The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [138]
Immigrant children suffered as well. During the 1960s, teachers in San Francisco Chinatown observed students dozing off behind their desks in class. When confronted, some youths confessed that after school they had to labor in sweatshops for at least eight to ten hours a day. Edward Redford, then assistant superintendent for secondary education, explained why: “They work half the night in laundries or sewing shops, apparently because they owe money to someone who brought them here.”
Sleep deprivation was not the only problem. Another was that classes were conducted in English, and that most of these children had minimal English-language skills. Even though some had spent their childhoods in the British colony of Hong Kong, the public schools there had offered woefully substandard English-language instruction.
Fights broke out frequently between the ABCs—the American-born Chinese—and the FOBs, the “fresh off the boat” foreign-born Chinese from Hong Kong. In his memoir Chinese Playground, Bill Lee, a native of San Francisco Chinatown, remembered the taunts as the first Hong Kong families moved into his neighborhood in the early 1960s:
It began with the newcomers getting hassled.
“Fresh-off-the-Boat!”
“Fuckin’ China Bugs!”
“Ching Chongs!”
“Look at them clothes, dude!”
“No speaka’ English?”
In turn, the FOBs called the ABCs “Tow Gee” (privileged and spoiled landowners) and “Juk Sing” (empty and hollow bamboo). Soon, some of the immigrant teenagers banded into a gang of their own called the Wah Ching, or “China Youth.” According to Lee, they terrorized the ABCs:
It was payback time and their retaliation was fierce. This was now a different ball game. ABCs were getting jumped left and right and the beatings were severe. After school, if you made it out of the grounds, they’d find you at the bus stop or cable car turn-table. It wasn’t just a one-time payback. The assaults were repeated over and over. Make fun of any foreign-born kid in class or bump one of their brothers or cousins in the hall and you’d pay dearly for it. These guys grew up in the rough streets of Hong Kong and Macao where gangs were hardcore. Many had spent a good part of their youths in brutal prisons.
Unable to learn English quickly enough to succeed in school, many children of the newest arrivals dropped out and hit the streets. Dressed in black from head to toe, wearing bouffant hairstyles and high-heeled boots, they strutted through Chinatown, followed by little boys who idolized them and helped carry their guns. Skirmishes broke out between rival factions, and within a few years, juvenile violence had escalated into full-fledged battles. Journalist Ben Fong-Torres recalled that era: “delinquency was too clinical a word for what was going on in Chinatown. People were being killed in the streets, merchants were being extorted; gangs were at war not only with each other but with community leaders and cops.”
Beneath the violence came open pleas for help. At a Human Rights Commission hearing in San Francisco in 1968, the Wah Ching gang asked for a community clubhouse and a two-year training program so they could gain vocational skills and high school diplomas. In response, the Human Rights Commission turned for assistance to the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), an umbrella organization that grew out of the historic Six Companies in Chinatown, but the CCBA responded coldly: “They have not shown that they are sorry or that they will change their ways. They have threatened the community. If you give in to this group, you are only going to have another hundred immigrants come in and have a whole new series of threats and demands.”
Other Chinese Americans, however, eager to defuse a situation they recognized as a ticking time bomb, expressed far greater sympathy. “Some of these kids are talking about getting guns and rioting,” one observer noted. “And I’m not threatening, the situation already exists.” Socially progressive Chinese Americans—in particular, college students and young professionals