The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [144]
Worst of all was the vague sense of being a second-class citizen, yet having an unspoken, tentative membership in the first class. “As a kid, I remember going to the theatre and not really knowing where I was supposed to sit,” Sam Sue told an interviewer. “Blacks were segregated then. Colored people had to sit upstairs, and white people sat downstairs. I didn’t know where I was supposed to sit, so I sat in the white section, and nobody said anything. So I always had to confront those problems growing up. So these experiences were very painful.”
Sam Sue eventually became a lawyer in New York City, but his father remained in Mississippi after retiring, despite efforts by the family to get him to leave. “It is all he knows,” Sue said. His father was “attached to the area—not that he has affection for it, only that he is used to it—he feels it is home.”
One group remained relatively untouched by the chaotic 1960s—the community of scholars who had migrated to the United States to study, teach, or conduct research. While American-born Chinese youths talked revolution, these foreign-born immigrants had already witnessed one, or escaped its effects. Ensconced at universities, research laboratories, or corporations, often high tech, they had a mindset different from the rest of Chinese America. As creative artists and intellectuals, they defined themselves more by ideas than ethnicity or region, belonging to international communities that recognized no borders. Many, especially those who came from lives of education and privilege, believed they could adapt to life anywhere, as long as they had their work to sustain them.
Their interviews fairly glow with confidence. I. M. Pei, the world-famous architect and son of a Shanghai banking magnate, recalled a childhood filled with servants, summer vacations in Suzhou, and private schools. “I had the impression that anything I wanted, I could get,” he said. An Wang, a self-made computer mogul and son of a teacher in China, felt optimistic about his future prospects when he arrived in America at the age of twenty-five to study at Harvard. “I had heard that there was discrimination against Chinese in the United States, but I came here with no insecurities about what I might try to do.” For a young man who had spent his formative years in the international city of Shanghai, the United States did not seem at all like a foreign country: “Frankly the United States seemed a lot like China to me.” Perhaps most importantly, as a doctoral student in applied physics, he understood the lingua franca of his field: “Science is the same the world over—a language I could speak.”
What this group had lost in China they quickly found—or rebuilt—in the United States. Success came rapidly for them, and some would emerge as world celebrities by the 1960s. I. M. Pei designed many of the most important structures of the twentieth century. An Wang, who started Wang Laboratories in 1951 with $600, took his company public in 1967 in one of the largest initial public offerings in history, turning him into a billionaire and one of the richest men in the world. Chin Yang Lee, born in Hunan, China, and educated at Yale, wrote The Flower Drum Song, which achieved instant best-seller status upon its publication in 1957, was turned into a Broadway musical in 1958 by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and then into a film