Jap prejudice, as indicated by the release of new
anti-J apanese war movies, continued strong until the
mid-Fifties, when the first signs of a change in white attitude
was an announcement disclaiming prejudice against loyal
Japanese-Americans, before the airing of World War II anti-Jap
movies on TV.
In the travel books and in music Japanese-America was
indiscriminately linked in confusion with Chinese-America. As
in Ruby and Kalmer's popular song of the Twenties, "So
Long Oolong (How Long You Gonna Be Gone)," that tells of
a girl, "Ming Toy" pining for her sweetheart, "Oolong"
stranded in America. In America's pop mind, Japan and China,
as well as Japanese-America and Chinese-America, were all one
in exotica. China and Japan and Japanese-America became
distinguished from each other by hatred. That hatred was not
explained in the terms of culture and politics, but in the terms
of the Hatfields and McCoys-we were all some kind of silly,
but civilized hillbillies feuding in the hills of jade.
Chinese-Americans became America's pets, were kept and
groomed in kennels, while Japanese-Americans were the mad
dogs who had to be locked up in pounds. The editors and
writers of the Japanese-American community papers were
thrown together ever closer with Japanese-American artists,
poets, and story tellers. The Japanese-American writing in
English that had been an activity was now welded into a
movement.
The tradition of Japanese-American verse as being
quaint and foreign in English established by Yone Noguchi and
Sadakichi Hartman, momentarily influenced American writing
with the quaintness of the Orient but said nothing about
Asian-America, because in fact, they weren't Asian-Americans
but Americanized Asians like Lin Yutang and c.y. Lee.
The first serious creative writing by an Asian-American
to hit the streets was Mine Okubo's Citizen 13660, an
autobiographical narrative in drawings and words, describing
the relocation and camp experience from an artist's point of
view. A remarkable book given the time of its appearance,
1946, when anti-Japanese sentiment was still high. Toshio
Mori's collection of stories, Yokohama, California, appeared in
1949. It had been scheduled for release in 1941, but World
War II anti-Jap prejudice worked against Japanese-America
appearing in print; however, it also spared them being shaped,
used and manipulated like Chinese-America.
After the war the best way to rehabilitate
Japanese-America, from the white point of view, was to link it
up and get it inextricably confused with Chinese-America
again, so from Fifth cbinese Daughter, came son of Fifth
Chinese Daughter, Monica Sane's Nisei Daughter, a book
remarkable for maintaining its Japanese-American integrity in
spite of its being, in the publisher's eyes, blatantly modeled on
Wong's snowjob.
None of the Chinese, Japanese and Filipino American
works in this volume are snowjobs pushing Asian-Americans as
the miracle synthetic white people, America's proprietors of
white liberal pop Tom Wolfe, ABC Television ("If Tomorrow
Comes," "Kung Fu," "Madame Sin") and racist henchmen
passing for scholars Gunther Barth and Stuart Miller make us
out to be.
The Asian-American writers here are elegant or repulsive,
angry, and bitter, militantly anti-white or not, not out of any
sense of perversity or revenge but honesty. America's
dishonesty, its racistwhite supremacy passed off as love and
acceptance has kept seven generations of Asian-American
voices off the air, off the streets, and praised us for being
Asiatically no-show. A lot is lost forever. But from the few
decades of writing we've recovered from seven generations, it's
clear we have a lot of elegant, angry, and bitter life to show.
We know how to show it. We are showing off. If the reader is
shocked, it is due to his own ignorance of Asian-America.
We're not new here. Aiiieeeee! !
San Francisco, 1972
Frank Chin
Jeffery Paul Chan
Lawson Fusao Inada
Shawn Hsu Wong
better ideas
. fro m Xe ro:r;
The microfilm edition of the BULLETIN is
now available. Back issues on microfilm
may be purchased for $4.00 for volumes
one through two [March 1969-Fa1l 1970].
Volume three, 1971, and future volumes
are $4 per volume/year. Note catalog n
6049 BULLETIN OF CONCERNED ASIAN SCHOLARS.
Order from: Customer Services-periodicals,
University Microfilms, 300 N.Zeeb Rd,
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 USA.
36
INTRODUC'TION
In the one hundred and forty year history of Asian
America, fewer than ten works of fiction and poetry have been
published by American born Chinese, Japanese and Filipino
writers. History suggests that in six generations of
Asian-Americans there was no impulse to literary or artistic
self-expression. The truth is that Asian-Americans have been
writing seriously since the Twenties, and writing well, but
haven't been published. America's stereotypes of "Orientals"
were sacrosanct and no one, especially a "Chink" or a "Jap,"
was going to tell them no; that America, not. Asia, was their
home, that English was their language, and that the white
stereotype of the "Oriental," good or bad, was offensive. What
America published was, with rare exception, not only
offensive to Chinese and Japanese-America, but was actively
inoffensive to white sensibilities.
World War II signaled the suppression of a
Japanese-American writing movement that had been active
since the late Twenties, and the sudden popularity of
Chinese-Americans wntmg to encourage America to
"assimilate her loyal minorities," as the dust cover to Pardee
Lowe's Father and Glorious Descendant, states. The implied
virtue of these first Chinese-Americans to reach mass print and
enjoy a degree of popularity was that they were not serious or
professional writers, and were therefore more sincere and
honest than professionals. They were more manipulatable. The
autobiographies of Pardee Lowe and later Jade Snow Wong
were treated less as works of art than anthropological
discovery. Indeed, the dust jacket to Lowe's book said that
Lowe "enlisted in the U.S. Army shortly after delivering the
manuscript of this book," as if this patriotic gesture affected
the literary worth of Lowe's book.
Much of Asian-American literary history is a history of a
small minority being cast into the role of the good guy to
make another American minority look bad. In World War II
the Chinese were used against the Japanese. Today, Chinese
and Japanese-Americans are uf('d to mouth white racist cliches
of the Fifties, as evidenced b} a recent Newsweek magazine
article (June 21, 1971) entitled, "The Japanese-American
Success Story: Outwhiting the Whites," and the favorable
reception of Daniel K. Okimoto's American in Disguise, and
Betty Lee Sung's Mountain of Gold: The Story of the Chinese
in America.
Betty Lee Sung's Mountain of Gold (1967) went
through two printings of 7500 and in 1971 was issued in a
paperback edition under the title The Story of the Chinese in
America. Hers is the only book by a Chinese-American still in
print, and further enjoys the distinction of being cited by
scholars (Forgotten Pages of American Literature, edited by
Gerald Haslam) as an authoritative source, supporting the
age-old stereotype of Chinese-Americans being culturally
Chinese and only monetarily white.
"There is nothing wrong with autobiography," writes
Kai-yu Hsu in his introduction to Asian-American Authors
(Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1972), "except when one realizes that
the perceptions of reality revealed through these works seem
to continue to confirm rather than to modify a stereotyped
image of the Chinese and their culture." Part One of Virginia
Lee's novel, The House that Tai Ming Built, consists mostly of
the retelling of the legend of "the house that Tai Ming built."
This narration is supposed to be from the Chinese point of
view, but we find that the point of view is surprisingly white:
Grandfather Kwong continued: "To know why Tai Ming
wore a queue we must go back in Chinese history, to the
time when the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan and his
successors ruled China for nearly a century in the Yuan
Dynasty from the year 1230 until 1368 A.D., when they
were driven out ofpower by the Chinese. "
Virginia Lee is the victim, so completely brainwashed that she
sees no discrepancy between an old man from China talking
about China in reference to the white Christian calendar. Yet
she would be the first to jump up with a protest if John Wayne
were to speak about Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves in the
Year of the Dog. In the early novels, confirming the education
of the white reading audience became an obsession to the
point where writers like Virginia Lee obviously had to do a lot
of research into things Chinese such as Chinese history,
Chinese-American history, Chinese art, and Chinese opera-all
from the white point of view. And the white point of view
being that Chinese were "culturally superior." That the
cultural superiority of the Chinese served white supremacy by
keeping Chinese in their place is clear in the work of Jade
Snow Wong and Virginia Lee. They both respond to racism
silently and privately, not with action but with an attitude of a
non-communicative cultural superiority that as a response is
ineffectual:
The first thing Lin noticed as she stepped into the house of
Mrs. Hayes was the wallpaper in the foyer. It was a lovely
medallion design in pale yellow. She wondered if Mrs.
Hayes knew that the ancient Chinese had invented
wallpaper and that it was not until the fourteenth century
that wallpaper was introduced into Europe. I
I
This was not a first hand knowledge of Chinese culture, but it
was being passed off as first hand knowledge. She para phrases !
!
Chinese history as written by white and Chinese scholars.
Kai-yu Hsu correctly states that, "These largely
I
autobiographical works tend to present the stereotype of
,
I
Chinese culture as described in the connoisseur's manual of
Chinese jade or oolong tea, and the stereotype of the Chinese
immigrant who is, or should be, either withdrawn and stays
I
totally Chinese, or quietly assimilated and has become
I.
unobtrusively American, exhibiting a model of the American
ideal of the melting pot process."
f
An American-born Asian writing from the world he was
i
born to, raised in, as Asian-American who does not reverberate
to gongs struck hundreds of years ago, or snuggle into the
doughy clutches of America hot to coddle something ching
I
chong, is looked upon as a freak, an imitator, a liar. The myth I
is that Asian-Americans have maintained cultural integrity as
!
Asians, that there is some strange continuity between the great i
high culture of a China that hasn't existed for five hundred
I
years and the American-born Asian. Gerald Haslam in
~
Forgotten Pages of American Literature perpetuates this idea:
I
... the average Chinese-A merican at least knows that China
I
has produced "great philosophies," and with that
knowledge has come a greater sense of ethnic pride.
Contrasted, for example, with the abject 'cultural
I
deprivation long foisted upon AfrO-Americans,
Asian-Americans have an inner resource: The knowledge
that their ancestors had created a great and complex
37
civilization when the inhabitants of the British Isles still
painted their fannies blue.
Thus, fourth, fifth and sixth generation Asian-Americans are
still looked upon as foreigners because of this dual heritage, or
the "concept of dual personality" which suggests that the
Asian-American can be broken down into his "American" part
and his "Asian" part. This explains Asian assimilation,
adaptibility and lack of presence in American culture. This
sustaining "inner resource" keeps the Asian-American a
stranger in the country he was born in, and he is supposed to
feel better off than the Blacks, whose American achievement is
the invention of modern American culture. American
language, fashions, music, literature, cuisine, graphics, body
language, morals, and politics are what they are today, largely
because of the Blacks. They have been cultural achievers, in
spite of white supremacist culture, whereas, Asian-America's
reputation is an achievement of that white culture-a work of
racist art.
The overthrow of the Manchus, the Sino-Japanese War,
World War II, the success of the Communist Revolution and
the Cultural Revolution are five major events resulting' in a
China the Chinese of a hundred years ago, the ancestors of
fourth, fifth and sixth generation Chinese-Americans, never saw
and wouldn't understand. These new Chinese are emigrating to
America. The assertion of distinctions between Chinese and
Chinese-Americans is neither a rejection of Chinese culture nor
an expression of contempt for things Chinese, as the whites
and the Chinatown establishment would make them out to be.
It's calling things by their right names. Change has taken place
in China, in American Chinatowns and the world generally,
changes that have been ignored and suppressed to preserve the
popular racist "truths" that make up the Oriental stereotype.
It is the racist truth that some non-white minorities,
notably the Asians, have suffered less and are better off than
the other colored minorities. It is generally accepted as fact
that Asians are well liked, and accepted in American society,
that they have assimilated and acculturated and contributed to
the mainstream of American culture. There is racist hate and
racist love. That is, if the system works, the stereotypes assigned
to the various races are accepted by the races themselves as
reality, as fact, and racist love reigns. The minority's reaction
to racist policy is acceptance and apparent satisfaction. Order
is kept, the world turns without a peep from any non-white.
One measure of the success of white racism is the silence of
the minority race and the amount of white energy necessary to
maintain or increase that silence. The Chinese-American is told
that it's not a matter of being ignored and excluded but of
being quiet and foreign. It's only recently that we have come
to appreciate the consequences of that awful quiet and set out
collecting Chinese-American oral history on tape. There is no
recorded Chinese-American history from the Chinese
American point of view. Silence has been a part of the price of
the Chinese-American's survival in a country that hated him.
That was what the matter was with the language. It was full of
hate. Silence was love.
The failure of white racism can be measured by the
amount and kind of noise of resistance generated by the race.
The truth is that all of the country's attention has been drawn
to white racism's failures. Everything that has been done by
whites in the politics, government and education in response
to the failure of white racism, while supposedly anti-racist, can
be seen as an effort to correct the flaws, redesign the
instruments and make racism work. White racism has failed to
convince the Blacks that they're animals and failed to convince
the Indians that they're living fossils. Nightriders, soldier boys
on horseback, fat sheriffs and all the clowns of racism did
destroy a lot of bodies, mess up some minds and leave among
these minorities a legacy of suffering that continues to this
day. But they did not destroy their impulse to cultural
integrity, stamp out their literary sensibility and produce races
of people that would work to enforce white supremacy
without having to be supervised or watchdogged.
In terms of the utter lack of cultural distinction in
America, the destruction of an organic sense of identity, the
complete psychological and cultural subjugation of the
Asian-American, the people of Chinese and Japanese ancestry
stand out as white racism's only success. The secret lies in the
construction of the modern stereotype and the development
of new policies of white racism.
The general function of any racial stereotype is to
establish and preserve order between different elements of
society, maintain the continuity and growth of western
civilization and enforce white supremacy with a minimum of
effort, attention, and expense. The ideal racial stereotype is a
low maintenance engine of white supremacy whose efficiency
increases with age, as it becomes "authenticated" and
"historically verified." The stereotype operates as a model of
behavior. It conditions the mass society's perceptions and
expectations. Society is conditioned to accept the given
minority only within the bounds of the stereotype. The
subject minority is conditioned to reciprocate by becoming
the stereotype, live it, talk it, and measure group and
individual worth in its terms and believe it. The stereotype
operates most efficiently and economically when the vehicle
of the stereotype, the medium of its perpetuation and the
subject race to be controlled are all one. When the operation
of the stereotype has reached this point, where the subject
race itself embodies and perpetuates the white supremacist
vision of indifference to the subject race sets in among
mass socIety. The successful operation of the stereotype
results in the neutralization of the subject race as a social,
creative, and cultural force. The race poses no threat to white
supremacy. It is now a guardian of white supremacy,
dependent on it and grateful to it. In Monica Sone's Nisei
Daughter the operation of the stereotype In the
Japanese-American is clearly evident:
Although I had opinions, I was so overcome with
self-consciousness I could not bring myself to speak. Some
people would have explained this as an acute case of
adolescence, but I knew it was also because I was Japanese.
Almost all the students of Japanese blood sat like rocks
during discussion period. Something compellingly Japanese
made us feel it was better to seem stupid in a quiet way
rather than to make a boner out loud. I began to think of
the Japanese as the Silent People, and I envied my fellow
students who clamored to be heard. What they said was not
always profound or even relevant, but they didn't seem
worried about it. Only after a long, agonizing struggle was I
able to deliver the simplest statement in class without
flaming like a red tomato.
For the subject to operate efficiently as an instrument of
white supremacy, he is conditioned to accept and live in a
38
state of euphemized self-contempt. This self-contempt itself is
nothing more than the subject's acceptance of white standards
of objectivity, beauty, behavior, and achievement as being
morally absolute, and his acknowledgement of the fact that,
because he is not white, he can never fully measure up to
white standards. In A merican in Disguise (Weatherhill,
Tokyo-New York, 1971), this self-contempt is implicit in
Daniel K. Okimoto's assessment of japanese-American literary
potential:
... it appears unlikely that literary figures of comparable
stature to those minorities like the jews and Blacks will
emerge to articulate the Nisei soul. japanese-Americans will
be forced to borrow the voices of james Michener, jerome
Charyn, and other sympathetic novelists to distill their own
experience. Even if a Nisei of Bernard Malamud's or james
Baldwin's talent did appear, he would no doubt have little
to say that john O'Hara has not already said.
The stereotype within the minority group itself, then, is
enforced by individual and collective self-contempt. This
gesture of self-contempt and self-destruction, in terms of the
stereotype is euphemized as being successful assimilation,
adaptation and acculturation.
If the source of this self-contempt is obviously generated
from outside the minority, interracial hostility will inevitably
result as history has shown us in the cases of the Blacks,
Indians and Chicanos. The best self-contempt to condition
into the minority has its sources seemingly within the minority
group itself. The vehicles of this illusion are education and the
publishing establishment. Only five American-born Chinese
have published what can be called serious attempts at
literature. We have already mentioned Pardee Lowe, jade
Snow Wong, Virginia Lee, and Betty Lee Sung. The fifth,
Diana Chang, is the only Chinese-American writer to publish
more than one book-length creative work to date. She has
published four novels and is a well known poetess. Of these
five, Pardee Lowe, jade Snow Wong, Virginia Lee and Betty
Lee Sung believe the popular stereotypes of
Chinese-Americans to be true and find Chinese-America
repulsive and don't identify with it. They are "exceptions that
prove the rule." In an interview taped by Frank Chin in 1970,
Virginia Lee said, " ... so in other words, you want the white
population to start thinking of Chinese other than being quiet,
unassuming, passive, etcetera, right? That's what you want,
huh?"
"I don't want to be measured against the stereotype
anymore," answered Frank Chin.
"But," she said, "you've got to admit that what you call
the stereotype does make up for the larger majority of
Chinese-Americans, now I've seen that in school (Virginia Lee
is a school teacher). I think it behooves all minorities, Blacks,
Chinese, whatnot, not to feel so insulted so fast. It's almost a
reflex action."
Frank asked her if she would continue to write about
Chinese-America. She said, "I wouldn't want to go on a
Chinese, you know, American conflict like that again. I don't
want to do another one."
"Why?" he asked. "Was it difficult?" .
"It wasn't difficult," she said, "but very candidly now,
this might not even ..." She took a deep breath. "I just
don't think it's that interesting."
And jade Snow Wong on Chinese-America as it exists
here: "The American-Chinese 1 grew up with, in high school,
out of forty or fifty ..,. none of them went to college. We're
not friends now." jade Snow Wong, Virginia Lee, Pardee Lowe
and Betty Lee Sung are all of the first generation to go
completely through the public school system. The preceeding
generations were barred, by law, from attending public
schools. Their parents went to segregated mission schools if
they went to school at all. Diana Chang lived from infancy to
her early twenties in China.
Of these five, four were obviously manipulated by white
publishers to write to and from the stereotype. Of these four,
three do not consider themselves to be serious writers and
welcomed the aid of editors, as jade Snow Wong describes in
this interview :
"Elizabeth Lawrence was the one who asked me to write
it. And the other one was Alice Cooper, who's dead now. She
was my English teacher at City College."
Frank Chin asked her, "What did their help consist of?"
"Oh, Elizabeth Lawrence, you know, she said, 'I want a
story,' or something. Then I wrote up maybe three times as
long as what finally came out in the book. 1 sent it to her and
she went through it and said, 'ten, twenty, thirty pages, this
may be necessary for the writer to write, but it's not necessary
for the reader to read.' So then she took parts out. And then 1
took what was left of the manuscript and went to Los Angeles
to see Alice Cooper who helped me bind it together again."
"You think this is right? Are you happy with the
book?"
"I finally got to read it the second time about two or
three years ago. It reads all right. Some of the things are
missing that I would have wanted in, then, you know, it's like
selling to Gumps or sending to a museum. Everybody has a
purpose in mind, in what they're carrying out. So, you know,
you kind of have to work with them. If this is what they want
to print, and it's the real thing. I mean they didn't fabricate
anything that wasn't so."
This was the talk of a good businesswoman, not a serious
or very sensitive writer. Chin asked, "But you feel things were
left out?"
She matter-of-factly expressed an acceptance of her
inferiority as if it were a virtue. "Oh, maybe they were too
personal, you see. I was what? Twenty-six then. And, you
know, it takes maturity to be objective about one's self."
The construction of the stereotype began long before
jade Snow Wong, Pardee Lowe, Virginia Lee and Betty Lee
Sung were born within it and educated to fulfilI it. It began
with a basic difference between it and the stereotypes of other
races. The white stereotype of the acceptable and
unacceptable Asian is utterly without manhood. Good or bad,
the stereotypical Asian is nothing as a man. At worst, the
Asian-American is contemptible because he is womanly, !
effeminate, devoid of all the traditionally masculine qualities
i
of originality, daring, physical courage, and creativity. The
I
mere fact that four out of five
Chinese-American writers are women reinforces this aspect of
the stereotype. The fact that four of these writers, the four t
autobiographers, completely submerge and all but eradicate all
traces of their characters in their books. Sung, by writing
t
almost exclusively about "cases I heard of," and what
i
happened to "an acquaintance of mine," and Wong by writing I>
about herself in the third person, further reinforces the
I
J
stereotypical unmanly nature of Chinese-Americans. Virginia
39
Lee's novel, The House that Tai Ming Built, depicts a
Chinese-American girl, for instance, who's just too much for
the wishy-washy boys of Chinatown and falls in love with an
"American," meaning "white," man.
