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By Root 1491 0

words. In the 1930s, the Oriental Division of the United States Employment Service in San Francisco reported that more than 90 percent of their placements were in the service sector, mainly the food industry. Some Chinese engineers and scientists were demoralized at finding themselves back in Chinatown working at menial jobs in laundries and restaurants. “Father used to tell me, ‘Look at your boss,’ ” said James Low, an American-born Chinese, whose boss had been educated as a mining engineer, but ended up in a garment factory. “‘He was going to be an engineer, look what happened to him!’ ” One Chinese graduate of MIT became a waiter. Residents of Little Canton, a Chinese enclave in Cherrywood, California, remembered that several Chinese Americans with engineering degrees had no choice but to work in restaurants. “Oh, you couldn’t get a job outside of the Chinese community because, you know, look [at] your face,” one elderly bachelor said. “You’re Chinese, you’re not American. So what if you’ve got ten degrees?”

Perhaps China, then, was the better option for them. In 1933, the respected San Francisco Chinese-language newspaper Chung Sai Yat Po openly urged young Chinese Americans to seek employment in their ancestral homeland, where they would be less likely to encounter racism. The bleak job prospects during the Great Depression made it easier for some youths to vow allegiance to a motherland they had never seen. Rodney Chow remembered his Chinese American friends dreaming about going “back” to China, even though some had difficulty speaking the language and had never visited the country. In 1935, 75 percent of the attendees at the Chinese Young People’s Summer Conference in Lake Tahoe announced that they wanted to serve China, many professing that it was their duty.

In 1936, the conflict over identity and loyalty was intensified in a national essay contest with the theme “Does My Future Lie in China or America?” The competition, sponsored by the Ging Hawk Club in New York, an organization founded by the International Institute of the YMCA, provoked a lively debate among second-generation Chinese Americans, and the Chinese Digest published the finalists’ essays.

The winner was Robert Dunn, a student at Harvard. Dunn viewed himself as a human bridge between two cultures. He could achieve more in the United States, he wrote, by fostering understanding, goodwill, and business partnerships between the two countries. But he also noted that “ever since I can remember, I have been taught by my parents, by my Chinese friends, and by my teacher in Chinese school, that I must be patriotic to China.” China had enjoyed a glorious four-thousand-year history and Robert owed his very existence to his Chinese ancestors, they told him, and he should recognize the humiliation endured by the Chinese in the United States. “Don’t you realize that the Chinese are mocked at, trodden upon, disrespected, and even spit upon?” he quoted his parents as telling him. “Haven’t you yourself been called degrading names? Have you no face, no sense of shame, no honor? How can you possibly think of staying in America to serve it?”

Yet Robert also felt that the United States was worth defending. “I owe much pride and gratitude to America for the principles of liberty and equality which it upholds, for the protection its government has given me, and for its schools and institutions in which I have participated. Without them, I certainly would not be what I am now. I am certainly as much indebted to America as I am to China.” Employment opportunities were scarce in China, he wrote, and as an American he would have a hard time adjusting to life there. His future, he concluded, belonged to America.

The second-place winner, Kaye Hong of the University of Washington, had no feelings of ambivalence. His duty, “built on the mound of shame,” lay in China. “The ridicule heaped upon the Chinese race has long fermented within my soul,” he wrote. He believed that jobs for ABCs were more plentiful in China, where they were needed to build a greater, stronger nation.