The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [200]
During the spy plane crisis, recalls Theresa Ma, a Chinese American chemist in Lincoln, Nebraska, a neighbor approached her and asked, “Why don’t you go to China to bring our men home?” This neighbor could not figure out the difference between Chinese Americans and Chinese foreign nationals—despite the fact that many Chinese Americans were U.S. citizens whose families had lived here for generations.
Some members of the media recommended the mass dismissal or expulsion or even imprisonment of the entire Chinese American community. In Springfield, Illinois, two radio deejays urged the boycott of all Chinese American restaurants, suggested that all Chinese Americans be shipped out of the country, and telephoned people with Chinese last names to harass them. A Fox News host called for Chinese employees to be fired from the national laboratories. A national talk-show host demanded that Chinese Americans be interned by the federal government, as the Japanese Americans were during World War II.69
Surveys have demonstrated the depth of anti-Chinese sentiment. A 2001 Gallup poll found that more than 80 percent of Americans viewed the PRC as “dangerous.” In another poll, a national telephone survey commissioned by the Committee of One Hundred and the Anti-Defamation League of 1,216 randomly selected adult Americans, close to half thought that Chinese Americans “passing secrets to the Chinese government is a problem.” Almost a third believed Chinese Americans were more loyal to the PRC than to the U.S. And in the political arena, Chinese and other Asian Americans stood out as the most unpopular candidates of all. Among those surveyed, more people felt reluctant to vote for an Asian American president than for a woman, an African American, or a Jewish American.
For the Chinese American community, these polls confirmed many of their worst fears—that their acceptance was linked to the ever-shifting relations between the United States and China rather than to their own particular behavior. It was sobering to consider that, more than a century after passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, they were still perceived by many to be strangers in their own country.
The anti-Chinese backlash engendered much soul-searching and debate within the Chinese American community. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw endless, frantic discussions on how to prove one’s loyalty to the United States, or whether to confront these attitudes with organized protests. Some immigrants began to blame themselves for being too complacent—for immersing themselves in their careers and families, and not braving the risks of participation in affairs of the larger world. On Internet chat groups and in public forums, they openly questioned whether they had been giving the right message to the next generation. Was it, perhaps, short-sighted to discourage their children from careers in the media and the arts, careers that could influence public perception of Chinese Americans, in favor of the more anonymous fields of science and technology? Could the putative security offered by such fields have been nothing more than an illusion? Were they wrong to warn their children to avoid politics? Could their own memories of repressive regimes in Asia have nudged them toward a safe haven of political apathy in the United States?
The national hostility to Chinese Americans also provoked high-profile discussions among community leaders and prominent activist groups such as the Organization of Chinese Americans, the Committee of One Hundred, and 80/20.70 Some advocated bloc-vote strategies to give the community greater political clout; others discussed devoting more resources to public relations and philanthropy; still others encouraged ethnic Chinese to drape American flags over their windows. Like so many other immigrants, Chinese Americans knew they had made a genuine, permanent contribution to the United States, a place they now called home. They wanted