The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [120]
Despite overt racism, for many the benefits of military service far outweighed the disadvantages. It empowered Chinese Americans, giving them a sophistication and worldly knowledge they never could have achieved in the insular world of America’s Chinatowns. Their daily contact with white men made whites less threatening and mysterious. When Paul S. Wong taught an English-language class to illiterate white recruits, the myth of white superiority was forever demolished for him. “I was so damn surprised when they could not write their name [or] even add,” he said.
The military also gave Chinese Americans the opportunity to be heroes. One such was Gordon P. Chung-Hoon, a Honolulu-born ABC and 1934 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. In the spring of 1945, Chung-Hoon served as commanding officer of the USS Sigsbee, which helped destroy twenty Japanese planes near the island of Kyushu. When a kamikaze pilot smashed into the Sigsbee, throwing the port engine and steering control out of commission, Chung-Hoon skillfully handled two crises simultaneously: he directed anti-aircraft battery fire against the enemy while overseeing damage control to allow the Sigsbee to reach port safely. He won the Navy Cross and Silver Star for conspicuous gallantry and extraordinary heroism, and in 2001 the Navy honored Rear Admiral Chung-Hoon posthumously by naming a guided missile destroyer after him.
Maybe most important, service in the U.S. military forced Chinese Americans to question their identity and every value taught them by their parents since childhood. For many ABCs, the war was the defining moment of their lives, the pivotal years that changed them, psychologically, from “Chinese” to “Americans of Chinese descent.”
One military unit in China—the all-Chinese American 14th Air Service Group (part of the “Flying Tigers”), which had approximately 1,300 members—vividly illustrates this transformation. When Lawrence Chen was a boy, his parents told him, “China is your home.” But after Chen joined the U.S. Army Air Force and entered the Pacific theater, China became more than a glorified abstract concept to be discussed over the dinner table; it was a daily reality. It soon became clear to Chen and other ABCs in the U.S. military that China was not, and never could be, “home.” Their experience destroyed all their romantic illusions about China. They were shocked by the levels of KMT corruption—by the sight of Nationalist soldiers marching in straw sandals (or sometimes barefoot), of peasants being dragged out of their homes and forcibly impressed into the military. Their lives had been threatened not only by the Japanese but by hostile Nationalist troops. (One ABC, John Chuck, was accosted at gunpoint by a Nationalist guard demanding money, until others convinced him that Chuck was American.) They were disturbed by the level of poverty in some regions of China—the lack of flushable toilets, showers, or indoor running water, the construction of pebble roads by brute manpower, the throngs of starving refugees fleeing the Japanese invasion and ignored by Nationalist officials. China, in the words of these young ABCs, was “behind time—like cavemen,” “primitive,” and “scary.” Wing Lai of the 555th Air Service Squadron described the people in China as “so poor. These beggars there—boy you feel sorry for them. You just had to give them something to eat, but how much can you feed so many people?”
These cultural barriers precluded true friendship