The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [95]
Somewhere in the middle were those torn between the demands and expectations of both cultures, Chinese and American. “There was endless discussion about what to do about the dilemma of being caught in between,” remembered Victor Wong, an American-born Chinese who grew up in San Francisco.
Finding a comfort zone in a racially stratified society took time. For some ABCs it took decades. Confusion about identity was only one problem; another was overt and covert racism. Those who grew up in white areas often did not feel the full effect of racism until reaching puberty. “We have never lived in Chinatown but have always lived in an American neighborhood,” Lillie Leung recalled in 1924.21 “I mingled with all the children quite freely, but when I was about twelve years old they began to turn away from me. I felt this keenly. Up to that time, I never realized that I was any different, but then I began to think about it.”
It was in the white or integrated public schools that many Chinese American children felt the sting of racism most sharply. Esther Wong of San Francisco remembers a French-language teacher who made no effort to hide her hatred of the Chinese. After asking Wong to read aloud in class, she remarked, “Well, you read all right, but I don’t like you. You belong to a dirty race that spits at missionaries.”
Racism also pervaded the curricula and textbooks, driving a wedge between Chinese Americans and their white classmates. “In grade school I was fairly successful in being admitted to the ‘inner circles,’ as it were,” one ABC recalled of her childhood in the 1910s. “Children are not prone to think a great deal of their ‘social selves’ and since I spoke English as well as they, and played and dressed as they did, I was not regarded as an outsider.” That is, until China was taught in geography and history class:
When we came to the study of China, the other children would turn and stare at me as though I were Exhibit A of the lesson. I remember one particularly terrible ancient history lesson; it told in awful detail about “queer little Chinamen, with pigtails and slanting eyes” ... and went on to describe the people as though they were inhuman, and at best, uncivilized. Even I, young as I was, resented these gross exaggerationswhich were considered the gospel truth by other pupils. I meditated on ways and means of absenting myself from class that day; I would have welcomed a sudden and violent attack of illness, or even sudden death, but since my health remained disgustingly good, I was forced to sit through a very embarrassing hour.
Another kind of struggle was being waged after school, at home. Many Chinese American children not only faced daily prejudice from whites, but at home had to deal with rigid attitudes their parents had imported from the old country. Fear and insecurity compelled many Chinese parents to shield their children from the influence of the outside, alien world, especially their daughters. “Mother watched us like a hawk,” Alice Sue Fun recalled of her formative years in San Francisco during the 1910s. “We couldn’t move without telling her. We were never allowed to go out unless accompanied by an older brother, sister, or someone else.”
In certain households, the girls were burdened with household work while still very young. Many second-generation Chinese women endured an unusually restrictive upbringing, with heavy domestic responsibilities and orders to stay home, while their brothers were permitted to venture out into the streets to play. After coming home from Oriental Public School each day, Alice Sue Fun had to do “a lot of housework for my mother—washed dishes, scrubbed the children’s clothes by hand, helped her sew.” By the time she was eight or nine years old, “I was cooking rice. If I burnt the rice, I would get a ling gok [a knuckle-rap on the head].”
Boys also learned early to work hard, although, unlike their sisters, they were usually given more freedom to work outside the home. The poverty