A colorful, sometimes sad story
Rich Simons, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
----------------------------------- The Chinese in America Iris Chang, Viking Press, 2003 496 pages -------------------------------------
Americans are very rich people. They want Chinaman to come and will make him very welcome. There you will have great pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description. You can write to your friends or send them money at any time and we will be responsible for the safe delivery.
It is a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers. All alike; big man no larger than little man. There are a great many Chinamen there now, and it will not be strange country. China god is there, and the agents of this house. Never fear, and you will be lucky. (From a 19th century promotional/advertising poster at a Hong Kong brokerage house).
From laundrymen and railroad workers to astronaut fathers, parachute children and Will Hung, (if you don't know him yet, check www.williamhung.net) Chinese-Americans have played all those parts in the building of the United States.
Indeed, there have been some fantastic success stories, from skating champion Michelle Kwan, to the founder of Yahoo, to David Ho -- Time Man of the Year for his work on HIV drugs --, violinist Yo Yo Ma and, of course, the aforementioned Mr. Hung, in addition to millions more who have contributed mightily to the making of what the United States is today.
Now I doubt that anyone has kept such statistics, but if anyone measured the achievements and contributions of Chinese- Americans vis-a-vis its number of people, against any other ethnic group, be they Irish-Americans, German-Americans, French- Americans, Italian-Americans, African-Americans, Mexican- Americans or Swedish-Americans, it seems quite clear the Chinese- Americans would rank among the highest of any in terms of achievement.
Chang's latest book The Chinese in America (she is also the author of Rape of Nanking -- a gut-wrenching historical account of the horrible brutality of the Japanese after they invaded China in the 1930s) is part serious historical treatise, part social commentary and part a call-to-arms against racial stereotypes as they regard the more than 3 million Chinese- Americans, who have called the U.S. their home over the last 200 years.
As a Californian of European descent, who has lived in Indonesia for the better part of seven years, I have enormous respect, even awe, for the people, the struggles and achievements of the Chinese diaspora in both places, as well as in East Timor and Cambodia, where I still have acquaintances with several people who claim Chinese heritage. I have had the pleasure of being very close friends during my school days in California and here in Jakarta with many Chinese-Americans and Chinese- Indonesians, respectively.
While none of those experiences qualify me as an expert, I was still somewhat surprised by Chang's almost unceasing criticism of the Chinese experience in America. In the third paragraph of the Introduction, she drops all pretenses when she states, "... how much more difficult was their struggle because of the racism and xenophobia of other Americans?"
It's a fairly sweeping accusation/criticism of all other Americans who are not of Chinese heritage. In context, there were times and places in the history of their journey in America when racism was clearly a distinguishing feature of the experience for many Chinese-Americans, as well as Mexican-Americans and African- Americans -- but all other Americans and at all times?
When she sticks to the historical events, she does a great job of encapsulating the cultural background that most of her fellow Chinese-Americans still respect and maintain, and how the three different waves of immigrants over the last two centuries changed depending on world political and economic events.
The first wave consisted of mid-19th century laborers and gold-rushers, later to become shopkeepers, Wild West laundrymen and builders of the great Transcontinental railroad. They mostly came from well-ordered and structured, but poor villages in China to a very chaotic, lawless, inhospitable Wild West, where the rough-hewn gold mining men outnumbered women 12 to 1.
The second wave came a century after the gold rush of 1849 and consisted of highly educated, anti-communist Chinese from Taiwan in the wake of Mao's revolution on the mainland. The arrival of this wave created a bipolar community, sharply divided by wealth, education and social status. But as many found, they had so many cultural traits that were similar, such as devotion to family, hard work and entrepreneurship that it helped bridge the differences, and most now intermingle and intermarry as Americans.
The third wave encompassed all socioeconomic groups and also involved many from the mainland as Sino-U.S. relations improved under president George Bush Sr. Hong Kong got into the act in a big way before the 1997 British handover and spawned the trans- Pacific commuting Astronaut Father. In addition, another group is in this wave; the more than 40,000 adopted Chinese children (now at a rate of more than 6,000 per year), most into white upper- middle class families.
As most of them are still toddlers, it is not clear what impact they will have -- perhaps a bridging of the racial gap, which she adamantly harps on throughout, between white America and their Chinese-American brethren.
Their struggle for acceptance is a recurring theme for Chang, regardless of which wave they were part of. But as most sociologists will make clear, acceptance is a two-way street. Take the story of one of the earliest immigrants who came over as a laborer with nearly 200 of his countrymen on the Libertad from Canton to San Francisco, enticed, perhaps, by that early promotional ad above. He was quoted as saying he was half-starved because it was so difficult to eat the food of the "barbarians", referring to the ship's crew, who were of European descent.
Finally, while I highly encourage people to read this book (regardless of ethnic heritage), I did find Chang's negativity and bitterness wearing. In doing other research on the subject, for instance, the dozens of websites I came upon that dealt with Chinese adoptions, all made clear that the experience, for both parents and children, was that of newfound joy and great support from a variety of people and government agencies.
Yet Chang's only contribution to this obvious win-win situation was to quote some deranged Vietnam veteran, who she claims approached a mother with her adopted toddler and said, "I killed lotsa your cousins".