The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [198]
In June 1999, Ted Lieu, a United States Air Force captain who grew up in Ohio and attended college in California, wrote the following for the Washington Post:
“Are you in the Chinese Air Force?” the elegantly dressed lady sitting next to me asked. For a moment I was left speechless. We were at an awards dinner and I was proudly wearing my blue United States Air Force uniform, complete with captain’s bars, military insignia, and medals. Her question jarred me and made me realize that even Air Force blue was not enough to reverse her initial presumption that people with yellow skin and Asian features are somehow not Americans. I wish this was just an isolated incident. Unfortunately, too many people today still view Asian Americans as foreigners in America ... As an officer in the United States Air Force, one day I may be called to give my life to my country. It would be a shame if some people still question what I mean when I say “my country.”
Scratch the surface of every American celebrity of Chinese heritage and you will find that, no matter how stellar their achievements, no matter how great their contribution to U.S. society, virtually all of them have had their identities questioned at one point or another.
Connie Chung, the second woman in American history to co-anchor a network nightly news broadcast, survived an unwelcoming newsroom atmosphere. Being one of the few women was bad enough, but as she adds, “In those early days at CBS, ‘71 to ’76, people were saying ‘Yellow Journalism’—little remarks that were clearly racist.” But as late as 1990, Cliff Kincaid, a radio host in Washington, D.C., would call her “Connie Chink.”
Maya Lin, now the most famous female architect in the United States, was viciously attacked when, as a Yale undergraduate in 1980, she won a nationwide contest to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. “How can you let a gook design this?” some veterans asked. “How did it happen that an Asian-American woman was permitted to make a memorial for American men who died fighting in Asia?”65
After her novel The Joy Luck Club became a literary blockbuster, author Amy Tan had to struggle to get it produced in Hollywood. Before the movie was released, one film executive complained to Chris Lee, the Chinese American president of Columbia TriStar, that there were “no Americans” in The Joy Luck Club. Lee retorted, “There are Americans in it. They just don’t look like you.”66
At the 1998 Olympics, when U.S. figure skater Michelle Kwan finished second after her teammate Tara Lipinski, the headlines on MSNBC read, “American beats Kwan.” Many Chinese Americans were distressed that the media automatically considered Kwan a foreigner when in fact she had been born, reared, and trained in the United States. Four years later, this error was repeated after Kwan lost the gold medal to Sarah Hughes. In a secondary headline, the Seattle Times announced, “American outshines Kwan, Slutskaya in skating surprise.”
In 1998, when Matt Fong, a California state treasurer, ran for the U.S. Senate, reporters asked him which country he would support if China and the United States went to war. Fong was a fourth-generation American and the son of March Fong Eu, the first Asian American woman to serve as a California secretary of state. He lost the race and later told Time magazine,