Asian American Dreams

Farrar Straus Giroux

Chapter One

BEYOND OUR SHADOWS

From Nothing,
a Consciousness

"Little China doll, what's your name?"

    This question always made me feel awkward. I knew there was somethingunwholesome in being seen as a doll, and a fragile china one at that. But, taughtto respect my elders at all times, I would answer dutifully, mumbling my name.

    "Zia," they would cluck and nod. "It means `aunt' in Italian, you know?"

    To me, growing up in New Jersey, along the New York-Philadelphia axis, itseemed almost everyone was a little Italian, or at least had an Italian aunt.

    One day in the early 1980s, the routine changed unexpectedly. I was introducedto a colleague, a newspaper editor. Making small talk, he said, "Your nameis very interesting ..." I noted his Euro-Anglo heritage and braced myself for yetanother Italian lesson.

    "Zia, hmm," he said. "Are you Pakistani?"

    I nearly choked. For many people, Pakistan is not familiar geography. Inthose days it was inconceivable that a stranger might connect this South Asian,Pakistani name with my East Asian, Chinese face.

    Through the unscientific process of converting Asian names into an alphabeticform, my romanized Chinese last name became identical to a commonromanized Pakistani name. In fact, it was homonymous with a much despisedruler of Pakistan. Newspaper headlines about him read: "President Zia Hated byMasses" and "Pakistanis Cry, Zia Must Go." I'd clip out the headlines and sendthem to my siblings in jest. When President Zia's plane mysteriously crashed, Igrew wary. After years of being mistaken for Japanese and nearly every otherEast Asian ethnicity, I added Pakistani to my list.

    I soon discovered this would be the first of many such incidents. Zia Mariabegan to give way to Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. A new awareness of Asian Americanswas emerging.

* * *

The abrupt change in my name ritual signaled my personal awakeningto a modern-day American revolution in progress. In 1965, animmigration policy that had given racial preferences to Europeansfor nearly two hundred years officially came to an end. Millions of newimmigrants to America were no longer the standard vanilla but Hispanic,African, Caribbean, and--most dramatically for me--Asian. Though Iwas intellectually aware of the explosive growth in my community, I hadn'tyet adjusted my own sense of self, or the way I imagined other Americansviewed me.

    Up until then, I was someone living in the shadows of American society,struggling to find some way into a portrait that was firmly etched inwhite and, occasionally, black. And there were plenty of reminders that Iwasn't relevant. Like the voices of my 1960s high school friends Rose andJulie. Rose was black, and Julie was white. One day we stood in the schoolyard, talking about the civil rights movement swirling around us, aboutcities engulfed in flames and the dreams for justice and equality thatburned in each of us.

    As I offered my thoughts, Rose abruptly turned to me and said,"Helen, you've got to decide if you're black or white." Stunned, I wasunable to say that I was neither, that I had an identity of my own. I didn'tknow the words "Asian American." It was a concept yet to be articulated.

    Somewhere between my school yard conversation and the confrontationwith my Pakistani namesake, Asian Americans began to breakthrough the shadows. By then we had already named ourselves "AsianAmerican" and we were having raging debates and fantastic visions of anAmerica we fit into. But few outside of Asian America cared about ourshadow dreams.

    Gradually we began to be visible, although not necessarily seen theway we wished. Then we had to discover what it meant to be in the light.

    When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, there were barely ahalf-million Asian Americans in the nation. Of those, only 150,000 wereChinese Americans--not enough to populate a small midwestern city. Wemade up less than 0.1 percent of the population. Most of us lived on theislands of Hawaii or in a few scattered Chinatown ghettoes.

    My parents met in New York City's Chinatown in 1950. They wereamong the new wave of Northern Chinese who fled China as a result of theJapanese occupation, the devastation of World War II, and the rise of theChinese Communist Party. My father, Yee Chen Zia, was a poet and scholarfrom the canaled, garden city of Suzhou, known as the Venice of China.Like many Chinese of his generation, he had been a patriotic warrioragainst Japan, later becoming a newspaper editor and a member of theChinese diplomatic corps in the United States. After the war, he decided tosettle in New York, taking on various odd jobs--cabdriver, Fuller Brushsalesperson, Good Humor ice cream truck driver.

