The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [114]
Chinese Americans also organized to try to prevent the sale to Japan of American scrap metal, which was being turned into munitions used to kill Chinese. In January 1938, thirty-nine Chinese sailors in San Francisco refused to ship a cargo of scrap steel to Japan and were promptly dismissed from their jobs. Within months, Chinese American demonstrations broke out in New York and along the West Coast, effectively halting the shipment of raw war materials to Japan. One of the largest protests began in San Francisco in December 1938. When Japan’s Mitsui Company leased the SS Spyros, a Greek freighter docked in the city, to transport steel to Japan, Chinese American groups and their allies threw up a picket line on the docks. A crowd of two hundred Chinese volunteers and three hundred Greeks, Jews, and other Caucasians demonstrated in front of the Spyros. Soon they were joined by more Chinese Americans, who had flocked in from nearby cities, until the picket line comprised eight thousand people. Drenched by rain, they made a pitiful spectacle: the red ink trickled from their posters, and their faces, in the words of one reporter, looked as if they were “spattered with blood and tears.”
But pitiful sight or not, their demonstration won over the dock workers. Members of both the International Longshoremen (ILU) and the Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) passed resolutions of support, stating that they were “100 percent opposed to passing the picket line.” Loading stopped for five days, and through negotiations between the union and the Chinese American leaders it was decided that the picketing would end if the ILWU hosted a conference to promote an embargo on all war matériel to Japan. In a rare moment of solidarity, organized labor actually joined forces with the Chinese War Relief Association, the American Friends of China, and the Church Federation to initiate a national embargo. Their efforts and those of others paid off when in early 1941 Congress authorized President Franklin D. Roosevelt to halt the sale of arms and certain raw materials outside the western hemisphere (except to Britain), angering the Japanese.
Simultaneous with the embargo drive were efforts to raise money and supplies for the Nationalists. Starting in 1938, San Francisco Chinatown organized “Rice Bowl” parties—massive street spectacles that drew hundreds of thousands of people. Cities with large Chinese populations, such as New York and Los Angeles, also hosted their versions of these parties. Like Mardi Gras celebrations, they were boisterous, noisy affairs, lavish in scale and lasting for days. Through confetti-filled streets, the Chinese orchestrated dragon dances, floats, fireworks, re-creations of “Old Chinatown,” mock air raids, and sales of “humanity” buttons. Bystanders would pour money into rice bowls to support the Chinese war effort, or toss coins and dollar bills into a giant flag of the Chinese republic that was proudly paraded through the streets by Chinese women.
Fund-raising for the Pacific war united all levels of Chinese American society. Immigrants and American-born Chinese alike solicited money door to door and sold war bonds. Chinese physicians helped organize a blood bank in New York as well as the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, to assist sick and wounded victims of the Japanese invasion. Chinese volunteers served the Red Cross, preparing shipments to China of bandages, drugs, and vaccines. Middle-class women hosted bazaars, dances, and fashion shows for the cause, combining their social lives with social activism.