The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [166]
So great were the number of new Chinese arrivals that some whites came to view them as part of a massive foreign invasion. “I feel like I’m in another country,” a white resident of Monterey Park complained to Timothy Fong, author of The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California. “I don’t feel at home anymore.” “I feel like a stranger in my own town,” another said. Cars flashed bumper stickers with messages like “Will the Last American to Leave Monterey Park Please Bring the Flag?” In 1986, a gas station in town posed the same question, along with a picture of two slanted eyes.
Anti-Chinese jokes began to surface: about senior citizens wearing pajamas in the streets, about reckless driving habits. “I Survived the Drive through Monterey Park,” one bumper sticker boasted. Monterey Park was dubbed the “Traffic Collision Capital of the World” and Atlantic Boulevard was “Suicide Boulevard,” causing residents to remark it should be illegal to be “DWC”—Driving While Chinese. But simmering below the taunts and snickers was hatred that often reflected envy of the openly displayed success of the new arrivals. When the local newspaper, the Monterey Park Progress, announced it would print a section in the Chinese language, vandals attacked Chinese-owned movie theaters, smashing windows and throwing paint on the marquees.
Hostility toward the newcomers in Monterey Park came not only from Caucasian residents but from many local Chinese Americans as well. Previously, up to the early 1970s, the Chinese in Monterey Park were mainly young professionals, usually salaried engineers, respectable, upper-middle-class Chinese Americans with quiet, conservative lifestyles. Like their white neighbors, they were scarcely prepared for the arrival of fast-talking, aggressive businessmen from Hong Kong and Taiwan, who turned the streets of the city into a crass showcase for their expensive jewelry, designer suits, and custom-made mansions. The newcomers grated on the nerves of those who could not afford such ostentation, or who believed that flaunting wealth was unspeakably vulgar. “First it was the real estate people, and then trading companies, heavy investors, people who came with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash,” Wesley Ru recalled. “Their first stop would be the Mercedes dealer, and the second stop would be the real estate broker.”
Another way the nouveau riche Chinese disturbed their neighbors was their children’s success in school classrooms. In an increasingly class-conscious America, Chinese academic ability would create another source of anxiety.
By the 1980s, ethnic Chinese children no longer had to struggle for educational opportunities. Generations of civil rights activists had ended the system of segregated schools, and federally funded public schools and public libraries made education more accessible to even the most impoverished Chinese immigrant families. At the same time, America saw the rise of a Chinese professional class, who comprised not only the descendants of earlier Chinese Americans but also new émigrés with education and status. The children of these groups grew up in privileged settings such as white suburbs or university towns. Their parents were professors, scientists, engineers, or doctors, not laundry or restaurant workers who needed their children to help out with the family business. These parents spared no expense in sending them to the best schools, where they could devote their full energy to academic achievement.
Large numbers of Chinese American students were now attending elite private preparatory schools, such as Phillips Exeter, Groton, and Deerfield, or top academic programs in competitive public programs, like the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School in New York, or Lowell High School in San Francisco—all of which served as fast-track conduits