The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [98]
“Me no likee, me no wantee Chinee boy,” she said.
Suppressing a “huge desire to laugh,” Lowe responded, “Mrs. Bittern, I understand perfectly.”
Lowe saw with distressing clarity that it was his skin color and not some fault in his credentials that barred him from employment. Even his flawless, educated English could not overcome a prospective employer’s prejudice about the Chinese. “Everywhere I was greeted with perturbation, amusement, pity or irritation—and always with identically the same answer,” he wrote.
“Sorry,” they invariably said, “the position has just been filled.” My jaunty self-confidence soon wilted. I sensed that something was radically, fundamentally wrong. It just didn’t seem possible that overnight all of the positions could have been occupied, particularly not when everybody spoke of a labor shortage. Suspicion began to dawn. What had Father said? “American firms did not customarily employ Chinese.” To verify his statement, I looked again in the newspaper that next morning and for the week after, and sure enough, just as I expected, the same ten ads were still in the newspapers.23
Chinese American college graduates were sometimes barred not only from professional positions but even from the lowliest jobs at white firms. During the exclusion era, even companies outside of California had strict policies against hiring Asians. “Recently two friends of mine wrote to no less than fifty firms throughout the country to apply for a position where they could get some experience along their own line and all they have got were negative answers,” University of Washington graduate Fred Wong told an interviewer in the 1920s. “They went to the Oriental Admiral Line to apply for a job as common labor on the boat. The superintendent at first told them that it was not the policy of the firm to hire people other than Americans. The boys told him that they were American born and did not come into the excluding list. They talked with the supervisor for a while and finally he said, ”I am sorry boys, I cannot employ you people.”
Perceived as foreign, ethnic Chinese job seekers even endured linguistic standards that were not imposed on Caucasians. Some employers expected Chinese Americans to be fluent in both English and Chinese, hiring them to serve as the company’s link between the white and Chinese communities. For instance, a Los Angeles bank hired a young second-generation Chinese man to serve its Chinese American customers. Although he spoke perfect English, his lack of proficiency in Chinese caused him to be fired, prompting his father to send him to China to study the language. Other employers expected ABCs to be verbally deficient in English and naturally gifted in Chinese. When a candidate for a teaching post answered questions using correct English diction, he was asked, “Don’t you have an accent? You’re Chinese.”
Some Chinese Americans learned to ignore such racism, and forged ahead with little more than the energy of their own ambition. Frank Chuck, son of a Chinese schoolteacher in Hawaii, arrived at Stanford University with only twenty-five cents in his pocket. In desperate need of cash and housing, and knowing that Chinese students were not welcome in Stanford’s dormitories (one Chinese boy, he recalled, was bodily “thrown out of Encina Hall”), Chuck worked his way through college by cooking for a Stanford professor in exchange for room and board, and earned a bachelor’s degree in organic chemistry in 1922 and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1925.
Chuck’s education changed not only his life but America’s eating habits as well. In 1927, after a stint teaching in China on a Rockefeller Fellowship, he became a research chemist for Western Condensing Company, the parent company of Carnation Milk. There he discovered the chemical actions responsible for milk dehydration and whey stabilization and in the process, invented powdered milk and instant cocoa. Later, Chuck would identify a way to prevent the parasitic disease coccidiosis from ravaging the poultry