The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [139]
Some American-born Chinese felt a special obligation toward these émigrés as a result of early parental influence. In his memoir The Rice Room, Ben Fong-Torres describes belonging to two separate worlds during the 1960s: one as a pioneer rock radio deejay and the first Chinese American writer and editor at Rolling Stone, the second as the “number two son” of immigrant restaurant owners in Oakland Chinatown. In the evenings, his mother took piecework home from local garment factories and talked as her children held skeins of yarn for her. “I knew to expect stories about China,” Fong-Torres recalled, “and what the Communists were doing to our family in the village, and how important it was for us to do well, so that we could help provide for them.”
The Communists were never out of the minds of certain Chinese American families. Although they could never visit mainland China, because of either finances or the lack of legal permission, they received occasional, tissue-thin air mail letters from relatives, their last fragile link to China during the cold war. “I was nine years old when the letters made my parents, who are rocks, cry,” wrote Maxine Hong Kingston,38 daughter of Chinese immigrant laundry owners in Stockton, California, and author of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. The letters described how the new Communist regime forced her uncles to kneel on broken glass and confess to being landlords. They told of relatives who had been sent to rural communes, of others who had been executed, and of still others who had simply disappeared. A few resurfaced in Hong Kong and asked her parents for help. “The aunts in Hong Kong said to send money quickly; their children were begging on the sidewalks, and mean people put dirt in their bowls.”
The crusading spirit of the 1960s prompted some American-born children of Chinese immigrants to respond to Chinese calls for help. Two forces in particular stoked the fires of activism. One was the civil rights movement led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., which began as a grassroots effort among southern blacks in the 1950s to end Jim Crow but spread rapidly across the country through the following decade, when television cameras brought into middle-class homes the ugly spectacle of southern sheriffs turning hoses and police dogs on blacks engaging in peaceful protests. Sympathy for the plight of African Americans in the American South soon expanded to include a more general interest in human rights, particularly for people of color living in white-controlled societies.
The second force was the Vietnam War, in the background of which was the largest college enrollment at any time in American history. As the nation debated why we were in Vietnam, students on campus after campus organized marches to protest the war. Once again, television played a critical role, first in dramatizing the horrors of war in a way never before possible, and second by sensitizing white Americans to the fate of nonwhites in developing countries across Asia.
Few regions in the country were more politically active than the San Francisco Bay Area. Campuses like the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State College became centers of protest, not only over the war but also about a wide spectrum of social ills in American society. Relatively large numbers of ethnic Chinese students attended these schools, and, inevitably,