The Chinatowns of Jade Snow Wong and Virginia Lee
and Pardee Lowe differ starkly from the drab, even boring
Chinatown described in Louis Chu's novel, Eat a Bowl of
Tea. In Eat a Bowl of Tea you have the first Chinese-American
novel set against an unexoticized Chinatown, the kind of
Chinatown that has been duplicated wherever large numbers of
Chinese emigrants settle, basically a bachelor society, replete
with prostitutes and gambling, existing as a foreign enclave
where the white world stands at an officially described
distance, where Chinatown and its inhabitants are tributaries
to a faceless <).nd apathetic authority. Published in 1961, one
can imagine the reception of such a work by a public so fully
grounded in the machinations of family associations, picture
brides and a reminiscence for a China that no longer exists.
From Lin Yutang's euphemized portrait of Chinatown to c.y.
Lee's imported apothecary of ginseng and tuberculosis, the
white reading audience has been steeped in the saccharine
patronage of Chinatown culture.
Chu's portrayal of Chinatown is an irritating one for
white audiences. The characters in this book are not reassured
by the pervasive influence of the kind of Chinatown that we
see in the autobiographies and pseudo novellas of Wong, Lee
and Lin. The kind of Chinatown that the characters are secure
in is a Chinatown devoid of whites. It is a Chinatown that we
are familiar with-filled with vulgarity and white whores, who
make up for the scarcity of Chinese women. In the same way
that Chu's Chinatown holds the white reader at a distance, his
characters speak a language that is offendingly neither English
nor the idealized conception that whites have of a
"Chinaman's tongue"-the pseudo-poetry of a Master Wang in
Flower Drum Song or a Charlie Chan. Witness:
"Go sell your ass, you stinky dead snake, " Chong Loo tore
into the baTber furiously. "Don't say anything like that! If
you want to make laughs, talk about something else, you
troublemaker. You manymouthed bird. "
The manner and ritual of address and repartee is authentic
Chinatown. Chu translates idioms from the Sze Yup dialect
and the effect of such expressions on his Chinese-American
readers is delight and recognition. Chu's unerring eye and ear
avoids the cliche, the superficial veneer and curio-shop
expressions. He knows Chinatown people, their foibles and
anxieties, and at once can capture their insularity as well as
their humanity:
In a homogeneous community like Chinatown, people
spent most of their free time in the shops, sipping tea or
coffee, just talking with their friends. Each had his own
favorite spot. The coffee shop. The corner candy store. The
barber shop. The steps in front of the Chinese School. With
rent collector Chong Loo, it was the Wah Que Barber shop
and Money Come.
"Hey, do you know that Wah Gay's daughter-in-law
has a big belly?" Chong Loo announced the next time he
showed up at the Wah Que Barber Shop. He eased himself
into the first chair.
"You dead man, don't be making up stories now,"
admonished Ah Mow, his hands temporarily stilled. After a
moment, as if by habit, his right hand began manipulating
the scissors again, though they were not touching Chong
Loo's hair. "Wow, your mother," he continued, "don't go
around pulling offyour big gun or I'll clip offyour ear. "
"Wow your mother," retorted Chong Loo. "Go ahead
and try if you want to die. Cut it off and see how many
pennies per four liang you would make . .. The scissors kept
clipping at the air, close to Chong Loo's ear. "You
sonovabitch, what do you know what's going on? All day
long you stay here and work on your scissors . .. chop . ..
chop . .. chop. If what I say is not the truth do you think I
would tell it. Last week I saw her with my own eyes. She
was coming out of the grocer's on East Broadway . .. " He
paused to peer at himself on the .wall mirror. "She looked
to me like she has a big belly. "
"Wow your mother, maybe she's getting fat," Ah
Sing laughed. "But I thought you said the husband is no
can do. "
"You can go sell your ass. When someone talks about
a hammer, you talk about a chisel. "
The self-contempt deals in part with the assertion of our
manhood. The survival of Chinatown was always threatened
because there were few women. To readers familiar with this
s.ensibility, Chu's description is enough to suggest this
depressing atmosphere in Chinatown, the loneliness and
frustration of men separated from their women. The main
concern of course is the perpetuation of the family name. In
Chu's novel, Ben Loy must be a man and to practice his
manhood, be a husband and father. Chu's Chinatown is a
world where the practice of Chinese manhood is constantly
frustrated and never satisfying. Among the old, this frustration
is exhibited in self-deprecation, indulging in sexual innuendo,
underscoring the hopelessness of their situation. For both the
fathers and their sons, there are only white prostitutes, which
is humiliating and unsatisfactory. Ben Loy's impotency is
more than sexual impotency. In a society that views
humiliation as an instrument of social control, competition is
based on self-contempt. One competes to become better based
on the asumption that one is no good to begin with. Ben Loy
has won Mei Oi, but in his mind does not deserve her. This
picture of a predominately male Chinatown is unique in
Chinese-American literature. Historically, Chinatowns were
predominately male. Chinese families like those described in
Jade Snow Wong, Virginia Lee and Pardee Lowe's books were
rare. In these better known works, the frustrated bachelors of
Chinatown, comprising the majority of the Chinatown
population, are symbolically rejected or totally ignored.
Japanese-American writing has only recently accepted
the concept of the dual personality. In Chinese-America, due
to the reign of the concept of the dual personality that
dictates that culture in this country is white, to write meant
becoming white and thus rejecting, and being rejected by, the
community. Daniel Okimoto's American in Disguise, of all the
Japanese-American book length works, unquestioningly
accepts the concept of the dual personality and makes it
central to the work. Significantly, though Lawson Inada also
published a book in 1971, one that ignores the concept,
Okimoto's book has been favorably reviewed by the nation's
press, while Inada's book of poetry, the first book of poetry
published by an American-born Japanese-American, has been
ignored, and the reviews of his work when submitted to
40
metropolitan newspapers have been rejected. The works of
Japanese-American writers Toshio Mori (1949), John Okada
(1957), Mine Okubo (1946), and Lawson Inada (1971) all see
through the phoniness of the concept of the dual personality
and reject it. Even Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter
(Atlantic-Little Brown, 1953) rejects this concept in spite of
the publisher's blatant attempt to emulate Jade Snow Wong's
Fifth Chinese Daughter (Harpers, 1950) and capitalize on that
book's success.
"Although a 'first person singular' book, this story is
written in the third person from Chinese habit." Thus Jade
Snow Wong, in her Author's Note, immediately gives herself to
the concept of the dual personality. George Sessions Perry, on
the book's dust jacket, both accepts the concept of the dual
personality and accidently hints at its debilitating effect on the
individual, if not its phoniness:
Here is the curious dissonance of a largely Americanized
young lady seeing her purely Chinese family life from both
her and their points of view.
The suggestion is that the "dissonance" arises from her being a
"largely" but not completely Americanized "young Chinese
girl." The "dissonance" that thrills, bewilders and charms
Perry is built into the concept of the dual personality that
controls his perception of Asian-America and does not arise
naturally from the Asian-American experience is dramatized
clearly in Monica Sone writing of her attending public school
in the daytime and Japanese school (Nihon Gakko) in the
afternoon:
Gradually I yielded to my double dose of schooling. Nihon
Gakko was so different from grammar school I found
myself switching my personality back and forth daily like a
chameleon. At Bailey Gatzert School I was a jumping,
screaming, roustabout Yankee, but at the stroke of three
when the school bell rang and the doors burst open
everywhere, spewing out pupils like jelly beans from a
broken bag, I suddenly became a modest, faltering, earnest
little Japanese girl with a small, timid voice.
The concept of the dual personality was forced on her from
without. Social pressure and education make her both
Japanese and American. From her own experience, she is
neither:
Mr. Ohashi and Mrs. Matsui thought they could work on me
and gradually mold me into an ideal Japanese ojoh-san, a
refined young maiden who is quiet, pure in thought, polite,
serene, selfcontrolled. They made little headway, for I
was too much the child of Skidrow.
She declares herself a "child of Skidrow," and a "blending of
East and West." For the Nisei authoress, this was a fatal
mistake, in terms of sales and popularity. The concept of the
dual personality and conflict between the two incompatible
parts are centrai"to Wong's work, as it is with the work of all
Chinese-Americans, except Diana Chang. Fifth Chinese
Daughter has gone through several paperback editions in the
United States and England. It has been published in several
languages and is critically and financially the most successful
book ever produced by a Chinese American.
Unlike Chinese-America, Japanese-America produced
serious writers who came together to form literary-intellectual
communities. Through the Thirties and Forties
Japanese-American writers produced their own literary
magazines. Even in the internment period, Japanese-American
literary journals sprung up in the relocation centers and,
during this, one of the most trying and confusing periods of
Japanese-American history, their writing flourished. In the
pages of TREK and ALL ABOARD, and the magazines and
newspapers of camps around the country, Japanese-American
English was developed and the symbols of the
Japanese-American experience codified by writers like Toshio
Mori, Globularius Schraubi, poet Toyo Suyemoto, artist Mine
Okub 0 and Asian-America's most accomplished short story
writer, as of this writing, Hisaye Yamamoto. In spite of the
more highly developed literary sensibility and literary skills of
Japanese-American publications, much of it commissioned by
Japanese-American community organizations, more books by
Chinese-Americans have been published than by
Japanese-Americans.
No-No Boy (Charles Tuttle, 1957) is the first and,
unfortunately, the last novel by John Okada. At the time of
his death in 1971 he was planning a new novel on the Issei and
the immigration from Japan to America. As it stands, this
novel is the first J apanese-American novel in the history of
American letters and the second book to be produced by a
Seattle Nisei in the Fifties (the other was Monica Sone's Nisei
Daughter published in 1953). Some scholars of
Asian-American literature have said that No-No Boy cannot be
considered to have any literary value, but is worth reading as a
fairly accurate representation of the emotional and
psychological climate of Japanese-Americans at a certain
period in history. As a social history, these critics say, not as
literature, Okada is worth reading. The distinction between
social history and literature is a tricky one, especially when
dealing with the literature of an emerging minority sensibility.
The subject matter of minority literature is social history, not
necessarily by design but by definition. And if the sensibility is
a new one that has not been communicated and tried with any
frequency before, the terms of that sensibility, the terms of
the experience, or the people and the tradition that begat and
bred this work are unknown except as manifest in this work.
There is no reference, no standard of measure, no criterion. So
by its own terms, Okada's novel invented Japanese-American
fiction full blown, was self-begat, arrogantly inventing its own
criteria. There were several criteria, none of them white
criteria with their implicit white supremacist stands, their
patronizing, cultural imperialist "universal" that would reduce
all non-white writing to a checklist of emotions, situations and
pithy sayings rendered in quaint and bad English that have
analogs in one liners babbled by Christian thinkers and other
eunuch supremacists.
The minority writer works in a literary environment of
which the white writer has no knowledge or understanding.
The white writer can get away with writing for himself,
knowing full well he lives in a world run by people like
himself. At some point the minority writer is asked for whom
he is writing and in answering that question must decide who
he is. In Okada's case, being Japanese or American would seem
the only options, but he rejects both works on defining Nisei
in terms of an experience that is neither Japanese nor
American_ Okada's hero, embodying his vision of the
Japanese-American, cannot be defined by the concept of the
dual personality that would make a whole out of two
41
incompatible parts. The hero of the double and hyphenated
"No" is both a restatement of and a rejection of the terms
"Japanese-American"-"No" to Japanese and "No" to
American.
The question of point of view is only partially stylistic in
the case of minority writing. It has immediate and dramatic
social and moral implications. As social history, the mere
gesture of Japanese-American writing is significant. Then the
question of control follows, that is, what forces are operating
and influencing the writer and how aware of them is he?
Specifically, how does he cope with, and reflect, prevalent
white and non-white attitudes of the period? How is he
affected by the concept of the dual personality? Christianity?
How does he define the relationship between his own race, the
other minorities, and the white race? And when dealing with
Asian-American writing, a question must be asked of
Asian-American writing because so little of is exists; how
seriously committed to writing and his point of view is this
writer? And if, as is too often the case, the writer is no writer
at all, by his own admission, the question of white publisher
and editor manipulation is raised, usually after the answer has
become obvious.
So the serious Asian-American writer, like any other
minority writer, who works with the and
universals of minority experience and applies them to his
work, is treated as a quack, a witch doctor bughouse prophet,
an entertaining fellow, dancing the heebie jeebies in the street
for dimes. Okada wrote his novel in a period all but devoid of
a Japanese-Amprican literary tradition above ground. There
were only three predecessors, a book of short stories, Toshio
Mori's Yokohama, California (1949), an autobiography, Nisei
Daughter (1953), and the short stories of Hisay e Yamamoto.
Okada's novel was an act of immaculate conception, it seemed,
producing from nowhere a novel that was by any known
criterion of literature so bad that Japanese-American literary
critics ignored the book or dumped heavily on it, loaded up
again and dumped on it again. An instant forgotten work,
No-No Boy, as evidenced by the fact that fifteen years after its
publication, the first edition of 1500 copies has not sold out.
The critics have forgotten that the vitality of literature
itself stems from its ability to codify and legitimize common
experience in the terms of that experience, to celebrate
critically life as it's lived. In reading Okada or any other
Asian-American writer, the literary establishment, the
word-pros putting around with tried and true whiteness, have
never considered the fact that a new folk in a strange land
would experience the land, come into new sensibility and
develop new language out of old words, and that they would
grunt up new words in old syntax twisted new to
communicate the specifics and nuances and wonders and the
stuff of life as it was ordered and made real in the new
sensibility. Strangely, the critics accept this as given in science
fiction stories of new planets in the future, and even the
notion that the cultural clash produced by futl.lre overdoses of
mass media will make new folks and new languages is
accepted; as evidenced by the critical success of Anthony
Burgess' A Clockwork Orange in the Sixties, funny talking
Flash Gordon of the funny name in the TV Fifties, Buck
Rogers and The Wizard of Oz in the Thirties, and, a few years
before that, the science fiction of languages, nations and life
styles changing for no other reason than that Jesus Christ
didn't get along with people in high places.
The critics were wrong in calling Toshio Mori's language
"bad English," as William Saroyan did in his introduction to
Mori's book, Yokohama, California:
Of the thousands of unpublished writers in America there
are probably no more than three who cannot write better
English that Toshio Mori. His stories are full ofgrammatical
errors. His use of English, especially when he is most eager
to say something very good, is very bad. Any school
teacher of English would flunk him in grammar and
punctuation.
The critics were also wrong in ignoring or being too
embarrassed by Okada's use of language and punctuation to
deal with his book at all. The assumption that an ethnic
minority writer thinks in, believes he writes in, or has
ambitions toward wntmg, beautiful, correct and
well-punctuated English sentences is an expression of white
su premacy. The universality of the belief that correct English
is the only language of American truth has made language an
instrument of cultural imperialism. The minority experience
does not yield itself to accurate or complete expression in the
whiteman's language and way of speech, yet the minority
writer, specifically the Asian-American writer, is made to feel
morally obligated to write in a language produced by an alien
and hostile sensibility. His task, in terms of language alone,
then is to legitimize his, and by implication, his people's
sensibility as white, codify his experience in the form of prior
symbols, cliches, linguistic mannerisms, and a sense of humor
that appeals to whites because it celebrates Asian-American
self-contempt. Or his task is the opposite, namely; to
legitimize the language, style, syntax of his people's
experience, codify the experiences and sensibility common to
his people into symbols, cliches, linguistic mannerisms and a
sense of humor that emerges from ;m organic familiarity with
the experience.
The tyranny of language continues even in the
instruments designed to inject the minority sensibility into the
mainstream. Virtually every anthology of Third World writing
containing Asian-American sections confuses Chinese from
China with Chinese-Americans, conveniently ignoring the
obvious cultural differences, and feature Chinese writers from
China, c.Y. Lee and Lin Yutang who, being born and raised in
China, are secure in their Chinese culture, and unlike
Chinese-Americans, are Chinese who have merely adapted to
American ways, and write about Chinese-America as
foreigners. Their work inevitably authenticates the concept of
the dual personality. However, their being Chinese precludes
their ability to communicate the Chinese-American sensibility.
The other Chinese-American writers collected in this new
splash of anthologies most often include Jade Snow Wong and
Pardee Lowe, who also reinforce the stereotype. They were
educated by the stereotype to the role. Lowe's book, Father
and Glorious Descendant, came out in 1943. The dust jacket
revealed the racist function of the book, saying that Father
and Glorious Descendant "is a timely document at a moment
when America must learn how to assimilate its loyal
minorities. "
The deprivation of language in a verbal society like this,
for the Chinese and Japanese-American, has contributed to:
(1) the lack of a recognized Asian-American cultural integrity
(at most, native-born Asian-Americans are "Americanized
Chinese or Japanese") and (2) the lack of a recognized style of
42
Asian-American manhood. These two conditions have
produced "the house nigger mentality," under which Chinese
and Japanese-Americans accepting responsibility for, rather
than authority over, the state language, accept dependency. A
state of dependency encouraged by the teaching of English
and the publishing establishment.
John Okada writes from an oral tradition in a verbal
language he hears all the time, and talks his writing onto the
page. Here is Japanese-American tradition in print. To judge
Okada's writing by the white criterion of silent reading of the
printed word is wrong. Listen as you read Okada or any other
Asian-American writer. Okada changes voices and characters
inside his sentences, running off free form but shaping all the
time, and these voice changes grate against the white tradition
of tonal uniformity and character consistancy, but more
accurately duplicate the way people talk and carryon: "a
bunch of Negroes were horsing around raucously in front of a
pool parlor." There is a quick change act here between
"horsing around" and "raucously" and "pool parlor" that is
right. The style itself is an expression of the multivoiced
schizophrenia of the Japanese-American compressed into an
organic whole. It's crazy but not madness.
John Okada's work is new only because whites aren't
literate in the Japanese-American experience, not because
Okada has been up late nights inventing Japanese-American
culture in his dark laboratory. And though he presents an ugly
vision of American in which Japanese-Americans wander
stupified with self-contempt, then over-compensates with
despairing wails of super-pattiotism, his book cannot honestly
be dismissed as an operatic cry of self-pity or a blast of
polemic. Yet the book has been ignored if not by whites then
by Japanese-Americans fearful of being identified with
Okada's work. Charles Tuttle, the publisher of No-No Boy,
writes in a letter" "At the time we published it, the very
people whom we thought would be enthusiastic about it,
mainly the Japanese-American community in the United
States, were not only disinterested but actually rejected the
book."
Depression, despair, death suicide, listless anger and a
general tone of low key hysteria closed inside the grey of a
constantly overcast and drizzling Seattle pervade the book.
Definitely not the stuff of a musical. There is at the same time
something genuinely uplifting and inspiring about this
book-at least for Asian-American readers. The book makes a
narrative style of the Japanese-American talk, gives the talk
the status of a language, makes it work and styles it, deftly and
crudely, and uses it to bring the unglamorous but more
commonly lived aspects of Japanese-American experience into
the celebration of life. The style and structure of the book
alone suggest the Japanese-American way of life of a specific
period in history. All in ali, there is nothing arcane or
mysterious about why this book satisfies, and through all its
melodramatic gloom, cheers the blood to running warm. This
is new literature, one for which the experience and the people
have already been tried and want nothing but the writing and
the reading. This isn't an attempt to appeal to old values,
translate life into a dead language, or an attempt to drive
whites into paroxysms of limpid guilt, or an effort to destroy
the English language.
Ichiro, the No-No Boy of the title, is a Nisei who refused
to be inducted into the armed forces during the war and chose
prison instead. The novel opens with Ichiro's arrival in Seattle,
home from two years in prison. He has come home to a
mother who's so convinced that Japan has won the war that
she refused to send money or goods from the family store to
relatives writing from Japan, begging for help. Ichiro's father is
an alcoholic, his younger brother, Taro, drops out of high
school to join the army to make up for the shame of Ichiro's
being a "no-no boy." Other "no-no boys" fade out into easy
booze and easy women and out of Ichiro's life. His best friend
turns out to be Kenji, a war hero with a medal and without a
leg. His heroism has cost Kenji his leg, and by the end of the
book his life. Kenji, the admirable war hero, dying of a
progressive creeping crud that repeated amputations of his leg
have failed to check, seems to have the divinity of the
suffering. He gives Ichiro an understanding woman, an
abandoned wife whose husband, rather than coming home,
re-enlists and stays in Europe. Kenji makes Ichiro himself a
symbol of goodness and strength.