    My mother, Beilin Woo, was raised not far from Suzhou, in themetropolis of Shanghai. She fled its postwar chaos as a tubercular teenageraboard the General Gordon, the last American ship to leave Shanghaibefore the Communist government took power. Her first task upon arrivalat the port of San Francisco was to find a husband who could not onlyensure her continued stay in the United States but also help her repay hersister for the cost of the passage to America.

    Finding marriageable suitors was not a problem for women from Asia.For more than half a century before World War II, several racially discriminatorylaws prohibited Asian men from becoming U.S. citizens ormarrying outside their race. The United States also barred women fromChina, India, and the Philippines from immigrating. The combinedimpact of these prohibitions created generations of lonely Asian bachelorsocieties in America. But World War II forced the United States to changesuch policies, so obviously offensive to its allies in Asia as well as to thethousands of Asian and Asian American GIs fighting for America. Theshameful citizenship laws were eventually repealed and women like mymother gained entry into the country.

    Among the many Chinese American men who courted my mother ather boardinghouse near San Francisco's Chinatown was a bank clerk whohad come all the way from New York City in search of a wife. His jovial dispositionand stable job appealed to her, even though he said he was fortyyears old. They were married in Reno, Nevada, on October 31, 1949. Mytwenty-year-old mother was on her way to New York as Mrs. John Yee.

    Communicating with her new husband, however, was not easy. Likethe vast majority of Chinese in America at that time, he was from CantonProvince, a thousand miles away from Shanghai. The language, customs,and even facial features of the regions' peoples were different. Their localChinese dialects of Shanghainese and Cantonese were unintelligible toeach other. Cantonese people were considered more easygoing, lightheartedin spirit and darker in complexion, while Northern Chinese weretaller and thought to be arrogant and hot-tempered. To get around in Chinatown,my mother had to learn some Cantonese. In the meantime sheand her husband communicated in a mixture of pidgin English and pidginCantonese.

    They settled into a dank tenement on Henry Street, where many newarrivals made their first home in New York. It stands today, with the sharedbathroom down the hall and the bathtub in the kitchen, still home to newgenerations of Chinese immigrants. A year later, my older brother wasborn. They named him Henry, after the street. Had he been a girl, theyplanned to name him Catherine, after the nearby cross street. During theday, Henry's father worked a few blocks away in Chatham Square, at theBank of China, while my mother found new friends. New York's Chinatownhad only 15,000 residents in 1950, compared to more than 100,000in 1990; a tiny but growing number came from Shanghai and its neighboringcities of Hangzhou, Ningbo, Suzhou, and Nanjing. Bound by theirsimilar dialects and regional cuisine, which were so unlike those of thelarger Cantonese community surrounding them, the Shanghainese speakerscongregated at the curio shop of a Mrs. Fung, on the corner of Doyersand Pell. That's where my mother met my father.

    When Henry was still an infant, his father suffered a massive strokeand died. From his death certificate my mother learned that her husbandwas ten years older than he had disclosed. The young widow was eligiblefor marriage again in the Chinatown society, with my father in pursuit.Months later they wed and moved to Newark, New Jersey, where my fatherwas trying, unsuccessfully, to run a small furniture store. I soon came onthe scene, another member of the post-World War II Asian American babyboom.

    On a clear day the Manhattan skyline is visible from Newark, but theinsular familiarity of Chinatown was worlds away. Outside of Chinatownit was rare to encounter another person of Chinese or other Asian descent.In Newark and the various New Jersey communities where we latermoved, the only way to meet Asians was to stop complete strangers on thestreet, while shopping, or at the bus stop--anywhere that we happened tosee the occasional person who looked like us. At an A&P supermarketcheckout counter, my mother met her friend Sue, who came to the UnitedStates as a war bride, having married a GI during the postwar occupationof Japan. The animosity between China and Japan that brought bothwomen to New Jersey was never an issue. Each was so thrilled to findsomeone like herself.

