The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [156]
At the Diablo start-up, Lee developed the first daisywheel printer for mass production. In 1972, the Xerox Corporation, avidly seeking a product to compete with IBM ball-type printers, bought Diablo for $28 million, turning David into a multimillionaire. Xerox retained him as head of its printer department, but appointed someone else as his boss—a white man whom Lee asserts knew nothing about daisywheel printers. “During that time, Chinese Americans were not viewed as capable managers,” he remembered. “Many companies didn’t want to promote the Chinese—they just wanted to use them.” Knowing that he had hit the glass ceiling at Xerox, Lee trained his new boss and resigned in 1973.
The same year Lee left Xerox, he co-founded Qume Corporation, a manufacturer of computer peripheral equipment, with the primary goal of creating a new daisywheel printer to compete with the one purchased by Xerox. In 1978, ITT bought Qume for $164 million and asked David to stay at the company to manage its growth. He rose to become the president of Qume, then a vice president of ITT and chairman of its business information systems group.
Under his leadership, Qume grew into the largest printer company in the world as well as the largest manufacturer of floppy drives in the United States. By contracting with Chinese manufacturers, Lee also helped foster the growth of the personal computer industry in Taiwan. Three Taiwanese companies that built products for Qume—Acer and Mitac for personal computers, and Jing Bao (also known as Cal-Comp Electronics) for terminals—became giants in the industry, transforming the island into a major export leader in PCs and computer peripherals.
Looking back on his life, Lee observed that many of his fellow émigrés followed safe trajectories and shunned entrepreneurialism, while he was inclined—eager, even—to take risks. “To this day I believe that if you have a Ph.D., you can always get a regular job if your company fails,” he said. “My father—who could not speak Spanish and who had no advanced degrees—faced far worse odds when he launched his own business in Argentina.”
Not everyone, however, shared Lee’s optimism. During the 1970s, Chinese American professionals began voicing complaints of racial discrimination, and of exploitation by white employers. Some felt they were treated like honorary whites rather than as fully equal fellow Americans, and believed their advancement in academia, government, and corporate America had been arrested by an artificial barrier, what some called a “bamboo ceiling.”
Many claimed they had to work harder just to win second-level status in their companies. “Orientals are inordinately industrious, reliable, and smart in school but like Avis Rent-A-Car, ‘being only number two,’ Chinese must try harder to prove their middle class Americanization,” James W. Chin wrote in the East/West newspaper in 1970.
On the surface, the statistics seem to refute charges of racism. In the 1970s, studies found that on average, the Chinese in America possessed more education than whites and earned more money per household. But these studies neglected three important factors: the regional concentration of the Chinese American population, the number of wage earners per family, and the professional and financial returns on their academic degrees. Most Chinese resided in urban centers with higher costs of living, so any somewhat higher earnings were spent on significantly higher rent and taxes.47 Also, while the average household income of Chinese Americans exceeded that of whites, more Chinese women worked full-time than white American women, and more children held part-time jobs.
The one dimension in which many new Chinese immigrants managed to compete successfully was education. In 1970, one in four Chinese American