The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [260]
34
Delbert Wong’s life was transformed by military service and federally subsized education. A third-generation Chinese American born in California, Wong served in the Army Air Force during World War II, flying thirty bombing missions over Europe and winning the Distinguished Flying Cross. The government supported his education at Harvard Business School, and after the war he also studied law at Stanford, which launched his forty-year judicial career.
35
The United States reserved 70 percent of its admission slots for only three countries—the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany—slots that largely went unused. Countries in southern and eastern Europe or Asia had tiny quotas and long wait lists: Italy had an annual quota of only 5,666, Greece 308, and Yugoslavia 942. For the Chinese, the number was even smaller—105. Furthermore, according to the U.S. government, a Chinese alien was not simply someone who originated from China, but any foreigner with at least 50 percent Chinese ancestry, no matter where he or she lived in the world. Thus, immigrants of Chinese heritage born in Europe, or even people of half Chinese, half white ancestry in Europe, were categorized not as European but as Chinese, and were barred from using European quotas.
36
Supporters of the bill assured their opponents that the purpose was to fight racial discrimination, not swamp the country with newcomers from Third World countries. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) predicted that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset” and that the bill would not “inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.” Hiram Fong (R-Hawaii) echoed these sentiments, pointing out that “Asians represent six-tenths of one percent of the population of the United States” and that “the people from that part of the world will never reach one percent of the population ... Our cultural pattern will never be changed as far as America is concerned.” President Johnson added, “This bill we signed today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives.” These claims, however, were wrong—the act profoundly changed the history of modern immigration and affected millions of lives.
37
According to the documentary Sewing Woman, seamstress Dong Zem spent almost every waking moment hunched over a sewing machine after she migrated to the United States: “I can still recall the times when I had one foot on the pedal and another one on an improvised rocker, rocking one son to sleep while the other was tied to my back. Many times I would accidentally sew my finger instead of the fabric because one child screamed or because I was falling asleep on the job.” †In her memoir Paper Daughter, M. Elaine Mar describes how her family emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver in 1972, when she was five. Her father, employed by a Chinese restaurant managed by one of his relatives, was too poor to buy a ten-dollar T-shirt with her grade school logo printed on it. “Your father has to work a long time, many hours, to make ten dollars,” her mother explained. “How much money do you think we have? We’re not like the Americans, with their English and their four-dollar-an-hour McDonald’s jobs! Don’t you think your father would work at McDonald’s if he could speak English?”
38
Maxine Hong Kingston, winner of the National Book Award and National Critics Circle Award, is the most widely taught living author in the United States.
39
Lee and Yang first met as students at National Southwest United University, when the Japanese invasion forced them to flee to the city of Kunming in Yunnan. After World War II, they won doctoral scholarships to study physics under Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, beginning a scientific collaboration that continued even after Yang moved to Princeton University and Lee to Columbia. When they received the Nobel, Yang was only thirty-four years old, and Lee barely thirty-one, the second youngest scholar