    Auntie Sue and her son Kim, who was of mixed race, white and Japanese,were regular visitors to our home. Though our mothers bondedreadily, it was harder for their Asian American kids to connect simplybecause we looked alike. Mom and Auntie Sue had the shared experienceof leaving their war-ravaged Asian homes for a new culture, but Kim andI shared little except for our Asian features; we stuck out like yellow streakson a white-and-black canvas. Outside of Chinatown, looking Asian meantlooking foreign, alien, un-American. The pressure on us was to fit in withthe "American" kids we looked so unlike, to conform and assimilate. Whywould we want to be around other Asian kids who reminded us of ourpoor fit? At the tender age of six, I already felt different from the "real"Americans. I didn't feel comfortable with Kim and sensed his ambivalenceto me. But the joke was on us, because no matter how hard we might tryto blend in with the scenery, our faces gave us away.

    Still, I was proud to be Chinese. Mom and Dad filled us with storiesabout their childhoods in China. Dad was born in 1912, one year after thefounding of the Chinese Republic, and was imbued with a deep love for hisnative country. He was the second son of a widow who was spurned by herin-laws. His mother sold her own clothes to pay for his schooling. She beatmy father every day so that he would study harder--this he told usproudly whenever we slacked off. Dad modeled his life after the ideal ofthe Confucian scholar-official: by studying assiduously he won academichonors and scholarships and achieved recognition as a poet and writer.China's system of open examinations was the foundation of the civil service--aChinese creation, Dad pointedly reminded us as he turned the TVoff. Studying hard, he said, was a time-honored route to advancement foreven the poorest Chinese.

    Mom grew up in Shanghai under the Japanese occupation. From thetime she was a small child she lived with a fear and dislike of Japanese soldiers.Because of the war, her education was disrupted and she never wentbeyond the fourth grade--a source of regret that made her value educationfor her children. Mom's childhood memories were of wartime hardshipsand days spent picking out grains of rice from the dirt that had beenmixed in as a way to tip the scales. Her stories taught me to be proud ofthe strength and endurance of the Chinese people.

    Dad told us about our heritage. When other children made fun of us,or if news reports demeaned China, he reminded us that our ancestorswore luxurious silks and invented gunpowder while Europeans still huddlednaked in caves. Of course, I knew that Europeans had discoveredclothing, too, but the image was a reassuring one for a kid who didn't fit.My father wanted us to speak flawless English to spare us from ridicule andthe language discrimination he faced. He forbade my mother to speak tous in Chinese, which was hard, since Mom spoke little English then. Wegrew up monolingual, learning only simple Chinese expressions--che vele, "Come and eat"--and various Shanghainese epithets, like the popularphrase for a naughty child--fei si le, or "devilish to death." Dad alsoexpected us to excel in school, since, he said, our Asian cranial capacitieswere larger than those of any other race. Pulling out the Encyclopaedia Britannicato prove his point, he'd make us study the entry, then test us tomake sure we got the message. He told us about the Bering Strait and theland bridge from Asia to America, saying that we had a right to be in thiscountry because we were cousins to the Native Americans.

    These tidbits were critical to my self-esteem. In New Jersey, it was sounusual to see a person of Asian descent that people would stop what theywere doing to gawk rudely at my family wherever we went. When wewalked into a store or a diner, we were like the freak show at Barnum &Bailey's circus, where Chinese were displayed as exotic creatures in the late1800s, along with the two-headed dog. A sense of our own heritage andworth gave us the courage and cockiness to challenge their rudeness andstare down the gawkers.

    What Mom and Dad couldn't tell us was what it meant to be Chinesein America. They didn't know--they were just learning about Americathemselves. We found little help in the world around us. Asians werereferred to most often as Orientals, Mongols, Asiatics, heathens, the yellowhordes, and an assortment of even less endearing terms. Whatever the terminology,the message was clear: we were definitely not Americans.

