Becoming American: The Chinese Experience; 103; No Turning Back

We'll see you again. ¶¶ Funding for this series is provided by Walter and Shirley Wong and by the Henry Loose Foundation, the family of Shen Chen and Bae Pao Lu Chow, the family of Kenneth and Mary Wong, the Herb Albert Foundation, Sit Investment Associates and Sit Investment Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Star Foundation,

the Kelvin Foundation, and Albert Yu and Mary Beckman, the Tang Fund, Gina and David Chu, Nautica International, the Chang Kingdom Foundation, Intel Corporation, Sybase eBusiness software because everything works better when everything works together, and by Mutual of America. For over half a century, people from all walks of life have turned to Mutual of America for retirement and pension products. What's striking is how little I remember that day. So much was a foot in the White House, so many bills were getting signed, that this was almost routine. On October 3rd, 1965, at about 130 p.m., we headed to New York's Liberty Island.

This bill says simply that from this day forth, those wishing to immigrate to America, shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationships to those already here. My job as press secretary was just to make sure reporters and camera crews had a clear view of LBJ as he signed a new immigration act into law. Actually, we didn't consider it such a big story. This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. I remember as we left, the president put his armor on me, leaned over so no one could hear, and said, Bill, if this was not a revolutionary law, what the blank did we go all the way to New York to sign it for? It turns out he needed to have worried. None of us knew it at the time, or even intended it, but that bill would take racial bias out of our immigration laws.

America had always thought of itself as white, despite its large black minority. Now, this would become a country of all shades and tents and hues. The law helped change the country's identity, the idea of what it means to be American, and another people would emerge from the shadows. Their story would take its place in the making of America. I just wanted to tell you that this is the largest gathering of Chinese since the railroad was completed. Years later, we could see the immigration law was a turning point. No, the turning point. Once this last legal obstacle was dismantled, the Chinese were free to come into their own. The first day I stepped on the land of the United States. I talked to my wife, and I said to myself, I'm free. I can speak freely. I can speak what I want to say.

In this final program of our series, you'll meet just a few Chinese Americans, but through them, the experience of a modern American people, living the fears of the Cold War. The revolts of the 60s, the rise in immigration, and then a striking climb to the top wrongs of American life, a climb that's been swift and at times painful. Vincent Chin's mother was crying because it sounded like people were saying there's nothing we can do, and I sat there and I raised my hand. This story will be told one person, one family at a time, because after the Second World War, and even more after 65, becoming American was less a legal drama than a human one. Not thought in the courts of streets so much as the private territories of heart and hope.

I am an American, but I have to become an American to everybody else all the time. I don't know, you tell me you're the white guy. Every where you look in recent years, you see this accept. I am paid and his landmark buildings in America and worldwide.

The breakthroughs in science, as with AIDS researcher David Ho, and Stephen Chu, one of six Chinese American winners of the Nobel Prize, or Yo-Yo Ma. Everywhere it seems, that music gets made. One of my favorite success stories, because it's so unlikely, played out over this plot of land. Now they all but sacred side of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. When it came time to build it, there was a contest. Everyone knew its importance, and top design firms across the country joined in. Who won?

My roommate came and got me, and only said, don't get your hopes up, but you got a call from Washington. A college student, Chinese American, just 21 years old. And I didn't quite understand, so he told me again, and I'm still not quite understanding. Her delight that day wasn't shared by all. No matter that she was US-born, the features of her face stirred up old ghosts. H. Ross Perot, self-appointed champion of the vets, called her A-Grow. Writer Tom Wolf called her plan something, quote, out of the Chinese cultural revolution. One Vietnam vet recommended adding an inscription to her monument, designed by a group. So was this another desperating tale of racism? Or the opposite? After all, her design got built to much acclaim. It struck me, her story is like the story of Chinese America as a whole.

It shows how powerful race can be in this country, and how powerless, when matched against human will. To get at that story, I had to reach back more than 50 years. Chinatown was small on those days, but I always noticed that when I walked on a street with my father, I must have been under the age of ten. Other men would come across the street to say hello to my father, total strangers. Shake his hand and then look at me and toss on my head or off me candy or a cake or something. For many of them, of course, because they had children of their own in China, which they had not seen in years. And the sight of a child in Chinatown was remarkable at that time. Charlie Chan grew up in Queens, New York, the son of a laundromat. When he was a boy, the old Chinese America was very much alive. And he'd see it firsthand when his dad brought him to Chinatown.

You still could find old Waqiu, the old Toisan uncles, who were still living in little apartments. Some of them still six or seven in an apartment where they had been for twenty, thirty or forty years. From the days when they first came over and trapped by time. Charlie didn't know it then, but he was watching the legacy of the exclusion laws. On the books till just before he was born. The law had barred Chinese from bringing in wives. And for these old laborers, its repeal had come too late. Charlie lived a few miles east across the river. And there too, exclusion had done its job. There were 4,000 kids in his high school, just a handful looked like him.

