The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [102]
A developing Chinese American subculture afforded young ABCs opportunities to select their own marriage partners. Excluded by white fraternities and sororities, Chinese American college students in California built their own Greek system. In 1928, six Chinese engineering students founded Pi Alpha Phi (nicknamed “Pineapple”) at the University of California at Berkeley. Two years later, Chinese American women at San Francisco State Teachers’ College created the first ethnic Chinese sorority in the country, Sigma Omicron Pi.
Cities with well-established Chinatowns, like Los Angeles and San Francisco, organized Chinese American social clubs at local high schools and colleges, where students could hold their own dances and parties. In 1929, a reporter in San Francisco observed large posters of a Chinese flapper dancing with a young Chinese man in formal wear; the caption read “Chinese Collegiate Shuffle!” “What would old John Chinaman think,” the reporter wrote, “could he see one of these lively dancing parties of the Chinese students of the San Francisco district, jazz music, bright costumes, beautiful young women, gaiety on every hand. ‘Everything but hip flasks,’ someone said of the dance.” In regions with smaller (or nonexistent) Chinese communities, such as the South, some ABCs were willing to travel long distances to socialize with other ABCs. Edward Wong recalled that “our parents always preached that you need to marry a Chinese. We used to have dances together. We used to drive from San Antonio all the way to New Orleans or Houston for a dance on Saturday night and go back home on the same night.”
Some Chinese parents were apprehensive about this new freedom. Many immigrants who cherished the Confucian ideals of wifely obedience and filial piety believed that their sons would find the embodiment of these qualities only in native Chinese brides. They worried that American-born Chinese women were “spoiled,” “too Americanized,” and liable to be difficult daughters-in-law. One man recalled that the parents in his community would have been especially proud to have a daughter-in-law from China, because she represented “the real thing.”
In addition, some immigrant parents wanted their daughters to marry native-born Chinese nationals, but often the legal and cultural barriers proved overwhelming. American-born Chinese women who married native Chinese men would lose their citizenship. The Expatriation Act of 1907, which forced all women to adopt their husband’s nationality upon marriage, gave way to the 1922 Cable Act, which stipulated that any woman who married an alien ineligible for naturalization would relinquish her own U.S. citizenship.
While some foreign-born Chinese immigrants had Western educations and considered themselves modern men, they were not always prepared for the degree of female liberation in American society. In the 1920s, second-generation Chinese women enjoyed a level of freedom inconceivable to most families in China: they worked outside the home, volunteered for various social causes, married men of their own choice, and practiced birth control. Some native Chinese men were horrified by the casual displays of intimacy between Americans of the opposite sex. When Yu-shan Han arrived in the United States in 1926, he was greeted by a friend’s girlfriend with a kiss. Appalled, he described the episode in an essay for a Chicago literary contest on the subject of “My Most Embarrassing Moment.” He didn’t win the contest, he later explained, because a kiss from a girl meant nothing in the United States.
“Chinese women who are born here are regular flappers,” Mar Sui Haw, an upwardly mobile first-generation Chinese immigrant in Seattle, declared in 1924. He went to San Francisco to work for his uncle’s store and newspaper,