    There is a drill that nearly all Asians in America have experiencedmore times than they can count. Total strangers will interrupt with theabsurdly existential question "What are you?" Or the equally commoninquiry "Where are you from?" The queries are generally well intentioned,made in the same detached manner that you might use to inquire about apooch's breed.

    My standard reply to "What are you?" is "American," and to "Where areyou from?" "New Jersey." These, in my experience, cause great displeasure.Eyebrows arch as the questioner tries again. "No, where are you reallyfrom?" I patiently explain that, really, I am from New Jersey. Inevitably thiswill lead to something like "Well then, what country are your peoplefrom?" Sooner or later I relent and tell them that my "people" are fromChina. But when I turn the tables and ask, "And what country are yourpeople from?" the reply is invariably an indignant "I'm from America, ofcourse."

    The sad truth was that I didn't know much about my own history. Iknew that Chinese had built the railroads, and then were persecuted. Thatwas about it. I didn't know that in the 1700s a group of Filipinos settled inLouisiana, or that in 1825 the first Chinese was born in New York City. Ididn't know that Asian laborers were brought to the Americas as a replacementfor African slaves--by slave traders whose ships had been reroutedfrom Africa to Asia. I didn't even know that Japanese Americans had beenimprisoned only a decade before my birth. Had I known more about myAsian American history I might have felt less foreign. Instead, I grew upthinking that perhaps China, a place I had never seen, was my true home,since so many people didn't think I belonged here.

    I did figure out, however, that relations between America and anyAsian nation had a direct impact on me. Whenever a movie about Japanand World War II played at the local theater, my brothers and I becamethe enemy. It didn't matter that we weren't Japanese--we looked Japanese.What's worse, by now my family had moved to a new housingdevelopment, one of the mass-produced Levittowns close to Fort Dix,the huge army base. Most of our neighbors had some connection to themilitary.

    At the Saturday matinee, my brothers and I would sit with all the otherkids in town watching the sinister Zero pilots prepare to ambush theirunsuspecting prey, only to be thwarted by the all-American heroes--whowere, of course, always white. These movies would have their definingmoment, that crescendo of emotion when the entire theater would rise up,screaming, "Kill them, kill them, kill them!"--them being the Japanese.When the movie was over and the lights came on, I wanted to be invisibleso that my neighbors wouldn't direct their patriotic fervor toward me.

    As China became the evil Communist menace behind the BambooCurtain, and the United States was forced to deal with its stalemate in theKorean War, the Asian countries seemed interchangeable. Back whenJapan was the enemy, China was the good ally--after all, that's how mymom and dad got to come to America. But now, quixotically, Japan wasgood and China was evil.

    Chinese in America were suspected to be the fifth column of ChineseCommunists, as J. Edgar Hoover frequently said before Congress andthroughout the McCarthy era witch-hunts. In the 1950s, while JapaneseAmerican families attempted to return to normalcy after their releasefrom American concentration camps during the war, the FBI switched itssurveillance eye onto hundreds of Chinese Americans. My father was one.

    Our mail routinely arrived opened and damaged, and our phonereception was erratic. I thought everyone's mail service and phone lineswere bad. Polite FBI agents interviewed our neighbors, asking if my fatherwas up to anything suspicious. What attracted the attention of the FBI wasDad's tendency to write letters to newspapers and politicians when he disagreedwith their views on China or anything else. Nothing ever came ofthe FBI investigations of my father, nor was a ring of Chinese Americanspies ever found--but I later learned that the probes succeeded in intimidatingthe Chinese American communities of the 1950s, creating a distrustof and inhibiting their participation in politics.

    The FBI queries hardly bolstered our acceptance in our working-classhousing tract. Neighbor kids would nose around and ask, "So what doesyour father do?" It didn't help that my father had instructed us to say, "He'sself-employed." This only added to our sense of foreignness.

    Like so many Asian immigrants unable to break into the mainstreamAmerican labor market, my father had to rely on his own resourcefulnessand his family's labor. In the back room of our house we made "baby novelties"with little trinkets and baby toys and pink or blue vases that myfather then sold to flower shops. Every day, in addition to doing ourschoolwork, we helped out in the family business.

