The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [151]
It was a time of mass disillusionment, of eroding trust in government. American students felt betrayed when President Richard Nixon, who had pledged to end the Vietnam War, sent troops into Cambodia to interrupt the flow of arms from North Vietnam to the Vietcong guerrillas in the south. This decision ignited riots at American universities, and led to the deaths of four students at Kent State in Ohio. Gasoline prices soared when Arab nations, angered by American support of Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, drastically increased the price of oil exported to the United States, which the major oil companies exploited to raise prices even further. In this decade Germany and Japan, America’s former wartime adversaries, emerged as serious economic competitors, and for the first time in the twentieth century the United States began to import more than it exported. The value of the dollar plummeted, while inflation skyrocketed into double digits. Money dropped in value faster than pay raises, shaking the American middle-class dream of prosperity.
Disgusted by the Vietnam War, government corruption, and the country’s economic problems, many American youths simply refused to participate in the system. Tens of thousands decided to challenge the establishment by rejecting consumerism, spurning corporate America, and seeking spiritual enlightenment. They flocked to communes and lived off the land. They embraced, spontaneously and voluntarily, a national uniform that erased distinctions of class: denim blue jeans. Discarding traditional bourgeois values, they experimented with alternative lifestyles: cohabitation without marriage, homosexual and lesbian relationships, discos and drugs. While many found these changes liberating, others despaired at what they considered mindless hedonism and the collapse of American civilization.
The newcomers from Taiwan had no frame of reference with which to assess these upheavals. Upon arrival, many were simply trying to distinguish one Caucasian face from another. “White people all looked alike to me in the beginning,” my mother recalled of her first year at Harvard. “Pale skin, big noses—that was all I could notice in the beginning.” Despite the profusion of different shades of eye and hair color, all she could take in about the Caucasian population were those racial features that would not be seen on a Chinese person.
American food repulsed them. Many Taiwanese Americans remember being half starved through their first term in graduate school because they could not stomach the meals. They described the horrors of barbecues, college cafeterias, and inauthentic Chinese restaurants in the United States. Wrote Cai Nengying, the wife of a graduate student, “The sight of a hot dog dripping with red tomato sauce and yellow mustard is enough to take your appetite away ... hamburgers are even worse: semi-raw beef with a slice of raw onion and a slice of raw tomato.” And to add insult to injury, good manners required that the “terrible tasting food must be praised to the skies.” Once she almost threw up when served a dessert of cored apples stuffed with plum jam and coated in sugar, yet knew she was obligated to say, “Delicious! Delicious!”
And inevitably, the newcomers struggled with the language. At first most could not grasp the freewheeling American vernacular. Their studies back in Taiwan had not prepared them for the slang terms and many idiomatic expressions in which words had meanings they had never learned. There were also hand and facial gestures that seemed like coded signals. Jokes had incomprehensible punch lines. It was often difficult to follow the lectures of professors, to decipher certain passages in textbooks and academic papers, and to make oneself intelligible during classroom discussions.
The first semester was a frightening time for many. They saw themselves