I would do myself one young woman named Mickey Shimazu, a Filipino woman whose name is Orokaka Haininan, and a young man named John Yang, a Korean American. You remember them all? Well, because I dated both of the girls, number one. And I was friendly with John. We had no other choice, really. We were very, very few of us here. If you were going down the street, if the family was in a car going down the street and it saw another Asian people would stop and look at each other. And sometimes tentatively would kind of come up and ask, are you Chinese? Because it was so rare to see other people outside of the confines of Chinatown itself. In the first blusher of the fifties, Chinese Americans began to slip the restricted world of Chinatown, or bypass it entirely, to venture into the white world. When my family would walk into a store or a public place,

it would be like everybody in the store would just stop dead in their tracks and stop and kind of turn just to look and see who are these people who walked in. So I knew very, very early on that I was different. Helen Zia and her family were among the first to move into Levittown, New Jersey. Pioneers in more ways than one. At that time, there were fewer than 150,000 Chinese Americans in this whole country and in New Jersey. And the little suburban town that I knew as home, we were one of maybe a couple of families. And the people around us, I mean, I was mostly treated as this exotic little creature who could have come from Mars, who was a foreign visitor, even though, you know, baseball and hot dogs and apple pie were the only thing I really knew. And then at the same time, within our family, my mother and father, China was their home, that was their touchstone.

Helen's father had come here with a degree from St. John's University in Shanghai. Before the Communist shut it down, this was a training ground for China's elite, expected to help lead their country back to a place of pride in the world. Her father was schooled in the classics, new by heart, the great poets of China and the West. Then trained as a diplomat, but in New Jersey, none of that meant much. So he took our jobs, whatever paid, and clung to memories of his old life. My father was part of, I think, a lost generation of China. In China, but also in America, a generation who was educated, who had imbued in their very spirit, the idea that they could do something for China, his homeland. But because of circumstances, there really wasn't an opportunity for him to do that.

He was such a proud, proud man, and very proud of his heritage. And he felt that Chinese culture was the superior culture of the world. He felt that Chinese as people, as human beings, were superior to whites, and really just superior. He definitely felt that way. He would read encyclopedia passages about China, and he would underline them and cross them out, and he would have all of us read them and say, this is wrong. He was so irate with the encyclopedia Britannica that he actually, he not only complained, he sued them, they sued him back. Your father sued encyclopedia Britannica? Yeah, he did. We're being wrong about China. Right. Sometimes we would have to sit through lectures that would go for hours about these things that my father was so upset about, and we would just be rolling our eyes.

This China land, a place she'd never seen, was alive in Helen's imagination. But even more so was the land of her birth, the America she was now learning about in school and summer camp. And the recreation leader said, let's play charades, and we're going to do Washington crossing the Delaware. She said, OK, Helen, you play George Washington. So I knew that meant I would have to stand at the head of the little boat, you know, with my trusty team of Orisman behind me, and there I was pointing the way, you know, in my gym shorts. While Helen was growing up, her dad ran what he called a baby novelty business. He'd assemble pink and blue vases and trinkets on his kitchen table, then he'd drive up and down the east coast selling them out of his car. And believe it or not, he was able to raise a family of six kids doing this.

To this day, I don't know how he really did it. But, you know, we were the labor, the kids, he and my mom. And while he would sit there and paint pink or blue pieces of wood, he would recite the poems that he knew. He would think about what was happening in China. There was the world inside our family's home. My father was God. Whatever he said was the law. But in the outside world, when he would have to go do his business, and he would have to go sell these little pieces of wood and plastic toys, that he would then have to go and almost, I felt, his voice would change. He would be almost obsequious and fawning, and his voice would take more of a high-pitched tone. And I would just see that and just feel that, you know, just what a difference there was and what a shame there was.

In the 1950s, China was the enemy. Mao's troops were fighting in North Korea, killing American giants. And Chinese Americans felt the chill. Their image was still tied to China's, like it or not. They had breathed a lot easier around World War II, when the US and China had been on the same side. But now, the pendulum was swinging back, and with it an old American attitude returned. The Chinese were foreigners, and always would be. The 50s were a very rough time for the Chinese American community in general. And I can't think of anybody I know from those days who wasn't affected on one level or another. In my own family's case, starting in 50-51, we got visits from the FBI.

Apparently, my father's name, and my mother's name, was exactly the same as somebody they were looking for. And so, in the middle of the night, when they were sure that everybody was home, they'd be banging on the doors, and I remember peering behind my mother's house dress, because we all were woken up, of course. At these strange, big men, long overcoats with fedoras, kind of like ward bonds, you know, with a fedora on. And wondering who they were, and noticing that my parents were really scared, which... Well, you don't forget. They were using a normal procedure at that time to root out what they thought might be common as sympathizers. So, one of the things my father wrote was a pamphlet that was called the US Got Red China All Wrong. He actually sent copies of it to many leading politicians at that time. There would be these weird clicks and noises and strange static on the phone line.

Our mail would come to us, delivered all sort of damaged and bashed up. And I had the impression that everybody, every kid's family, their phone and their mail, came, you know, damaged, or that they had weird static on their phone like we did. Until one day, some of the neighbor kids, you know, the kids we played with, came over and said, hey, what does your dad really do? You know, because the FBI was over at our house, asking about your father. And it was at that point, I knew, you know, that, oh, our dad's being watched by the FBI. Here's the strange thing about the McCarthy years. With a cloud of suspicion hanging over them, Chinese Americans were making a move to the mainstream, getting a taste of the good life. You see it all in Sean Wong and his family.

