Chinese Americans After World War II

ASSIMILATION AND DISCRIMINATION

MODEL MINORITY AND NEGLECTED MINORITY

ANOTHER WAVE OF CHINESE IMMIGRATION

A BRAIN TRUST, YET NOT TRUSTED

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In the 1950s and 1960s, social progress and the African-American civil rights movement opened some doors for Chinese Americans in employment, education, and housing. As a result, there was a steady exodus of Chinese out of America’s Chinatowns. The postwar economic boom, an expansion of higher education, and rapid suburbanization created unprecedented job opportunities in selective sectors of the labor market for women and minorities in the suburbs. College-educated Chinese Americans began to enter traditionally white workplaces and schools, neighborhoods and suburbs, and professional and civic organizations. In particular, the rapid growth of the defense industry, especially in the electronic, telecommunication, and aerospace sectors, provided a rare opportunity for Chinese Americans trained in science and technology. In addition, changes in immigration law in 1965 brought a new wave of Chinese immigrants from both ends of the economic spectrum.

ASSIMILATION AND DISCRIMINATION

The exodus to the suburbs proved to be bumpy and at times painful. The Chinese-American arrival in these areas was seen as a transgression into historically white space, and those who chose to move there were frequently greeted with resistance and more subtle forms of discrimination. Chinese-American men were deemed competent technical workers, excelling in mathematics, accounting, science, and technology, and Chinese American women were regarded as compliant and reliable clerical workers. Nevertheless, Chinese Americans found that these racial stereotypes severely limited their occupational choices and upward mobility. This kind of benevolent but selective assimilation gave rise to a Chinese-American concentration in certain types of occupations and residential settlements in neighborhoods and suburbs outside of Chinatowns in major cities, such as the Richmond District of San Francisco and Flushing in New York City. Clusters of Chinese-American populations grew in select suburbs, such Daly City, Fremont, Cupertino, Mountain View, Monterey Park, and Alhambra in California. Even in the midst of some integrated work-place and residential spaces, Chinese Americans remained, by and large, socially segregated.

In 1965 the U.S. Congress enacted amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that abolished the insulting limitations on immigration from the “Asia-Pacific Triangle” and phased out the discriminatory national origins quotas over a three-year period. The number of Chinese immigrants in the next few years jumped to 25,000 to 30,000 per year, contributing to a sharp increase in the Chinese-American population in the United States. (This population numbered 217,000 in 1960, 433,000 in 1970, 805,000 in 1980, 1.6 million in 1990, and 2.4 million in 2000). In signing the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared, “I pledge we will not delay or we will not hesitate, or will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same rights as all others in the progress of democracy.” That pledge turned out to be too late and a promise unfulfilled. By the late 1960s, Chinatown populations and socioeconomic problems were bursting at the seams and racial discrimination against Chinese Americans was no longer confined to Chinatown. Traditional social organizations, such as the huiguan (district associations) and gongsuo (family associations), were too Chinatown-bound, paralyzed, and ill-prepared, having only dealt with issues and problems within the geographic confines of traditional Chinatowns. Among middle-class Chinese Americans in the suburbs, the drive toward assimilation and the obsession with gaining acceptance by Euro-Americans stifled the founding of new Chinese-American civil rights, professional, and political organizations that could speak out effectively for the new Chinese America.

MODEL MINORITY AND NEGLECTED MINORITY

In spite of steady middle- and lower-middle class exodus of Chinese Americans from Chinatowns into white working-class neighborhoods and suburbs after World War II, Chinatowns did not disappear from America’s urban landscape, as predicted by the Chinese-American sociologist Rose Hum Lee. What emerged in the early decades after the war was the fragmentation, or more accurately, the bifurcation, of Chinese America. On the one hand, upwardly mobile, well-educated Chinese Americans were settling into middle-class occupations and residential areas in the suburbs. On the other hand, non–English-speaking, poor, new immigrants, especially those who came after 1965, were saturating the already over-crowded, dilapidated Chinatowns by the late 1960s, precipitating an explosive crisis in housing, employment, health, youth, and education, as well as a dire situation for the elderly population. This class divide was further aggravated by the diverse geographic and linguistic origins of the post-1965 Chinese immigrants.

