The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [113]
The Japanese imperial government expanded operations by dispatching troops to northern and central China, as well as to the coastal city of Shanghai, China’s largest metropolis. Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist government, invested his best forces in the defense of Shanghai, but they were no match for Japan’s better trained and better equipped military. The Nationalist army suffered some 250,000 casualties in a vain attempt to save the city. Before the end of the year, Japanese forces had also conquered Nanjing (Nanking), the capital of the Republic of China. In one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, a bloodbath that came to be known as the Rape of Nanking, the Japanese imperial army raped and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians, presaging a war that would last eight years and claim the lives of as many as 35 million Chinese.
Especially hard hit was the Toishan region, the point of origin for most of the Chinese immigrants in America. When the Japanese seized the region’s crops to feed their own troops, many locals simply starved to death. Further, the Japanese capture of the port city of Hong Kong in 1941 closed off a major hub of communication between China and the United States. For generations, Hong Kong had served as the headquarters for major emigration firms, which safely and reliably delivered money from Chinese American men to their Toishanese families. The fall of Hong Kong ended this inflow of overseas money, turning the lives of many Gold Mountain families upside down almost overnight. Having settled in as members of the local leisure class, they were particularly vulnerable because they no longer had the skills required to provide for themselves and their families. To buy food, some pawned first their jewelry and furniture, then their homes, and finally themselves. In the most desperate cases, Gold Mountain wives entered into prostitution and sold their own children into slavery. Before the war’s end in 1945, at least 150,000 Tolshanese—about one in four—had either died or disappeared.
Galvanized by the plight of their families, and horrified by reports of Japanese atrocities, Chinese Americans rallied to promote public awareness of the Sino-Japanese War. Most Chinese immigrants had not been formally educated in the United States and were not fluent in English, but they did their best, however imperfectly, to make Americans aware of the situation in the Far East. The publicity campaign was waged both within and beyond the Chinese community. In general, the recent émigrés used Chinese newspapers, radio programs, and street demonstrations to disseminate within the Chinese communities news of the dire plight of China, while the American-educated Chinese used the English-language press and the lecture circuit to reach a broader segment of Americans. In New York City, the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance distributed thousands of English-language flyers through their laundry shops, asking Americans to boycott Japanese goods.
The Chinese Americans not only talked, they acted. One practical contribution they could offer China was skilled manpower in aviation. During the early stages of the Pacific war, China’s air force was so primitive that it posed virtually no threat to Japan’s. At one point Nationalist China possessed fewer than ninety planes in safe working condition, compared to more than two thousand in the Japanese military. But in the United States, as early as the 1920s, Chinese Americans had founded a number of private aviation schools or clubs to train young pilots to defend their ancestral homeland