His dad was an engineer. Yes, a Chinese engineer in America at a time when few could imagine such a thing. They lived in Berkeley. My mother used to tell me, we're Chinese and you're Chinese American. I have no idea what that was. I didn't know what the difference was. My mother would wear Chinese dresses, chunk songs. My mother and father would speak Chinese to each other at home. And here I am, this little boy. I wanted to be Willie Mays. I wanted to be Roy Rogers. When I was young, I went to a lot of different schools. My family moved around a lot. So I was always the new person at the school.

When I was in the second grade, my father took a job in Taiwan, working as an engineer for the US Navy. And I'm enrolled in the American school there in Taiwan, along with a lot of other military kids. And I remember on the first day of school, we're waiting by the street and I'm with my mother. And the school bus comes by and we get on the bus. And all the kids in the bus who are all white start chanting, no Chinese allowed on this bus. And the first thought that popped in my mind is that, oh no, it's okay. She's my mom. You know, I didn't think of myself as Chinese. I thought of myself as being just like them. I think I just had to figure it out on my own. Your parents always are telling you, be proud your Chinese. No, and of course, yeah, yeah, right mom. That doesn't help me out in the school yard.

I definitely grew up hearing every kind of taught and it would make me angry. Most of the time it wasn't like that. I had wonderful friends and neighbors and people I grew up with. But you never knew when something like that would happen. You never knew when somebody would yell at you, go back where you came from. They were doing what most kids do, fishing around for a model, trying to fit in. I remember in 1958, noticing that Cal had a Japanese American football player. I'd never even heard of such a thing. And his name was Pete Demoto. His number was number 60 and he played left guard for the Rolls-Bull Bound California Bears. I used to run down onto the field with the other little kids at the end of the game.

Other kids were trying to get quarterback Joe Cap's autograph and I was there trying to find Pete Demoto. I wanted his autograph. I wanted to see if he looked Asian. If he looked like me. Because here was some guy who was a football player and that was something spectacular. My name is Benjamin Pan, but people would call me Benny. Last name is P-A-N, just like a Peter Pan. But I'm not Peter, you see. Most Chinese in America today never had an American childhood. If they've learned stories like Peter Pan or a little Red Riding Hood, it's his adults since they were born overseas and grew up speaking Chinese. I want to tell you the story of one such man and his journey to Queens, New York, a journey that would take him half a lifetime.

Like most immigrants in American history, his dream grew out of the sheer misery of life in his homeland. And like others before him, he was after more than just US comforts. He wanted a life that was his own. Jiangsu Province, 1957. Benny Pan was not someone you'd expect to find in these rice patties. Like Helen's father, he'd studied at that training ground for the elite, St. John's University. In fact, was president of his class.

I was a member of the track and field team as a 100 and a 200 meters statue. I were very fast at that time. I was strong at that time. Now it's old getting old. His graduation just weeks before Mao took over was one of the last great ceremonies of the old China. I was graduate in 1949. We have a gathering together under the Canva tree, have a tea party. But when communist come, means all the dreams spoil. No, all the life spoil. You can never think of coming out. Communist rule would trap most Chinese. From a nation of hundreds of millions, immigration to the US would drop to near zero. Benny, as the oldest son, felt he shouldn't leave. But he got his sister Diana onto a train to Hong Kong as the borders were shutting down.

At that time, I was 19. And my mother didn't want me to leave. I was so scared. And the train station is a mess at that time. People's leaving, people's crying, and then communist guard, they searched me, and they took my luggage and took my pocketbook, everything. And the train is going to move. And Ben just pushed me to the train. And my mother came and said, no, no, you're not going to leave. But Ben said, no, she must go. Let her go. Let her have her life. I look back and he's waving, and then my mother's crying. That's all I can remember.

He's my life's ever. If not because of him, I'm never going to get a chance to leave. He was a Christian, a college graduate, the child of wealthy parents. All that made him now a marked man. Benny kept his head down, and his voice low, became a librarian and language instructor. When he wed Chen Ling in 1957, he slipped off his mow jacket and borrowed a tux at the photo studio. But then came his year in the rice fields, and that was prelude. In 1967, as Mao's cultural revolution reached fever pitch, anyone with ties to the west could be denounced, held interrogated. Benny's diaries and family pictures were burned.

They tried to squeeze out what you did wrong to the communist. If you don't confess, if you don't admit what they say, they beat you. But I was not afraid of anything, because nothing wrong in my heart. So, I faced that, and I stand up for that. But some of my colleagues did die. They called me suicide. That was terrible. That was really terrible. He was separated from his wife in daughters and set to media labor for six years. Diana waited anxiously for news. She was building a life, first in Hong Kong, later in New York in Connecticut. That she was now prosperous and safe, only added to the anguish. The letter just stopped, that really scares me. Diana's experience was like that of most Chinese Americans, nearly a decade of silence.

But he's a very strong person, strong real person. I hopefully I can hear from him. So, I didn't give up my hope, I didn't. Even as Chinese saw their few freedoms fall away, Chinese Americans were reaching for theirs. January 1961. Left the word go for, from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. When JFK was elected, this was a great wind of hope that spread through the country for people of color at that time. The day after he was inaugurated, I was at a house party with predominantly African American friends. And the highlight of the party, if you could imagine, was we turned off the record player and turned up the lights.