Ichiro has come home to a world in which
everything he touches and loves dies, is killed or goes mad. All
offers of life, the love of a woman, a job by an understanding
Mr. Carrick, are refused because he is unworthy, because he
must somehow prove himself worthy by himself. He has been
spat on, rejected by his brother, lost his good and his bad
friends and his parents. Ichiro seems to be a pathological loser.
What he does is wrong, and what he doesn't do is wrong. He is
full of self-contempt, self-pity and yet is governed by an innate
sense of dignity, if not a coherent sense of humor. He is not
Stephen Dedalus out to "forge the unformed conscience of his
race in the smithy of his soul," but he is searching for
something more than his identity. It is the nature of the
language itself, this embryonic Japanese-American English
language that can only define the. Japanese-American that is
neither Japanese nor American, in anything but negative terms
that makes every attempt at positive expression an exercise in
futility and despair. "Think more deeply and your doubts will
disappear," Ichiro's mother says. "You are my son," she says,
triggering a spinning running internal monologue and one of
the most powerfully moving passages in the book:
No, he said to himself as he watched her part the curtains
and start into the store. There was time when I was your
son. There was a time that I no longer remember when you
used to smile a mother's smile and tell me stories about
gallant and fierce warriors who protected their lords with
blades of shining steel and about the old woman who found
a peach in the stream and took it home, and, when her
husband split it in half, a husky little boy tumbled out to
fill their hearts with boundless joy. I was that lad in the
peach and you were the old woman and we were Japanese
with Japanese feelings and Japanese pride and Japanese
thoughts because it was all right then to be Japanese and
feel and think all the things that Japanese do even if we
lived in America. Then there came a time when I was only
half Japanese because one is not born in America and
raised in America and taught in America and one does not
speak and swear and drink and smoke and play and fight
and see and hear in America among Americans in American
streets and houses without becoming American and loving
it. But I did not love enough for you were still half my
mother and I was thereby still half Japanese and when the
war came and they told me to fight for America, I was not
strong enough to fight you and I was not strong enough to
43
fight the bitterness which made the half of me which was
bigger than the half of me which was America and really
the whole of me that I could not see or fe.el. Now that I
know the truth when it is late and the half of me and the
half that remains is enough to know why it was that I could
not fight for America and did not strip me of my birthright.
But it is not enough to be only half an American and know
that it is an empty half I am not your son and I am not
japanese and J am not American. I can go someplace and
tell people that I've got an inverted stomach and that Jam
an American, true and blue and Hail Columbia, but the
army wouldn't have me because of the stomach. That's easy
and J would do it, only I've got to convince myself first and
that I cannot do. J wish with all my heart that I were
japanese or that J were A merican. I am neither and I blame
you and I blame myself and I blame the world which is
made up of many countries whicb figbt with each other and
kill and bate and destroy again and again and again.1t is so
easy and simple that I cannot understand it at all. And the
reason I do not understand it is because I do not
understand you who were tbe half of me that is no more
and because I do not understand what it was about tbe half
of me whicb was American and tbe half which might bave
become the wbole of me if I had said yes I will go and figbt
in your army because that is what I believe and want and
cherish and love.
This passage is central to the book in suggesting the wholeness
that Ichiro contains and is searching for. His whole life is
contained in the paragraph, beginning with childhood, and
Japan in the form of his family moving from the first "no"
through the Samurai defending their lords to Ichiro refusing to
defend America and ending on a hypothetical positive chord
ringing with "yes" and "cherish and love."
A sign of Ichiro's strength, and his sense of despair, and
the truth of his being neither Japanese nor American is the
fluid movement into the sick joke about the inverted stomach
that simultaneously recalls the stereotype of Japanese being
slant-eyed, sideways, doing things backwards, and draft dodger
humor. His being not Japanese is subtly underscored by his
avoidance of Japanese terms: "gallant and fierce warriors"
instead of "samurai."
Okada's No-No Boy is an exploration of the universe of
racial self-contempt. At one point through Ichiro, Okada
suggests that self-contempt based on your physical and
cultural difference from other more favored races, produces a
contempt for all who are like you:
... I got to thinking that the japs were wising up, tbat they
had learned that living in big bunches and talking jap and
feeling jap and doing jap was just inviting trouble. But my
dad came back ... 1 hear there's almost as many in Seattle
now as tbere were before the war. It's a shame, a dirty
rotten shame. Pretty soon it'll be just like it was before the
war. A buncb of japs witb a fence around them, not tbe
kind you can see, but it'll hurt them just as much. They
bitched and bollered when the government put them in
camps and put real fences around them, but now they're
doing the same damn thing to themselves. They screamed
because the government said they were japs and when they
finally got out, they couldn't wait to rush together and
prove tbat tbey were.
The literature of Japanese-America flourished through
the Thirties, into the War years and the camp experience.
These were years of tremendous literary and journalistic
output, these War years, during which the question of
Japanese-American identity, the conflicts between Issei and
Nisei, yellow and white relations, black, white and yellow
reltations and the War were all examined and re-examined, in
camp newspapers, literary magazines, diaries and journals. The
result of the camp experience was a literate Japanese-America
whose sensibility encompassed broad areas of American
experience. Highly skilled writers came from camps, like Bill
Hosokawa and Larry Tajiri who became editors of the Denver
Post, and fiction writers and poets like Iwao Kawakami,
Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Paul Itaya, Jack Matsuye, Toshio Mori,
Toyo Suyomoto and Hisaye Yamamoto. The journalists made
it, but the writers of fiction and poetry, all native to their
brand of English, with rare exceptions, remain confined to the
pages of the Japanese-American Citizen League paper, the
Pacific Citizen, by an America that has some mysterious
investment in the absence of Asian-American culture. To
preserve the illusion of our absence, many Asian-American
writers have been asked to write under white pseudonyms.
C.Y. Lee was told a white pseudonym would enhance his
chances for publication. To his credit, he kept his name.
The first and perhaps the only novel published about the
camp experience was predictably written by a white,
non-Japanese woman, Karen Kehoe, City in the Sun, (1947).
The appearance of this book led the Pacific Citizen to wonder
why a Japanese-American had not written a work of fiction or
non-fiction about the camp experience. They then went on to
speculate that perhaps the experience had been too traumatic.
The truth is that the camp experience stimulated rather than
depressed artistic output. The Japanese-Americans did write of
the camp experience, but weren't published outside.
Blacks, Chicanos, and Jews all write what could be called
bad English. Their particular badmouth is recognized as being
their own legitimate mother tongue. Only Asian-Americans are
driven out of their tongues and expected to be at home in a
language they never use and a culture they encounter only in
books written in English. This piracy of our native tongues by
white culture amounts to the eradication of a recognizable
Asian-American culture here. It's ridiculous that a
non-Japanese woman should be the one and only novelist of
the Japanese-American camp experience. And it's a lie.
As in the work of John Okada, there is nothing quaint
about Lawson Inada's poetry, no phoney continuity between
sign-inspiring Oriental art and his tough, sometimes vicious
language. No one, not even William Saroyan trying hard, can
made Inada out to be quaint or treat his work as a high school
English paper. "Inada's poem is lean, hard, muscular, and yet
for all that it has gentility, humor and love," Saroyan says on
the jacket of Inada's first book, Before the War. A monster
poet from the multi-racial ghetto of West Fresno where he ran
with Blacks, grew up speaking their language, playing their
music. But his voice is his own, Japanese-American, Sansei
voice afraid of nothing. It's as distinct from the Blacks now as
country western is from Soul.
In an anthology of Fresno poets, Down at tbe Santa Fe
Depot (Giligia Press), Inada wrote of hatreds and fears no
44
Asian-American ever wrote of before. Inada is tough enough to
write about self-contempt. He took the names whitefolks
called Chinese and Japanese and used them to violate the holy
word of the English language. The result is not death but
magic and a new American truth:
CHINKS
Ching Chong Chinaman
sitting on a fence
trying to make a dollar
chop-chop all day.
"Eju-kei-shung! Eju-kei-shung!"
that's what they say.
When the War came
they said, "We Chinese!"
When we went away,
they made sukiyaki,
saying, "Yellow all same."
When the war closed,
they stoned the Jap's homes.
Grandma would say:
"Marry a Mexican,
a Nigger, just don't
marry no Chinese. "
The Chinese were contemptible for being actively "not
Japanese." In No-No Boy, Kenji tells Ichiro, essentially, to be
not Japanese. "Go someplace where there isn't another Jap
within a thousand miles. Marry a white girl or a Negro or an
Italian or even a Chinese. Anything but a Japanese. After a few
genetations of that, you've got the thing beat."
Inada echoes No-No Boy. The language, sentiments, and
imagery are virtually the same in both books. The similarity is
and is not accidental. Inada is bound to Okada by a common
sensibility and not by any real knowledge of his predecessor's
work. Inada did not learn of the existence of Okada's work
until ten years after he had written "West Side Songs." Both
articulated the belief common among Japanese-Americans that
one remedy for being a contemptible, self-hating
Japanese-American is to leave their society, and associate
oneself with whiteness of some kind and rise in the world.
As in "Chinks," "Japs" ends with the formal name of
the race, and it, not Chinks or Japs, is the dirty word.
JAPS
are great imitators
they stole
the Greek's
skewers,
used them
on themselves.
Their sutras
are Face
and Hide.
They hate
everyone else
on the sly.
They play
Dr. Charley's
games-bowling,
raking,
growing forks
on lapels.
Their tongues
are yellow
with "r 's"
with "['s."
They hate
themselves
on the sly. I
used to be
Japanese.
Inada confronts his own experience, everything in his life is in
his deceptively simple and humerous poems that have the feel
of having been written in the guts of a juke box. He tears
himself apart exposing all the symbols of Asian
assimilation-education, the preservation of Oriental
culture-as acts of desperation, terrific efforts to buy a little
place in the country. It is the fear of America that causes this,
not assimilation.
The original title of Inada's book of poetry was The
G ~ e . a t Bassist. The bassist appears in two poems, heading and
tallmg the book. These bassist poems deal with an area of
Asian-American experience never before explored. It might
come as a shock to America that the popular stereotype of the
Asian-American as gentle, law-abiding, non-aggressive, meek,
artfully inconspicuous servant is insulting. It pictures the
Asian-American as being a race of people without manhood,
and in America, for a boy, growing up without command of
your manly style marks you as nothing, at worst, and the
victim, at best.
Language is the medium of culture and the people's
sensibility, including the style of manhood. Language coheres
the people into a community by organizing and codifying the
symbols of the people's common experience. Stunt the tongue
and you've lopped off the culture and sensibility. On the
simplest level, a man in any culture speaks for himself.
Without a language of his own, he no longer is a man. The
concept of the dual personality deprives the Chinese-American
and Japanese-American of the means to develop his own
terms. The tyranny of language has been used by white culture
to suppress Chinese-American and Japanese-American culture
and exclude the Asian-American sensibility from operation in
the mainstream of American consciousness. The first
Asian-American writers worked alone within a sense of
rejection and isolation to the extent that it encouraged
Asian-America to reject its own literature. John Okada died in
obscurity, and Toshio Mori lives in obscurity. In the past,
being an Asian-American writer meant that you did not
associate with other Asian-American writers. Emulating the
whites, we ignored ourselves. Now we seek each other out.
Recently in San Francisco twenty Asian-American
writers, representing three generations of writers, gathered
together for the first time as Asian-American writers.
Attending were Kai-yu Hsu, editor of the first Asian-American
anthology of writing, Toshio Mori, the first Asian-American to
publish a book-length creative work, Lawson Inada, the first
45
Asian-American to publish a book of poetry, Frank Chin,
author of the first Asian-American play produced in the
history of the American legitimate theater, Victor and Brett
Nee, authors of the first Chinese-American history from the
Chinese-American point of view, and young Asian-American
writers many of whom are included in this book and who
represent the first generation of Asian-Americans to be aware
of writing within an Asian-American tradition. We know each
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47
nState of the C i t y ~ " froIn Trek (1942)
Shawn H. Wong and
Connie Young Yu
A friend of ours was born in Topaz. Like many others at
the time, her parents had married hastily, just before the
forced evacuation, so they would not be separated in different
relocation camps. During her three-year stay in camp her
mother had carefully saved every issue of the camp journal,
ironically titled Trek. When the war was over she could not
take the journals with her because the "evacuees" could only
take what they could carry, and that was what they had
brought with them. So the Trek journals were left behind in
the dust of Topaz. She did not need the journals to remind
her. But we do.
We are fortunate to have read the Trek journals, given to
us by Toshio Mori, one of the editors of the journal. The poet,
Lawson Inada, wrote, " 'Gain' is one of the works in the first
issue of Trek, December, 1942, a magazine produced by and
for residents of Topaz. Topaz, of course, is a 'relocation
center' in Central Utah, in the desert, in the bed of a massive
Pleistocene lake." "Gain" begins to hint at the soul of Topaz
and of the Japanese-American people and we hear the elo
quent and sensitive voice:
I sought to seed the barren earth
And make wild beauty take
Firm root, but how could I have known
The waiting long would shake
Me inwardly, until I dared
Not say what would be gain
From such untimely planting/or
What flower worth the pain?
Lawson Inada continues, "Cheaply printed on cheap wartime
paper, what is on that paper is as invaluable as the beautifully
functional relics of our first Americans found in that vicinity.
Here, we have a living chapter of American literature, art,
history, sociology ... "
"Falderol" is the title of the closing note of the
Christmas 1942 issue of Trek, yet the closing note for the City
of Topaz was not nonsense at all. Instead a carefully con
trolled and modulated anger. If you listen carefully there is a
laugh somewhere in "Falderol," an inward laugh, and a bitter
laugh:
By now the radio listener in Topaz ought to be pretty
familiar with the Voice of Birth Certificate, Inc. Several
times each day, this transcribed Demonsthenes mounts the
turntable and broadcasts over the stations of the Inter
Mountain Network.
His point appears to be that no one can be a real
American without a birth certificate: "Of course, you say
you're a 100% American . .. but can you prove it?" By an
amazing coincidence, Birth Certificate, Inc. is in a position
to furnish that proof for, of course, the usual slight service
fee. Put one buck on the line, and BCI will swing into
action, getting documentation of u.s. birth for the cus
tomers. This, the voice assures us, is an open sesame to jobs
in the "shipyards, airplane factories, and other vital war
industries. "
It was a great relief to hear him. Our faith in the
efficacy of birth certificates-which hasn't been burning
with anything like a bright, gem-like flame since evacuation
-is again renewed. For one-sixteenth of our monthly
earnings we can get the real thing-definite assurance that
we are, so the Voice says, "real Americans, born in the
United States." It's obvious that the certificate we've been
lugging around so trustingly until now came from the
wrong company.
The imminent appearance of the Topaz high school
newspaper reminds us of that bright era when we were
putting out a studen t journal. Those were the "days of wine
and roses" when the world was ready to turn half-flips at
our bidding.
Though our harangues were usually directed at lax
ness in elections (Vote Today, Students!), apple-polishing
(Wine-sap Simonizing: Its Dangers) and rowdyism (Stu
dents! Don't Disgrace Our Banner )-we occasionally ele
vated our editorial guns and shot at the stars with, for
example, a dissertation on the brevity of man's existence
(this was after reading Thomas Wolfe) or an outline for
world peace. When ideas were hard to come by, we could
always resuscitate an old mummy labeled "School Spirit. "
Looking back on it now, we realize that what we
wrote then was corn, but it was rich, beautiful com, written
with such driving si1Tcerity that it almost reached the
digni ty of tripe.
On these cold, crisp winter nights, when we're almost
ready to concede that life in the desert has its points, the
smell of the sewerage swamp drifts into the City and
snuggles up to us.
Probably it was some magnanimous engineer's con
cept of a good deed to locate the outfall area a mile west of
the residential district because, as some of our friends have
suggested, he wanted to convey a sense of nostalgia to
former residents of the East Bay.
49
Undoubtedly the idea is a beautiful one-a touching
gesture: but we, who have always scrupulously avoided
passing on the leeward of sugar refineries, cannot fully
appreciate it.
Maybe a good foghorn supplementing the odor and
blo'J.Ving every few minutes from the southwest corner of
Topaz would create the proper nostalgic mood. Did any
body remember to bring a good foghorn?
In the Trek article "Topaz Station" by Toshio Mori (and
as in all his stories from his book, Yokohama, California,
Caxton Printers, 1949), the juxtaposition of traditional Amer
ican images and the Japanese images grate against the sensi
bility at first, but the total image is an organic whole, the
language of experience. The image is a natural image, there is
no argument, not even the harsher edge of bitterness. It fits.
Topaz, America--not another Lil' Tokio. Topaz is
here to stay, there will be no changes on the map. Before
the Japanese came there was Topaz, and there always will
be a place called Topaz. Topaz, the distributor of progress.
This is the home front ofa new day. Aged Japanese people,
living twenty to fifty years in America, cannot erase their
years in America. They have hope in the American way of
life, they know no ease but by their participation in the
struggle on the American frontiers. They seek pleasures of
life, they enjoy music, songs, drama, liberty, glamor, and
ham and eggs. More than ever, the young Americans of
Japanese ancestry see the world of movies, ice cream,
milkshakes, Broadway, Buicks, Saturday Evening Post, elec
tric refrigerators, and hot dogs. This is their life, not the life
under the shadow of a dictator.
This is the place where the plowings are done every
season so that new life crops up regularly. New crops of
improvement overrunning the mistakes of judgement and
the variable weather, this is where the mistakes of life are
the lessons of profit, and not the food for the firing squad.
Topaz is the city of many brothers, sisters, and
parents whose sons are in the U.S. Army. The city where
the people follow the progress of their soldier-sons . .. The
city where the small table radios and portables receive
William Winter, Charlie McCarthy, NBC Symphony, Benny
Goodman, and Bob Hope. The community of laughter,
sorrow, loneliness, and spirit. And Topaz is where little eyes
and hands reach out for the education of better living.
These tiny heads seek an outlet to the broad spaces oflife
on the American soil.
In "Digressions" by Taro Katayama, even the stuff of Ameri
can life became an affront to the residents of Topaz and an
ironic reaffirmation of a particular satiric faith.
A lengthy treatise might be written on the tyranny of
modern conveniences. We don't in tend to write one here,
but we thought we. might contribute a suggestion or two to
point the way for anyone so minded. The immediate cause
of our putting down these few observations is the recent
sudden and complete defection of our radio. Where but
lately it had faithfully poured its daily spate ofindiscrimin
ating sound, it now sits mute and soulless, an inanimate
thing of no earthly utility. Frank, the radio man, tells us
that all it needs is a couple of new tubes to be restored to
usefulness. But with a war going on, his pronouncement is
simply a sen tence of death. Science gives and priorities take
away.
The lesson is plain to us. Man, who glories in the
belief that he is progressively freeing himself by his
ingenuity from the limitations of his original untrammeled
state, is only delivering himself to a more inexorable
bondage-the bondage of utter dependence on his own
inventions. In the languor of his trust in the machine, he
allows all his primitive capacity for satisfying his needs
barehanded to atrophy into feeble ineffectualness. But let
that machine break down, that flow of mechanical largesse
cease, and he is left to the scant mercies of faculties gone
flabby, of addictions suddenly denied access to ac'Customed
opiates.
We had become so unreservedly conditioned to the
easy beguilements of our radio, that its present silence is a
positive affliction, like palsy or the shingles.
Or take the case of the flush toilet. Let its energizing
element stop flowing, its arteries run dry, and man is in a
moment stripped of all that sense of security which his
purblind faith in its workings has built up in him. For all its
gleaming porcelain perfection, it is infinitely less utilitarian
than the most primitive backwoods outhouse.
We won't bother to adduce other examples of the
vulnerability to which man becomes heir in the very act of
trying to fashion invulnerability for himself Its catalogue is
the whole list of his more ingenious inventions. In any case,
we think we've made our point sufficiently clear.
And for ourself, we aren't going to be quite so
unreservedly enamored of technological perfection as we
used to be. At least not while our radio continues to
confront us with soundless, ivory plastic imbecility.
The concluding remarks of Taro Katayama's article
"State of the City" leave something unanswered.
A Topaz emptied of its human component would soon be
reclaimed by the barrenness from which it is just beginning
to emerge. Left to continue its operations, the Project will
be able to exploit to the full all its known and yet
undiscovered poten tialities. Meanwhile, within its
mile-square nucleus of life, the city nourishes the germ of
its future.
Perhaps the implication at the end, the ironic statement of
Topaz everlasting, is the soul of the article. The future, then, is
not worth the pain and trouble caused by nurturing the seed
or "germ" of that future. When you read "State of the City"
keep in mind that the same man wrote "State of the City" as
"Nightmare":
Sleeping, he saw familiar sunlit skies
Darken with sudden argosies that made
A screaming hell of all the plain below;
And on the red horizon's rim he saw
The foe approaching, wave on ominous wave,
Like giant ants converging on some prey
That lies too weak to fend the creeping doom.
