The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [134]
Through this period, the Chinese American community achieved material wealth far above national averages. In 1959, for instance, they had a median family income of $6,207, while the comparable figure for all Americans was $5,660. Flush with disposable income, the Chinese American middle class could now afford mortgages in upscale white suburbs, if the legal obstacles to their purchasing such homes could be eliminated.
For generations, racist laws, mostly in California, had barred the Chinese from living in white neighborhoods or attending white schools, though some Chinese were informally integrated into white society. After World War II, these laws, both state and federal, were rapidly disappearing from the books. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the real estate covenants that barred homeowners in certain areas from selling to Chinese or other minorities, giving the Chinese the legal right to purchase housing or land anywhere in the country. Legislators in California also struck down laws in the education code mandating racial segregation.
The absence of these laws did not mean, however, that new Chinese suburbanites were welcomed with open arms. Many white homeowners feared that minority families in their neighborhoods would lower property values, and many local realtors catered to those fears, refusing to show homes to Chinese buyers. To circumvent these exclusionary tactics, some Chinese purchased homes directly from progressive-minded whites, or worked out secret arrangements with white friends, who bought the property first and then immediately resold it to them. To avoid possible confrontation with angry white neighbors, many of these new Chinese homeowners moved in furtively, in the middle of the night.
In extreme cases, a few whites resorted to harassment, vandalism, and even violence in hopes of driving out the Chinese newcomers. It was not uncommon for Chinese American families in prestigious suburbs to find unpleasant notes tacked on their doors, or garbage thrown into their yards. “The first night, they broke my windows, but I ignored them,” recalled Lancing F. Lee, who bought a house in a white neighborhood in Los Angeles. “Then they brought dogs over to cause trouble. If you crossed the street, they would bully you.”
Underneath the placid surface of suburbia, some Chinese American families would soon learn, lay a dormant xenophobia. In an era when homeowners erected fallout shelters in anticipation of nuclear war, when children practiced “duck and cover” exercises in schools in the event of a nuclear missile attack, fear was often an instinctive if irrational reaction to anyone who did not look true-blue American.
Alice Young, a Harvard-educated attorney, remembers growing up in “the only Asian family in what was then essentially Pentagon-CIA land”: the lily-white, conservative Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia. One day, her third-grade teacher showed a social studies film on the Communist threat, in which all the Communists depicted happened to be Chinese. “At the end of the film they said if you notice anyone suspicious, please call your local CIA or FBI,” she recalled. “There I sat in the third-grade class and when the lights came on all of my classmates had moved their chairs further back.”
Yet the exodus out of the Chinatowns into America’s suburbia continued. Not only did