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By Root 1473 0

(Three years earlier, as Mao struggled with other Communist leaders for power, he had asked millions of Chinese adolescents to continue his revolution as “Red Guards,” to destroy the last vestiges of feudal, bourgeois tradition in China.) As youths on the mainland studied The Quotations of Chairman Mao (also known as the “little red book”), so did ABC members of the American Red Guard Party wave copies of Mao’s book in the streets of Chinatown. Unlike their counterparts in China, however, the Red Guards in America remained a small fringe group. Forging alliances with the Black Panther Party in Oakland and the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State, the Red Guard Party went underground for weapons training and later disappeared.

Chinese American radicals who adopted socialism as their platform were often long on rhetoric and short on results. A few, however, did achieve tangible gains for the working-class community in Chinatown. In 1969, Chinese American youths in New York partnered with other Asian Americans to start the I Wor Kuen, named after the secret society that terrorized Westerners in China during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. I Wor Kuen provided free health services to the poor, administered tuberculosis tests in Chinatown on weekends, served meals to the elderly, and fought for the right to low-income housing. Their causes included joining forces with the “We Won’t Move” committee that prevented the Bell Telephone company from evicting thousands of tenants to construct a switching station, a cause that temporarily united ethnic Chinese and Italian residents in the area.

Much of America, however, did not associate the ethnic Chinese with radical activism. The images burned into the national consciousness were starkly black and white—the throngs of African American demonstrators, linking arms, singing “We Shall Overcome,” followed by Black Power advocates and white hippies in tie-dye and dread-locks laying siege to university administrators. Even less visible were the quiet upheavals shuddering through another group of Chinese Americans—those who had spent their youth in suburbs and small towns, far from the Chinatowns of major cities. During the 1960s, the emphasis would shift away from simply fitting in, and more toward openly questioning their place in society.

In her autobiographical novel Mona in the Promised Land (1997), Gish Jen opened a window onto Chinese American life in a privileged white suburb during the 1960s. Describing a prosperous Chinese American family, owners of a pancake house, who live in the fictional Scarshill, an affluent Jewish community, Jen shares memories of her hometown of Scarsdale, New York. It is 1968: “the blushing dawn of ethnic awareness has yet to pink up their inky suburban night,” and there are hardly any other Chinese in town, but in another ten years “there’ll be so many Orientals they will turn into Asians; a Japanese grocery will buy out that one deli too many.”

Jen’s work describes a world of contradictions, where youths talk about subverting society while also preparing to take their places within the East Coast establishment. When not obsessing over SATs, college admissions, and scholarships, Mona and her classmates experiment with ethnicity, acquiring or discarding new cultures like designer suits. Mona decides to be Jewish, her Jewish boyfriend decides to be black, an African American friend decides to be Buddhist. But her parents cannot shed their heritage as quickly as Mona can—and Mona’s private thoughts betray her impatience with them:

“You know, the Chinese revolution was a long time ago; you can get over it now. Okay, you had to hide in the garden and listen to bombs fall out of the sky, also you lost everything you had. And it’s true you don’t even know what happened to your sisters and brothers and parents, and only wish you could send them some money. But didn’t you make it? Aren’t you here in America, watching the sale ads, collecting your rain checks? You know what you are now?” she wants to say. “Now you’re smart shoppers” ... But in another