The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [92]
So the arrival of any Chinese female in the United States was a rare event. From 1906 to 1924, only about one hundred fifty Chinese women secured legal permission to enter the United States. Then the Immigration Act of 1924 was enacted, prohibiting the entrance of any foreign-born Asian woman. Aimed primarily at ending the practice of Japanese mail-order brides, it hurt the Chinese American community as well: from 1924 to the end of the decade, not a single Chinese woman was admitted to the United States.
Despite the daunting numbers and the discriminatory laws, small communities of families gradually emerged. Because the typical Chinese immigrant could not afford to marry in the United States and was not permitted to bring his Chinese wife to his newly adopted country, those men with families by their side were almost always of the merchant or entrepreneur class, the petty bourgeois of Chinese American society. Consequently, the American-born Chinese children of these families (abbreviated as “ABCs”) tended also to be part of an elevated socioeconomic stratum. Still, many of these families were hardly rich by American standards. And though their children had avoided the horrors of steerage and the struggle to adjust to a strange country, they faced their own unique challenges in the United States.
The first great challenge was the right to an education. Even more than many other immigrant groups, the Chinese, with their Confucius-infused culture, preached the importance of education to their American-born progeny. As they scrambled and grubbed for a living—washing other people’s clothes, slaving away in sweatshops, stir-frying food in hot restaurant kitchens—they were driven by the all-consuming dream of all immigrants: that their children, particularly their sons, would lead a better life than they had. Education represented status, and some traditional Chinese parents, acutely sensitive to the stigma attached to merchants in China and the respect accorded scholars in Confucian society, venerated book learning as a worthy goal in itself, not simply as the path to skills that bring financial security or success. But the special place reserved for education was also based on its direct, practical outcomes. Immigrant parents especially favored careers such as medicine and engineering, not only because they were relatively lucrative, prestigious, and stable, but also because they did not require political connections, enormous outlays of capital, or advanced English-language skills. “My parents wanted us to become professionals,” one American-born Chinese recalled of his childhood days. “If either of my brothers [had become] a doctor, my mother would have been thrilled.”
Many parents also believed that if, for whatever reason, their American-educated children failed to establish themselves in the United States as doctors, engineers, or scientists, they could always go back to China and practice there the profession for which they had been trained in the West. Education was the one thing that could not be stripped from their children, and the parents frequently reminded them of this with adages like “You can make a million dollars, but a good education is better than a million dollars. You can lose everything but nobody can take away your good education.”
But immigrant Chinese parents learned from painful experience that an American education—even public education—was not a right for their children, but a privilege that had to be fought for. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, state authorities tried to exclude Chinese American children from attending white public schools, over the protests and petitions of their parents.
In 1859, San Francisco school board members, making no secret of their contempt for the Chinese (referring to them even as “baboons” and “monkeys”), shut down a public school for Chinese children, even though their parents