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By Root 1373 0

novels bought from neighborhood drugstores, spent Saturday afternoons at the local nickelodeons watching movies. Child-related activities of civic and religious groups also encouraged the assimilation of the American-born Chinese. Missionaries established Chinatown churches, and by 1920, almost all of the Chinese American children in San Francisco—close to a thousand of them—were attending Sunday school. The YMCA in San Francisco Chinatown organized athletic competitions in sports like soccer and basketball.22 At the same time, Chinese American children took the initiative of starting their own clubs. In 1914, eight young Chinese American boys thumbed through a Boy Scout handbook in the playground of a Methodist church in San Francisco and decided to create their own Scout chapter. It became the very first Boy Scout troop in San Francisco, and probably the first ethnic Chinese Boy Scout troop in the world.

The urge to partake in American customs grew more intense as children got older. Chinese American adolescents craved what they saw on the silver screen, in glossy advertisements, and in the (mostly white) public schools. By the 1920s, one of the most prosperous decades in U.S. history, ABCs were increasingly torn between parental restraints and the seductive pull of American consumer culture. The urban enclaves of Chinese America of that decade were so profoundly transformed that their earliest settlers would have found them unrecognizable. “Take it all in all, the Chinatown of today is not the Chinatown of the bygone days,” Dr. Ng Poon Chew, the founder of San Francisco’s Chung Sai Yat Po, wrote in 1922. Chew and others noticed how American traditions supplanted Chinese ones—how Chinese costume and skullcap gave way to closely cropped hair and Western clothes, how Chinese women wore the latest fashions and styled their hair in pageboy bobs or marcelled waves, and how while older women tottered about in bound feet, younger women wore high heels.

But the most dramatic changes were the ones least visible to the casual observer: the shifts in thought, attitudes, and values. Chew noted that Chinese children spoke English and enjoyed American slang. Chinese American women, independent and assertive, dated whomever they pleased and selected their own husbands instead of leaving these decisions to their parents. And Chinese students—ambitious and patriotic United States residents, Chew observed—aspired to earn first-rate college degrees.

By the first few decades of the twentieth century, a substantial number of Chinese Americans, mostly children of small business owners, had fulfilled their parents’ dreams of becoming well educated and were now enrolled at universities along the West Coast, especially in California. But parents and children alike would soon learn that in America, a university degree did not guarantee them respectability, career success, or even employment.

Mainstream society thought of Chinese males as workers in service industries such as laundries, restaurants, and produce markets. Those who aspired to break into the professions—that is, college graduates with degrees in fields such as engineering, architecture, or the sciences—faced difficulty in trying to secure positions at large, Caucasian-controlled firms. In California, consonant with the state’s legacy of racial discrimination, many firms had specific regulations against hiring Asians. “It is almost impossible to place a Chinese or Japanese of either the first or second generation in any kind of position, engineering, manufacturing or business,” the Stanford University Placement Service reported in 1928.

In a family memoir, Father and Glorious Descendant, Pardee Lowe wrote about the discrimination he faced when seeking work, when certain whites could not see beyond the stereotype of the Chinese as houseboy or coolie. While a student at Stanford University, Lowe had applied for a job as chauffeur for a banker’s wife, who insisted upon speaking to him in pidgin English. “You Chinee boy or Jap boy?” she asked.

“Chinese, of course, but born in