The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [178]
The growing divide between American haves and have-nots was felt keenly not only among whites and blacks, but within the ethnic Chinese population as well. The decade of the 1990s would witness the development of a two-tiered society among new Chinese arrivals: the rise of an elite group of highly visible, educated people, and the disappearance of thousands of illegal aliens into servile positions in an underground economy, where they were forced to endure dismal working conditions. But whether they were “high-tech” or “low-tech” immigrants, both groups would face a series of crises during the 1990s related to their Chinese ethnicity.
For “high-tech” Chinese, the 1990s resembled the gold rush days, except that the 1990 fortune seekers were mining for nuggets in a new form of sand—silicon. The modern gold rush, like the 1849 gold rush, occurred in northern California, but this time south of San Francisco, in a region dubbed Silicon Valley. The area had already witnessed the birth of the personal computer revolution in the 1970s, when two young men, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, started the Apple corporation, selling desktop computers they had built in their garage. Proximity to Stanford University in Palo Alto, the University of California at Berkeley, and San Francisco as a major port for trade with Asia, helped transform the area into a world center of the high-tech industry.54 But an even bigger revolution erupted in the 1990s—the Internet revolution.
The roots of the Internet stretch back to the 1960s, when academic and government experts envisioned building a global computer network that could function even in the event of nuclear war. Preliminary research at MIT led to a government contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which linked together a few computers at major universities through telephone lines. For the next two decades, a small community of academics—mostly computer scientists, engineers, and librarians—would exchange information with colleagues by posting messages on this cyberspace bulletin board, a government-funded system of electronic mail (or “e-mail”).
In the early 1990s, this network crashed into public awareness when companies such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigybegan offering the general public unlimited access to this new form of communication for a monthly fee. The unprecedented growth of what came to be called the Internet spawned a rash of new Silicon Valley startups. Known as “dotcoms,” these companies were typically run by young men and women fresh out of school. To attract employees with the special computer talents needed, most of these cash-poor start-ups offered employees stock options in lieu of high pay. When the companies were able to offer their stock to the general public, a rush to get in on the ground floor of a brand-new industry that seemed to have an unbounded future led to oversubscribed initial public offerings (IPOs). The outstanding stock was then bid up to astronomical levels, despite the fact that most of these companies had not yet shown a profit (and many never would). Before the dotcom bubble burst, many young Americans of Chinese heritage, both founders and those who had received stock options, joined the ranks of twenty-somethings with million-dollar portfolios, with many expecting to accumulate their first billion before age thirty. This kind of wealth, noted Stanford historian Gordon Chang, transformed the image of the young Asian American male from “son of a laborer or laundryman” to “future Internet millionaire.”
One icon of the dotcom world was Jerry Yang, the billionaire founder of Yahoo!, an Internet search engine and Web service. Born in Taiwan in 1967, Yang moved with his family to San Jose, California, while he was still a teenager. His company grew out of a simple idea: to create a directory of his favorite sites on the international network of information now referred to as the World Wide Web. By the early 1990s, any location on the Web could be accessed by typing the location’s Web address into an