The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [143]
All this required a delicate balancing act, especially since blacks formed most of the customer base for Chinese stores. For decades, the Chinese community had survived in the South by appearing to be friendly to both black and white interests. However,. as the 1960s went on, this façade was difficult if not impossible to maintain, as Chinese grocers found themselves caught in the crossfire of a race war. Black civil rights leaders asked Chinese grocers for financial donations and for display space for political signs in shop windows. Meanwhile, white supremacist groups, in a supreme stroke of irony, insisted that the Chinese join their White Citizens’ Councils, to help them counter black activism. Aware of their precarious status in the South, the Chinese, as a group, made every attempt to remain politically neutral. Some tried to hedge their bets by hiding their White Citizens’ Council memberships from black customers, and their civil rights contributions from the white business elite. This was not an entirely successful strategy, and their unwillingness to take a stand finally angered the black community. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, Chinese stores in Memphis were singled out for violence during black riots.
“If you sided with the whites, the blacks would be all over you, but if you sided with the blacks, the whites could crucify you,” said Sam Chu Lin, a California radio and television broadcaster who grew up in Mississippi. No Chinese American, he recalled, dared to become a civil rights activist in his region: “I saw none on the picket lines—they would been either killed or socially ostracized.” The Chinese in the South, he said, were “skating on thin ice,” anxious to survive in a society where even the smallest transgression of the racial code could be met with violent retaliation. Once, while he was working as a radio disc jockey in Mississippi during the 1960s, two young white women came into the station looking for him, completely unaware that the voice they admired was not the voice of a white man. “They were groupies who wanted to make moon-eyes at the deejay,” Lin remembered. “And I told them, ‘I’m just cleaning up the station—the guy’s busy right now.’ The Chinese knew what happened to blacks who dated white girls. And Sam Chu Lin wasn’t going to take any chances.”
An undertone of bitterness can be detected in many interviews of American-born Chinese who grew up in the South during this era. Like the Jewish community in the region, the Chinese had successfully adopted white culture, yet they could not earn full acceptance by the white elite, not even as honorary Caucasians. Nor did they feel entirely comfortable among their own people, especially the gossipy, tight-knit social network of their parents. “I didn’t go to the Chinese dances,” one American-born Chinese woman told sociologist James Loewen. “My parents tried to push us to go, and we resented it. I always tore up the invitations before Dad saw them.” In addition, they expressed disgust for the Jim Crow laws that humiliated the black community. When they came of age, many ABCs protested not with their mouths, but with their feet. Gradually, the South witnessed an exodus of the American-born Chinese, who left the small towns of their childhood for the cities of the North and West.
Such was the decision of Sam Sue, son of an immigrant Chinese grocer in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His father had worked seven days a week, every night until ten o’clock, providing blacks with essential social services. His store was not only a warehouse and a home but also an informal bank and accounting firm. Speaking broken English in a black dialect, his father would extend black sharecroppers the credit denied them by white institutions.