Whereas middle-class Chinese Americans struggled to blend and assimilate themselves into their new neighborhoods, the historic Chinatown came under mounting pressures from both within and outside. From the outside came new spatial contestations: urban renewal versus preservation, and downtown corporate interests versus community and human interests. For example, the encroachment of downtown San Francisco into the historic Chinatown-Manilatown district succeeded in wiping out virtually the entire Manilatown, located next to Chinatown. The protracted high-profile struggle over the I-Hotel, the last building standing between renewal and Chinatown, is a textbook example of the stress and strain a typical Chinatown came under as America’s urban downtowns sought both renewal and expansion into minority neighborhoods. It was also a fight that pitted old, poor, vulnerable Chinatown against the interests of both city hall and big business.

Similar patterns can be seen in other Chinatowns across the United States. By the 1990s the gentrification of Chinatowns was occurring in lower Manhattan, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Houston. The new Tufts Medical Center in Boston, the freeway approach to the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, and the MCI Stadium in Washington, D.C., all demolished and replaced as much as half of these cities’ Chinatowns.

Chinatown leadership was clearly not prepared to deal with a crisis of this magnitude and intensity. Chinatowns may not have exploded into full-scale urban riots—such as America witnessed on TV in cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore in late 1960s—but high rates of juvenile delinquency, school dropouts, gang violence, suicide, mental illness, and sweatshop working conditions made local and national headlines. Yet the Chinatown establishments, for face-saving reasons, generally chose to pretend that these problems did not exist. When they did acknowledge them, they insisted the problems were nothing the Chinese themselves could not resolve.

On the other front, those from the Chinese-American middle-class who had left America’s Chinatowns and moved into new city neighborhoods and suburbs were joined by newly arrived, highly educated, middle- and upper-class Chinese immigrants, creating both a new class structure never before seen in the history of Chinese America and a class division that frequently undermined the racial solidarity among Chinese Americans in the struggle for civil rights. Moreover, many of the new immigrants became highly accomplished, widely publicized scientists and engineers in research universities, government-run laboratories, and corporate research facilities.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, during the height of the black civil rights protests, the middle- and upper-class Chinese were celebrated as the “model minority” by politicians, social scientists, and the national media. Suddenly, the despised Chinese Americans became successful and revered scientists in the national media, in stark contrast to other racial minorities. Based largely on the theory of assimilation, social scientists generated a substantial body of literature on the so-called success of the Chinese American middle-class in the United States. Using criteria such as achievements in education, occupation, income, language, religion, lifestyle, personality, residential location, and intermarriage, they showed how Chinese Americans had succeeded in unloading or eliminating their Chineseness and in absorbing the dominant white outlook and acquiring Euro-American social and cultural values. In fact, by the same criteria, Chinese Americans had become more successful than some Euro-Americans. This assessment, however, failed to mention the other half of Chinese America, which was desperately in need of public assistance.

Unfortunately, Chinese American “success” was an exercise of self-denial and self-deprecation. Furthermore, the government and the media were using their “success” ideologically, both to celebrate the United States as a land of generosity and unlimited opportunity for all willing to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, regardless of race, and to denigrate other minorities, most notably militant African Americans, for demanding civil and welfare rights. In the process, the success story was also used in 1970s and 1980s by the government to justify cutbacks in social spending and erode civil rights gains in minority communities across the nation, including Chinatowns. A historically unassimilable racial minority was now more assimilated than even Euro-Americans. It was an incredible transformation in the ideological and political use of the notion of assimilation. The subtext of this new narrative nonetheless remained racist, because it mentioned nothing of the ordeals of assimilation and pitted Chinese Americans against African Americans.

It was within this intensely unsettling environment that the Chinese American postwar baby-boom generation arrived on the campuses of American colleges and universities and injected a new counter-narrative to the assimilationist one. Under the influence of the Black Power movement, they discovered the bifurcated Chinese America, the myth of assimilation, pervasive institutional racism, and the meaning of being poor, disenfranchised, and powerless. They quickly joined other minorities, creating the Asian American movement and the Third World Liberation Front in the fight for a new Asian-American identity, Asian-American Studies programs, and a civil rights agenda on campus and in the communities. They also chose to return to the problem-plagued Chinatowns abandoned by their assimilation-obsessed parents, identifying themselves with the historic Chinatowns and their ongoing struggles against urban renewal and neglect. Along with many young Chinese-American professionals, these students and activists effectively assumed the leadership role in defining what constituted Chinese-American civil rights and what strategies to pursue to achieve their goals for Chinese America. They effectively ushered in a new era of Chinese and Asian-American identity and self-determination.