And Stanley, who was one of the guys that I hung out with, had memorized the speech, the inauguration speech overnight, and stood up and recited it, and then we all applauded. Charlie Chin was 17 when JFK went to the White House, and he knew he wasn't going to follow his father into laundry work to earn three cents per shirt. Like his friends, black and white, he expected more. So in the weekends, we would go down to Greenwich Village where all kinds of interesting things happen. Go to listen to jazz, and then pretend to be old enough to drink and go into bars. And like everybody else, I got myself a black tonalic sweater and a beret, and I learned to smoke go-was, cheap French cigarettes, and interspersed foreign words in my conversation just so I would sell more worldly. A friend of mine said to me, if I wanted, I could go down to the corner. There was a coffee house, and if I played and passed the hat, I could make some money.

Well, I was pretty desperate, so. I went down and I played, you know, some Appalachian tunes, and a couple of Pete's Seagull kind of tunes. And then I passed the hat, and I made like $5 in change, and I thought, wow, this is the life for me. People would be looking at me very intently, and I thought it was because I was such a good player. Now I realized, of course, that they were thinking, why is this Chinese guy playing the banjo? It was a great place to be when you're young, and young people were tasting for the first time intellectual freedoms, philosophical freedoms, political freedoms. Yes, even sexual freedoms. Well, all of a sudden being exotic now because I'm Chinese was a definite advantage. Well, I wasn't that much of an advantage, but it was a small advantage.

It was almost on a lark that Charlie decided to go to Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. And I myself marched on Washington the first time. If you're going to identify with somebody, who you're going to identify with, the people who had instituted unfair laws and discriminatory practices, or the people who were fighting to get them changed. And it was pretty obvious if you had a brain in your head that you had no choice, you had to identify with the people who were fighting discriminatory laws, fighting injustice. The laws and norms were all being revised. Helen was no more insulated than Charlie. There was a moment when I was in the high school school yard with my friend Julie, who was white, and my friend Rose, who was black, and the three of us, white, black, and yellow, were standing there talking about civil rights.

And then one of my friends turned to me and said, you know, Helen, you've really got to decide whether you're black or white. And I was dumbstruck. I was that just shut me up completely. I just thought, well, but I'm not black, and I'm not white. I'm something else. But at that time, when I was in high school, there wasn't something else. Where did she fit? Through high school, Helen was still assembling her parents' flower shop novelties. But when she applied to college, Princeton offered her admission, all tuition paid. My father was very proud that I had won this scholarship. But when it came time for me to actually get him to sign the registration papers that every parent has to sign, it says it's okay for my kid to go to your college. I went into the kitchen, I brought him the papers and a pen, and he put the paper down, put the pen down, and said, no.

The proper place for an unmarried Chinese daughter is to stay at home with her parents. And when he put that pen and paper down, I just, I saw my future was slamming shut in front of me. And it was that point in time. My father was, you know, he was God in our family. I had never knowingly disobeyed my father once, you know, until that point. I was 18 years old, and I said, I somehow, I slammed the table and I said, no, I'm going to college. And he took one look at me, didn't say a word, picked up the pen, and signed the paper and walked out of the room. In college, I learned that I was an Asian American. I learned that I didn't have to call myself oriental, like a rug. It was like a light bulb going off. It was exhilarating. It was, I have to say, it was such a thrilling time.

I mean, the 60s for Asian Americans, with the first time you could speak out. You know, you no longer wanted to be invisible. Sean Wong was in college in the Bay Area, when students there invented the term Asian American. That was 1968, the year of bitter strikes, the win courses in black and Asian history. The early teachers were often the students themselves. There were no books. If you wanted to learn about Chinese American history, you got your tape recorder, and you went into Chinatown, and you found some old timers to tell you about their lives. One day a call came into the university from a park ranger who wanted help reading Chinese. Something about an old building they were going to burn down out in the Bay on Angel Island. And the interesting thing was, we sort of a young radical Asian American studies teachers or students, we didn't know anything about Angel Island.

It was the old attention center of the exclusion era. Tens of thousands of Chinese had been held there when they tried to enter the country. Many had never made it in. And so a bunch of us went over there. And we walked into the building. And it was very dilapidated, broken glass on the floor. And on the walls are hundreds and hundreds of palms engraved in Chinese. And the person we were with started reading the poems on the walls. Why do I have to languish in this jail? My parents wait in vain for news. My wife and child wrapped in their quilt, sigh with loneliness.

And as we went through the building and our translator was reading the poems very bad on the walls, you could sort of relive the history. We were in there discovering the history that gave us a sense of who we were and gave us a sense of place in America. A place in America, more Chinese came each day to claim theirs. Their presence was a surprise, an unintended result of the new, more liberal immigration law. To be fair, most people in the community didn't recognize it at first either. By the time the law took effect on 68, overnight, in one year, suddenly the face of Chinatown was beginning to change. And this was very apparent if you knew Old Chinatown because it was quite common to walk down the streets of Old Chinatown, pre-68, pre-65, and pretty much know all the people on the street and say hello to various distant relatives.

But by 68, 69, 70, you could walk down to be whole groups of people and you could realize their recent arrivals and their families. They weren't necessarily people who came from farms and small villages. They were coming from more urban areas, they were coming from Hong Kong. These people were more sophisticated, more knowledgeable, certainly than the people of my father's generation who were literally raised in feudal China or just the post period of feudal China. So it changed everything and by the early 70s, it exploded in Chinatown. Everything started to change. The cuisine changed. The Chinese Americans, coming back into Chinatown, become for dinner, they didn't know how to order anymore. People began to arrive who were skilled restaurant tours, who were professionals. They began to bring in food products and things we had never seen before.