But while his friends stayed on, grim-faced, to fight
The futile fight, to slay and, slaying, die,
Himself he saw in solitary flight,
Gaining a trembling refuge in the hills
50
And there in lonely safety crouched, earth-hid,
He watched his comrades march, as men have marched
In every age. to do the ghastly work
Not willed by them or those they fiercely fought.
From havening hill he watched while slaughter grew
Below him on the plain, and thought himself
The wiser man for having fled a field
So bare ofhope-and on this thought awoke
To know a sick self-loathing in his soul.
In the article. "State of the City." all the mechanics of
oppression are documen ted. The victim of Topaz was fully
conscious of what was happening to him, like a numbed
patient watching himself being operated on in a mirror.
Trek writers, American prisoners of war in America, had
the time and the sensibility to analyze and describe the hard
reality in which they were trapped. The writers spoke for their
whole community, which despite the humiliation and
degradation, was a community with an indomitable spirit. And
it is this spirit and this language of experience that gives
meaning to what Toshio Mori wrote in Trek: "Topaz,
America-not another Lil' Tokio. Topaz is here to stay, there
will be no changes on the map. Before the Japanese came there
was a Topaz, and there will always be a place called Topaz."
STATE OF THE CITY
[From Trek. December 1942, pp. 2-11, Topaz, Utah.]
Christmas week, 1942, finds the city of Topaz nearing
the middle of its fourth month of existence as a functioning
social entity. The estate to which in that period of time the
Central Utah Relocation Project has attained is the focus of
the present article's inquiry. However, no exhaustively detailed
treatment of the subject is intended here. What is attempted is
a more generalized picture of the community's current status
as it is reflected in certain key aspects of Topaz life at the time
of writing.
It is a truism of history that the state of a community at
any given time has meaning only in relation, among other
factors, to the point of that community's beginnings. In our
consideration of the Topaz of today, therefore, it will
contribute to a more balanced perspective to look back briefly
to the Topaz which was hardly more than a yet unnamed
point on the map only a few months ago.
One of ten similar forced-growth communities into
which an America at war has funneled something over 100,000
human beings, Topaz as recently as June of this year was
merely one of the sites selected by the War Relocation
Authority to accomodate the evacuated Japanese and
Japanese-descended population of the West Coast. As such, it
bore certain generic similarities to the other relocation areas,
belonging, as did the others, to the "wilderness" type of
territory toward which the WRA was driven by circumstances
in its selection of sites.
The Topaz to be was then merely a 17 ,500-acre tract of
alkali land bordering Utah's Sevier Desert, only partially and
not too profitably cultivated by the local landowners from
whom it was purchased, and, for the rest, given over to the
unluxurious encroachments of greasewood and other
semi-desert vegetation.
Upon this desert-edged tract of land, Topaz as a tangible
physical thing began to materialize on July 6 of this year. On
that day, the first ground was broken with the start of drilling
on a well to provide water for the workmen. The first building
to go up was the headquarters of the U.S. Engineers, under
whose supervision the mushroom city was to spring up.
From this beginning, over 800 men, representing every
category of building skills, labored on a schedule which by the
first week of September had resulted in sufficient completed
construction to permit the project administration staff to
ready its operational functions. On September 8, the military
police arrived and were housed in the corner of the emerging
city area allocated to them. And three days later, the arrival of
the advance contingent of volunteer evacuee workers from
Tanforan Assembly Center signalized the birth of Topaz as a
living community.
Asked what the infant city was like, those first residents
might have, with some justice, summed it up with one
word-dust. For dust was the principal, the most ubiquitous,
ingredient of community existence at the beginning. It
pervaded and accompanied every activity from sleeping and
eating and breathing on through all the multitude of other
pursuits necessary to maintain and prepare the city for those
yet to come. It lay on every exposed surface inside the
buildings and out and it rose in clouds underfoot and overhead
on every bit of exposed ground wherever construction work
had loosened the hold of greasewood roots on the talcum-fine
alkali earth. It obscured almost every other consideration of
communal life just as, when a wind rose, it almost obscured
the physical fact of the city itself.
But if in the beginning, dust was almost synonymous
with the state of the city, other states have succeeded since,
51
I
j
I
I
marked by gradual abatement of that nuisance and the
rightful emergence of other aspects of community existence
on which evaluations of the totality of Topaz life might be
based. For the state of the city is not a static thing. It varies
from week to week, almost from day to day, with the changes
in physical Circumstances, with the reactions of human beings
to those changes, with the interactions of all the co-existing
phenomena of communal life.
If the Topaz of today is a far cry from the Topaz of the
early days of September, the difference is not identifiable as
the result of any single isolated germ of change, is not to be
defined by any simple hypothesis of flux. The Topaz of today
is the sum of all the changes, big and little, physical and
non-physical, which have taken place in all the multitudinous
and ramified aspects of the city's life since it rose out of the
dust and the greasewood.
To the casual eye, the larger project area-that portion
of the total 17,500-acre tract beyond the square mile of
habitation-is admittedly still pretty much as it was at the
beginning. But even here, certain evidences of change, actual
and potential, are visible. To date, over 2000 acres of this
outlying land has been subjected to some form of agricultural
preparation or development, 150 acres having already been
planted to barley and sweet clover, another 100 acres made
ready for seeding and the rest either cleared or put under the
plow. Also adding their evidences of change to the scene are
the fences, shelters, and other structures necessary to Topaz's
two active livestock projects, which now involve some 165
head of cattle, 111 hogs, and several sows and their litters.
It is in the city proper, however, that the most marked
signs of the physical development of Topaz are apparent.
Construction work, so far as structures for resident habitation
and use are concerned, is now virtually 100 percent
completed, leaving only the hospital boiler house and laundry
to be finished and the city's four permanent 80-foot water
towers to be constructed. When work on the latter is
completed at the end of January, 1943, the U.S. Engineers will
end their labors here, leaving behind a city of over 600
structures meeting all the essential requirements of its
residents.
Several other construction projects, not under the U.S.
Engineers but the WRA proper, will be started or, if already
under way, will be completed upon final clearance of priorities
on building materials. Projects in this category include high
school and elementary school buildings, administration
dwellings, community church, slaughter house, meat packing
plant, bakery, engineers' and agriculture buildings, garage and
repair shops, chicken brooders, permanent hog pens, and
others.
Near completion of total construction is paralleled by
the present condition of individual building units themselves.
Sheetrocking of interiors is complete in all apartments and
recreation halls and virtually so in the dining halls. Likewise,
skirting of building foundations is nearly finished. Thus, with
the exception of the laundry rooms, all Project structures are
prepared against the approach of midwinter, installation of
stoves having been completed some time ago.
The open ground between buildings is still no
landscapist's dream but presents a considerably improved
appearance in comparison with earlier days. Dust is no longer a
problem, owing partly to the surfacing of all roads and streets
and partly to the natural packing effects of winter weather,
although the opposite problem of mud rears itself following
any precipitation. Grading of the city's bumpy terrain has
been in progress for some time and should be completed soon.
The most noticeable external additions to the city scene,
however, are the trees of various kinds brought from outside
areas and transplanted here. Some 4800 willow saplings now
adorn the fronts of apartments and the surrounding spaces in
all of Topaz's 35 occupied blocks, while a number of larger
trees, including Siberian elms and Utah junipers, have been
placed at strategic points near the administration and hospital
buildings and at the site of the proposed civic center.
Shrubbery in the form of approximately 1000 tamarisks now
also grace the city. Not in sufficient number yet and, owing to
the season, not in a state of verdure, these trees have
nevertheless improved the barren appearance of the original
community and give promise of a spring with some touch of
green.
Such is the general external backdrop against which the
daily routine of Topaz life is now being carried on. Also part of
the physical picture of the city are the various facilities by
which the day-to-day needs of the residents are satisfied. These
include, among other things, the hospital, dining halls, and
community enterprises.
Topaz's hospital, necessarily the most elaborate of the
Project facilities, is, as we have already noted, almost
completed. Finish of work on its boiler house and laundry unit
will permit attainment of full operating efficiency. Currently,
certian wings and equipment are not being utilized pending the
setting up of the central heating system. However, within the
limitations imposed by incomplete construction and by the
inevitable shortages of materials and equipment on priority,
the range of medical services dispensed there satisfactorily
fulfill practically all the essential requirements of the
community from obstetrics to autopsy. Dental,
pharmaceutical, and optical services are all available in
addition to those coming under medicine proper.
The most imposing feature of the hospital in the way of
equipment is the complete X-ray and fluoroscopic machinery
installed there, which is both large and of the most modern
type. The most immediate problem is the inadequate number
of doctors, there being currently only four on the resident
staff to meet the requirements of nearly 8000 people. In direct
contrast, the number of dentists, pharmacists, and
optometrists available is in excess of the normal quota for the
population. If steps now being taken to augment the medical
staff are successful, the Project will be prepared against
whatever health emergencies may arise in the future.
The process of feeding the city has attained a reasonably
stable norm, all dining halls being in operation and under
resident staffs adequate to perform the necessary work. The
inevitable minor differences in the standards and types of
cooking in the various kitchens constitute no outstanding
problem, and there is no widespread manifestation of
dissatisfaction within the Project.
However, Topaz, like the rest of the nation, has
increasingly felt the effects of the proliferating rationing
program and of the war-created shortages of certain staple
food products not yet rationed. Meat, coffee, and sugar, under
OPA control for some' time, are all somewhat less plentiful or
less frequent in their appearance on the table than in earlier
days. Of more recent date, supplies of dairy products, though
not subject to official rationing, have also diminished in their
52
flow into the city because of increased demands for them on
the outside. Milk is now more definitely restricted to
consumption by children, invalids, and the aged, while
oleomargarine in recent days has been substituted for butter.
In general, Topaz is confronted by the same situation which all
America is facing and is meeting it, like the other communities of
the nation, with good grace.
With respect to the facilities catering to the more
secondary needs of the community, Topaz is supplied at
present, though not with complete adequacy, through the
resident consumer enterprises. These include the project
canteen and the recently opened dry goods store as the chief
functioning units and a number of smaller service projects,
namely two barber shops, two motion picture houses, and a
radio repair shop. Contemplated as additions to these in the
near future are several other necessary services, including shoe
repairing and laundry and dry cleaning.
Rounding out the picture of the physical aspects of the
city are the facilities associated with such divisions of the
Project as public works, transportation and supply,
maintenance and operations, fire protection, property control,
and warehouse. Limitations of space prevent discussion of
these here. It is sufficient for our purposes to note that their
adequacy or inadequacy in relation to the city's needs is
generally conditioned by the limited availability of the
materials or the manpower necessary to their functioning. A
persistent difficulty in the transportation division, for
instance, has been the lack of sufficient repair parts and
equipment to offset the inevitable wear and tear on cars and
trucks used by the Project. Similarly, one of the main
obstacles to optimum conditions in the operations of the
maintenance division has been an insufficiency of resident
manpower for certain types of work such as garbage disposal
and sanitation. But, taken all in all, these and other difficulties
have not engendered any outstandingly grave or continuing
emergency, since they have in most instances been sufficiently
resolved through various expedients to meet the immediate
requirements of the city. Physically, then, Topaz is in fair
shape at the present time, existing conditions presenting no
problems that the natural human capacity for adjustment
cannot offset.
Turning from things to people-to what they are doing
and how they are doing it-we can conveniently divide our
discussion into several parts under the following heads:
employment, education, self-government, actiVItIes, and
prevailing social' atmosphere. These categories, while not
embracing every phase of resident activity, will nevertheless
give a general picture of city life sufficient for our purposes.
Topaz's employment situation resolves itself into two
phases-employment on the Project proper and outside
employment. As of the third week of this month, some 3679
persons were working within the Project. This means that
about 40 per cent of the total population (7880 on December
22) and about 77 per cent of the able-bodied residents of
working age (approximately 4800) are currently employed in
the various operations necessary to maintain the city. The
types of work being done by the residents cover the whole
range of employment classifications from manual labor to the
higher professional and technical occupations. About 70 per
cent of all those employed are males. Of the 3679 workers, the
largest number, 1124, are in the dining halls, and the smallest
number,S, in the Project Attorney's office. By wage
classification, some 510 fall within the $19 per month or
professional and technical group, while the rest are in the $16
category, only one person being listed at $12. The maximum
volume of resident employment expected within the Project
during the next quarter of year is around 4000.
As to .the outside employment situation, latest available
figures reveal that something over 400 persons originally
inducted into the Project are currently engaged in permanent
or semi-permanent work in localities ranging from nearby
Delta to points in the Eastern and Central states. Of these
outside workers, nearly 300 are those who left the Project for
group agricultural employment, mainly in the sugar beet fields
of this and other mountain states. (At the peak of outside
agricultural work, nearly 500 Topaz residents were out of the
Project, but a large number have since returned.) The rest of
those currently employed outside the city are in domestic
service or industrial work.
On the over-all employment picture, certain general
observations may be made. Residents working on the Project
are, generally speaking, performing duties for which by
previous training or by inclination they are most qualified.
Incidence of skills in relation to total population does present
some problems, as in the already mentioned instance of
hospital personnel, although these are inevitable in a
community like this, created by the evacuation and
congregation of an arbitrarily determined group of people.
Neither does employment on the Project constitute a
permanent solution of the ultimate destiny of those working,
but as a means of perpetuating existing skill or of developing
new ones and as a factor in maintaining morale, it does have a
value which cannot be overlooked.
As to the present status of outside employment, neither
the number nor the types of jobs thus far involved can be
considered as indicating a solution to the problem of
relocation. The agricultural work into which the majority of
the residents on leave from the Project have gone is practically
all of the seasonal variety and suitable only to those who
expect to make this sort of labor their occupation for an
indefinite period. Likewise, outside work taken by residents
can be looked upon only as a stop-gap in the majority of cases.
Thus outside employment as a logical step in the permanent
relocation of people here still falls short of satisfying the
primary desideratum, jobs commensurate with the skills and
the training possessed by many of the city's residents.
Topaz's school system forms one of the most important
features of the city, involving as it does the continuance and
completion of necessary education for close to 2000 children
and the furtherance of the cultural needs of several thousand
adults. Delayed in its inception by' lack of adequate housing
facilities and supplies, the system currently is functioning on a
full schedule in all its several branches, which include
pre-school nurseries, elementary and secondary schools, and
adult education. However, shortage of instructional supplies
and equipment, particularly in some of the high school grades,
is still a problem, and construction of permament school
buildings, as noted earlier in the article, still awaits clearance
of priority ratings on material. (All schools are at present
housed in the regular barrack type buildings of unoccupied
blocks and sections of blocks.) Likewise a problem is the
difficulty being encountered in securing the full desirable
quota of Caucasian teaching personnel. But despite these
obstacles, it is expected that the educational program will be
53
consummated according to plan.
Lowest in Topaz's educational hierarchy are the nursery
centers for pre-school age children. At present there are three
of these centers in operation with a total enrollment of 182,
which represents 43.2 per cent of the number of children of
nursery school age in the Project. The centers are staffed
entirely by resident personnel, there being at the present time
26 assistants working under two certified supervisors and
following standard pre-school training practices.
The elementary school, embracing grades from
kindergarten through high sixth, has a total enrollment of 675
with an average daily attendance of 644. Personnel attached to
the school include seven Caucasian and 28 resident teachers
and two Caucasian librarians. An additional nine or ten
Caucasian teachers are currently desirable to attain the full
scholastic standard in the school staff.
The high school, comprising the grades from the seventh
to the twelfth inclusive, has a total enrollment of 1037
(including 20 post-graduate students), with an average daily
attendance of 1005. The Caucasian staff includes four
counselors and directors-on vocation, health, guidance and
placement, and cadet teaching-20 teachers, and one librarian.
Resident personnel is made up of 25 teachers. The curriculum
of the school includes classes in agriculture, art, business
training, commerce, core (a telescopic course combining
English and social studies), drama, general science, home
economics, industrial and vocational arts, journalism, Latin,
mathematics, music, modern languages (German, French,
Spanish), physics, physical education, shorthand, speech, and
special English. In the high school, as in the elementary school,
there is a current insufficiency of Caucasian teachers, though
the lack here is not as marked, since an additional four or five
will bring the staff up to the desired complement.
Less formalized than the school proper and meeting less
immediately pressing scholastic requirements, the adult
education program is nevertheless, in its variety and rapidly
expanding scope, one of the most interesting features of the
academic scene. The total present enrollment of 3250 in its
165 different classes far exceeds the combined registration in
the rest of the education system. While a number of courses
are given by Caucasian instructors drawn from the high school
staff and the Project administration, the adult education
personnel is preponderantly resident, there being at the
present time some 54 teachers and lecturers from among the
evacuees. Main divisions of the program include at this time
the art and music schools, flower arrangement, sewing and
knirting, basic English, mathematics, evening classes, and
lectures for non-English speaking residents.
Of particular interest as indicating the desire of adults,
both nisei and issei, for widening their range of knowledge and
abilities are the courses now being offered in the evening
classes and the lectures in Japanese. Evening instruction is
available in the following subjects: democracy in action,
psychology, German, auto-mechanics, co-operatives,
carpentry, cabinet making, radio repairing, shorthand, business
English, phonetics, current events, public administration,
practical electricity, and first aid. Recent lectures were based
on such topics as common American laws, American history,
American foreign policy and world affairs, and history of the
mountain states.
While the main energies of the city's people are thus
54
engaged by employment and education, a fair share of their
attention is also directed toward matters of community
government and toward leisure time pursuits and activities. In
the sphere of civic politics, the event of most immediate
moment is the approaching general election of a regular
community council to be held on the 29th of this month in
the Project's nine electoral districts. Candidates for the 33
council posts were nominated at district meetings on
December 22. The legislative body named to office by the vote
is to supersede the present temporary council, which has been
functioning in a fact-finding and recommending capacity till
now. Thus, this election, taken together with the recent
ratification of a constitution by Topaz residents, will signalize
the final establishment of self-government machinery in the
city after almost four months of civic operations on a
temporary basis. As to the state of general interest in the
impending balloting, it is apparent that the familiar pattern of
preponderantly older generation participation will be repeated
on this occasion, as on all previous ones involving matters of
community representation.
Leisure-time activities in the city, both organized and
informal, are now established on a fairly wide base despite the
general inadequacy of facilities and materials. Most of the
recreation halls are not being utilized for their original ends,
since many of them are in use for other purposes such as
nursery schools, store buildings, and department offices, while
the lack of equipment has kept the usefulness of others down
to a minumum. A few outdoor basketball and volley ball
standards have been set up and are now in use, although the
major current athletic activity is in the form of touch football
in open areas of the Project. A large space for an ice skating
rink, staked off in the recreation area, still awaits completion.
The two movie houses, billing different pictures weekly,
are perhaps the most popular focus of recreational attention,
although they have no seating facilities and their projecting
apparatus is of the 16 mm. variety. The recently opened
library, which draws an average weekly patronage of 2500, has
added a regular Wednesday evening record concert to its
bookish attractions. As for organized entertainment
events-dances, variety shows, and other affairs enliven the
social scene at regular intervals, but lack of a large community
center keeps them confined to relatively small groups. Among
the organized groups through which these recreational
activities are channeled are the Boy Scouts, the YWCA, and
the various units of the Project community activities section.
At the present time, the attention of all these and other groups
and of the community in general is centered on an elaborate
Christmas holiday program and pageant.
We have now covered in a general way the most
important components, physical and functional, of the
community as they appear at the present time. So far, we have
been treating of matters whose name and identity are either
inherent in themselves or readily extracted from the figures
and other information relating to them. But in dealing with
the sum and synthesis of all these things, with the social
atmosphere engendered by them, we are on less certain
ground. For here we are involved with a less tangible aspect of
the community's being, the morale of its people, the attitudes
and feelings associated with their daily pursuits and routines.
To characterize the prevailing general mood of Topaz's
population, we might begin by using such terms as quietness"
and "settledness." For this has always been, and still is, a
"quiet" project, without any of the outbursts of violence
which has sporadically cropped up in some of the other
relocation areas. There have been no open clashes of politically
or ideologically opposed groups, though that such division into
factions exists here, as in all evacuee communities, is not to be
doubted. There are on the blotter of the internal security
department only a few incidents involving misdemeanor or
felony, and these only in connection with individuals, not
groups. Likewise, the community welfare section of the
administration has been more occupied in dealing with
problems of housing and physical needs, leaves and student
relocation, than with cases of social maladjustment. The
religious element here has always been strong in its tempering
influence on all activities, and church attendance among all
faiths has been large and consistent.
