The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [115]
In the end, some twenty cities collected about $20 million for the Chinese War Relief Association, and during the eight years of Japanese occupation, the Chinese American community donated a total of $25 million. These sums were not remarkable for their absolute dollar amount, but certainly so for the amount per individual. The ethnic Chinese community in the continental United States was minuscule during the Pacific war: about 75,000 at the start of the 1930s, a number that increased by only a few thousand as the decade progressed. The fund-raising efforts drew about $300 for every Chinese in the country, a substantial figure, particularly given the value of the dollar in the 1930s and the constricted budgets of most Chinatown residents, many of whom earned only five or six dollars a week; some gave almost every cent of their life savings to the cause.
However noble the intent, the effect of these fund-raising efforts on the outcome of the Sino-Japanese War is uncertain. Although some of the money bought clothes, gas masks, mosquito nets, and airplanes for the Nationalists, no one can determine if the funds collected, or provisions purchased with them, actually reached the Chinese soldiers. It is now clear that the Nationalist army was hardly a model of virtue or efficiency; during the war Chinese peasants were routinely kidnapped and conscripted into the army, given starvation-level food rations, and brutalized by their superiors. Montgomery Horn, the filmmaker of We Served with Pride, a documentary about Chinese American contributions to World War II, has expressed the belief that most of the money intended for the soldiers ended up in the pockets of corrupt Nationalist officials.
The heartfelt efforts did, however, give rise to a sense of political unity among the Chinese in the United States. Ironically, these fund-raisers drew on and in turn reinforced dormant feelings of loyalty to China during an era when ever-diminishing numbers of Chinese Americans had personal connections to their ancestral homeland. In 1940, for the first time, the percentage of U.S.-born Chinese Americans surpassed that of foreign-born immigrant Chinese. Thus, a majority of the Chinese in America had grown up in America, and most had never been to China. This left them with very little sense of personal identification with China, except through their parents. The war brought the entire community back together at just the time when a drift toward assimilation was gaining momentum.
By 1940, Japan had occupied nearly all of China’s major cities, and the retreating Chiang Kai-shek was forced to establish a wartime capital in Chongqing, in Sichuan province deep in the interior of China, but still subject to relentless Japanese air raids. With the coast firmly under Japanese control, the only route Chiang had available to obtain military supplies from the outside world was the Burma Road, a single treacherous ribbon of dirt highway twisting through the mountains between west China and Burma. Despite China’s precarious condition, the country itself and its vast territories seemed unconquerable. Japan found itself mired in Chinese guerrilla warfare, overwhelmed by the nation’s size and enormous population.
Although foreign correspondents sent back grisly reports for U.S. newspapers, and short newsreels about the Japanese invasion were shown in theaters, the war in China meant little to most Americans. The United States, with its predominately European-descended population, focused much more attention on the war in Europe, where one country after another was falling to the Nazi blitzkrieg. But so strong were the isolationist sentiments among Americans that