The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [140]
The results of their activism were mixed. For one thing, reentering Chinatown put some of these ABC crusaders at tremendous risk. Not only were they at loggerheads with the powerful capitalists who exploited new immigrants, but they also came into close daily contact with dangerous youth gangs. Volunteers were often threatened and harassed, and one social worker was murdered. Barry Fong-Torres, the idealistic, Berkeley-educated twenty-nine-year-old brother of journalist Ben Fong-Torres, had taken a one-year leave of absence from his job as a probation officer to become director of the Youth Service and Coordinating Center in San Francisco Chinatown. Despite his genuine efforts to reach out to troubled immigrant teenagers, the local gangs feared he was an undercover agent and resented his talking to leaders of rival groups. Eventually, Barry Fong-Torres was gunned down in his apartment, with a misspelled note left near his body: “PIG
INFOMERS DIE YONG.”
One unexpected and controversial legacy of ABC activism in Chinatown was the growth of the bilingual education system in the United States. During the 1960s, Chinese immigrant parents in San Francisco had complained that their children were unable to follow classroom instruction in English. The Chinese for Affirmative Action, founded in 1969 to fight racial discrimination against Chinese and other Asian Americans, helped ethnic Chinese students file a class action lawsuit against education officials to get them to address their language needs in the public schools. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which in 1974, in Lau v. Nichols, overruled a lower court decision, not on constitutional grounds but instead by finding, “It seems obvious that the Chinese-speaking minority receive fewer benefits than the English-speaking majority from respondents’ school system, which denies them a meaningful opportunity to participate in the educational program—all earmarks of the discrimination banned by [H.E.W] Regulations. In 1970 H.E.W. issued clarifying guidelines which include the following: ‘Where inability to speak and understand the English language excludes national origin-minority group children from effective participation in the educational program offered by a school district, the district must take affirmative steps to rectify the language deficiency in order to open its instructional program to these students.’ ” The Supreme Court concluded that it was a “mockery of public education” to demand that all children possess basic skills in English before availing themselves of a public education. This decision paved the way for historic language reforms within the American education system.
At San Francisco State College, ethnic Chinese students joined the Third World Liberation Front, which called for solidarity among Americans of Asian, African, Latin, and Native American descent. In 1968, demonstrators at San Francisco State refused to attend class and demanded an ethnic studies program that would include not only black studies but also Asian American studies. The strike lasted more than four months, the longest college strike in American history, leading not only to the establishment of the first ethnic studies program in the country but also to the beginnings of the Asian American political movement. Other strikes quickly followed at Berkeley and UCLA, which instituted similar departments.
While many activists were educated and middle-class, some came from the margins of Chinatown society. They too seized the opportunity to demand more, and the end of the 1960s bore witness to the rise of militant groups calling for actual revolution. In 1969, in the San Francisco Bay Area, American-born Chinese youths, many of them former street gang members, founded the Red Guard Party, in honor of the state-sanctioned vigilantes of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.