The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [197]
Many illegal aliens felt the money was worth the risk, the heartbreak, and the fractured families. Some believed their children would ultimately benefit from the arrangement: “I am sacrificing myself to bring happiness to my family,” one Chinese worker said. Others groped toward an elusive but enticing vision of future paradise. “Look at your salary,” Fuzhou native Cho Li Muwang told an American reporter after two failed attempts to leave China. “If you can go to some other place, even very far away, across the ocean, and work the same, but make ten times more money, would you go? What about twenty times more? What about one hundred times more? Would you go?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
An Uncertain Future
My grandfather came to this country from China nearly a century ago and worked as a servant. Now I serve as governor just one mile from where my grandfather worked. It took our family one hundred years to travel that mile. It was a voyage we could only make in America.
—Governor Gary Locke of Washington State, the first Chinese American governor in the United States, January 28, 2003
My book chronicles only the past and present journey of the Chinese in America, not where their story will go from here. Each new generation must rediscover history in the light of new events, and so it must be left to future scholars to continue the narrative.
Instead, I can only close this book with a fervent hope: that readers will recognize the story of my people—the Chinese in the United States—not as a foreign story, but a quintessentially American one.
From the moment the Chinese set foot on American soil, their dreams have been American dreams. They scrambled for gold in the dirt of California. They aspired to own their own land and businesses, and fought to have their children educated in American schools alongside other American children. Like most immigrant groups, they came here fleeing war and famine, persecution and poverty. And like the descendants of other immigrant groups, their children have come to call the United States home.
The America of today would not be the same America without the achievements of its ethnic Chinese. Generation after generation, they worked to build the American nation to its present level of greatness. Some fought in the Civil War and built the railroad that welded the country together. Their early struggles for justice created new foundations of law later used by the civil rights movement. They built America’s earliest rockets and helped win the cold war. In Silicon Valley and elsewhere, their contributions helped establish and maintain U.S. supremacy in the information age. Today, they are dispersed in every profession imaginable: as inventors, teachers, authors, doctors, engineers, lawyers, CEOs, social workers, accountants, architects, police chiefs, firefighters, actors, and astronauts.
But sadly, despite this long legacy of contribution, many Chinese Americans continue to be regarded as foreigners. “Go back where you came from” is a taunt most new iminigrants have faced at some point. As one put it, “Asian Americans feel like we’re a guest in someone else’s house, that we can never really relax and put our feet up on the table.” Accents and cultural traditions may disappear, but skin tone and the shape of one’s eyes do not. These features have eased the way for some to regard ethnic Chinese people as exotic and different—certainly not “real” Americans. Thus the Americanization of Chinese Americans has been overshadowed by the convenient but dishonest stereotypes in the mass market, which portray them as innately and irreversibly different from their fellow Americans.
What, in human terms, is the impact of such divisiveness? It’s a native-born Californian, a West Covina city council member, being told over the phone, “Funny, you don’t sound like a Wong. You sound so American.” It’s