The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [142]
In the midst of this suburban soul-searching, a few Chinese Americans would discover black culture, borrowing liberally from it to create new personae of rebellion. In the 1960s, composer Fred Ho found that jazz could voice his alienation from white society, his rejection of Chinese American bourgeois values, his kinship with the oppressed and downtrodden. The son of a professor of Chinese politics, Ho grew up in the wealthy white communities of Palo Alto, California, and Amherst, Massachusetts, where, unable to win acceptance from his Caucasian classmates, he turned to the Black Power movement instead, becoming an avid reader of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Fusing his fascination with both Chinese and African American cultures, Ho applied ancient Chinese instruments to jazz, thereby inventing a new strain of music. His works include Bound Feet, to expose the ancient abuse of Chinese women; Chi Lai! (literally, the Chinese term for “rise up!”), to celebrate the struggle of early Chinese laborers in the United States; Journey Beyond the West, a ballet based on the myth of the Chinese monkey king; and Chinaman’s Chance, a Chinese American opera documenting the epic story of the Chinese immigrant experience, the first to be written in jazz.
Grace Lee Boggs was another Chinese American who drew spiritual and political sustenance from the black community. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, Boggs, a highly educated, middle-class intellectual, refused to become a token member of the white elite. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Barnard and a doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, she turned to radical politics as a protégée of C. L. R. James, a renowned West Indian Marxist scholar. The first president of Ghana proposed marriage to her, but she decided instead to wed James Boggs, an African American automobile assembly-line worker and Black Power activist. Through the 1960s—and for decades afterwards—she and her husband served as tireless civil rights leaders in Detroit, organizing unions and reviving the inner-city black community. The FBI labeled her an “Afro-Chinese Marxist,” but Boggs resisted easy categorization: “Through sheer will, without waiting for social conditions to come around and without waiting to explore her identity, she turned her back on who she was and barged into new territories,” Louis Tsen wrote of Boggs. “She was a woman who barged into men’s territory; she was a Chinese who barged into black territory; she was an intellectual who barged into workers’ territory.”
Indeed, Boggs was an exceptional activist, even in an age filled with self-proclaimed rebels. Many Chinese Americans paid lip service to fighting the system in the 1960s, but few had the courage to dedicate their whole life to such a cause. Instead, like the majority of Americans, most preferred to accommodate to the status quo, to not challenge it, or, still better, to quietly distance themselves from social problems.
Perhaps nowhere did Chinese Americans tread more carefully than in the South, where a small population of ethnic Chinese had long kept low and quiet, avoiding open conflict with the white community. Not until the civil rights movement erupted in the 1950s were southern Chinese forced, at last, to confront the racial codes by which they had lived their lives.
By the 1960s, Chinese Americans in the South, primarily a community of grocers and merchants, had already made the remarkable transition from “colored” to “white,” leaping over the chasm of race and class to win acceptance as honorary Caucasians. Their social rise was made possible by both their financial status and their racially ambiguous position. Although the Chinese worked closely with black customers, they also gained entrance to white institutions, such as churches, schools, barbershops, and theaters.