The different regional cuisines from Hunan, from Sichuan, from Shanghai, whereas growing up all there was Chinese American food, chapsui. The new immigrants came from Taiwan and Hong Kong, almost none from the Chinese mainland. The people's Republic of China and its borders were still tightly policed, though there were stirrings of change with the visit from an old enemy. When Nixon came to China in 1972, that's still in the cultural revolution.

Like thousands of others, Benny Pan still lived under virtual house arrest. I was specially advised not to leave the school, not to go back home, not to go any place. I didn't know why at the beginning. Later, some of the communists told me, because you can speak English, if you go out, if you met Nixon, maybe you would tell the truth to the Nixon. Well, I don't think I can meet Nixon at that time. It was not until 1973, a year after Nixon's visit, that Benny Pan even dared send a letter out. When I saw his writing, I was really excited, and I'll call my friends, tell them the good news.

All across America, news was now trickling in. A family members who had survived or not. Of relatives had broken by the cultural revolution, others born. Their names and faces until now, not even known. China's opening restored families, thought a corner in the hearts of Chinese Americans that had been frozen for years. And by the late 70s, some traveled in and out, became possible again. It was 30 years since Benny put his sister on the train out. Now, he wrangled a visa to get his oldest daughter free. But his own request to leave, with his wife, was turned down. Their dream would have to wait. Helen Zia graduated in Princeton's first class of women, breaking a 200-year tradition. Her parents were elated when she was accepted to medical school, a guest when she dropped out.

My father would write me letters that were so angry. And I picked them up, I'd open them, and I'd peek just to see the beginning of what he might have written. And some of them began with the salutation to my daughter, who was worse than my worst enemy. And then they would just go downhill from there. She didn't help matters by moving to Detroit to stamp out car hoods and fenders on an assembly line. But what happened in Detroit would change Helen's life and touch the lives of Asian Americans all across the country. In 1982, Detroit was a grim place. At the start of the new year, the U.S. Labor Department said Michigan's jobless rate was 14.9%, nearly double the national average. Its cars couldn't compete with those coming from Japan. And the resentment of all things Japanese was palpable.

On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chen, a draftman, was teased away from his wedding, celebrating his bachelor party at a neighborhood lounge. Unfortunately for him, sitting across from him at the bar were two auto workers who looked at him, saw his Asian face, his Chinese face, and saw red. They saw him as the enemy. We'll never know for sure how it started. There was drinking and angry words were exchanged. The white men mistook Chen for Japanese and taunted him. He was a nip, a jab, then a chink. It's because of you they said that we're out of work. After a scuffle broke out, everyone was told to leave. Once outside, the white stalked Chen, cornered him, then beat him with a baseball bat.

Four days later, he was dead. I remember that distinctly because I was at a gallery showing in Chinatown. Somebody walked in and said, have you heard what? They killed a Chinese guy in Detroit because they thought he was Japanese. Everybody got quiet because this was our worst fear. It wasn't in the deep south. It wasn't in 19th century California. It was in Detroit. If it could happen to Vincent Chen, it could happen to any Chinese American. Ronald Evans and Michael Knits were charged with second-degree murder, but plea bargain down to lesser charges of manslaughter. There's tenants, $3,000 fines, plus court fees, and probation. The judge was quoted as saying, these weren't the kind of people you sent to jail.

Helen had been laid off her job as an auto worker. She was writing for a couple of Detroit papers when she heard the news. It was like wildfire. You know, the first meeting had 100 people. The next meeting had 200 people. The light sentences outraged much of Detroit and stunned the Asian community, but lawyers said there was little hope of changing them. Vincent Chen's mother was crying because it sounded like people were saying there's nothing we can do. And I sat there and I raised my hand. And I said, we have to let people know that we think this is wrong. We have to do something. Speaking up about this was had everything to do with my experiences and the cumulative insults. All of the things that had built up, all of the things I had seen my parents subjected to, all of the bitterness that I could see my father carried with him because he was making baby novelties.

All of those things came to me. In these meetings, there would be people who would stand up and say, I've been working as a scientist or an engineer for the last 30 years in this company. I've taught every wet behind the ears college kid to be my boss and I know I've known more than every one of them has ever known and I've never been considered to be the supervisor. This time I have to speak up. We want justice. We want justice. We want justice. With Chinese leading the way, a coalition formed with Japanese Filipinos, Koreans and South Asians. It was the first Asian American advocacy group of its kind with a national scope and it led to one of the first federal prosecutions of a civil rights case on behalf of an Asian American.

To have rallies and demonstrations and to be marching and talking about civil rights and about racism was something very new to Chinese Americans and to Asian Americans. For community people, for restaurant workers to shut down their restaurants for a day so that their waiters and their cooks and the family could go and participate in a march. That was unheard of. And that was how deeply people felt at that moment, how important it was, you know, 100 years after the Chinese Exclusion Act to say, 100 years have gone by. We don't have to accept this stuff anymore. When the federal conviction was thrown out on appeal, Lily Chen filed a civil suit and won.