As for the "settled ness," this is perhaps to be equated
with a general attitude of acquiescence to the dictates of the
present rather than with any popular misconception of the
permanence of Project life. As such, this is also possibly just
another manifestation of the seemingly inherent temperateness
of the people's reactive mechanism. Relocation possibilities are
borne about on the Topaz air but there is no great excitement,
no disruption of city operations. Project employment figures
still maintain an even keel, as replacements quickly fill in any
gaps left by departures to the outside. It is as if the city,
confronted by the cold winter months ahead, had assumed a
deliberate stability, determmed to leave until spring any
necessary stir about the outer world and the future.
This mood seems to emanate particularly from the older
generation, since relocation to them is less shining a hope, less
a source of excitement than to their offspring. There seems to
be less inclination on the part of the people to shift about even
within the Project itself. Applications on file for housing
adjustments have fallen to a mere 65 from the several hundred
which were outstanding at one time not so long ago. And, if
teachers' testimony is to be accepted, even the younger
element appears to be settling down to a more serious
application to studies.
It would be interesting but fruitless to speculate on the
question of to what causes the social climate of Topaz is
specifically due--whether to the particular segment of
California's Japanese population represented here, whether to
the general conditions obtaining at this Project, or whether
merely to the tempering effect of Utah's winter cold. At any
rate, Topaz this week, its calm temporarily disrupted by a
dramatic and successful search for a resident lost in the
mountains, awaits Christmas with an air of quiet, expectant
festivity.
I
Such, then, is the portrait of Topaz today. The Project is
out of its swaddling clothes. Toward what physical and social
I
maturity it is headed, it would be difficult to prophesy with
any degree of certainty. Much will depend on the success or
unsuccess of the relocation program currently contemplated
by the WRA. A Topaz emptied of its human component
l
would soon be reclaimed by the barrenness from which it is
just beginning to emerge. Left to continue its operations, the
Project will be able to exploit to the full all its known and yet
undiscovered potentialities. Meanwhile, within its mile-square
nucleus of life, the city nourishes the germ of its future.
-Taro Katayama
1
I
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars
I
t
i
National Offices:
t
West CASS, clo Helen Chauncey, Building 600T,
Stanford, CA. 94305
Midwest clo Kenneth Hazelton, 400 Ford Hall, Univ. of
Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. 55455
East CCAS, clo Jean Doyle, 86 Elm St., Somerville,
I
MA.02144
i Write the Stanford office for information
I
I
Statement of Purpose
I
We first came together in opposition to the brutal
aggression of the United States in Vietnam and to
the complicity or silence of our profession with
regard to that policy. Those in the field of Asian
studies bear responsibility for the consequences of
their research and the political posture of their
profession. We are concerned about the present
unwillingness of specialists to speak out against the
implications of an Asian policy committed to ensur
ing American domination of much of Asia. We
reject the legitimacy of this aim, and attempt to
change this policy. We recognize that the present
structure of the profession has often perverted
scholarship and alienated many people in the field.
The CCAS seeks to develop a humane and knowl
edgeable understanding of Asian societies and their
efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to con
front such problems as poverty, oppression, and
imperialism. We realize that to be students of other
peoples, we must first understand our relations to
them.
The CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the
prevailing trends in scholarship on Asia which too
often spring from a parochial cultural perspective
and serve selfish interests and expansionism. Our
organization is designed to function as a catalyst, a
communications network for both Asian and West
ern scholars, a provider of central resources for local
chapters, and a community for the development of
anti-imperialist research.
[passed March 28-30, 1969, Boston]
55
GRATEFUL HERE
1
Emerging from the subway station,
then lost among the orange signs on Nedicks snack bars,
I could smell the thick rice soup and dumplings
I would order in that basement lunchroom
already beckoning me. I thought:
like a salmon returning to its spawning ground
-and, bemused, followed my Chinese nose.
2
Early one Sunday morning each spring,
our family would visit my grandparents' graves,
offering gifts of tea and suckling pig,
burning colored paper, incense, and lpud firecrackers.
Later, my mother would take me to church.
I sang in the choir and would carry, that day,
fragile lilies to the altar of my risen Lord.
3
When walking with a Caucasian girl,
holding hands, I would pass by teenage hangouts,
overhearing insults. They would always pick on the girl,
as though she were a lesbian.
Separately, I guess, we would pretend
not to have noticed-avoiding embarrassment
for the other, tightening our grips.
4
Observing two gay Negroes, powdered gray,
and struting regally in their high-heeled boots,
I followed them half-enviously with my eyes,
understanding, for the first time, that dark allure
of nighttime caresses. I was in rural Pennsylvania,
and found housewives at the grocer's brought their children
with small, craning necks to whisper about me.
5
After a sit-in at the Pentagon,
the arresting marshall misspelt my name.
Actually, though, I know I should feel grateful here.
In fact, just last week on the radio, I heard
that the Red Guards had broken the wrists
of a most promising young pianist. Among other things,
he once journeyed to Manila for a recital of Brahms.
-Wing Tek Lum
STARFIGHTER
I see your riding
the yellow sun out here
in the Asian copra
because you've brought rocks
from the moon
told how green
blue the earth's seas
how Vietnam
and Southeast Asia fell
under a cloud
out of sight
a okay you say
you've knocked hell
in five blows
a golf ball through the universe
with a folded six iron
i know better
i know better i
see the horses of
your plains
no more
- Sam Tagatac
NIGHT SONG IN ASIAN AMERICA
For the living memory of John Okada, pioneer, novelist:
No-No Boy, 1957
The sky fits perfectly on all matter.
Nothing is jagged enough: volcanic
masses of the Cascades; structures of Seattle.
To come upon disaster at Cottage Grove
the smashed front end of a Chevrolet,
occupants and lights strewn in order ...
Which is why the moon hides
half of itself over Roseburg, or beacons
seek and find in the cracks of cliffs.
Napa tsukemono in the back seat
spreads its lovely, abundant musk.
Everything we eat needs rice.
These supplies must reach the people.
- Lawson Fusao Inada
56
CITY LETTER
City is my million-footed friend
crying by trumpet noise.
I am coming back to your home,
father,
to fall and jump into your small space
that deep pooled green
sweet blue meadow fold.
I cannot listen to my fears.
And if you would have me,
morning could be doe-like,
and a swiftly listening heart
would be my own secret.
I may run to you
carefully before your door
not wanting to cry.
And I will say words
yesterday's stream taught me
as I bring you my soul
and your warmth
would move upon me
like the early canyon sun.
I would grow larger
and stop chasing you nights
through keyholes.
The song belongs to a mountain woman,
wet city alleys,
and sweet meadow folds.
I lay down in blue flowers
to see again and again
mountain north by the sea
where I am child-like
in your father arms.
-Shawn H. Wong
CCAS BOOKS - CHEAP - IN BULK ORDERS
Chapters and individuals can still buy CCAS books through the Bulletin at large discounts on bulk orders of 2S
copies (minimum order for each title). Books now may be ordered from Harper and Row as well as from
Bantam:
Bantam (40% off) 2S copIes 50 copies
CCAS, The Indochina Story, $1.25 $18.75 $37.50
CCAS, China! Inside The People's Republic, $1.50 $22.50 $45.00
Harper & Row (38% off)
Brodine and Selden, Open Secret: The Kissinger-Nixon Doctrine, $1.50 $23.25 $46.50
Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars, $1.95 $30.25 $60.45
Send orders and payment to the Bulletin (604 Mission St., room 1001, San Francisco 94105), but make checks
payable to the appropriate publisher. Minimum order is 25 copies of any book.
Confessions of the
Chinatown Cowboy
Frank Chin
Between the western nations and China is no common
psychological speech. Their thought processes are radically
dissimilar. There is no intimate vocabulary. The Western
mind penetrates the Chinese mind but a short distance
when it finds itself in a fathomless maze. The Chinese mind
penetrates the Western mind an equally short distance when
it fetches up agains a blank, incomprehensible wall. It is all
a matter of language. There is no way to communicate
Western ideas to the Chinese mind . .. the Chinese mind
cannot thrill to short Saxon words; nor can the
English-speaking mind thrill to hieroglyphics. The fabrics of
their minds are woven from totally different stuffs. They
are mental aliens.
Jack London, THE CHINAGO, 1914
His hometown, Chinatown San Francisco has forgotten
the name of Ben Fee and the man he was, for its own good. In
New York he's what he was in Frisco, but more so, a word of
mouth legend, a bare knuckled unmasked man, a Chinaman
loner out of the old West, a character out of Chinese
sword-slingers, a fighter. The kind of Chinaman we've been
taught to ignore, and forget if we didn't want America to drive
Chinatown out of town.
Ben Fee looks like a scaled down Edward G. Robinson, a
slightly shorter version of a short tough guy. An open, boyish
smile on his face all the time and a Tiparillo in the right side of
his mouth, all on top of a loose careless swaggering tough
chubbiness that stops for nothing, not for moving cars, traffic
jams, falling safes, nothing but the touch of Chinatown ladies,
members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union
in the daytime, members of his English classes Friday nights,
his friends all the time, who can't talk to him without
touching his arm or hand, " ... to see if I'm real," he says. He's
sixty-three years old, nearsighted, and on the move. I say that
about him without any extra heart for an old man still going
strong at 63. He's from Chinatown. In Chinatown the old
aren't expected to stop until they drop. What makes him a
special old man is that he's not afraid of America, doesn't hate
Chinese-America, and likes himself enough to talk about a past
that runs from China to San Francisco to New York. Unlike
most of his genera tion, he hasn't given up memory and pride
as the price for life in this country.
looked to meet him, researching "Chinaman's
Chance"-A Portrait of Changing Chinese-America, a
documentary I did with Ene Riisna for WNET-TV. Ene Riisna,
a tall-6 ft.-skinny blonde braless film-maker wore a shrunken
pullover sweater that reached to her waist with a stretch of the
imagination and a skirt that hung around her hips. She tried to
pull herself together, keep her navel covered and look straight,
responsible, objective, not knowing what to expect, and
expecting the worst as we were over an hour late for our
appointment with Fee. My hair was long, parted in the middle.
My beard was long and as effective as a beard as needles are at
making cactus look hairy, but it was me then, a kind of
topping for me all in black, black from my cowboy boots,
black denims, black leather belt with a tough, but not flashy
two fanged buckle instead of the standard one prong job, a
black western shirt with phoney pearl snaps, a silver vest a
toothpick in my mouth and a Chinese wiseass beard making
me solid affectation. Alice in Wonderland growing out of her
clothes and a Chinaman dressed for a barn dance were on the
scene. But we shared an attache case.
Shirtsleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, tie loose,
collar unbuttoned, waving his Tiparillo, he appeared out of too
many old movies, a mobster ordering a hit, a cynical
newshawk stopping the presses, a labor organizer, sauntering,
looking something like a teddy beat: and broadcasting all the
instant charisma of naked man wearing nothing but dynamite
sticks, there he was, unmistakably nobody else but Ben Fee,
wondering who the hell we were. Everything about him shifted
into a "Who the hell are you?" when, suspecting this was Ben
Fee, I said, "Ben Fee?"
He shifted his weight to the leg furthest from us, wh,ile
appearing to stop slightly forward, coming out of the Chinese
movies now and westerns at the Palace, put the Tiparillo in his
mouth, and took it out again, passing a quick look over us, and
took it out again. A sheathed sword in the right hand is a sign
of trust. You can't draw your sword when it's sheathed in
your sword hand. Shifting it to your left hand is a warning.
You can't shake hands with a burning cigar in your right hand.
It's all a matter of language. He smiled, snapshot a quick
album of us then put the cigar back in his mouth, freeing his
hand for a shake. Chinatown, Frisco all the way. He was from
58
home. There was a moment of Chinatown manhood, not a
kingdom of style, but a moment, at least a Frisco moment I
had to come to New York to discover.
Now that we were home, I wondered how much home
would get in our way.
In the code of Chinatown, only fools and finks took
English language, or Chinese language or words, written words,
spoken words seriously as language. Language as it was known
in the world was emasculating, sissy stuff ... that's how we
compensated for the humiliation of all the time being heard
talking in language lessons by Chinese folks and American
people who never heatd any sense from us when we opened
up. Instead of real talk, we memorized phrases that worked,
kept a stock of cliches we could string up in combos for any
occasion and say nothing at all, no more. Polite, short, and
out. Out without being corrected, a "I'm fine thank you," and
swoop free ... we'd pulled one on the fan gwai whiteman.
There were two kinds of talkers among us, two kinds of
clowns, for only clowns talked. Talking made you a clown. On
the street, if you kept your hands loose, not so down at tight
as to look a chicken, but loose enough not to be mistaken for
action, and kept everybody laughing, you wouldn't get beat
up. "I'm going to beat the shit out of you," a big guy with a
gang says, "Well, you better hurry up, man, cuz I gotta get to
Chinese school," you say, making it a joke, making them busy
with some fun. That was practical language skills of the here
and now school. There was something of a man in that clown
act, but not the one where you talk college white. That college
white in your mouth was the sound of shame on us, the sound
of teachers calling us stupid, and you talking like a teacher
grading papers meant you were too good for Chinatown and
Chinamen. It meant if you weren't thinking of graduating the
town for whiteness, you'd better. Hungry, all the time hungry,
every sense was out whiffing for something rightly ours,
chameleons looking for color, trying on tongues and clothes
and hairdos, taking everyone elses, with none of our own, and
no habitat, our manhood just never came home. Everything
was copycat. Hunger and copycat. We had a lot of stutterers,
thumbsuckers. The sound of whiteness inevitably crept into
our tongue, became the sound of good grades and making
good, and t:hinatown didn't want us anymore. The language I
wrote, that Thorn Gunn the first real poet I ever met, and
writer Phillip Roth told me wasn't English, making me go
"huh?" the sounds out of my mouth a black migrant worker
giving me a lift in Florida told me was "pretty good language
for a Chinese person," is just good enough to turn off many in
Chinatown. What they hear in the way I talk is a message
white schools put in the sound, a message I don't mean ...
that I've turned my back on Chinatown and become white,
worse than white. To become white, you shit in your blood,
hate yourself and all your kind. For juk sing to become
"Chinese" (Pass for juk hok) means the same thing, a
treatment, a session between electrodes, called an education.
Ben Fee and me, both from home, a generation between
us, out of the town, working in white businesses that have
done Chinese-America bad in the past. The labor movement in
California was formed to exclude Chinese labor and drive us
out of the country. It led lynchings and made outlaws and
scabs of every one of us who drove a truck, tended a bat and
hundreds of other jobs until the 50's. My brother was the first
Chinaman to crack the bartender's union. I was the first
Chinaman brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad. If I
wasn't prejudiced against a Chinaman being into the union
movement, I was at least suspect. Every Chinaman who ever
wrote, came on proud of his education and English langauge
and wrote a combination tour guide and cook book ... a
clown act, showing Chinamen off as "Chinese-American"
fools. Educational television served up a formula for being
Chinese-American, "I'm Chinese because I like chow mien, and
I'm American because I like spaghetti," the
"Chinese-American" writer/reporter said on a program aired
special to grades three to six in Frisco last year. Fee looked at
me, Mr. TV in black and silver, wearing boots, from Oakland
really, and an old Oakland at that ... Oakland was never quite
Frisco ... affecting Oakland for TV, come to do a job on New
York's Chinatown for TV, come to talk. Talk what? Talk
how? We'd show in the talk, whether or not we had anything
to say to each other, other than "whiter than thou," "more
Chinese than thou," "more assimilated than thou."
Between us was our awareness of our history, white
racism's success with our people, and the new wave of writing
about us calling white racism's success our success, stuff off
the pens of Tom Wolfe, explaining "Why there' is no National
Association f()r the Advancement of Chinese Americans,"
("Most Chinese who get college educations and good jobs leave
Chinatown and the village life forever. But the Chinese
heritage, the Chinese 'pride,' does mean that it is impossible
for the Chinese in America, poor or rich, to picture themselves
as a weak and helpless minority, hopelessly adrift in the tides
of circumstances. "), Kenneth Lamott, explaining "The
Awakening of Chinatown" ("A central point at issue is that,
whereas the blacks see the dominant white society as their
chief enemy, the Chinese activists ate primarily in rebellion
against the older generation of their own people .... Perhaps it
is an over-simplification, but I don't think it is far wrong to
say these young men are more in rebellion against Confucius
than they are against Mister Charley. ") and others writing in
Esquire (Tom Wolfe), Newsweek (Charles Michener) , Atlantic
(Maty Ellen Leary), New York (Tom Wolfe), West (Kenneth
LaMott), The New Yorker, U.S. News and World Report, Time
on Chinatown Frisco against busing, on our preservation of
culture, our assimilation, "out whiting the Whites" ... all of it
penning love for us racistly. All of it making us look good at
the expense of the blacks, all of it full of disturbing echoes of.
the Nazi anti-Semitist argument, all of it cunningly white.
Thanks to our lives in America I could call Ben
"Chinese" and insult him. I could call him "American" and
insult him. I could call him "black" and insult him. I could call
him "Japanese" and insult him. Between Ben and me it was all
a matter of language, whether or not we talked, because we
were Chinamen in America ... and the most suspicious kind
of Chinamen. Each of us in our own way, was something of a
"star" in a bit of the white world, doing a white thing. He
stepped forward, up close to me, grinned and said, "Welcome,
Chinatown Cowboy," and I was finally glad to see him.
Thanks, Ben. Ride with this Chinatown Cowboy a bit, while I
run off to rustle strange words and maverick up a language to
write this mess in. Remember Burt Lancaster in VERA CRUZ?
a grinning gunfighter in black, always talking about some
"Hannah" fella, who taught him everything he knew, a kind of
foster father priest of the badass good time way of life, like the
Master in the Chinese movies, the old teacher. I come from
your school. (It's an older school than you know.) My right
hand is free.
59
TOM WOLFE, I'M TALKING TO YOU IN ALMOST
YOUR OWN LANGUAGE! And it hurts. We can only be
wishy washy in your mouth and untrue. "White racist" is the
baddest word in the language today, not "motherfucker,"
"cocksucker," "sonofabitching cocksucking motherfucker,"
but "white racist" isn't a word we're expected to use, speaking
for ourselves. It's impossible for us to be taken seriously as
victims of white racism, by whites who are convinced that no
matter what, we are sustained by Chinese culture and "the
Chinese heritage, the Chinese 'pride,' does mean that it is
impossible for the Chinese in America, poor or rich, to picture
themselves as a weak and helpless minority ..." Blacks agree
with you. They don't see us as a weak and helpless minority,
but a strong and helpful one, a race of agents for Mr. Charley
whose "Chinese culture" is a white racist institution. David
Hilliard of the Black Panthers called us "the Uncle Toms of
the non-white people in the U.S." In Richard Wright's
autobiography BLACK BOY, is a famous scene involving
Shorty, an elevator operator in the South. He makes quarters
off white men by letting them kick him in the ass. They kick
him in the ass and he laughs, wriggles his butt, picks up their
quarters with his teeth and thanks them. "You're all right,
Shorty, you sonofabitch," the white men say. And he is a
good sonofabitch. He's assimilated into white Southern culture
without violence. He's entertaining but not obnoxious to
whites. What Betty Sung said of us in Mountain of Gold: The
Story of the Chinese in America (MacMillan Co., 1967) holds
true for Shorty:
Much to their credit the Chinese view prejudice with a very
healthy attitude. They were never overly bitter. They have
gone into occupations which command respect and which
lessen conflict from competition.
In 1876, George D. Roberts, the president of a company that
had used Chinese labor to reclaim 30-40,000 acres of
California Tule land in the Sacramento Delta, spoke to
Congress, in fore-echoes of Mrs. Sung, giving us the roots of a
"Chinese-American" psychology. "To the general prosperity
of the country," he said, "I think they are a great advantage. I
think they fill a place that white labor would fill very
reluctantly ... I think the wealth they produce stimulates
prosperity to such an extent that it gives white men higher
positions." We went into occupations which commanded
respect and lessened conflict, doing a job that's been forgotten
by whites, and Chinese-America because the story of the job,
though nice in numbers, was not a story the Chinese wanted to
tell their children. "In my opinion," Roberts said, "the
aggregate product of the wealth produced by the Chinamen in
this state is equal to the mines, inlcuding the mines of Nevada
and Dakota. Probably they produce sixty, eighty, ninety
millions a year in wealth."
The Chinese laborers Roberts was talking about came
from Chinatown, San Francisco, like the Chinese laborers who
built the railroads. The railroads created a detention camp and
called it "Chinatown." The details of that creation have been
conveniently forgotten or euphemized into a state of sweet
confusion. The men who lived through the creation are dying
out, unheard and ignored. When they die, no one will know it
was not us that created a game preserve for Chinese and called
it "Chinatown."
