The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [263]
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“Bill Press, a prominent Democrat and co-host of CNN’s Crossfire program, was the guest host of the Ron Owens show this morning,” wrote one listener, Eddie Liu. “Within just five minutes of my listening, Press twice referred to Lee as a ‘spy,’ with no qualifying adjectives such as ‘alleged.’ ”
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Mainland China received so many adoption applications from the United States that in 2002 the government decided to impose a yearly quota.
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Many believed that America was synonymous with wealth, and viewed their relatives in the United States as “Gold Mountain uncles” and tycoons. When visiting ancestral villages during the 1980s, Chinese Americans reported excessive demands for money and gifts, a culture consumed by greed. “Those friends and relatives would all want money from you,” one Chinese American remembered. He was appalled to find that his PRC relatives scorned certain gifts, such as a black-and-white television set, because they had expected something more expensive. “They were all dissatisfied, they’d wanted a color model. We don’t even have one ourselves.”
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Of course, the Chinese are not the only people who used desperate means to enter the country. Immigration officials can recite accounts of many nationalities employing extreme measures to get into the United States, such as strapping themselves to the landing gear of airplanes, where they might fall or freeze to death, or even cramming themselves into suitcases, in hopes of making it into American airports undetected.
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A 1986 study conducted by the Real Estate Board of New York exposed shockingly high prices: in a community where rents were once lower than in Harlem, the cost of retail space on Chinatown’s Canal Street surpassed even that on Wall Street.
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American police have been known to commit anti-Chinese hate crimes. In January 1987, New York City police officers appeared at the doorstep of a Chinatown apartment to investigate charges that the occupants had illegal access to cable TV. When the Wongs, a Chinese couple, asked to see a warrant, the police apparently broke down the door, yelling, “Why don’t you Chinese go back to China?” and struck both of them. (Mrs. Wong, hit in the face with handcuffs, later required twelve stitches.) They later sued the police department and settled for $90,000. In January 1991, a New York City policeman pulled over Zhong Guoqing for running a red light. But Zhong, a Chinese émigré, failed to understand the officer’s demand to see his registration, which so enraged the cop (“Are you a wise guy?” he asked) that he handcuffed Zhong and pounded his head. Zhong was wounded so severely that he spent the night in the hospital and suffered the partial loss of vision in one eye.
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Lin later noted her loyalty and patriotism to the United States. “If you ask, I would identify myself as Chinese American,” she wrote in Art in America in 1991. “If I had to choose one thing over the other, I would choose American. I was not born in China, I was not raised there, and the China my parents knew no longer exists ... I don’t have an allegiance to any country but this one, it is my home.”
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The Joy Luck Club interwove Tan’s family history with the fictional stories of four American women and their immigrant Chinese mothers. No other novel by an Asian American writer had achieved such success in the history of publishing—it topped the New York Times best-seller list and sold 4.5 million copies by 1997. The film appeared in 1993, directed by Wayne Wang and based on a screenplay co-written by Tan and Ron Bass.
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Foreign correspondents and academics have also observed the coming of age of a new generation of Chinese “superkids” or “little emperors”—the fruit of China’s one-child policy—for whom no sacrifice or expense was too great for their parents to provide with the best education possible. The American