The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [103]
They [Chinese American women] do not have any virtues whatever. Chinese women who come over are so taken with them that they do not try to learn what they should. In China no women are immoral. Here they do not care. It is hard for me to pick up a mate here. I like to marry and have a family. Before the new immigration law, I thought I would like to go back to China and get a wife, but now I cannot do this. It is hard. A class of Chinese girl here in this country who do not care. Shows, dancing all the time. I cannot stand that kind.
Other men shared these sentiments. “It is not right for Chinese man born in China to marry Chinese woman born in America,” Andrew Kan asserted. “They will not be happy. They do not have the same training, the same feeling about the home the girls do in China.” In the 1920s, when Wallace Lee, a Chinese immigrant in Buffalo, New York, was searching for a wife, his cousin warned, “Don’t get married in the United States! Chinese girls talk about freedom, freedom, free, free, free too much! Too new, too fresh, couldn’t make a good wife.”
Still other taboos remained to be broken. Some American-born Chinese braved ridicule, gossip, and ostracism by entering into interracial marriages, which in many states were banned entirely by anti-miscegenation laws. For many immigrant parents, such marriages were unthinkable. Some could not tolerate their sons or daughters wedding outside the Chinese ethnic community, and a few Chinese Americans of that era recall being shunned by friends and relatives simply for marrying Japanese or Korean Americans. Within certain families, even marriage to a person of Chinese heritage was not enough to fulfill strict family requirements; Rodney Chow recalled that his grandparents did not want any of their offspring to marry outside their own dialect.
Yet interracial unions were more common than might be expected. Studies in some parts of the country found that as many as a quarter of all marriages involving Chinese partners were mixed marriages. In Los Angeles, Milton L. Barron surveyed 97 Chinese marriages contracted between 1924 and 1933 and found that 23.7 percent were interracial. For the same period, he examined 650 Chinese marriages in New York State (excluding New York City) and discovered that 150 were to non-Chinese partners. The interracial marriage rate for Chinese in the United States was much higher than that for Japanese, at 6.3 percent, or blacks, at only 1.1 percent.
In time, some of these marriages transcended the barriers of prejudice. When Tye Leung, a Chinese American interpreter at Angel Island, married Charles Schulze, a Caucasian immigration inspector, both were fired from their civil service jobs in San Francisco. Many Chinese snubbed them as well. At first, the residents of Chinatown referred to their mixed-race children as fan gwai jai (“foreign devil child”). But the Schulze family gradually gained acceptance, if only because Tye Leung devoted countless hours to volunteer service in the community. Later, she reminisced that her husband’s mother and her own parents “disapprove very much” of their marriage, but as she observed, “when two people are in love, they don’t think of the future.”
While some parents fretted over the behavior of their children, others may have been even more concerned about the well-being of their families back in China. The 1920s were an era of prosperity for the United States, but in China the decade was a time of lawlessness, when the country was ruled by rapacious warlords. By the late 1920s, there were hopeful signs that the Republic of China would survive. A young Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, emerged to unify a fractured nation. The son of a merchant in the coastal province of Zhejiang, Chiang had gained his military training first in Japan and later, as a protégé of Sun Yat-sen, in the Soviet Union. Between 1926 and 1928 he led a campaign, known