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By Root 1525 0

as the Hart-Celler Act, abolishing racial discrimination in immigration law.36 Under the new act, each independent nation beyond the western hemisphere had a yearly quota of twenty thousand, while the spouses, parents, and unmarried minor children of American citizens could enter as non-quota immigrants. This legislation would have a dramatic impact on the size of the Chinese community in America. Before the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, the 1960 census counted only 236,084 ethnic Chinese in the United States—about one-tenth of one percent of the general population. After the act, the ethnic Chinese population in the United States would almost double in size every decade.

The newest Chinese arrivals moved directly into Chinatown neighborhoods. They were by no means the poorest or least educated in Guangdong province, but most came without savings, having sold almost everything they owned to pay for transport to the United States. Worse, most could speak no English, which restricted their job searches to Chinese-owned businesses.

At the end of the 1960s, Lillian Sing, then associate director of the Chinese Newcomers Service Center, conducted a small survey of the occupational changes of several Chinese men who had left Hong Kong for new lives in the United States. Their downward mobility was apparent.

In Hong Kong

Chinese doctor

Sweater-weaver

Seaman, first mate

Factory owner

Accountant

Chinese doctor

Social worker

Teacher

Newspaper reporter

In San Francisco

Laundryman

Cook

Kitchen helper

Janitor

Busboy

Errand boy

Student

Busboy

Busboy

These new arrivals weakened the negotiating position of the ethnic Chinese who were already living in Chinatown but still working as laborers. The original inhabitants were also insufficiently fluent in English to take other jobs or to start their own businesses. With a fresh pool of labor available, local Chinese businessmen understood that they could slash salaries and stretch work hours at will. Workers who fell ill could easily be replaced, those who complained, blackballed. With this imbalance in power, employers ha no incentive to improve working conditions. Chinatown factories became so hazardous that conditions there prompted several government investigations. One, by the 1969 San Francisco Human Rights Commission, discovered that ethnic Chinese women garment laborers were receiving no overtime pay, no vacation time, no sick leave or health benefits. “It’s really amazing how the Chinese exploit themselves,” one worker noted.37

For some families, even minimum wage was an unattainable American dream,† and some émigrés made desperate, almost pathetic attempts to learn English, to help them break out of a ruthless job market. In San Francisco and New York, they enrolled in federally funded adult education courses to study English, but their age and physical exhaustion from sixty-hour work weeks made it difficult to concentrate. More significant, their isolation from native-speaking Americans prevented them from practicing English on a daily basis.

Trying to make do on very little, many immigrants crowded into unfurnished single-room apartments, with no furniture or heat. “We each slept on a small piece of plywood which we put on top of two oil cans or chairs right before bedtime,” one recalled. “That’s how we all learned to sleep perfectly still.” Her family bathed just once a week because they had no hot water or bathtub, only a galvanized iron tub that they also used to wash clothes. After she rented a room of her own, she admitted, “I have been showering twice a day! Just to make up for the past.”

Neglect and exhaustion soon bred disease and despair. Immediately after the influx of the refugees, San Francisco Chinatown suffered the greatest tuberculosis rate in the country, six to seven times higher than the national rate at the time. The most despairing resorted to drugs, alcohol, and even suicide. San Francisco Chinatown recorded the highest suicide rate in the country: between 1952 and 1969, Chinese men took their own lives at the mean rate of 27.9