ANOTHER WAVE OF CHINESE IMMIGRATION

President Richard Nixon’s policy of détente with China, political instability in Southeast Asia, and the transfer of Hong Kong from British to Chinese sovereignty were landmarks in a political and economic realignment that brought a new wave of immigrants of Chinese descent to the United States. Middle- and upper-class arrivals with substantial resources joined the push for urban renewal in and around historic Chinatowns.

From New York to San Francisco and from Miami to Chicago, real estate, banking, the high-tech industry, upscale Chinese restaurants, supermarkets, and shopping malls in Chinatowns and in Chinese-concentrated suburbs were among the favorites of transnational capital from Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Their investments have profoundly changed the landscape and class structure not only of Chinatowns, but also of those middle-class suburbs with a strong Chinese presence. Nowhere is the change more dramatic and visible than in the string of suburbs along Interstate 10 heading east from downtown Los Angeles. Chinese businesses and shopping malls dominate Monterey Park, Alhambra, Rosemead, San Gabriel, El Monte, Hacienda Heights, Covina, Walnut, Diamond Bar, Roland Heights, and Pomona. Cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Toronto have several Chinatowns, while cities such as Houston, Dallas, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Miami have Chinese shopping malls here and there. The middle-class suburbs along the two highways—101 and 880—leading to the famed Silicon Valley south of San Francisco and Oakland have the highest concentration of Chinese-American scientists and engineers in the country. The presence of a high percentage of Chinese-American faculty, staff, and students at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco also add to the disproportional presence of Chinese-American scientists and engineers in the entire San Francisco Bay area.

A BRAIN TRUST, YET NOT TRUSTED

The original intent of the 1965 immigration law was to promote family reunion and attract brainpower and skillful personnel needed by the U.S. health care, science, and technology industries. Because the exclusion laws had kept Chinese-American families separated by the Pacific Ocean, the new law immediately allowed tens of thousands of family members of prewar immigrants to reunite with their loved ones. Most of them were non–English-speaking and of working-class background. They moved into historic Chinatowns, worked in service and garment industries, and joined their predecessors in pursuing the elusive American dream. The same law also enabled the government, universities, and corporations to massively recruit well-educated and highly skilled Chinese to meet the demand for skilled personnel in science and technology, the most important growth sector of the U.S. labor market in the second half of the twentieth century.

Before 1965, most highly trained Chinese immigrants had to circumvent the exclusion laws by entering the United States as refugees and foreign students pursuing advanced degrees. Most of these students eventually received Ph.D. degrees in science and technology and were absorbed, some legally and others illegally, by industry and academia. Thousands of well-prepared and highly motivated Chinese from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asian countries entered the United States in this way before 1965. The new law not only allowed the pre-1965 students who had completed their advanced degrees to become permanent residents, it also extended preferential treatment to foreign-trained specialists of this type to seek permanent status, as long as their skills were needed and they had company sponsors. From 1950 to 1985, at least 200,000 of “the best and the brightest” Chinese immigrants were admitted, providing needed skills in science and engineering in the high-tech sector of the economy. A disproportionate number of Chinese-American college graduates also selected science and engineering as their career, because they correctly perceived it to be a high-growth sector and less racially discriminatory.

Overall, this represented one of the largest concentrated and timely infusions of scientific talent in U.S. history. Like their counterparts in the second half of the nineteenth century, who provided the indispensable labor needed during the economic development of the West, Chinese-American scientific professionals formed the backbone and brainpower of postwar U.S. scientific and technological development. Most did basic research and performed technical services, but many also became distinguished scientists in virtually every scientific discipline. Quite a number of them would become Nobel laureates, members of the National Academy of Sciences, and leaders in various professional organizations. This was the group of high-profile achievers that contributed to the stereotype of the “model minority” in the 1960s and 1970s. There is no doubt about their contributions to postwar U.S. superiority in science and technology. But the failure of the media and the government to pay attention and do something for the poor and disadvantaged Chinese Americans, and to those racially discriminated against on both sides of the class divide, was a disservice to all Chinese Americans.