    Our home was our workplace, the means to our livelihood, and thereforethe center of everything. This conveniently matched the Confuciannotion of family, whereby the father, as patriarch, is the master of the universe.In our household it was understood that no one should ever disobey,contradict, or argue with the patriarch, who, in the Confucian hierarchy, isa stand-in for God. My mother, and of course the children, were expectedto obey God absolutely.

    This system occasionally broke down when my mother and fatherquarreled, usually about my father's rigid expectations of us. But in theend, God always seemed to win. Growing up female, I could see the Confucianorder of the Three Obediences in action: the daughter obeys thefather, the wife obeys the husband, and, eventually, the widow obeys theson. The Confucian tradition was obviously stacked against me, as a girl.

    I found similar lessons in the world beyond our walls. Mom's bestfriend from the Chinatown Shanghainese clique had followed us to NewJersey, attracted by the low home costs and the fact that we already livedthere. Auntie Ching and her husband opened a Chinese restaurant at amajor intersection of the highway. In those days, there were few places outsideChinatown to get real Chinese food. After they had spent their ownmoney to upgrade the kitchen and remodel the restaurant, business wasbooming. But Auntie Ching had no lease for the restaurant--and the GermanAmerican owner, sensing an opportunity for himself, evicted theChings and set up his own shop.

    Our tiny Chinese American community was horrified that the Chingswould be treated so unjustly. My cantankerous dad urged them to fight it outin court. But they chose not to, believing that it would be better not to makewaves. Chinese cannot win, they said, so why make trouble for ourselves?Such defeatism disturbed my father, who would often say in disgust, "InAmerica, a `Chinaman's chance' means no chance." He felt that the Chineseway of dealing with obstacles--to either accept or go around them, but notto confront them directly--would never get us very far in the United States.

    As a child, I didn't see Chinese or other Asian Americans speaking upto challenge such indignities. When my parents were denied the right torent or buy a home in various Philadelphia neighborhoods, they had towalk away despite my father's outrage. We could only internalize ourshame when my mother and her troop of small children were thrown outof supermarkets because we were wrongly accused of opening packagesand stealing. Or when Henry was singled out of a group of noisy thirdgraders for talking and he alone was expelled from the lunchroom for therest of the year. Or when my younger brother Hoyt and the few other Asianboys in school were rounded up because another kid said he thought hesaw an "Oriental" boy go into his locker.

    Other times the discomfort was less tangible. Why did my fifth-gradeteacher, a Korean War veteran, become so agitated when topics of Chinaand Asian culture came up? Was there a reason for his apparent dislike ofme and my brothers, who also had him as a teacher? After my Girl Scouttroop leader asked all the girls to state their religions, what caused her toscowl in disgust at me when I answered Buddhist? My family didn't practicean organized religion, so I didn't know what else to say.

    Absorbing the uncertainty of my status in American society, I assumedthe role that I observed for myself--one of silence and invisibility. Ienjoyed school and, following my father's example, studied hard and performedwell academically, but I consciously avoided bringing attention tomyself and rarely spoke up, even on matters related to me.

    For example, there was Mrs. George. From second grade until I graduatedfrom John F. Kennedy High School, Mrs. George was my physicaleducation teacher. She was the aunt of Olympic track star Carl Lewis andwas always kind to me. But for those ten years, Mrs. George called me Zi,as though it rhymed with "eye." One day, when I was in twelfth grade, sheyelled over at me, "Zi, come over here." A classmate standing nearby said,"Mrs. George, Helen's name isn't Zi, it's Zia." Mrs. George looked at meand let out a huge laugh. "Zi," she said, then corrected herself. "I mean, Zia,how come you never told me how to say your name after all these years?"

    I didn't know how to answer. It had never occurred to me to correctmy teacher. In the Confucian order of the world, teachers were right upthere with parents in commanding respect and obedience. I simply had novoice to raise to my teacher.

Continues...
Excerpted from Asian American Dreamsby Helen Zia Copyright ©2001 by Helen Zia. Excerpted by permission.
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