The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [96]
When we grew up, we just lived on a bare minimum. If there was nothing to eat, we just ate plain rice and water. Whatever. Just wash it down. I used to get up at 7:00 in the morning and go to work at a wholesale florist. And I worked there for an hour before I went to school. I’d take my bicycle and I’d ride from Fifth and Mission Street, all the way to Galileo High. After school, I’d go to an apartment to wash the kitchen or do housework for an hour. Then I’d go home and eat dinner. And we started Chinese school at 5:00. From 5:00 to 8:00, we had three hours Chinese school. After that, I’d go home and do the laundry, or clean up the house or whatever, and do some homework and then go to bed.
Some families forbade their children to speak English at home and insisted that they attend special Chinese-language schools after their public school classes, six days a week. Chinese-language schools represented the hopes and efforts of first-wave immigrant parents eager to maintain in their American-born children some vestige of their Chinese heritage. The earliest of these schools appear to have been informal arrangements between scholars and Chinese immigrant families. Known as kuan, and held in the private homes of their tutors, they consisted of classes of twenty to thirty children who learned the rudiments of Chinese language, calligraphy, philosophy, and classical literature. By the end of the 1920s, some fifty Chinese-language elementary schools and a half dozen Chinese-language high schools existed in the United States, mostly in the West.
The children’s reaction to this additional education was mixed. Chinese lessons were “an ordeal that I grew to hate,” Louise Leung Larson recalled of her childhood in the 1910s. “I didn’t see why I had to learn Chinese when I was always going to live in America. The only way I could remember the characters was to write the American phonetic sound beside them.” Rodney Chow had a Chinese-language teacher in Los Angeles with a “totalitarian attitude” toward the children: “It was just memorizing, writing, and reading, and it was very, very strict because he actually took the stick and hit us.”
Even if the teacher was not abusive, it was difficult for some children to concentrate on their studies. There was the problem of different dialects: one Chinese school made the mistake of employing a Mandarin-speaking instructor for children of Cantonese-speaking parents, which frustrated the students and led most of them to drop out. And often the interest simply was not there. Pardee Lowe, an ABC who grew up in San Francisco in the 1920s and graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law School, described his personal struggle with Chinese school: “It was not that I was entirely unwilling to learn, but simply that my brain was not ambidextrous. Whenever I stood with my back to the teacher, my lips attempted to recite correctly in poetical prose Chinese history, geography or ethics, while my inner spirit was wrestling victoriously with the details of the Battle of Bunker Hill, Custer’s Last Stand, or the tussle between the Monitor and Merrimac.”
Yet immigrant parents believed these classes were necessary to sustain continuity with the ancestral homeland and their identity. In 1924, a Los Angeles-born woman of Chinese parents recalled, “I had to learn the Chinese language because father told me time and again that I could never be an American because my skin was yellow and only white people could be Americans.”
But neither Chinese schools nor Chinese parents could shelter children from the onslaught of American culture. Outside the narrow confines of Chinatown and family, a larger world beckoned. Popular culture permeated even the most isolated ethnic ghettos, shaping the desires of ethnic Chinese youths, exposing them to new values, new ideas, beyond the reach of parental control. The children listened to the radio for entertainment, read English-language newspapers, pored over comic books and pulp