"Murder without blood," said Warner Oland, Charlie
Chan The First. " ... like Amos without Andy," in CHARLIE
CHAN AT THE RACETRACK. I asked Mrs. Sung why not
being overly bitter was a healthy attitude toward prejudice,
and she answered, "If you make yourself obnoxious ...That is
a hindrance to acceptance." Shorty doesn't make himself
obnoxious to anyone except his fellow blacks. He is accepted
in the South. And the Chinese-Americans are accepted coast to
coast as a showcase minority. "At a time when Americans are
awash in worry over the plight of racial minorities," says U.S.
NEWS AND WORLD REPORT (Dec. 26, 1966) "One such
minority, the nation's 300,000 Chinese-Americans, is winning
wealth and respect by dint of its own hard work."
"I'm going north one of these days," Shorty would say.
We would all laugh knowing that Shorty would never leave,
that he depended too much upon the whites for the food
he ate.
"What would you do up north?" I would ask Shorty.
"I'd pass for Chinese," Shorty would say.
The U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT "Success Story of
One Minority Group in U.S." makes it clear that Shorty
wouldn't make it up north, not because letting whites kick
your ass for a quarter is looked down on, but because the
success of the Chinese-American minority is based on their
being, mightily, sincerely, definitely not black:
Still being taught in Chinatown is the old idea that people
should depend on their own efforts-not a welfare
check -in order to reach America's "promised land. "
David Hilliard and Richard Wright are correct; coldly
and painfully so. We are the Uncle Toms of the non-white
people, the despicable Shorty's, a race of yellow white
supremacists, yellow white racists. We're hated by the blacks
because the whites love us for being everything the blacks are
not. Blacks are a problem: badass. Chinese-Americans are not a
problem: kissass. Tom Wolfe suggested in his Esquire article
(December 1969) that kissass was Chinese and that badass
Chinamen boys was the result of school integration:
The Chinese teen-agers who ended up at Gompers, many of
them immigrants from Hong Kong, found that Chinese
culture-obedience, filial piety, hard work, selt-respect
didn't mean a damn thing at Gompers. Being a cool and
bad-ass cat, that was all that mattered. The gangs ran the
show at Gompers, the bloods and the Mexicans, but mainly
the bloods. They were loud, violent, sexually
aggressive-stuff that really stunned most Chinese. But if it
was the bloods who ran the show, maybe the thing to do
was to get in on their thing . .. That was when one really
started seeing some exotic sights in Chinatown. Here came
the Chinese kids who really had the gait, man, down pat,
that coooooool rolling gait, with the hips and the shoulders
turning over like the wheels on a railroad engine.
Hard on, into the echo of Wolfe's December article came
Newsweek's Min Yee piece, on the streets in the center of
Chinese New Years blowing facts and figures on CHINATOWN
IN CRISIS. Ah, Tom, writing of the great American haps the
way Stanley Kramer makes movies, you roused the Chinatown
establishment coast to kissass coast, the English language
mouthpiece of the Chinese Six Companies, The
Chinese-American Citizens Alliance (The Chinese NAACP you
said doesn't exist) felt betrayed. After working so hard to
fulfill the Charlie Chan image of "Chinese culture-obedience,
60
filiel piety, hard work, self-respect-" for whites who had
invented the image for us, after kissing your ass to not be
black, you said we were going to school and coming back to
Chinatown blackened. The CACA sent a warning out to
Chinatown, in the form of an open letter to you kissing your
ass:
... the Chinese remember that no people in our country
have proved suffered discrimination as we have. But we
have proved to our own satisfaction that from the personal
efforts of our parents and of ourselves, we have won the
respect and esteem of the non-Chinese community, and at
no time have we ever had to resort to violence to achieve
the status we now enjoy.... Of course we have had
problems with young immigrants from Hong Kong,
handicapped as they are by language problems and a lack of
marketable skills. Too, they have acquired some of the less
desirable mannerisms of other youngsters in this city
similarly handicapped by lack of marketable skills.
It was you, Tom Wolfe, who made Chinatown openly,
publicly, turn against school integration, you who said the
white image of Chinese culture was being blacked out in
Chinese schools and made it a national issue. You didn't have
to say whites hated blacks, that turning black meant white
disapproval; we already knew that was part of being
"Americans." Then Newsweek springs Min Yee, a literate,
educated journalist, obviously making good in the white world
... a choice example of the assimilated Chinese-American ...
right in the middle of the Chinese New Year's celebration.
Instead of the seasonal Chinatown piece he said Chinatown
"has some of the worst conditions in the country," sounding
black to the Six Companies trained to see Chinese culture and
acceptance and big bucks success in terms of black and white,
Min sounded black, a bad way for a Chinese-American to
blow, and then blew it all apart, the image of Chinese culture
and assimilation all blown away with:
But there is no question in my mind that our people must
have the same, social, economic and educational rights as
the other citizens. I never had such problems-but then, I
was whitewashed.
Chinatown went nuts! The sky was falling. The white press
was betraying the loyal non-black minority they had spent
over a hundred years of imagination to create. That race of
good Chinks hopped up on the Confucian ethic stooping high
into acceptance and approval by keeping their place preserving
Chinese culture with its emphasis on industry, honesty,
frugality, intellect and patience, that has won more attention
and recognition than could be expected of such an amazingly
small minority is a racist cartoon, a creation of white male
science fiction, Christian missionaries envisioning us sheep
"characteristically timid and docile," hack writers and the
Celestial Empire (under American guns) and later the
Nationalist Chinese Government working through the
recognized unofficial Chinatown establishment, known
variously as The Chinese Six Companies, The Chinese
Consolidated Benevolent Association, The Chong (or Chung)
Wah Benevolent Association ... by any name, the same outfit,
unregistered agents of a foreign power, fronting for the
Chinese Nationalist Party, allowed to carryon running
Chinatown as if it were a foreign colony, a bit of China, a city
within a city, by the United States Government. In San
Francisco and New York the president of the local chapter of
the Chinese Benevolent Association is traditionally called "The
Mayor of Chinatown," by the press and the President of the
United States. In the honorary title is recognition of an
understanding between the press and the Six that they are the
exclusive source of Chinatown news, an understanding
between the U.S. and Nationalist Chinese governments that
was being violated. A secret meeting of the "mayors" of all the
Chinatowns in the United States and Canada was held in San
Francisco soon after the Newsweek article. The word from
that meeting was, lock up the town. No news is good news,
and from now on it's good news only. (They knew you'd take
the Chinatown boycott of busing as good news, Tom. And you
rose to the bait in New York magazine's special issue on
"China in America." They knew, I mean, they really knew you
were white, white, white.)
I learned of that meeting from a friend, an
American-born Chinese-American grocer, with stories
Chinese-America must forget to preserve the image. I was
collecting oral history on tape. It was like a movie, a gangster
flick, complete with the "I can't talk on the phone," line, and
"come alone," and to come clean, no recorder, not that the
words would have become guns to his head, no, just the end of
his business. I walked into his store, alone, clean, feeling
strangely all them "but this is America but this is America but
..." wanting to wave my arms. My friend; born here, the
American dream come true, a little business, last year's
Pontiac, talks that fine English, sounds like Chicago on the
phone, no pigtail and the walk, part Okie sashay, part black
strut, of the chameleon Chinaman the most typical Chinaman
born in the most typical Chinatown, a town that's nothing but
a state of mind in multi-racial ghetto ... usually near railroad
tracks ... a chameleon Chinaman who was born to and never
gets used to the Negroes and Mexican people, most of the
people of his childhood, his world ... Fresno, Seattle,
Sacramento, myoid Oakland ... looking at him, looking at
me, as if our ... we and our families didn't live here, never
lived here. Later we learn we're loved by whites, creatures
from planet White who suit up and ship across the concrete
universe to teach us, and treat us better, making treacherous
sense of the looks we live with, from the people that surround
our homes. He finished up a customer, asking about the
family, smiling, tying string. He led her to the door, opened it
for her, locked it after her. We were in the wrong movie. All I
wanted to talk about was his life, a few stories about this town
... nothing necessarily scandalous. "Not here," he said, and
deeper into the wrong movie, to the back room and closed
curtains, just to say, "I can't talk to you. I'm telling you this
because we're friends." Then the news of the meeting. He'd
been asked not to tell, but since we were friends ... all the
wrong movie. How'd we come to this? That only among
ourselves, even as grown men, only in secret, among ourselves
and selected friends, we're not "Chinese." ("If you make
yourself obnoxious . .. That is a hindrance to acceptance.") I
recall what George Takei said (the Japanese-American actor
who played Mr. Zulu on STAR TREK, the ARVN officer in
John Wayne's THE GREEN BERETS, Richard Burton's
Chinese houseboy in THE ICE PALACE, a Chinese miner in an
episode of DEATH VALLEY DAYS, and offscreen enemy of
NBC's impending revival of Charlie Chan) talking about some
Asian-American actors being so conditioned into role of the
stereotype that they had what he called a "Pavolvian" reaction
61
to lights and cameras ... how men who walked upright and
talked straight, carried hidden in their every muscle, the strong
right hand of white racist imagery, how the son the great white
father sacrificed to planet Chinatown, Charlie Chan, to teach
us to live righteously in his image takes over the bodies and
voices of many Asian-American actors. (The only thing that
stands out in the mind, when you're playing an Oriental of
EDUCA TION, is that, number one: his manners are very good
... So you do a lot of bowing.) In front of the cameras they
crumpled up into that Charlie Chan fetal position, screwed up
their faces, and talked buck buck bagaw. It was always the
wrong movie.
Keeping us foreign, semi-assimilated aliens with our
hearts and souls in China and our labor in America was a
matter of government policy, an unwritten under the table gun
at the head understanding between China and the United
States. America put pressure on the Chinese government to
discourage yellow immigration to this country for the purpose
of settling. Still we came, with eyes to settle here. All who had
the money, brought their families (until women were
outlawed, first by California, later by U.S. law), bought
property (until owning property was outlawed), went to the
Supreme Court of the State of California or the United States
against repressive laws and practices, at least once every year
between 1850 and 1906 (until prejudice against Orientals
became a national hysteria after the Japanese sunk the Russian
Navy, and with the power of the mightiest Navy on the seas,
outraged America by threatening to go to war unless Japanese
children were admitted into San Francisco's public schools).
The laborers who'd come without their families when they
could afford to regularly returned home to say hello, make
children, then returned to America saying, "Me longtime
Californ," to the immigration officials, telling them, they were
coming home, "Me heap sahbay."
We did not make life bearable here with idealized
notions of Chinese culture and a dream of going home rich
until an honorable life in America was made impossible. We
were fishermen, farmers, shoemakers, cigarmakers,
laundrymen, miners all over the West wherever we could go,
until we saw that America, not just San Francisco and
California, was determined to wipe us out. The California laws
against the entry of Chinese women had been struck down in
court, because the Constitution didn't allow states to mess
with immigration.; that was for Congress to do, and in 1924,
Congress did.
The law warred against our women to deny us our
manhood, to drive us out of the country, to kill us. Our
American-born women lost their American citizenship if they
went to China. They lost their citizenship if they married a
Chinese citizen. And to become an American citizen, you had
to be born here. Twenty to thirty men for every woman, a
woman who wouldn't, couldn't marry any Chinaman not born
here. Those who could afford it carried on long distance
family life, trans-Pacific commutes between years of work and
months of family, coming home "Longtime Californ." Others
of us would never get to China, except as bones and ashes,
never have families; our future was simply a matter of growing
old and dying. Out of our despair, we took to burning our
letters from home, burning the pages of our diaries and
journals as we wrote them, burning tickets, receipts, bills,
burning everything with our names, everything written in our
hand and throwing the ashes into the sea, in the hope, that, at
least, that much of us would get home to China. America had
taught us, finally that China was our home and inspired the
invention of this little Chinese-American ceremony.
Meantime, America picked up the Charleston, big bands,
ragtime jazz and put to music, the agony of our old men
doomed here without women or a hope of returning to China
and danced to it. The songs of the old '4gers about "John
Chinaman," were updated and civilized in New York's Tin Pan
Alley to become LITTLE CHINKY BUTTERFLY, CHINA
GIRL, CIIINESE LULLABYE, and a song that must have been
sung a lot around the piano, for I've heard bits of it sung by
Chinese-Americans, mothers of grammar school friends, who
sung it in their school days in talent shows. I found the sheet
music and remembered hearing it, a song featured by Fred
Schmitt and his Rialto Orchestra called HONG KONG
DREAM GIRL:
China boy is very sad because he went away,
From his little China maiden,
China boy feel very sad and only yesterday
He wrote a note to her to say:
My little Hong Kong Dream Girl
In every dream you seem, girl,
Two almond eyes are smiling,
And my poor heart is whirling like a big sail round my pigtail
I dream of you till dawning,
But early in the morning
Oriental dream is gone,
China boy is so forlorn,
Hong Kong Dream Girl goodbye.
I understand why, we of all the immigrant minorities, have left
no folk or literary legacy, why I don't know my great
grandfather's name, my grandfather's name. My mother says
he had an imagination like mine, that he made up stories when
she saw him, that he was gone all the time working in the
steward service of the Southern Pacific. There's a picture of
him sitting with the family. And a watch with a train engraved
on the watch. The Chinese swordslinger begins with a master
of martial arts, a young protege and a crime against the
protege's family that send him on a mission of revenge, away
from the school for a distant mountain where the invincible
enemy waits. The crime against the family always involves
death. I took my grandfather's watch and worked on the
Southern Pacific. I rode in the engines up front ... I rode in
the cabooses where no Chinaman had even ridden before. I
was hired with the first batch of blacks to go braking for the
SP, in the 60's when the fair employment legislation went into
effect. (Ride with me grandpa, at least it's not the steward
service. You get home more often now.) Life for the Chinese
in America was over. There wasn't a Chinaman in the country,
man, woman, or child who didn't feel extinction happening.
We had been forced out of our fisheries, laundries, cigar
factories, forced out of our women, and out of American
sight, mind and culture, by blatant exclusion laws, laws
designed to protect fish, secure fire safety, protect public
health and morality against us. The few Chinatowns around
the ports of entry and exit grew large, attracting us like
elephants' graveyards. The only possibilites we had left were
death and China. Those of us who stayed, prepared against
America's closing the last loophole in their plan to stamp us
out by preparing ourselves to become Chinese. Deportation
62
wasn't a fear among us, it was a dead certainty.
In 1934 Jimmy Ginn sent his father back to China to be
done with it. "At that time," Jimmy says, "he didn't want to
go. He wanted me to go first and marry, you see. He wanted
me to go home. Get married. Have a family. I think then he
figured I'm more apt to tie with the home and the family, with
my country than the United States, but mainly he wanted me
to go back because of the fact ... an if he told me once, he
told me about 500 times, that this is a white man's country.
'You go back to China when you make your money. That is
where you belong. If you stay here, the white man will kill
you.' " Here is the root source of our culture, our sense of
being Chinese-American, our self-effacing presence on the
American scene, our so-called "Chinese culture-obedience,
filial piety, hard work, self-respect-." The white version roots
our psychology in China, not white racism, because it's
prettier and far away. Thus the substance of Jimmy Ginn's
conversation with his father has become the white myth of the
Chinese Sojourner, and Chinese pride, what Tom Wolfe calls
the "Aramco psychology":
Most Chinese who have come to the United States since
1850 have looked upon their experience in America as an
interlude in their careers in China. It is the same state of
mind an American has when he goes to work for Aramco in
the Near East. He may run into all sorts of religious and
even statute laws that bar him from Arab life. Yet it would
never occur to him to think of it as "discrimination" ...
Weird cockamamie foreigners, nothing more . .. That is
because his psyche still resides in Portland, Oregon or
Norman, Oklahoma . .. The Near East is just an interlude in
his career in America. "
The logic of the myth of the Chinese Sojourner
duplicates the logic Nazi's used to justify anti-Semitism in
Europe. We came to America without our women (a sign we
had no intention of settling here), refused to assimilate, were
alien and incapable of accomodating the democratic,
individualistic manly ideals that throbbed in the guts of every
American word, breath and deed, established our own clannish
social structures in defiance of the laws of the land, robbed
America of her wealth and took it home to China and our
women; therefore, we deserved the exclusion laws, the
anti-Chinese riots, the lynchings to stop the drain of America's
wealth.
Miraculously our attitude changed at the outbreak of
WW2. We woke up one morning transformed from despised
"Chinamen" into "loyal Chinese-American citizens." The
"conquest of affection by which the Californian Chinese
transformed themselves from our race adversaries to our dear,
subject people," envisioned by a white writer in 1908 was
complete in 1943, when the publishers of Pardee Lowe's
Father and Glorious Descendent, touted his book as " ... a
timely document at a moment when America must learn how
to assimilate its loyal minorities," and noted that "Pardee
Lowe ... enlisted in the U.S. Army shortly after delivering the
manuscript of this book." The most authoritative, complete,
influential and scholarly expression of the Myth of the Chinese
Sojourner as Jew of the Orient is Bitter Strength, by Gunther
Barth of the University of California, Berkeley, History
Department ... born in Germany in 1925, the Nazi
anti-Semitist logic of his time, had his mind and his body, until
Allied troops captured his body in WW2. His high flying white
supremacist vision of my history has directly influenced
everything written by anybody about Chinese-America, and
been given a Chinese-American signature in Betty Lee Sung's
Mountain of Gold: The Story of the Chinese in America. This
book by a former writer for the Voice of America, now
teaching Asian-American studies at the City College of New
York, has gone through two printings of 7;00 copies each
since its 1967 release, and in 1971 hit the streets in paper. It's
the only book by a Chinese-American in print, out of the five
serious literary efforts ever published by American-born
Chinese-Americans.
As she told me in "Chinaman's Chance" the statistics
show more Chinese left the country than entered up until
WW2 when trans-Pacific travel stopped.
The numbers seem to support the myth of the Chinese
Sojourner. But they didn't start counting until late in the
game, and when they started the numbers twenty to thirty
years after we started coming, they didn't show that the bones
of our dead travelled as paying passengers and were included in
the numbers. They didn't show the number of American-born
women returning from China who'd been turned back because
their visit to China had cost them their citizenship ... so on
the books they exited twice and never entered. They don't
show the number of illegal entries, who came to settle, the
families who landed and got out of California quick for parts
of the country that did not outlaw Chinese women and
children. But the most original restatement of the myth of the
Chinese Sojourner has to be Tom Wolfe's "Aramco
psychology." Because our psyches still resided in China and
America was just an interlude in our career, those of us who
came over since 1850 didn't look on the repressive laws as
discrimination, "If things should become absolutely repressive,
he might pack up and go home." (C<. and if he told me once,
he told me about 500 times, that this is a white man's country.
'You go back to China when you make your money. That is
where you belong. If you stay here the white man will kill
you. ' ")
In 1915, a young Ben Fee left Canton, China for the
Golden Mountain. His right hand was full. The sword was
sheathed. His grandmother was the second Chinese woman to
be born in America. Ben was a long time coming to the Golden
Mountain to meet the Invincible Enemy. He came to stay.
"I can't get a haircut outside of Chinatown, no matter
how far away from Chinatown, I can't get a meal outside of
Chinatown .... 'course I can't live outside of Chinatown."
(". .. dut he would not be likely to waste many hours
thinking about organizing a protest movement. ") "So all these
racism developed ... sit down, and sit-in ... we going through
that as a kid. And we are way ahead of the civil rights
movement, in San Francisco!" In the 20's, Fee developed his
skills as a labor organizer, integrating San Francisco. He used
the laws to build up the bucks to pay his way, moving out.
I
"San Francisco had a law, when you pay a deposit down, if
the landlord welches on his promise, he has to pay double the
I
deposit. We raised forty dollars, and we get the two American
kids and two Chinese. The Americans, they go in and look for
apartment and pay down ten dollar deposit. The next day, we
would go, all four together look over the apartment. And the
landlady say, 'Heyheyheyhey ... ! What is these things here?' \
... In eight weeks we make that forty dollars be four hundred
dollars! Just by collecting deposits." He leaned back in his
I
63
I
chair and deliberately put his closed right hand on the table
and drew on his Tiparillo, grinning. "And we fight from block
(down comes his fist, thunk) to block (again his fist, thunk)
push from Stockton (thunk) to Powell (thunk), from Powell
to Mason, from Mason to Jones and Taylor," his fist up and
down taking hin) along, "It's just like fighting a war! That we
keep on pushing (thunk) and pushing (thunk). And on Geary
Street and Van Ness Avenue, there's a restaurant called
'Almond Blossom.' Now, that's a typical name," Fee says
laughing. "We went there," he says and is suddenly in the
character of the waitress, talking the movie about him,
"'Nope!' the waitress said. I said, 'Well, how dare you call
Almond Blossom and don't serve Chinese.'
" 'Oh,' the waitress said, 'I have no prejudice against
Chinese, but the manager .. .' So the manager come out and, 'I
have no prejudice against Chinese, but the customer objects.
Sorry.' So we left.
