Dr. Colleen Fong
Introduction to Keynote Speaker Iris Chang
Chinese Diaspora Symposium
The National Fulbright Association Northern California Chapter
California State University, East Bay
April 28, 2004
I can think of fewer more appropriate places to hold a symposium on the Chinese diaspora than Cal State East Bay. Thirty eight percent of students who declared their race in fall 2003 identified as Asian Pacific Islander/Filipino; Chinese descent students make up a very large number of this group.
Those students that I have had contact with are mostly first or second generation Americans and they originate not just from China, Taiwan or HK but from throughout the world. I have had Chinese American students whose families either originated from or have lived in Australia, Tahiti, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Costa Rica. Many of my faculty colleagues are also from different parts of the world, mostly from Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, but I see one in the audience who studied in New Zealand and know of another who was born in Guyana.
I myself, a third generation Cantonese American, am the descendent of the 19th century wave of Chinese immigration pre-dating the 1882 Exclusion law, the first Federal law to exclude a group of people based on race. My paternal grandfather left Toishan County and entered the U.S. in 1878 at around 16 years of age in search of work. After migrating to Santa Barbara County where fellow countrymen of the same surname had congregated, he began working as a domestic, for a dentist and his family. More than two decades later he had saved enough money to buy a few acres and became a landholding farmer. All he needed was a wife, however the Exclusion law preventing laborers from bringing wives into the country so he traveled to San Francisco and paid a visit to the Presbyterian Mission Home and married an inmate who was living there. My grandmother was between the age of 17 and 19. She had resided in the Home since her rescue from Butte, Montana two years earlier where she had lived with a Chinese merchant as his mui tsai or slavegirl. This family story is part of my current research on family formation among Chinese laborers tentatively titled, "From Domestics Servants to Husbands; From Mission Home Inmates to Wives: Establishing and Maintaining Chinese American Families in the Shadow of Exclusion."
According to Lynn Pan, the general editor of the Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, Chinese communities can be found in more than thirty-seven countries in places like Southeast Asia and the Americas, but also places that we might not necessarily think of such as the Caribbean, South Africa, the Netherlands, and the South Pacific. When I traveled in Papua New Guinea a couple years ago I was fascinated to find out that the former prime minister had a Chinese surname, Chan. Sir Julius Chan is biracial Chinese; his father was from Taishan County, just like my paternal grandfather!
Most of the Chinese have emigrated from the coastal provinces of Guangdong (formerly Canton), Fujian, Zhejiang and Hainan Island. More than 3.5 million people left China between 1850 and 1925.
Chinese have migrated for various reasons: centuries ago it was to set up trading zones. In the past hundred or so years it has been to find work, pursue education, reunite with family, and to flee war or persecution. In the nineteenth century, labor brokers in Hong Kong enticed able bodied men to come to the United States. A circular they used reads:
"Americans are very rich people. They want the Chinaman to come and make him very welcome. There you will have great pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description . . . "
The circular ends with, "Never fear, and you will be lucky" which Iris Chang has appropriately adopted into the title of her chapter on the 19th century emigration to Gum San or Gold Mountain, the Chinese term for California. Iris Chang has used the words from this circular as the opening to the third chapter of The Chinese in America.
Chinese are still leaving their mother country to labor. Between 1983 and 1993 approximately 175,000 Chinese laborers, mostly males from Southern China, were working abroad on construction contracts in over 100 different countries. The Chinese government condones this type of migration as a way to relieve the high unemployment and increase foreign exchange reserves. It is estimated that those laborers remitted the equivalent of nearly $7 billion dollars to China. Thousands of Chinese, mostly from Fuzhou in Fujian Province are also leaving the country to labor abroad but without the government's formal permission. Instead, they are paying up to what the Los Angeles Times estimates to be $60,000 to snakeheads or smugglers to be brought into New York where they work as virtual slaves until they have paid off this debt. A similar traffic in humans to Western Europe, costs about half as much, and leaves from Wenzhou of Zhejiang Province. Lynn Pan estimates that more than 500,000 Chinese have been smuggled out of China in this manner between 1970 and the mid-1990s.
The families of the vast majority of Chinese descent students that I have had have reportedly come for a "better life" through the family reunification categories of the 1965 Immigration Law. Upon further inquiry the better life usually translates to a combination of better jobs for parents, more accessible education for children, family reunification, and/or freedom from persecution. A few of my students have entered on tourist visas, overstayed and lived undocumented.
Cal State East Bay is a microcosm for the greater Bay Area, which is the meeting ground of many diasporic peoples. After moving from racially homogeneous Oregon back to my native California in the early 1980s to write my dissertation, I reveled in the diversity of my first neighborhood in Oakland; the vibrancy which Ishmael Reed poignantly captures in his recent book, Blues City: A Walk in Oakland. In 1984, I lived in a fourplex where my neighbors included Blacks from a Caribbean Island (whose name still escapes me) who spoke English and Portuguese; African Americans; White Americans and myself, my White American husband and our biracial infant. On one side of my four-plex lived an African American couple, or the other side an Asian immigrant family who I took to be Vietnamese (and whom the Caribbean immigrant child consistently called, with impunity, "Chinks"). I had been in Oregon six years and was amazed at how the Southeast Asian population had grown in the Bay Area-the result of the wave of boat people, a large proportion of whom were Chinese purged from Vietnam--that began in 1978.