The men were ordered to pay her compensation, but most of it she never saw. They never served time in jail. Vincent Chen's death became a symbol shared by Chinese Americans, an emblem of identity. But what was the identity, the history they share? At the time of his death, the Chinese and American numbered almost a million. Nearly half were new immigrants. And for these newcomers, the scars of exclusion, even the battles of the civil rights were something remote, learned from newspapers and books. Chinese Americans were dividing as their numbers climbed. The poor and working class clustered in the old Chinatowns, making the streets more crowded and vital than ever.

The more educated meanwhile, made straight for the mainstream. But for new arrivals of whatever class, America was not about what had been, but what could be. For the poor, looking back was a luxury they could ill afford. And the fortunate, well, they were going to make history, not repeat it. Jerry Aing is co-founder of Yahoo, one of the most recognized brands on the internet. He left Taiwan in 1978. I do remember leaving Taiwan, and it feels a bit like a dream. I was just about to turn 10. I remember landing in LA. You have lines on line of people trying to get through immigration. Everybody had their belongings with them, you know. Black people, white people, yellow people. How come they didn't come?

Basically, we had everything we ever owned. You know, my mom and my brother and me and a few suitcases and didn't really understand the language. You know, it was very much like a scene out of a movie. It's loud and it's noisy and it's big, everything is huge and there's land everywhere and there's cars everywhere. And so that was the imagery that I remember of my first day in the United States. I never felt that I didn't belong. I felt like this is where I'm going to be. I think for me it was much more of a journey. You know, it's a journey of understanding how in this new world I could fit in.

Every generation of my family has immigrated. My parents immigrated from Taiwan, but my grandparents really immigrated from China. They fled during the war when the communist invaded. And so I think my parents grew up in a family where at any moment we had to pick up our things and leave and they didn't want that for me and my brother. They thought America is safe. America is a land of good fortunes and dreams so they wanted to come to America. Gene Tang's family arrived in America in 1978, the same year as Jerry Yang, completing a 7,000 mile journey from Taiwan to an aunt's house in Springfield, Illinois. My dad was a construction worker and my mom was a waitress and she worked at two or three different restaurants and my dad basically tried to find as many odd jobs as he could to fill up a day and make some money. They were lost. They were 35 years old and they didn't know the language very well.

And they tried their best to hide their insecurity and their fear from us. And so small things like going to the grocery store, not knowing where to buy things or not knowing how to use a checkbook and write out instead of 150, you have to write out 150 and spell it out. And so my brother and I would always be at the grocery store helping out my parents doing these type of things. In certain situations outside the home, you were the parent and they were the child. Like so many new immigrants, Gene's family turned to relatives for help. Her uncle owned a clothing store in a rundown section of LA. And after three tough years in Springfield, the Tangs moved west to run it. They kept its doors open every day of the year, Thanksgiving and Christmas too. After school, Gene would help customers, while her younger brother kept watch for shoplifting.

The message that me and my brother got growing up was, you guys need to study, you guys need to be professionals. You don't want to live like this like me and your mom. The most tense time was when we had to present our report cards. When we opened it and we got a B, there was a lot of guilt, there was a lot of mental anguish and mental beating yourself up. When your mom cries, when you get a B, it's very serious. Does this B mean that I'm not going to get a good job? My parents are going to still be poor. And my family is just going to have such a hard life because I failed as a fifth grader and got a B in English. So I think for so many Chinese kids, there's a lot of pressure and because so much is riding on your education and on that grade. Were you ever tempted to slack off to back away to take it easy? No, somehow that just wasn't an option for me.

My mom used to tell us, you have to achieve, you have to, you have to be a doctor or a lawyer. You have to because you have to be the best. By the time she was raising her children, Michelle Ling's mother was comfortably middle class. But still, her message to her children was urgent. She used to tell us, you know, if they can choose between a white person and you, they're going to choose a white person. But if they know that the only way they're going to either stay out of jail or live is to use your services, then no matter how hard it is, they're going to stay out of jail or live. Is to use your services, then no matter how short, funny-looking, slanty-eyed you are, they're going to hire you. And that I think, that in its way I think is an extremely American idea. My mom pretty much ran our house and she ran our house like a Navy ship.

Michelle and her sisters were raised as model daughters. Well-mannered, respectful, devoted to school. For years, her parents' authority governed the home without challenge. On a day-to-day basis, if you did something wrong, you had to answer to mom. The more you were, the more you were. On a day-to-day basis, if you did something wrong, you had to answer to mom. The more large overarching, bad things you might do, like not become a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, you know, then there was always the threat of your father. Michelle's father was born in China, met his bride here while a medical resident, then moved to LA to practice. That's where Michelle grew up, absorbing what was expected of her and what was not.

I've had this experience with many of my Chinese friends where there's no discussion about shame or you never get a lecture about, you know, the family tradition and shame. You just already know that it's just there. There's like this undercurrent, this fog that permeates the whole house. That's just guilt. You know, family and guilt and disappointment, not just of yourself and your own potential, but just of this entire race. You know, my dad never really said that much because he didn't have to. You just feel like, okay, never mind. I'll just go to medical school, you know, because that's, you know, it's fine. Whatever, whatever I was thinking, I don't know what I was thinking, never mind. So we moved here in 80s and the changes that we see now that there are a lot more Chinese folks living here. Just like my parents, they moved here so they can give their kids a better education because the school district in Arcadia is outstanding.

