The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [153]
After earning their degrees, only one in four students returned to Taiwan to settle down permanently. The majority remained in the United States, accepting positions at universities, government laboratories, and corporations, swiftly moving into upper-middle-class American society. Whereas previous generations of Chinese were forced by law or social custom to live in segregated Chinatowns, only to watch their descendants leave for the suburbs, most Taiwanese Americans never had any contact with Chinatown other than to eat meals there. Instead, their lives followed the pattern of a more privileged class of Chinese Americans. In 1970, Chia-ling Kuo provided a glimpse of this world in his study of Chinese émigrés living in Long Island, New York. Many of these people had grown up in upper-class families in coastal cities like Shanghai, attended Christian schools in China, and gained early exposure to Western culture. Now they were highly paid professionals, such as executives and bankers, with lives almost indistinguishable from their white neighbors. Owning expensive homes, they hosted dances and parties and led active lives in the community. Most attended church regularly and belonged to white country clubs, where they played tennis and golf. Their children often felt more comfortable among whites than among other American-born Chinese, because most of their friends and schoolmates were white.
Most interesting, many Chinese Long Islanders exuded confidence in the face of prejudice. Contempt, rather than fear or hurt, was the most frequent response to racist white Americans: “I would not let those ignorant people bother me,” one immigrant told Kuo. “After all, we have had four thousand years of civilization. You just can’t reason with fools and little people, as Confucius once said.”
Such attitudes caused some Americans to conclude that anti-Asian prejudice had all but disappeared. In 1970, the New York Times announced that bias against Chinese Americans had dropped significantly: “The great majority of Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, whose humble parents had to iron the laundry and garden the lawns of white Americans, no longer find any artificial barriers to becoming doctors, lawyers, architects and professors.” The article went on to report that many Asian Americans under the age of thirty could not remember a single personal instance of racial discrimination. “If you have ability and can adapt to the American way of speaking, dressing, and doing things, then it doesn’t matter anymore if you are Chinese,” the article quoted Mr. J. Chuan Chu, vice president of Honeywell Information Systems, as saying.
Individual success stories seemed to validate this position. Indeed, a number of Taiwanese Americans would soon reach the pinnacle of their professions within a single generation. In 1976, Sam Ting, a physics professor at MIT and head of a research team at Brookhaven National Laboratory, won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the J/psi particle, which contained a new kind of quark and its anti-particle. 46 The following decade, another prominent Taiwanese American scientist, Yuan Tseh Lee, a professor at Berkeley, would win a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research in the collision of molecular beams.
One Taiwanese American professor, Chang-Lin Tien, became the first Chinese American, as well as the first Asian American, to head a major research university in the United States. His career was propelled by personal determination and a fierce reverence for education—a reverence to which his family had introduced him by example.
Tien was born in Wuhan, the son of a wealthy banker. His father had earned a degree in physics from Beijing University, the most prestigious university in China. (“A degree in anything and you were automatically Mandarin; it