The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [112]
A number of them did. In the 1930s, an estimated one in five ABCs migrated to work in China. Most were sojourners, living in their ancestral homeland for a few years and then returning to the United States. Those with professional training found employment as engineers,scientists, doctors, professors, businessmen, social workers, and government bureaucrats. Foreign branches of American corporations, U.S. government agencies, educational institutions, and religious organizations like the YMCA needed the skills of college-educated Chinese Americans—preferably bilingual Chinese Americans, though individuals lacking fluency in Mandarin could still teach English. The Chinese Ministry of Industry sought engineers with experience in iron and steel, the Shanghai Aviation Association recruited pilots, and the Chinese government even invited ethnic Chinese farmers from the United States to migrate, promising them money, machinery, and property. Like the relatives of the first-wave immigrants, second-generation Chinese American expatriates (or true patriots, as some might define them) enjoyed a better standard of living than the typical Chinese native: many lived in prestigious residential areas populated almost entirely by other Chinese Americans, and hired teams of servants.
Interestingly enough, some fought fiercely to retain American customs in China, just as their parents had stubbornly retained Chinese customs in the United States. For instance, in 1932 Flora Belle Jan, the wife of a University of Chicago graduate, moved to Beijing when her husband accepted a position as a college professor there. Even though Jan, an ABC writer from Fresno, California, had always dreamt of living in her ancestral homeland, she could not establish an emotional bond with the natives because of her inability to read and write the language. She took a job at the U.S. Office of War Information in Beijing and befriended mainly English-speaking businessmen, diplomats, and students. She insisted that her Chinese-born children watch American films, wear Western clothes, and eat American food.
No matter what their personal feelings toward China, many American-born Chinese were forced to return to the United States for their own protection. For just when America was pulling itself out of the Great Depression, Nationalist China was facing a crisis so monumental it threatened to eclipse everything that had preceded it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“The Most Important Historical Event of Our Times”: World War 11
While the United States struggled in the 1930s to get through the depression, China faced a crisis the rest of the world would not face for the better part of a decade—the beginnings of war. By 1931, the Japanese had already seized Manchuria. There were further skirmishes in various places, including Shanghai, all marked by the brutality of the Japanese military against soldiers and civilians alike. Because the Chinese central government was weak and had failed to modernize its military, the Japanese were able to act with impunity. In the long term, their expulsion from China would require more than the efforts of the Nationalist government. It would require Japan’s defeat by the West.
Alas, the first, and only, response to these incursions, which were clear violations of international law and were executed with total disregard for the loss of civilian life, came from the League of Nations, which censured Japan as an aggressor nation. Japan rejected the opprobrium and withdrew from the League, undermining that body’s credibility just at a time when it needed it most; within a few years, Italy and Germany would pose bold new challenges to the weakened League’s ability to act as a peacekeeper. So would Japan, which in 1935 moved into a region of China now known as Inner Mongolia.
Two years later, in July 1937, Japan’s previous sporadic, but never haphazard, military thrusts into China reached the level