Arcadia, Southern California. Gene Tang and her parents moved here when this was a modest suburb, mostly white. So was neighboring Monterey Park, now headquarters for the Chinese communities that began to thrive in the 1980s. This is where you can eat a nice meal, you can do your grocery shopping, go to the bank, go to the post office, all speaking Chinese and not needing English at all. If you go to Charles Schwab, even the tellers are Chinese. If you think about the medieval ages and you think about the Lord's castle and the fiefdom that the central point of the entire structure would be Ranch 99 or the Chinese supermarket. These communities are so tight that my parents have been here for 18 years and their English has not improved over time.

On weekends, when all these families would get together, there would be the news who owned the Chinese fast food restaurant, there would be other tangs who own different businesses. When we all get together for my junk, the competition wasn't really about how well your store business did and it wasn't about growth and employees, it was all about how your children did. Oh, so-and-so's got an award in school, they are most improved, so-and-so got to be on the evening news because of the spelling bee or something like that. And so, living in my mom and dad always put out our awards and the medals we won in full display.

And, you know, it was very competitive with and even our cousins. So, it was just a big part of my life. I remember we would go to my uncle's house and go swimming, go play ping pong for a while and then you would sit there and do algebra for two hours and it sounds terrible, but you end up learning things that it was almost a game, it was fun rather than it's a chore. And then there's the typical thing that Chinese people do when they first get here and you randomly flip to a page in the dictionary and you got to remember five words from the dictionary and you get tested the next day. It's not a change from Taiwan, I mean Taiwan was even worse. So, you know, this is actually, you get to play and study rather than Taiwan, you just get to study. Math clinic, that's what I need. Nobel Education Institute, Harvard Education Institute.

I think I occupy a very special spot in my family and community because I've done well. That would precede me in every place. So, if we went to the barber shop or if we went to the supermarket, people knew about that and thought my parents did something right. And it wasn't until I think when I went to college, when one of my interviewers for a scholarship asked me, am I happy? Is this what I want to be doing? And I thought to myself, what a strange question. Strange. Strange in the sense that this was my job. These are the classes I needed to take. These were the grades I needed to get. But in terms of happiness, or is this really what you want? You know, that was almost secondary.

My parents spent their entire lives working to fulfill that model minority, you know, vision. That's what they wanted. That's totally what they work for, their entire lives. Model minority. The term came into vogue in the 70s and 80s, applied to Asian Americans. It evokes strong families, self-reliance, and more than anything, being good at school. It was a stereotype, of course, which many Asians did not, do not fit. Yet, it was rooted in something real. My family was a kind of family where it was like, you know, are you going to college, but which college? Michelle Ling got into UC Berkeley in 1988 and considered this. When she was in college, Asians were just 3% of all Americans. But they were 15% of students at Harvard, about 20% at Stanford at MIT, and fully a third of students at Berkeley.

But I do remember seeing a lot of Asians and thinking, God, there's a lot of Asians here. We talk about it amongst ourselves all the time. And this is like, white people don't know about this. But, you know, there's names, there's FOBs, fresh off the boat, there's ABCs, people like me, American-born Chinese, you know, then there's gradations. American-born Chinese, there's Twinkies. Twinkies? Or eggs? Twinkies, what are Twinkies? Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. And I guess that's the thing that I think a lot, most white people don't know, is that when you walk around Berkeley and you see that most of the people there, that the most prominent race on that campus, is some Chinese or Asian, that we don't all think of ourselves. Because as being the same, and that when I walk across that campus, I feel the same discomfort that you do.

Even though you look alike. Yes. Just because you look the same as George W. Bush, and you're both from Texas. Are you guys the same? When Michelle was completing college in 1990, there were 1.6 million Chinese in America. And there was no Chinese American world anymore. There were many. There were illegal immigrants trying to slip in undetected in the holes of ships. There were Chinatown laborers trapped in sweatshops and restaurants, ruthlessly exploited by other Chinese. There were Chinese who'd come by way of Vietnam, Cambodia, even Cuba. There were political refugees after Tiananmen Square. And on January 20, 1990, there was one elderly man, visa in hand. His weight now over.

When I got on the plane and to the United States, the first thing I thought of, why I was so old now, if I would be 40 years ago, that would be wonderful. But that's too late. But the second thought, well, I'm still lucky. A dream comes true. I'd be in the United States. A step on the place along for a long, long time. I haven't seen my sister for 40 years. And I haven't seen my daughter for 10 years. She looked around the airport and he's so happy. And his tears come off. He said, finally I'm here. And I say to myself, I'm free. I can speak freely. I can speak what I want to see.

So we try our best to find some job to do. Vinny and his wife got hired at Disney World in the China Pavilion, both of them wearing traditional costumes for the entertainment of tourists coming through. But no matter, it was a job. That's my first car in 1990, Dodge Shadow. We went to that only beach. We went to Bush Garden, all by my car. I like driving. Really? Driving is much fun than bicycle.

By the 90s, Chinese American success stories were everywhere, none more prominent than Jerry Yang's. It still amazes me every day of coming to Yahoo, where we started in the office of 1700 square feet. Actually, we really started in the trailer at Stanford University of less than 100 square feet. And now we're in a complex of a few million square feet. For all its booms and busts, the internet revolution changed America. And the Chinese proved as important to it as to the railroad a century before. A fifth of all the tech startups in Silicon Valley in the 90s were Chinese or Chinese American owned. For every Jerry Yang who became famous, there were thousands of Chinese American engineers who labored behind them anonymously. It was easy now to see the success, the upward mobility, harder to see what it had cost.