The Asian family was of particular interest to me because it was extended in nature - grandparents, parents and children-and as I said, I had seen nothing like this in my six years in Eugene, Oregon. The grandparents lived in one flat and the nuclear family in the other. Both flats were upstairs with front doors that faced my apartment rather than the street, and two staircases-a perfectly symmetrical facade. I watched at dinner time as one member of the family brought the rice cooker from one unit to the other and the extended family gathered or during certain afternoons when a white van pulled up and the adult women loaded hanging garments into it; garments that they had sewed at home. I also watched the adult man, the father/husband rubberbanding newspapers, earning his wage by distributing papers for the Oakland Tribune. Only the patriarch of the family seemed not to be gainfully employed.
The family was equally fascinated by my activities, a young working mother and student married to a white man, I carted groceries out of our car and up our stairs, I did the same with stacks of books and papers. I walked the neighborhood pushing my son around in a collapsible stroller, and walked our dog at the same time. They witnessed our friends come and go. They were of different races, listened to loud music, drank beer, shot baskets at the hoop my husband had installed which soon became a magnet for the adolescent males in the neighborhood.
It seemed we were of particular interest to the young daughter of the family. I estimated that she was between eight and ten years old, she was chubby, round- faced, rosy cheeks, a pixie haircut, she often wore flip flops that would sometimes cause her to trip as she ran up the stairs to her grandparents' ; usually she was carrying something. When ever I caught her watching me struggling with my stroller, I would smile and she would usually avert her eyes. We never really had any occasion to speak until once when my mother was visiting and said, "I can understand what your neighbors are saying." My mother understands a little of her parents' native language, Sze Yup or the fourth dialect of Cantonese. I responded, "Let's bring them some oranges [it was Chinese New Year] and introduce ourselves." My mother spoke to the patriarch and learned that they were from the same county as our ancestors, however they had migrated to Vietnam and lived there for some time, maybe even a generation or two before fleeing after the war and entering the United States as refugees. A century and several generations away from the source, our two families had become next door neighbors in Oakland, California.
But this diaspora story does not end there. After a decade and several moves later I rarely thought about our first neighbors in Oakland except to joke about how the family patriarch might have used me as a cautionary tale for his young granddaughter as she entered her teens. I could imagine him exhorting, "Marry Chinese!" In the first weeks of winter quarter 1994 however, the memory of this family vividly resurfaced. It was triggered by a young woman who sat attentively in one of my classes. She was of Asian descent, articulate, outspoken, engaged, round-faced with rosy cheeks and closely cropped hair. Yes, the little girl next door was now my student. She remembered little, other than the stroller. Our paths had converged a second time.
The personal stories provide a window for learning about people whom at first glance seem unfamiliar or faraway places and events that appear to have little relevance to our lives. This evening we will hear from Iris Chang and filmmaker Felicia Lowe, whose work and research has been inspired by family stories and personal experiences.
Iris Chang was first inspired to research Nanking after hearing stories about her grandparents' escape. Born in Princeton, NJ and raised in Illinois, Ms. Chang received her undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. After working for a short period of time as a reporter for the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune, she accepted a graduate fellowship to the Johns Hopkins University writing seminars program. The recipient of awards including the John T and Catherine D Mac Arthur Foundation Program on Peace and International Cooperation, tonight she will also be speaking on The Chinese in America: A Narrative History published just last year. A highly readable history of the Chinese in the US, this book also had its genesis in a personal experience. I quote from the Introduction:
When I was in junior high school in the early 1980s, a white classmate once asked me, in a friendly, direct manner, "If America and China went to war, which side would you be on?" I had spent all of my twelve years in a university town in Illinois and had never visited either mainland China or Taiwan. Before I could even answer the first question, she continued, "Would you leave and fight for China? Or try to support China from the U.S.?" . . . Her question, innocently put, captures the crux of the problem facing the ethnic Chinese today in America. Even though many are U.S. citizens whose families have been here for generations, while others are more recent immigrants who have devoted the best years of their lives to this country with citizenship as their goal, none can truly get past the distinction of race or entirely shake the perception of being seen as foreigners in their own land. . . . My classmate unwittingly planted the seed in my psyche that grew into this book."
Please join me in welcoming Iris Chang . . .
Postscript:
On June 12, 2004, Iris Chang delivered the Commencement address at California State University, East Bay. On November 9, 2004 she was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Newspapers reported that she had recently suffered from a breakdown and was being treated for depression. Colleen Fong is part of a committee planning how the campus can best memorialize Ms. Chang.