"So one day ... we'd counted how many seat at there at
the counter. There're ten of them. And the most expensive
item on the menu those days is the Porterhouse steak! Three
dollars. We get ten American kids. And the three of us ... one
Filipino, one Japan', and one Chinese ... we went to the
Almond Blossom." His fist thunks the desk. "And the ten kid
went there first, and they order, all of them Porterhouse steak!
A thirty dollar o'steak there. Oh! The manager so happy! He
never had such a good day. And he begin to fry it ... (thunk)
... And when we smell that pretty good steak flavor, we come
in (thunk thunk thunk) sit down. We went through the same
routine again," he says, rushing now. (Thunk) "The waitress
say ..." (Thunk thunk. The right hand at work in the rhythm
of his wartime.) " 'You come in again, gentlemen?' " in the
waitress' voice. His laughter showing how long ago that was,
how little times have changed, " 'You know I have no
prejudice against you.' ... and then get the manager. And the
manager begin to say the same thing" (Thunk) "Then I raise
my voice. I asked these kids, I say, 'Hey, gentlemen!"
(MORNING, MR. CLANTON. Thunk. "The only thing that
stands out in the mind, when you're playing an Oriental of
EDUCA TION, is that, number one: his manners are very
good.") " 'We have never met. I have never crossed your path
before ... " ("He's very simple, and very courteous. That's
about it. So you do a lot of bowing.") " 'I never did you any
wrong. Why do you object to us to ea,t?' " ("... I deliberately
kept my hands at my side. I very rarely used any gestures,
unless they were absolutely important.") " 'Why do you
object?'
"And the kid say, 'Who object?'
(Thunk)
"I say, 'The manager say you object to us eating here.' "
(Fastfists now, thunkthunkthunk thunk. The right movie.)
"They say, 'On the contrary! If they don't serve you, we
object!' So they all line up and walk out ... Oh, you ought to
see this manager!. .. Run out and watch those ten walking
down the block, and then come back and look at those ten
steaks ... He finally, he submit. He let us eat." There were
others like Ben. They left meat burning on the griddle. Walked
out of barbershops with half a shave, half a haircut, breaking
out of planet Chinatown. Rut what they were doing scared
Chinatown, that knew the whites would be antagonized, that
the whites would sweep in and orbit Chinatown to China.
Chinese-America scared into the game early on, was into the
psychology of the Chinese Sojourner, Tom Wolfe's Aramco
psychology to make life bearable here, to rationalize the
erasure of its history, and thought it better for all to ignore
and dissociate from men like Ben Fee, lay low and stall the
day of the big deportation. There came a day when the worst
thing a Chinese-American parent could say to a child, or a
Chinaman about another Chinaman, was, "You act like a hok
gwai. " ... a black. In trade for appearing in the documentary I
was doing, Betty Lee Sung asked me to speak to the three
classes in Asian-American studies she was teaching at the City
College. Afterwards, jumping from parked car to parked car
down the street, keeping my feet out of the moving living tide
of dogshit devouring New York, toward a coffeeshop I heard
her say something I can't get out of my mind. We'd been
talking about her classes, about teaching, being a
Chinese-American, and the special Chinatown issue of New
York that had hit the streets the day before. Nothing by a
Chinese-American in it, I said, the same racist love by Tom
Wolfe, going to China to tell us who we were. "You take it too
personally," Betty Lee Sung said.
"I take being a Chinaman pretty personally," I said,
"don't you?"
"No, I don't. I can't. If I did, I'd be miserable all the
time ... You know, Frank, you're really very black. You talk
like a black," said today's most respected and influential
Chinese-American teacher/scholar/writer.
"Why can't you boys, you Negroes and Mexicans," the
visiting cop said, all creases, jingling metals, and hair on his
knuckles, setting every Chinaman boy of us up for an
afternoon of fights, "... stay out of trouble like the Chinese?
Mind your folks? Study hard? Obey the laws?" And there we
Chinamen were, in Lincoln Elementary School, Oakland,
California, in a world where manliness counts for everything,
surrounded by bad blacks and bad Mexican kids who were still
into writing their names into their skin with nails dipped in
ink. They had a walk, a way of wearing their pants on the
brink of disaster, a tongue, a kingdom of manly style everyone
respected. Everyone knew what they called you behind your
back, because you had to, to survive in the yard. There we
were ... there I was, hair held up high and back with Tuxedo
wax, edges of hair by my ears turned down and shaped into
fake sideburns and spitcurls, toothpick in my mouth, pants
low, belt buckle on my hip, and black and white basketball
shoes, suddenly stripped and shaved bare by this cop, exposed
for copping another man's flash, imitating this from the
blacks, that from the Mexicans, something from whites, with
no manly style of my own, unless it was sissiness. There was
Chinatown where I lived, but nothing Chinese in my life as real
to me as the clothes people told me were foreign, "American"
things. Nobody knew what Chinamen called anybody behind
their backs and nobody cared. I was saving up for shades to
hide my Chinese eyes, and going out into the sun to make me
darker because I hated being hated by the rogues I admired for
doing things. They were like the gangs of tough swordsmen in
the Chinese movies I saw with my grandmother in Frisco. But
the going image of Chinese manhood wasn't swordsman. It was
a sissy servant, Charlie Chan and his fuckup sons.
Chinese from China, whose experience told them they
were Chinese just as everything about our experience tells us
we are not Chinese, were secure in their Chinese manhood and
capable of choosing to become "Americanized," to assimilate.
For them the concept of the dual identity, being Chinese and
American is real. The Americanization of Chinese writers Lin
64
Yutang (Moment in Peking, A Chinatown Family), c.y. Lee
(Flower Drum Song), Chiang Vee (The Silent Traveller series),
Frank Ching of the New York Times, and Simon Li ("... one
part of town the Chinese mission from Red China are almost
sure to visit is Chinatown," New York) has invariably meant
their absorption and acceptance of white Americanism ... not
just the stereotype of all of Chinese-America being obliged to
be definably Chinese and American, but the white male racist
overtones of that stereotype. With the aid of a Social Science'
Research Council grant, Francis L.K. Hsu disguised as a
sociologist became a yellow propogandist for white-male
supremacy, pushing the concept of the dual personality and
not too subtly reminding us American-bornjuk sing that we're
not really Chinese but must, if we're going to live here, learn
to be Chinese, that we're all of us, born here or not,
"Chinese":
. .. The Chinese in America, in common with other
minority groups, will have a continuing problem of double
identity. But the effective way of dealing with it is not to
deny its existence but to face it squarely. The first step is to
realize that the double identity of a minority group is not
dissimilar to that of the professional woman. She is a
woman and a professional. Some American professional
women have tended to forget about their sex identity but
most have kept some sort of balance between it and their
profession. In the latter case, their sex identity sometimes
becomes an advantage rather than a disability.
To achieve this balance, the Chinese in America will do best
if he knows Chinese as a second language or at least will
take the trouble to familiarize himself with aspects of
Chinese history and culture.
Hsu's book, The Challenge of the American Dream: The
Chinese in the United States, though it could have been
written by Jack London in the 19th Century, is fresh on the
market this year, down in the skidrow 24 hour dustless dens of
paperbacks, college outline series, and hometown papers, and
better yet, it's in colleges and universities that have adopted it
as a sociology text. To these Chinese writers, Chinatown is
fake China and we juk sing are contemptible for being
incapable of being authentically Chinese in anything but
yellow skin and black hair. They, and the white acceptance of
their point of view, tells us we're no good, that we have to
work to be something we are not, namely Chinese. Chinatown
is my home, I'm real there and it's real in me ... no fake
China. The Chinese cannot see that we juk sing are neither
Chinese nor American ... or does Simon Li expect the
delegation from Senegal to cab it up to Harlem for a breath of
home too?
With rare exception, all that has been published in this
country by "Asian-Americans" writing about themselves has
been white racist propaganda, quietly and subtly stated like
Hsu's, but propaganda nonetheless. The use of the word
"propaganda" implies a plot, control and censorship of
Asian-American publishing. Acting on a firm belief in the
stereotype of us being foreign, though born here, precludes the
need for a conscious plot against us. John Okada, author of
the first and only Japanese-American novel No-No Boy, was
born in Seattle, Washington, an ocean and a generation away
from Japan, spoke Japanese but grew up with English as the
language of his soul, a tongue developed in front of class
telling movies, telling radio shows on rainy days ... he wrote a
book on it, about a Japanese-American who's two years in
prison for refusing the draft in WW2 and comes home to a
world where all the men, especially the Nisei, seem to be vets.
The novel was rejected by several publishers because of
"language," some because of cuss words and others because of
his fluency with the English language. Strange for a man who
made his living as an advertising copywriter ... His novel was
rejected by every publishing house in the country. Finally
Charles Tuttle, a Japanese company, published the book in
1957. The 1941 publication date of Toshio Mori's collection
of short stories Yokahoma, California was delayed until 1949.
The very first sentence of William Saroyan's introduction led
you to believe, contrary to fact, that Mori was foreign born
and not native to English, and gave the reader to understand
that he wasn't reading a book of stories, but a series of English
papers: "Of the thousands of unpublished writers in America
there are probably no more than three who cannot write
better English than Toshio Mori." Rose Hum Lee, whose The
Chinese in the United States of A merica is considered the
definitive work on Chinese-American history and sociology,
could not find a publisher in this country. She published it at
her own expense in Hong Konh. In light of the publication of
c.y. Lee's eight novels, Francis L.K. Hsu's two books, the big
printings of Betty Lee Sung's work, with another book under
contract, the publishers' arguments about readers and lack of
interest in Asian-America fail to convince me. It's not a matter
of "It doesn't pay to write about Asian-America," as it is, "It
doesn't pay to challenge Charlie Chan."
America doesn't want us as a native visible minority.
They want us to keep our place as Americanized foreigners
ruled by immigrant loyalty. But never having been anything
else but born here, I've never been foreign, and resent having
foreigners telling me my place in America and America telling
me I'm foreign. There's no denial or rejection of Chinese
culture going here, just the recognition of the fact that
Americanized Chinese are not Chinese-Americans, and that
Chinese-America cannot be understood in the terms of either
Chinese or American culture or some "chow mien/spaghetti"
formula of Chinese and American cultures, or anything else
you've seen and loved in Charlie Chan. A Chinese can take
being told he speaks English pretty good and that he's pretty
"Americanized and aggressive" as compliments, as English and
being American for him are the results of conscious effort. The
same things said to a Chinaman are insults. It's putting him in
his place, not in the Chinatown a Chinese could see today, but
in the Chinatown that's in the blood of all juk sing, the
deathcamp Chinatown, Chinatown where the missionaries
erected forty churches and church agencies and opened
"Chinese schools" to teach us to -be Chinese, the way NASA
teaches Americans to be citizens of the moon playing on our
fear of deportation by perpetuating, if not the fact, then the
psychology of the Chinaman facing certain extinction by
death or deportation. That Chinatown is our language. It's in
our silence.
Like the languages the Chinese brought over a hundred
and twenty years ago that developed into an instrument of a
Chinese-American intelligence, making sense of a mess of
weirdness and happenings that didn't happen in China, and the
Kung fu that became high class dirty street fighting, the
Chinese movies I grew up with, that grew me up to figure in
the myths of a teacher, a quest, a gang and bloody death, were
65
only academically Chinese. As parts of my life, and the lives of
maybe two hundred thousand like me, second, third, fourth,
fifth, sixth, seventh generation, born here, bred here, home
here, the Chinese movies are not foreign entertainments, nor is
the meaning we take from them particularly Chinese. The
most popular Chinese movie is the sword slinger, a form
comparable to the American Western that serves the same
popular function of articulating the culture's fantasy of ballsy
individuality. The a-man-has-got-to-do-what-a-man-has-got-to
do ethic of gunslinger balls, that says the individual rides
alone, fights alone and duels man-to-man, is exercised only by
fools and the badguy in Chinese movies. The bad guy, a man
invincible in individual combat, goes down under the gang
swords of a hero, who's stepped out into life to learn that the
lessons of the master's school were right, that a man invincible
in individual combat will go down in gang action, that the
individual combat will go down in gang action, that the
individual needs friends. The balls the Chinese movie
celebrated in Chinatown was gang balls and didn't really clash
with John Wayne who was an extension of the master in Red
River, and Flying Tigers, and fit right in with street gangs.
When Frankenheimer's The Young Savages hit the streets,
Chinatown had been ready a long time with gangs. His movie
just gave us names for our gangs. We discovered names. Names
were big. From the dap down inspired badass Puerto Rican
gang in The Young Savages, one Chinatown gang took the
name of "The Horseman," and was home! That was a good
movie. Most were and are fatal doses of white supremacy.
The movies were teachers. In no uncertain terms they
taught America that we were lovable for being a race of sissies,
cowed by women, and not black with all our hearts, living to
accomodate the whitemen. Unlike the white stereotype of the
evil black stud, Indian rapist, Mexican macho, the evil of the
evil Dr. Fu Manchu was not sexual, but homosexual. The
sexual "evil" offered by Fu Manchu to the white race is
nothing less than satisfaction of the white male fantasy of
white balls being irresistable. Instead of threatening white
goddess blond bigtits with sexual assault, Dr. Fu swishes in to
threaten the All-Joe American with his beautiful
nymphomaniac daughter.
The differences between the evil Dr. Fu Manchu and the
good detective Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police
Department are superficial (except for one .. , Fu Manchu
asserts his will. He uses the first person pronoun "I." He
doesn't keep his place. Charlie Chan never uses the first person
pronouns "I" or "we" but speaks in the passive voice and
prefaces all his remarks with apologies ... "So sorry to
disagree ..." "Excuse, please ... may make one small
observation ...?"). But Fu Manchu and Chan are visions of
the same mythic being, brewed up in the subconscious regions
of the white Christian's racial wetdream. Devil and angel, the
Chinese is a sexual joke glorifying white power. Dr. Fu, a man
wearing a long dress, batting his eyelashes, surrounded by
muscular black servants in loin cloths, and with his bad habit
of caressingly touching white men on the leg, wrist, and face
with his long fingernails is not so much a threat as he is a
frivolous offense to white manhood. Chan's gestures are the
same, except. he doesn't touch, and instead of being graceful
like Fu in flowing robes, he is awkward in a baggy suit and
clumsy. His sexuality is the source of a joke running through
all of the forty seven Chan films. The large family of the
bovine detective isn't the product of sex, but animal
husbandry. Hollywood on high sacrificed three whitemen, gave
us their sons Warner Oland, Sidney Toler and Roland Winters,
Charlie Chan's I, II, and III, cast in the image of the most
perfect Chinese so that we might liken ourselves unto him, and
be guided along the true path toward assimilation. Chan did
not smoke, drink, or womanize, says Roland Winters, the last
surviving Charlie Chan of the movies. lie was Charlie Chan in
six of the 47 Chan features, and like Warner Oland and Sidney
Toler, he's out there, someplace, an invisible charge vibrating
in the air, mainlining to the brains of America from TV and
midnight festivals of pop art, driving America crazy. Chan has
been with us since 1926 and will live forever, teaching us our
place, Chinese culture, Confucius says, and how to move. "The
only Orientals I've ever dealt with," says Roland Winters, "I've
found very reserved of gesture. They don't wave their arms
around like Italians or Frenchmen. They're very, very
contained people.
"The only thing that stands out in the mind, when
you're playing an Oriental of education, is that, number one:
his manners are very good. He's very simple, and very
courteous. That's about it. So you do a lot of bowing," he
said, "rather than saying, 'right on!' you know, 'Yeah, vr
something. And I deliberately kept my hands at my side. I
very rarely used any gestures, unless they were absolutely
important. "
I asked, "How would Charlie Chan react to a physical
threat? "
"Oh, he was the bravest of the brave! Nothing ruffled
him, you know, he was a very courageous man. He, uh,
actually, as I recall, when we started this series, I said to them,
'If you want to do any physical stuff with the character, I'll be
glad to do it.' I was forty-one or two or three then when I
started these things, and in fairly good shape in those days.
And I told them that I was fairly proficient at judo and jiu
jitsu, which I had studied. And they said, 'Oh, no! No! Chan
never does anything like that! He never gets into violent
things.' "
"Well, let's say you were confronted by a young
Chinese-American who was bitter about Chan," I asked, "How
would you talk to him?"
"I hope it never happens to me," Winters said. An
elderly man who describes himself as being "older than God,"
still recognizable as the last Charlie Chan, knew the lessons
he'd been teaching, even when he'd been the guest of honor at
Chinatown banquets, he knew the clean fun of the Chan films
wasn't so clean and for some, not much fun. "The dice would
be loaded against me," he said, "because everything he said
would be more or less true. You know, you can say, 'Well,
there were different times, and people thought differently.'
And he'd say, 'Well, that's just what I'm talking about,' you
know, 'We were looked on as a minority and laughed at, and
made fun of. And you didn't do anything to help.' As I said
earlier, you asked me if I'd ever had any adverse comment
from Chinese. And I said, 'No, I never had, but I'm sure that it
was around.' I'm sure that any intelligent and proud Chinese
would more or less resent the whole idea of Chan. Not so
much Chan, because he wasn't too bad, but his, you know.
The silly kids that did stupid things."
The Chinese-American actors who played Chan's kids,
Keye Luke, Benson Fong, and Victor Sen Yung, thought they
were doing good for Chinese-America. Being "the silly kids
that did stupid things" countered the Dr. Fu Manchu image of
66
the Chinese, they believed and presented a more realistic image
of the assimilated 'Chinese-American, speaking good English,
wearing natty clothes and two-tone shoes. The language and
clothes might have been elements of a more realistic
characterization of the Chinese-American, but they were also
what made Chan's sons comical. Chan's sons were lovable
respectable fools, funny because they didn't have sense enough
to know they weren't white and wouldn't stop trying. Lovable
and respectable because they implicitly knew their place.
Birmingham (Mantan Moreland), the Chan's black chauffeur,
like Fu Manchu's Nubian slaves place the Charlie Chan (serving
the white men with his hands at his sides) and the
Chinese-American Honorable sons (laudably trying to
"outwhite the whites" to win acceptance) in proper racist
perspective. The Fu Manchu/Charlie Chan movies were
parables of racial order. In the cockeyed logic of that order,
the greatest insult to Chinese-America in these films, the
casting of a white man in the role of Charlie Chan, was and
still is no insult at all, but part of the charm of the films and a
sign of acceptance and assimilation.
NBC and Universal Studios, out to tap the continued
popularity of the Chan movies, planned to revive Chan, bring
him out in color and make a prime-time television series of
him and one of his honorable numbered sons. According to
the UPI, David Tebet, vice president for talent of NBC-TV was
asked to "Find us a Charlie Chan." Tebet went around the
world trying to sniff out "an Oriental actor who spoke English
that would be understandable in the U.S." He failed. Ross
Martin was cast in the role of Chan. It was all a matter of
language. But deep down, in the cultural subconscious there's
a link between tongue and balls that makes us sick. Roland
Winters, in an unguarded moment, explained the logic of
casting a white man in the role of Charlie Chan, this way:
"The only thing I can think of is, if you want to cast a
homosexual in a show, and you get a homosexual, it'll be
awful. It won't be funny ... and maybe there's something
there ..." It's all there, the complete message in easy to
decipher code. Somehow from Charlie Chan and his sons, from
television, from school from just like in America, we all get the
message. Wing Tek Lum, a young Chinese-American poet, a
winner of the New York Poetry Center award got the message,
and recited it from life in a poem, Grateful Here: "When
walking with a Caucasian girl/holding hands, I would pass by
teenage hangouts/overhearing insults. They would always pick
on the girl/as though she were a lesbian ..." meaning the
Chinese-American male holding that girl's hand was seen as no
man at all but as some kind of perverse woman. The
stereotype of us being a race without manhood has been so
thoroughly and subtly suffused throughout American culture
for so long, that it's become a comfortable part of the
American subconscious. White America is as securely
indifferent about us as men, as Plantation owners were about
their loyal house niggers. House niggers is what America has
made of us, admiring us for being patient, submissive, esthetic,
passive, accomodating essentially feminine in character
...what whites call "Confuciusist," dreaming us up a goofy
version of Chinese culture to preserve in becoming the white
male's dream minority. Our white-dream identity being
feminine, the carriers of our strength, the power of the race
belongs to our women. The dream women of this dream
minority naturally prefer white men to their own. This dream
is fulfilled in the movies, in life where the girls laugh your strut
away as a cop of another man's flash, easily pinning you for a
fake, and kicking you in the head with the news that real men
want them.
