The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [94]
A few Chinese American children managed to find ways to attend Caucasian schools. An unwritten rule was that they could enroll if the local community did not object—a situation that doubtless encouraged the ethnic Chinese students to be docile, respectful, and studious. This strategy could backfire, however, when high academic achievement inflamed white envy. In 1905, a group of white parents at Washington Grammar School in San Francisco insisted that four Chinese students, all academic superstars, were cheating by secretly exchanging answers in Chinese during tests. The students were separated during the next exam, but they still achieved the four top scores in the class. Undeterred, the white parents then complained to the Board of Education, which removed the four boys from the school altogether. In 1928, a white community in Mississippi decided to bar all Asians from attending the local white school after a Chinese boy graduated at the top of his class. The specter of segregation always lurked in the background, with the constitutionally protected right of school boards to expel Chinese students on any whim or pretext.
By the mid-1920s, it was becoming difficult to segregate Chinese students in California, largely because of the Chinese community’s willingness to organize politically. An effort to create a segregated junior high school failed in the San Francisco Bay Area when Chinese activists and organizations made vociferous protests. It appears that these barriers gradually, informally dropped away, several decades before actual laws were codified to ban racial segregation. So as the years went by, more Chinese American children attended integrated schools, and their initial exposure to whites often threw them into a welter of confusion about their identity.
In most children, feelings oscillated between a fierce pride in their heritage and a near-total rejection of being Chinese. Some saw themselves as informal ambassadors of China, interpreting its culture for their white classmates while also serving as models of deportment for their white teachers, as if upon their words and actions hinged the reputation of an entire country. Others had so deeply absorbed the toxin of racism that they grew to loathe everything Chinese, even their own looks. To make themselves appear less Asian, some Chinese American teenage girls taped or glued their eyelids in order to create an extra fold, and while Chinese American boys were less likely to resort to such tactics, some must have been equally insecure about their self-image during the 1920s. Even late into the twentieth century, one man would recall, “I remember rushing home from school one afternoon—I was eleven or twelve years old—and desperately staring at the bathroom mirror and praying to God my face would miraculously turn Caucasian. Only fear of pain and death kept me from committing suicide.”
A few American-born Chinese simply viewed themselves as white. Such individuals tended to live in rural areas, where the absence of an established ethnic Chinese community made them less threatening to whites and encouraged their participation in the mainstream. Bernice Leung, born in 1917 in the farming community of Fresno, California, remembered a period in her childhood in which she and her siblings did not believe they were Chinese at all. Asians, not Caucasians, looked strange to them, and they wondered why they themselves had not been born with blue eyes and blond hair. Noel Toy, who grew up in the only Chinese American family in a small northern California town, was astonished to meet another Asian woman in college. “I was brought up purely Caucasian, Western,” she recalled. “When I went to junior college, I saw an Oriental