The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [161]
But gradually, as the number of exchanges increased, uncensored stories of life under Mao emerged. Some former “stranded scholars” in the United States—the Chinese intellectuals who chose to remain in America after the 1949 revolution—had an opportunity to learn what had become of former classmates who had chosen to return to China during the civil war. Computer mogul An Wang remembered that roughly half the Chinese foreign students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had decided to move back to mainland China in the late 1940s. Decades later, he found that some had obtained powerful positions in the Communist hierarchy, while others had perished during the Cultural Revolution.
Linda Yang, another stranded scholar, met a few of her former American-trained classmates at her fortieth college reunion at St. John’s University in Shanghai. Some told her, with downcast eyes, about the persecution their families had endured, and how their children were deprived of the opportunity to attend school. She would never forget the “regret in their eyes,” the searing knowledge that, by returning to China during the Mao years, they had “not only sabotaged their own future, but the future of their children and grandchildren.”
While many Chinese Americans were reeling from the shock of these revelations, new immigrants from the PRC would be equally astounded by what they found in the United States. Some had incorrectly assumed that America was a vast utopia. During the 1930s, Let Keung Mui’s family in south China had gone hungry during the Japanese invasion: “All we ate was wild plants and grass roots.” Things were not much better under the Communists. People fought each other for food, and his favorite daughter committed suicide by taking poison. He was thrilled when, in 1979, a brother in New York secured permission for him to migrate to America. “The U.S. was a place I had dreamt of for a long time,” he recalled. “People had said, ‘America is a place with gold floors, diamond windows, tall buildings, and seven-foot-tall whites with red moustaches.’ ”
The reality was very different. When Let Keung Mui and his family flew to New York, what he found was hardly an American nirvana: “I felt that everything that my people said about how good the U.S. was, was not true. I felt like I had gone to the wrong place.” His brother found him housing in Chinatown, a dilapidated apartment with a crumbling ceiling and only three windows. Living there was a cold and alienating experience. Every resident shoveled his own snow, and he felt “like a stranger” when his neighbors locked their doors at night.
His nephew gave him a job in his garment factory, and there Let Keung Mui labored long hours, past 9 P.M. most nights and often as late as midnight, six days a week. The work was difficult, the pay low, and he received no preferential treatment from his nephew or brother merely because he was family. “I was so mad that I started not to rely on them and started looking for jobs on my own,” he said later. Soon he landed a position as a restaurant chef at a much higher salary, then served as a machine operator in a noodle factory. After toiling in the factory for five years, six days a week, twelve hours a day, he saved enough money to purchase a house in Queens, New York. But his disappointment