Jean Tang graduated from Berkeley in 1995 in the top 1% of students in her field. She won a full scholarship to Stanford Medical School. She'd more than met her parents' expectations. From Taiwan to Arcadia to Berkeley to here. Now she could look back at her steps, her family steps along the way. People talk about what is your gut reaction, what fills your heart with bliss. That feeling is harder for me to tap into because kind of overshadowing that feeling is what is best for my family. My parents have told me times are still tough for them because the business didn't go well and the store closed. But in their hearts they feel like they are successful and their colleagues impure eyes because my brother and I are doing well. I used to think comparing my life with friends whose parents are more stand-off-ish and the unit structure is not the family, the unit structure is the individual.

And I've always thought, wow, how refreshing that your parents don't care so much about what you do. There's not this neediness to succeed that your success is not necessarily their success and your failure doesn't necessarily reflect badly on them, how liberating is that and how freeing and how light. My parents will always live through my life and my brother's life. When I was an adolescent I was resentful for it but over time I realized why not. They've invested so much into us that they should reap their rewards. Michelle Ling's family was taken aback. When suddenly she announced she was stepping off the model minority track after being groomed for it all her life.

She didn't want to be a doctor or lawyer. She wanted to write. She hated to support her parents. She had a life to lead. My family is the most important thing to me, absolutely. And my parents' approval has always been of tantamount importance. Whether I like it or not it has always, I mean to this day when I think about it trying to find out if I can make my dad proud of me before he's dead. It brings me to tears to think that I could be not as successful as he thinks I could be or perhaps I should be. Chinese, Chinese American, model minority, beautiful daughter, all these identities. But when it came to stitching them together Michelle was like any other American owned her own. I think that the chinesiest thing about me is that I eat chicken feet. They're feet, make no mistake. They look exactly like a chicken foot.

The fact of the matter is they taste good but they're kind of good. I would need them every day and I don't think I have to eat them every day. So what does this have to do with the American dream? That is the American dream. That I get to eat Chinese chicken feet when I want where I want but I can choose not to eat them and I can eat hamburgers if I want. I get to choose whether or not I want to be Chinese or Americanized or black or white or whatever. You don't get to choose your color. I don't get to choose my color but I get to choose everything else. You get to choose your own identity. Yes, I get to compose my life one piece at a time however I feel like it. Not to say that it's not difficult and not to say that people don't bark at whatever I choose. Not to say that there isn't challenge all the time but more than material wealth you get to choose what you are, who you are.

I left my home and my parents at the age of 21. In a family of eight children I was the youngest son. Middle choice was left to me but to go to a foreign land. Oh, more than the passing of this wandering China man. Well, I'm a byproduct of the old Chinatown. I'm a byproduct of a Chinese American community that existed before the 1960s that saw the last of the Lohuaq, the old bachelor society. And the new image of Asians and Americans eyes in general is starting to me right now they're young, they are upscale, they're taking full advantage of the things that you could have in America if you have the money, if you have the education. So it's wonderful but for old-timers like me there's always this faint little voice in the back of my head saying yes but never forget to be careful never forget to be careful.

Sean Wong was made head of the English department at the University of Washington in Seattle where Chinese Americans and positions of influence became common. It's hard to remember that he growing up had just one role model in the public eye alone Japanese American on the California Bears. One day Sean received an unexpected phone call. There's this voice that says this is a voice from your past and I go who is this voice says this is Pete Demoto and I said I'm sitting there I said what he says this is Pete Demoto I said number 60 left guard and he go yep and I said wow and I think the first thing I said was can I get your autograph I said why are you calling me and it turns out at which I didn't know it turns out that he's the chairman of pediatric dentistry at the University of Washington and when he told me that I remember the first thought that went into my mind was

oh that's too bad he's a dentist family drew Benny Pan and his wife the Queen New York he said only one of the rapidly growing new Chinatowns if I want to be my life the rest in the United States why should I not be a American citizen then I can be as just one of the whole family

right that I became an American citizen I got it in 1999 after I've been here for 10 years I'm sorry that my wife got the same thing as me on the same day but after only half year she passed away she passed away on June 4 2000 years she couldn't have any chance to enjoy to be an American citizen I'm sorry about that but I'm still thinking of I'm so lucky I got everything really Toward the end of my father's life I actually had an occasion to ask him what he thought about his kids

a dangerous thing for a grown child to ask a parent and my father said without hesitation he said oh you're all too American you know and then if I were to start all over again I'd make you be more Chinese being born as an American and being raised in the American culture there was no turning back but I felt that I really should go back to my father's hometown being in Sujo really gave me the sense that I was imagining walking where my father had walked the spirit of not only my father but generations before my father that this is where some of my history and imagined memory lies

hundreds of years before my family became American this story is still being written every day there are new arrivals there's the bunk bed the job and the garment factory are restaurant the debts still owed to family and others who financed the long journey here like every immigrant group the Chinese in America are defined not so much by those who make it but by those who keep coming because they believe they can make it it's an old story and always new America itself is still becoming

it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo

it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo

it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo it's been a long time since I've been living in Sujo