Indeed, even accomplished Chinese Americans faced persistent inequality and racial discrimination. Whether they were research scientists in corporate research centers, in government research facilities, or in research universities, they encountered three basic problems: employment discrimination, social isolation, and racial profiling. Selective studies showed subtle but pervasive workplace discrimination against Chinese Americans in several areas, including recruitment, professional training and development, promotional and research opportunity, and salary disparity. Chinese Americans also found themselves socially isolated both in the workplace and outside it, sometimes due to cultural differences, communication barriers, or racial stereotypes, such as a belief that Chinese Americans preferred to be alone or disliked organized games and parties.

Finally, because the war-related industries were the areas where the Pentagon invested the most in research and development, and because much of the biological, chemical, and nuclear research in both public and private sectors had military applications, Chinese Americans found working on jobs in these areas particularly difficult. First, many of the jobs in these areas required security clearances over which they had no control, and they had no way of knowing that a denial of security clearance was based on race or racial profiling. Second, once on the job, they found themselves vulnerable to suspicion of espionage, if not outright accusation of espionage by their colleagues or supervisors, again on account of racial profiling. Lastly, they found their well-being to be dependent on the ups and downs of U.S.-China relations. If the relations were good, they enjoyed the normal treatment that all employees received. But if the relations turned sour or tense, they found themselves in an isolated, if not hostile, work environment.

Even though no Chinese-American scientists have been convicted of treason or a serious breach of national security, many Chinese Americans have been wrongly accused and falsely imprisoned. Among those who have faced such treatment are the rocket scientist and aeronautic engineer Qian Xuesen, the founding director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the nuclear engineer Wen Ho Lee, who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Qian was falsely accused of being a member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1955. He summarily lost his rocket research contracts with all three branches of the armed forces, was placed under house arrest for five years, and eventually exchanged for some American POWs from the Korean War. To date, there is no evidence to support the allegations against him.

Likewise, Wen Ho Lee was named as the man responsible for stealing American nuclear secrets for China by the New York Times in March 1999, following a deliberate, anonymous government leak. He was summarily fired the next day from the lab for which he had worked for twenty years, in violation of the lab’s personnel policies and procedures. For nine months, he and his family, his colleagues, and his friends were subjected to intensive investigation by two hundred FBI agents and eighty computer specialists. The investigation turned up not a shred of evidence, yet he was indicted for the improper handling of classified information in the lab. He was promptly arrested, chained from the waist down, and put in solitary confinement for nine months without a trial or a conviction. He was finally allowed to plead guilty to one count of mishandling classified data and freed by the presiding federal judge, James Parker, with a profound apology from the bench and a strongly worded attack on the government for misleading him and embarrassing the United States in the eyes of the world. In other words, the only reason Lee was prosecuted and persecuted was on account of his race, as the chief of counterintelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory testified in congressional hearings in 2000, when Lee was in solitary confinement.

Clearly, the cold war legacy of racially profiling Chinese Americans remains alive and well. In the meantime, the U.S.-China relationship has become even more important, and also more volatile, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attack on New York’s World Trade Center. As long as Chinese Americans continue to be seen as foreigners, the fate of Chinese Americans, especially those in science, will be determined not by specific crimes they commit but by the fluctuation of U.S.-China relations and the racial prejudice deeply imbedded and institutionalized in the law enforcement agencies of the United States. Chinese-American brainpower and talent will remain critical, but Chinese Americans will be distrusted solely on account of their race.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chang, Gordon, ed. 2000. Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Chen, Yong. 1997. “The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California.” Oral History Review (Summer): 126–130.

Lee, Rose Hum. 1960. The Chinese in the United States of America. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

United States Commission on Civil Rights. 1992. Civil Rights Issues Facing Asian Americans in the 1990s. Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Wong, Bernard P. 1982. Chinatown: Economic Adaptation and Ethnic Identity of the Chinese. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Zhou, Min, and James V. Gatewood, eds. 2007. Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press.

L. Ling-chi Wang