The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [257]
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The Wong Kim Ark case was only one of several important legal battles waged by the Chinese that would pioneer the field of civil rights law in the United States. Another landmark case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, would set the standard for equal protection before the law. Between 1873 and 1884, the San Francisco board of supervisors passed fourteen anti-Chinese laundry ordinances, one of which was a fire safety ordinance that mandated that all laundry owners in wooden buildings be licensed or risk heavy fines and six months of imprisonment. Since all of the Chinese laundries in the city were housed in wooden buildings, the Chinese viewed the ordinance as discriminatory, designed to cripple their livelihoods. When the board of supervisors rejected virtually every Chinese application for a license, the laundrymen protested by refusing to comply with the law and keeping their wash houses open. In 1885, the board refused to grant Yick Wo, a Chinese laundryman, a license to operate his business, even after he had secured city permits to prove that his building had passed the fire and health inspections. In response, the Chinese laundry guild filed a class action lawsuit that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that while the ordinance appeared to be “fair on its face and impartial in appearance,” its enforcement was not. The high court concluded that any law applied in a discriminatory manner, whether to U.S. citizens or foreign aliens, was unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Shanghai was divided at the time into Chinese districts and international settlements, where Western foreigners enjoyed extraterritorial rights.
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Between 1855 and 1934, a child born abroad legally gained U.S. citizenship if his father was a U.S. citizen at the time of the birth, and had lived in the United States before the birth.
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There was the infamous “chopsticks slaying case” involving Wong Shee, the wife of a New York merchant. In October 1941, she arrived at Angel Island, where immigration officials separated her from her nine-year-old son. After hearing rumors that she would be deported to China, Wong Shee killed herself by ramming a chopstick through her ear. A few years later, in 1948, thirty-two-year-old Leong Bick Ha hanged herself from a bathroom shower pipe after failing her examination. That same year, Wong Loy tried to leap from the fourteenth floor of an immigration building when told that she would be sent back to China.
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For years, the poetry remained unprotected from the elements. Some, written in pencil, could be easily smudged away, or disappear from flaking paint and water erosion. But a few scholars took the time to preserve the literature of Angel Island—to prevent this delicate legacy from crumbling away. In 1926, Yu-shan Han encountered the poems when he arrived in the United States to study at Boston University. Even though his trip was sponsored by a U.S. senator, immigration officials mistreated Han, calling him a “chink” and locking him away on Angel Island. While incarcerated, he read the poetry on the walls and, deeply moved, began to copy and translate them. Other efforts were made to record these verses. Detained in 1931, Smiley Jann copied ninety-two poems; the following year, Tet Yee, another inmate, recorded ninety-six poems. Some of these, and others, were later compiled by historians Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung in their book Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940.
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The original purpose of the Alien Land Act act had been to discourage Japanese immigration into California. Like the Chinese, Japanese arrivals had endured anti-Asian racism and could not become naturalized citizens, but unlike the Chinese, they were not systematically excluded