The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [117]
Pearl Harbor brought devastating consequences for the Japanese American community, even though as a group they had played no role in the attack. The U.S. Department of Justice rounded up a hundred thousand Japanese Americans along the Pacific coast and in Hawaii and interned them at remote concentration camps (in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and elsewhere), even though many were loyal American citizens who had lived in the United States for generations. Rodney Chow, who spent his boyhood in Los Angeles, remembers how Pearl Harbor changed the dynamics of playground politics in his neighborhood. A few Japanese American children, he recalled, used jujitsu to torment Chinese kids on the block. After December 7, these bullies were suddenly trying to convince their schoolmates that they were Chinese American, not Japanese. Then the Chinese in the neighborhood started to wear badges to distinguish themselves from the Japanese. Before long, the Japanese children disappeared altogether, and Chow did not see them again until the war was over, when they returned from the relocation camps.
A few progressive Chinese Americans, like the activist Hung Wai Ching in Hawaii, spoke out on behalf of Japanese American rights. But Hawaii had a fairly long tradition of Asian American activism, as well as better integrated Chinese and Japanese communities.28 In the continental United States, however, the majority of Chinese Americans kept silent about the civil rights abuses against other Asian Americans while accepting the temporary, short-term gains they might enjoy as a preferred minority. Terrified of being mistaken for Japanese, some Chinese Americans even carried identification cards signed by a Chinese consul general, wore buttons announcing “I am Chinese,” and placed similar signs in their shop windows to warn off potential vigilantes.
But ethnic profiling would hurt the entire Asian American community. Inevitably, some whites refused to distinguish between foreign Japanese nationals serving Japan’s imperialist designs and Americans of Japanese and Chinese ancestry; it was easier to lump all Asians into a single despised group, “the Japs.” Yu-shan Han became the target of anti-Japanese xenophobia when he was renting a house in Beverly Hills, California, during the war. Believing that Han was Japanese, the neighbors repeatedly reported him to the police, insisting that he was using a secret radio transmitter to communicate with enemy agents. Even Chinese Americans in the military were not immune to racist attacks. One Chinese American woman enlistee recalled how a white man spun her around in the middle of a street in Baltimore screaming, “You damn Jap, get out of that uniform!”
Some Chinese Americans saw a silver lining in this shift of racial antipathy and used the newly favorable Chinese image to bring about the repeal of the exclusion laws. After Pearl Harbor, several influential Americans, both ethnic Chinese and Caucasian, lobbied to overturn the ban on Chinese immigration that had been enacted back in 1882. In May 1942, more than 180 Caucasians founded the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, arguing that the United States should end exclusion for both moral and practical, war-related reasons.29 The movement’s leading activists included Ng Poon Chew, editor of Chung Sai Yat Po, Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Good Earth and daughter of Christian missionaries in China, and Buck’s second husband, Richard Walsh, a New York publisher. But the woman who dealt exclusion the strongest blow was Meiling Soong, the wife of the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek.
Madame Chiang Kai-shek grew up