The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [122]
In August 1945, the war finally came to a close when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender. After four years of combat in the Pacific, thousands of battle-scarred veterans returned home, anxious to put the war behind them, eager to start new lives and new families. The resulting baby boom comprised not only white births, but Chinese American ones as well.
Before the war, many Chinese men could not find wives because of the terrible shortage of Chinese women. In 1924, an immigration act prevented American citizens of Chinese heritage from importing alien Chinese brides, and as a result, no Chinese immigrant woman—not one—gained admission for the next six years. Then in 1930, the U.S. government decided Chinese wives could enter as long as the marriage had occurred before May 26,1924, a specific time requirement that limited the number of women arrivals. During the next decade, only about sixty Chinese women a year joined their husbands in the United States, but more recent Chinese brides faced difficulty gaining admission.
After World War II, the U.S. government decided to overhaul this immigration policy to reward Chinese American veterans for their service. The 1945 War Brides Act permitted them to marry in China and bring their wives to the United States. Given the low number of ethnic Chinese women at home (the male-female ratio was three to one), many servicemen decided to wed foreign-born Chinese women. Before the act expired on December 30, 1949, almost six thousand Chinese American soldiers went to China and returned with brides. For many, there was no time for elaborate rituals or lengthy, romantic courtship. They faced not only the deadline of the act’s expiration date but also the time constraints of their own furloughs. One soldier on leave flew to China, picked a bride, married, and then landed at San Francisco airport the night before his month’s furlough expired. As a result of such hasty marriages, after the war about 80 percent of all new Chinese arrivals were female. In March 1948, the maternity ward of the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco recorded an average of two births a day. According to historian Him Mark Lai, so many pregnant women came into this hospital that many had to sleep in the hallways. In part because of these new arrivals and new births, during the 1940s the ethnic Chinese population in the United States soared from 77,000 to 117,000.
For thousands of Chinese American men and their wives, the end of World War II was a time of celebration—a time of new hope, new beginnings. But in China it would be a different story. The defeat of Japan would inaugurate a new era of bloodshed and tragedy. Few people could have foreseen that the horror of war—the eight agonizing years under Japanese occupation—would serve as only the prelude to more war, this time a civil war between the Nationalist government and rebel Communist forces.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“A Mass Inquisition”: The Cold War, the Chinese Civil War, and McCarthyism
The postwar period opened with the Chinese in America enjoying a greater level of acceptance by fellow Americans than they had ever experienced. China and the United States had fought together to defeat an empire that had attacked both nations, and their wartime amity continued into the early postwar period. This new American perception regarding the Chinese led to a whole new direction in government policy, very much easing the lives of Chinese Americans.
But over the next decade, certain international events strained the wartime alliance, and Chinese Americans soon found themselves facing renewed hostility from their fellow Americans. The precipitating events were the start of the cold