The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [60]
Compared to those in the western states, the Chinese communities in the South and Midwest were tiny. In many regions, there simply weren’t enough Chinese to form their own Chinatowns, prompting the émigrés to interact more with people of different races. In southern cities, such as New Orleans, the limited number of Chinese made them less threatening to local whites, enabling them to escape the oppressive segregation inflicted on the African American population. The Chinese lived undisturbed with urban whites in southern boarding houses—though it should be noted that many of their neighbors were European immigrants, not native-born Americans. Similarly, in the Midwest, the Chinese did not live in concentrated ethnic neighborhoods like the Italians, Poles, or blacks. Instead, the Chinatown that evolved in Chicago served mainly as a social center for the Chinese spread throughout the city or in smaller towns nearby.
As with all immigration stories, the transformation within each traveler creeps up so gradually that it is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint the precise moment in his life when the ultimate change occurred. It usually starts small, such as the decision to use an Anglo name in the United States. (Late-nineteenth-century census data reveal that along the East Coast, some Chinese immigrants had adopted Western first names and even altered their last names.) But the revelation that the change is far more profound than a name scrawled on paper typically arrives during a visit to the ancestral homeland. In America, it is jarring even for people who have moved out of state to visit their hometown after an absence of only a few years. Cherished landmarks have disappeared, family members have aged, a once familiar town of friends is now filled with strangers. The Thomas Wolfe title, You Can’t Go Home Again, conveys the sense of dislocation. The experience of returning home from another country can be even more startling.
Relatives and old friends are often just as shocked that the émigré is no longer the man who once lived among them. His new habits, his new values, the different way he carries himself, his occasional utterance of English in conversation, are viewed with suspicion. The experience of Lue Gim Gong is particularly instructive. In 1868, Lue left Toishan at the age of ten, first to work in San Francisco and later at the shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts. There he befriended Fanny Burlingame, a Sunday school teacher and cousin of the famous diplomat Anson Burlingame. Impressed by his intelligence, Fanny adopted him as her son. Upon her death he inherited $12,000 and two houses in Deland, Florida, in the center of the state’s citrus region. In Florida he devoted his life to horticulture, creating the Lue Gim Gong orange, an award-winning orange that could withstand both frost and shipment over great distances without spoilage; the frost-resistant Lue Gim Gong grapefruit; a new kind of sweet apple; the cherry currant; and a greenhouse peach that could be cultivated to ripen before Thanksgiving. Though he achieved acclaim in the United States, Lue found himself in a kind of cultural limbo when he returned to visit his home village. His neighbors viewed him with animosity, baffled by his obsession with conducting agricultural experiments. When Lue pumped water uphill to sustain some orange trees, local farmers destroyed the grove, complaining that the trees blocked their feng shui, literally, “wind water,” the practice