In our literature too, Chinese-American women have
been used to legitimze the white stereotypes of us. Four of the
five American-born Chinese Americans to publish serious
literary efforts are women. Of these four: Jade Snow Wong,
author of the famous Fifth Chinese Daughter, the daughter of
a Christian convert, was asked to write her book by a white
friend and aided by a white teacher; Virginia Lee, author of
The House That Tai Ming Built, writes of a beautiful
Chinese-American girl gah gah over a handsome blonde
"American;" Betty Lee Sung was recruited to write ab ou t the
Chinese in American for the Voice of America, which inspired
her to write Mountain of Gold, a direct descendent of Gunther
Barth's Bitter Strength; Diana Chang, author of The Frontiers
of Love, the finest book produced by a Chinese-American to
date, and three other novels. Whether or not the individual
works were authored by women or confirmed the white male
supremacist stereotype of us wouldn't matter if, including
Pardee Lowe's Father and Glorious Descendent, only they did
not constitute all, I mean, all, the sum, the total body, the
best, worst, and only Chinese-American literature.
Beyond these five serious literary efforts, all we've been
able to publish in America has been a series of "Inside
Chinatown" hardcover soft-headed tour guides and
cookbooks. America has locked the whole race into the same
housewife stereotype women are running out of town. Our
lack of manliness, and all that manliness means in this culture
... aggressiveness, creativity, individuality, just being taken
t
seriously ... is subtly but visibly confirmed in the movies, and
I
life imitating the dark art. Chinese-America was rigged to be a
race of males going extinct without women. We've always been
ridiculous with men and still outnumber our women, but in
I
Hollywood, we as men count for nothing. The roles of Asian
principals-Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, General Yang, Mr. Moto,
the heavy Asian males from Griffith's Broken Blossoms to 55
Days at Peking, full circle to the 1971 Fourth Coming of
I
Charlie Chan-have been played by white men, while the Asian
female rarely, rarely has been played by the real thing. The
World of Suzy Wong, A Girl Named Tamiko, I Was A Japanese
I
War Bride, House of Bamboo, Love is a Many Splendored
{
Thing, Sayonara, Man in the Middle (movies of the Asian
boom of the late 50's early 60's using Asians as metaphors for
I
blacks by cautious Hollywood) Alice's Restaurant, and a TV
commercial showing cheap wine featured authentic Oriental
lovelies mixing it up with real whitemen, a Command hair
spray commercial ... You had to be a Chinaman to look on
the preponderance of white male yellow female couples
dreamed up by Hollywood as another movement in white
America's effort to drive us into extinction .. , what few
women we had, the whites were taking ... that's what we
read, and that's what was and is happening. There's more
interracial dating and marriage between Asian-American
women and white men than Asian-American men and white
women. To our women, we neither act nor look like "men," as
a Chinese-American girl, a student of mine, wrote: "Chinese
guys are not attractive to me because they are not the so called
I
'Mr. American' type of people. First of all, most of all, most of
them are not muscular and romantic ... " As black skin meant
"ugly" in America, so our small size means "sissy." We don't
r
have a surplus of men but a surplus of sissies, in a culture that t
67
loathes sissies. To become an acceptable sissy, all America asks
of us is to become "Chinese" or "Japanese" esthetes, foreign,
exotic, artistic, shy, what James Shigeta was in those few films
that mixed a yellow man and white woman ... a kind of male
ingenue Tomboy, the passive, reluctant lover, virgin, an
Oriental art. object aggressively collected by Carol Baker in
Bridge to the Sun, and Victoria Shaw in Samuel Fuller's The
Crimson Kimono.
Every stereotype is based on a grain of truth I'm told by
friends not really telling me that sissiness is a Chinese cultural
trait that has somehow survived six generations of
Chinese-America, but honestly suggesting that my "heritage"
is responsible for the notable lack of Chinese-American
presence in American culture. We have a fine popular
reputation, but no popularly known works or political,
literary, or artistic spokesmen. What we are really as
Chinese-Americans is explained in terms of"what was done to
us here, what we were made to be, in the same way that the
passive, subtly anti-American character of American prisoners
of war home from the Korean conflict is explained in terms of
what was done to them, what three years of controlled
environment made them be. We haven't been here undergoing
brainwashing for a mere three years but six generations.
In the late 19th Century, after the railroads had made
San Francisco an elephants' graveyard for Chinaman, Christian
missionaries and a California State law outlawing Chinese from
all schools but "Chinese schools" confirmed our worst fears
and contrived to help us out of America by creating the
"Chinese schools" of Chinatown ... the same schools
Chinatown parents against busing look to for the preservation
of what they've come to believe to be "Chinese culture."
White missionaries and the Chinese Benevolent Association
still run most of these schools in San Francisco and
Chinatowns all over the country and Canada. Some of us are
convinced the schools and the concept of being
Chinese-American taught in these schools are ours. And the
whites love us for it. Luckily ... I think, luckily ... for me
different lessons were taught at my Chinese school.
From five to seven at night, after "American" school, I
went to Wah Kue Chinese School, under Chinese Nationalist
Party headquarters in Oakland. My mother had gone to this
Chinese school, and my aunts and uncles. The wood of this old
building smelled of them. The building smelled old of a lot of
people ... and we smelled too, of hot feet in high topped
rubber soled black and white basketball shoes and the sweat of
the quick two hours on the court, between schools. One day
the teacher who lived upstairs behind Party headquarters was
late. We didn't hear his step working down the old stairs. But
people were walking up there. Then they came down. Two
men. One, a real smiler, standing on the teacher's platform
told us Mr. Wong was dead. The girls signed and the boys ...
for us it was good news. The old man used to beat us. He had a
ruler with the measures marked off with brass tacks. One end
of the ruler had the Chinese word for "big" carved in it. I used
to think he hit us with that thing because we were born here. I
still have a scar. The other man was our new teacher, Mr. Mah,
a skinney. He wore his blue suit the way lunch wears a
papersack.
Mr. Mah taught math and engineering at a university, the
name of which he wouldn't mention, during the day, then he
would drive his white Chevy down to the town to teach us
Chinese. One day he stomped in with a newspaper and shouted
at us, in real Chinatown buck buck bagaw, an angry
quick-tripping tongue promiscuously roaming all the languages
we knew, raping them of sense. He said he'd been on the way
to school when he saw a headline "JOE" and he said to
himself, "Joe Stalin alive?" and stopped the car and bought
the paper. "And you know what it said?" He opened up the
paper and showed us, "J oe Dimaggio Marries Marilyn
Monroe!" And he was off into how crappy American
journalism was, who the Tribune's publisher, Senator William
Knowland, was, the China lobby, Mme. Claire Chenault,
pounding his way to sense the way we told big movies up in
front of class, on rainy days when we couldn't go to the yard
at recess or P.E. period. There we are, kids. I was ten, eleven,
maybe twelve. And he's talking about Chinatown and Chou
En-Lai, the Long March, and how the Chinese in America have
done nothing but keep their place, preserving a Chinese culture
white men invented for them to preserve. He named names,
raged against the Chinese-Americans who were horrified at the
sound of the words "Chinatown" and "Chinaman." "Who
made Chinaman ashamed to be called Chinaman?" he asked.
"Not the Chinamen who came over as Chinamen, who were
called Chinamen all the time, answered to Chinamen, worked
hard and died as Chinamen ... not the Chinamen, but the
whites, the 'Americans' the 'Chinese-Americans' work so hard
to please." The Chinamen were our ancestors he said. The
price we were paying for getting along here, for being accepted
was our pride. "Give up your fathers, forget the Chinamen and
talk about Chinese art!"
I used to keep him talking and screaming a show for us
the whole two hours, to get out of doing my Chinese lessons.
I'd go to the library and read books on China, go through the
papers for stuff on Korea, the French in Indo-China, Joe
McCarthy, what was being said about Chinatown, and next
day, when we're opening up our books, casually ask,
something like "Who was Joe Stilwell?"
Then I began to hear around the town that people
thought he talked like a Commie. The kids told their parents
and they talked, and I felt it was my fault. McCarthy was
going then. Mr. Mah was dumping on McCarthy too and the
whole Red Scare, while the Chinese Nationalists through the
Chinese Benevolent Association were forming a new
Chinatown organization, the Anti-Communist League, a group
that, not surprisingly, loved Chiang and hated Mao. I'm ten.
Commies are bad. And to get out of my lessons, and for fun,
I've been making this man talk like a Commie.
He used to drive me home to the restaurant, and we'd
talk in the car. I'd invite him to dinner in the kitchen, but he
never came, even when I said he could eat in front, he never
came. I told him I was sorry, that I didn't want to get him in
trouble but there was talk about him being a Commie, and
that's why kids were dropping out of the school. There was a
new school down the street, a free one, but that wasn't why
the kids were being pulled out in the middle of the semester. I
told him I'd been making him jump and scream to get out of
doing my Chinese lessons. He hissed, turned his head around
this way and that, pounded the steering wheel. "I hate the
Communists!" he said. He'd welcomed them at first, thought
there would be more freedom under them, enough for him to
start a school. He started a school and was kicked out of the
country. But he was glad to see China in the hands of the
Chinese for a change. Did I know they were producing steel?
Yes, he'd told us. There was that pride, for he was still
68
Chinese, and would always be, in the same way he hoped we
would be "Chinamen."
He told me he'd started a school on Taiwan and the
Nationalists kicked him out. "I'm not a Nationalist. I am not a
Communist! I am a Chinese. I am a teacher," he said. He said
he wanted us to know there was no shame in being born here,
that it was all right not to be a Chinese from China, that it was
all right not to be a white American. That "Chinamen," those
yellow men that worked on the railroad, the people whites
collapsed mines on, paved over and built towns on, called
names on, made laws against, and made their children want to
forget ... they, the Chinamen, were good men. They'd fought.
There'd been brave men who stood out among them. Their
fights and their brave men had been forgotten in favor of
remembering white champions standing up for Chinese (these
champs had been bought, and trained by the Chinese
Benevolent Association, hip to the fact whites didn't like
Chinese to be so aggressive and obnoxious as to speak for
themselves, but would listen to another white man) and
perpetuating the myth of timid, meek, passive Chinamen. He
said their children's children, if not their children, should be
proud of them Chinamen. And I was one of the children's
children. I didn't know what he was talking about. All I knew
was that I'd done it again. I'd triggered nerves in this man and
made him cry and angry.
The Joe McCarthy thing caught Mr. Mah when the
university came out with loyalty oaths. I learned this later.
Much later, looking for the man, years later. He wasn't an
American citizen. He couldn't in good conscience sign an oath
of loyalty to America ...
The school closed with a party. There were now five
students left. A slow change had been working in Mr. Mah the
past few weeks. One day he asked us all what we wanted to be.
I said "artist or writer." Bill wanted to write sports. Calvin,
some kind of science. He told us all to go into engineering, and
we knew something was wrong, for before he was saying we
should grow up and make Chinese-America APPEAR! And
becoming an engineer was to disappear. We all brought goodies
to the party. Calvin's sister made a cake. She's married, a
mother and a schoolteacher now. Calvin became an engineer,
gave it up and is now an orthopedic surgeon. Bill Wong is a
staff writer for the Wall Street Journal. We had a party eating
off the ping pong tables, the five of us ... the fifth changes
sheets and sweeps rooms in a large motel near where the
school used to be ... and Mr. Mah. He gave things from the
school. The schoolbell, ping pong sets, swords, Mr. Wong's
studded ruler went and nobody seemed to want anything else.
He asked me what I did when I was on my own, what I did for
fun. I told him I went to the library, read books on China,
newspapers, Edgar Allen Poe, Sherlock Holmes. He asked
Calvin, my best friend, what he did for fun. Calvin said he
listened to baseball on the radio. And the skinny Mr. Mah,
rattling around in his blue suit, pointed at me, and taid me to
stop. "Stop!" he shouted, and hit the top of the table with his
hand, "Stop reading! Go home and listen to baseball on the
radio! "
McCarthy only helped. It was the five of us, like the
characters in those old Chinese swordslingers we watched and
mixed up with Westerns to make a Chinatown soul, we the
master's loyal proteges of I SHOT JESSE JAMES, who
brought down his school and him toppling. We'd done what
the Communists, the Nationalists, the Sino-Japanese War,
WW2, The Revolution, Korea, the whole world and Joe
McCarthy alone couldn't do. He, Mr. Mah, was the Invincible
Enemy on Golden Mountain, and now he was bowed. We
made him stop being obnoxious, set him on the path to a
healthy attitude toward prejudice, an acceptance of the
"Aramco" psychology, assimilation into America without
violence. He was the best teacher we'd ever had, and the
bravest. Now he was the most broken man we'd ever seen in
our lives. He looked like everything he hated, at last and
finally a "Chinese-American." As with most of
Chinese-America and dutiful housewives ... the price of
acceptance was his soul, but he didn't pay it up. We had to
take it from him.
The myth of the Chinese Sojourner, the stereotype of
the gutless, passive, effeminate Chinaman has become too
precious a part of the American white male legend for America
to give her up easily. Virtually everything being written about
us today reveals our true racist value to America as a race of
white right hands to hit the blacks and "less assimilated" races
in the head with. We're numerous enough to showcase as a
minority but don't count enough to take up America's media
time and space speaking for ourselves. Meantime, in the
Hollywood Old West we're dreamt up again as passive Chinks
sucking up to the white man and blowing opium in Robert
Altman's McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, and Frank Perry's
DOC ... the only version of the OK Corral showdown to
epitaph us that way. ("Morning, Mr. Clanton ... Which one of
you killed Virgil?") In the making of ANOTHER TRAIN TO
ROB, a 1970 production recently aired network coast to coast
as a Saturday night movie, a young Chinese-American actor
was given a history lesson by veteran Western director Andrew
MCLaglen. McLaglen kept cutting the shooting of one scene.
Finally he told the Asian actors what was wrong. They were
moving forward and lifting their picks and shovels
threateningly when the white stranger (George Peppard) rode
into the mining works. According to the Chinese-American
actor, who holds a shovel in the scene, McLaglen said Chinese
in the early West would back off and keep their hands down at
their sides at the approach of an unfamiliar white man, so he
wanted the Chinese to back off and keep their hands down.
Not the kind of ancestors a kid would go looking for or want
to be known by, but the kind of people loved and celebrated
in the new movies and the new writing about us. This vision of
our history that blows a racist fantasy of Confucianist, hands
down sissies backing off, bowing, kowtowing Chinese pride has
turned off too many generations of us, off to exploring our
American past. There's very little of it left. Each new word on
us creeping off the pens of America's righteous white is an
epitaph to our sensibilifY, another word, another man, another
generation away from the truth ... one truth being that we
were never passive; we had to be beaten down ... that the
Jimmy Gin's, Ben Fees, Mr. Mah's come from a Chinaman
tradition. They come the Deer Creek Chinaman recalled in
James Ladd Delkin's The Diary ofa 49'er:
The miners on Deer Creek below the town turned out last
week and drove all the Chinamen off that stream. The
heathen had got to be impudent and aggressive, taking up
claims the same as white men and appropriating water
without asking leave. They cut one of the miner's dams
and, when he attempted to repair it, chased him away,
brandishing their shovels and making a great hullaballoo.
My sword is sheathed, but in my left hand now, Tom Wolfe.
Tom Wolfe, Kenneth LaMott, Mary Ellen Leary, Charles
Michener, Gunther Barth, Stuart Miller, Gerald Haslam,
YOU'RE WHITE RACISTS! I was asked to end on a positive
note, show a sign of hope. Name calling is nothing, but it's all I
can do where there's not a hope, not a prayer, not a
Chinaman's chance in hell of being heard above the snores of
America's established writers dreaming us to our rightful place
in their American dream.
Contributors
Victor and Brett Nee are graduate students at Harvard
University, in sociology and Japanese literature respectively.
Spending the present year in Japan, they are finishing a book
on San Francisco Chinatown, Longtime Californ': The Story
of an American Chinatown (Pantheon, 1973). In Spring of
1972 they spent three months in the People's Republic of
China.
Connie Young Yu is a director of the Peace Union of Palo
Alto, California. A fourth-generation Chinese-American, she
has written articles on Chinese America, and the "chak chee"
on the cover was her grandfather's.
Shawn Hsu Wong teaches Asian-American literature at Mills
College. He is director of the literary project of the Combined
Asian-American Resources Project (CARP) and a former editor
with Glide Publications and the Glide Urban Center in San
Francisco. He has recently been published in Asian American
Authors (Houghton Mifflin), the Sierra Club Bulletin, and
Bridge, an Asian-American magazine.
Lawson Fusao Inada teaches English at Southern Oregon
College and is a director of CARP. His collection of poetry,
Before the War (William Morrow), appeared last year. His
poetry has appeared in New Directions 23, Evergreen Review,
Asian American Authors, and other literary magazines and
anthologies.
Frank Chin has won the Joseph IIenry Jackson Award, James
T. Phelan Award, EastlWest Players Playwriting Award and
was a Fellow at the State University of Iowa. He has taught at
San Francisco State College, the University of California at
Davis, and at the Univ. of California at Berkeley, where he was
Writer-in-residence during the Spring Quarter 1972. His work
has appeared in Young American Writers, 19 Necromancers
From Now (Doubleday), Asian American Authors, and other
anthologies and magazines. Recently, his prize-winning play,
The Chickencoop Chinaman, was produced by the American
Place Theater in New York.
Sam Tagatac teaches film in the Asian-American Studies
Department at San Francisco State College and IS an
accomplished poet, short story writer, and filmmaker.
SUBSCRIPTION BLANK
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Wing Tek Lum lives in New York; he is a student at Union
Theological Seminary and winner of the New York Poetry
Center award.
H. Mark Lai was president of the Chinese Historical Society of
America and chairman of Min Qing in San Francisco in the
1950's. Co-editor of History of the Chinese in California: A
Syllabus, he has lectured at California State University, San
Francisco, and has written numerous articles for East/West; he
works as an engineer. He has just published Outline, History of
the Chinese in America.
Jeffery Paul Chan is Chairman of Asian-American Studies at
San Francisco State College, Director of Quality Education
and the Chinese-American Student Project, and co-founder of
the Combined Asian-American Resources Project (CARP). He
is working on a novel, and his fiction has appeared in Asian
American Authors, Aion--an Asian-American Quarterly, and a
number of periodicals.
Diane Mark is an instructor in Asian-American studies at the
University of California, Berkeley.
70
JOURNAL of CONTEMPORARY ASIA
A journal seriously concerned with the Recent contributors to Vol. I, no. 4 include:
nature and modes of social change in Renato Constantino, Bruce McFarlane,
contemporary Asia. In its pages we Gabriel Kolko, E. L. Wheelwright,
have published articles on both the theory Vincent PoUard, Wayne O'Neil, Frederick
of social change and interpretations of Clairmonte, John Cowley I Jonathan Fast
Asian political, social and economic and Erich Jacoby.
problems. A most important additional
function of the journal is the republishing
of rare documents issuing from various
liberation movements in the continent.
Annual Subscription Rates:
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Government agencies . .. $12.00; citizens of the Third
World in Residence . .. $6.00.
Joumal of Contemporary Asia, P. O. Box 49010,
Stockholm 49, Sweden
Pakistan is perhaps the best example of how foreign
military and economic aid can destroy a nation. Yet so few
Americans understand the U.S. role in the present political
crisis and human tragedy of Pakistan.
Fortunately there is one publication that can help you
in understanding the nature of struggle in Pakistan before
U.S. B-52s and napalm open your eyes to another Viet Nam.
It just happens that PAKISTAN FORUM is published overseas.
It therefore has the distinction of being the only English
language publication of Pakistanis which is not controlled
uy Pakistan's Fascist military junta.
For news, views and perspectives on Pakistan and other
third world countries, read PAKISTAN FORUM.
Subscription rate for the second volume (12 issues) $7.00
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,
BACK COVER
ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
OF THE UNITED STATES
Now that you have settled in America, you are not only entitled to enjoy the various blessings of America's
free political system, but in addition will be able to shoulder the responsibilities of protecting these free
traditions.
Since you have personally experienced the suffering and bondage which is perpetrated by tyrannical
communist rule, you must by now certainly be able to realize in a profound way how valuable freedom is and
how terrifying and detestable communism is.
Communists frequently engage in secret activities within America's borders and plot to destroy the free
traditions of America, and while our bureau is on constant alert and pays close attention to these matters,
from now on you too may join in our defense against communism. We hope you will note the following:
1. If while in America you become aware of communists or Maoist spies who are engaged in intelligence
work or destructive and subversive activities you are urgently requested to telephone the local branch of the f
FBI at once. (The telephone number will be clearly listed in the first two or three pages of the regular
telephone directory of any city.)
2. You are requested to make your report based on hard facts known to you; do not become confused by
hearsay.
3. It will suffice for you simply to report what you know; do not carry out your own investigations. You
must realize that investigation is a specialized and sophisticated profession, and if ordinary people attempt it
they not only risk their own safety but also risk startling the snake from his hiding place.
Should you have anything to communicate, please inform the local branch of this bureau immediately. Local
branch telephone: 742-5533.
-(j. Edgar) Hoover
Director, United States Federal Bureau of Investigation
[leaflets posted on the walls of every large American Chinatown during winter 1971-72]
72

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